Propaganda

Top Obama Advisor Travels to Hollywood to Encourage “Obamacare” Mentions in Movie Scripts and TV Shows

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Just when you thought the Truman Show that is the U.S. these days couldn’t get any more ridiculous, a headline like this comes along to shock you back into dazed incredulity. Hollywood shenanigans aren’t a focus of this website, but I have covered them previously. The most recent example was almost exactly a year ago … Read more

Picture of the Day: Presenting the Average American Voter

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A friend of mine sent this to me earlier today from a family vacation to Disney World. I had always thought that the most terrifying venue to observe your fellow Americans is the airport, but apparently Disney World takes the cake. I suppose that makes sense. In fact, my first article to ever get published … Read more

Video of the Day – Reporter Reveals White House Press Conferences are Entirely Scripted Nonsense

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I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one. – The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene I As readers of this site are already very much aware, the entire world around us is micro-managed with intense propaganda by what Professor … Read more

The Line to See “Girls” Creator Leah Dunham at SXSW Was 10 Times Longer than for Snowden

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Nothing against Leah Dunham, but the fact that the line to see her speak at SXSW was 10 times longer than the line to hear Edward Snowden (they spoke at the same time earlier today) reflects quite poorly on our society’s priorities. Not that there was ever any doubt. Earlier today, USA Today reported: Update … Read more

Video of the Day: “Don’t Worry Be Happy” – Conan O’Brien Mocks Mainstream Media Idiocy

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Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State-that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist democracy such as the United States, it … Read more

Sales of Hitler’s Mein Kampf are Surging…

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How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.
– Adolf Hitler

The headline of this post is one that I am not sure how to interpret, but undoubtably marks something of significance. Personally, there have been many occasions throughout my youth, as well as my adult life, where I had a desire to read Mein Kampf. I was always curious to get into the mind of one of humanity’s greatest sociopaths. To get a glimpse of the thought process of a man capable of such cruelty and evil. To understand the types of words he used and the various psychological tactics he employed to manipulate an economically destitute and politically demoralized German population.

These feelings welled up inside of me once again back in 2008, when I feared that a financial and economic meltdown could cause the U.S. population to be thrust into the arms of a demagogue. I wanted to be able to more accurately identify the rhetoric of one of history’s more “successful” demagogue dictators in order to be able to spot similar trends should they arise in my time.

While I never got around to reading it, I did read part of one of Hitler’s speeches from before the war. It was interesting to not how he did not openly speak as a raging psychopath on his way to destroying much of Europe. Rather, he attempted to appeal to his audience as rational, passionate leader there to protect and exalt the German people back to greatness. That was the scariest thing of all.

This is what the top sales chart on iTune’ category Politics and Current Events looks like.

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At this point I’d like to remain hopeful that these sales trends spring from a similar curiosity on behalf of the population, rather than from a darker more hateful place.

From Time: 

The infamous manifesto Adolf Hitler wrote while in prison after a failed coup in 1923, Mein Kampf or My Struggle, in which the dictator outlined his idea of a global Jewish conspiracy, is a surprise hit on the ebook market. While the book’s print copy sales remain stagnant, the ebook is in the top 20 on iTunes’s Politics & Events chart, next to books by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, the number one Propaganda & Political Psychology book on Amazon, and the 17th bestseller in the company’s Nationalism list. How could that be?

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How The Washington Post and The New Yorker Refused to Publish an Article on Obama Admin Syria Lies

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Seymour Hersh is not some guy off the street with a laptop and a head full of crazy ideas. The pulitzer prize winning journalist broke the My Lai Massacre story during the Vietnam War and also led reporting on the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. Well his most recent investigative reporting involves covering some of the blatant lies told by the Obama Administration earlier this year in an attempt to push the nation into a war in Syria on behalf of al-Qaeda, based on some very shaky evidence that Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons. Bizarrely enough, the publication with which Mr. Hersh is most associated, The New Yorker, refused to publish it. So did The Washington Post.

I don’t know about you, but this sure stinks of self-censopship to me. In particular, I think the Washington Post is playing defense following its reporting of the Edward Snowden leaks, and is afraid to further piss off the crony Obama Administration. It also seems likely The Post didn’t want to publish an article that would have showcased the paper’s own sloppy and irresponsible reporting on the matter. Which if true, is beyond pathetic.

From the Huffington Post:

NEW YORK — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh accused the Obama administration Sunday of having “cherry-picked intelligence” regarding the Aug. 21 chemical attack in Syria that served as evidence for an argument in favor of striking President Bashar Assad’s government.

In his piece — titled “Whose Sarin?” — Hersh reported that al-Nusra, a jihadi group fighting in Syria’s long-running civil war, had also “mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity.” Therefore, he wrote, “Obama did not tell the whole story” when stating with certainty that Assad had to be responsible, crossing a so-called “red line” that would trigger U.S. retaliation.

You don’t say…

Hersh is a freelancer, but he’s best known these days for his work in The New Yorker, where he helped break the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. While Hersh is not a New Yorker staff writer, it was notable that his 5,500-word investigative piece landed in the London Review of Books, a London literary and intellectual magazine, rather than the publication with which he’s most closely associated.

In an email, Hersh wrote that “there was little interest” for the story at The New Yorker.

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How I Remember September 11, 2001

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I remember 9/11 like it was yesterday. I was one year into my Wall Street career. I got up that morning just like every other morning and headed toward Union Square station to get on the subway down to 3 World Financial Center, the headquarters of Lehman Brothers. I had just purchased breakfast in the … Read more

So Who Really Pays Television Pundits?

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It is the job of the Fourth Estate to act as a check and a restraint on the others, to illumine the dark corners of Ministries, to debunk the bureaucrat, to throw often unwelcome light on the measures and motives of our rulers. ‘News’, as Hearst once remarked, ‘is something which somebody wants suppressed: all the rest is advertising’. That job is an essential one and it is bound to be unpopular; indeed, in a democracy, it may be argued that the more unpopular the newspapers are with the politicians the better they are performing their most vital task.

– Brian R. Roberts from a October 29, 1955 article in the London periodical “Time & Tide”

I’ve used the above quote before, and it is one that many others have paraphrased in various ways over the past century. The key point is that news is supposed to be delivered by people who do not have direct financial conflicts of interests that will cause their news or opinions to be biased based on receiving a fat paycheck from an outside entity. If such conflicts exist, they should at the very least be disclosed. It’s hilarious that so many pundits call Glenn Greenwald an “activist” and not a “journalist,” when it is clear he is delivering information based on a genuine passion for civil liberties. Many of these same people that accuse Glenn of “activism” are paid shills for public relations (PR) firms that represent large corporate clients and special interests. Even worse, it is almost never admitted on air. I’d much rather a person report the news biased with a genuine passion for a cause than based on a bias that revolves around his or her bank account size.

I’ve been waiting for someone to put together a more comprehensive article on this topic, because while many people recognize that television news is nothing more than tabloid garbage or statist/corporate propaganda, most people don’t understand the inner workings of it all. One of the primary reasons television news is so bad is because the so-called “experts” or pundits are actually quite often highly paid spokespeople for special interests, something which is disgracefully almost never disclosed by the anchors.

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Watch Neocon Bill O’Reilly Get Schooled by Two Actual Military Men During His Show

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There aren’t many figures in U.S. media who have done more harm to the nation as a result of their incorrect, imbecilic and irrational platitudes than Fox News neocon fixture Bill O’Reilly. In case you forgot, Mr. O’Reilly was one of the most vocal supporters of the Iraq war, and was adamant in his conviction … Read more