After President Obama’s capitulation to the right-wing in the budget deficit plan he presented yesterday, I thought it might be in order to review what progressives got when we hoped Barack Obama would make a more effective president than his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton. We’re in three wars now, instead of two. The prison-cum-torture-chamber at […]
A great example of fixing the game before the game starts can be seen in “5 Things to Consider When Choosing Where to Retire,” which Investopedia distributed to Yahoo! Finance and other portals aggregating articles on personal finance over the past week. In the article, writer Stephanie Christensen, gives us the five following factors that […]
Everyone in Washington looks as happy as cherrystone clams at high tide this morning after the budget compromise that prevented a shutdown of the federal government. “Today Americans of different beliefs came together again,” said President Barack Obama. “We made history instead of repeating it,” said Speaker of the House John Boehner. Republican Representative Paul […]
While the war on public unions is getting most of the ink, new Republican majorities in state legislatures are quietly also moving to curtail the rights of women to have abortions in a large number of states. Arizona just became the first state to outlaw abortions for reasons of race or sex, which, as many […]
As we all know by now, the Fukushima plant’s inability to withstand natural forces has resulted in the poisoning of water and land in the surrounding area and the emission of radiation into the atmosphere that is now detected in parts of the United States. And the reactors are still not under control, the potential […]
The front page of Saturday’s New York Times displayed an egregious example of perhaps the most utilized propaganda technique other than the big lie: selection of details, facts or experts to distort reality. It works best, as in the Times article, when the writer does not state the point of distortion, but lets the facts […]
Ian Simpson gave a very reasoned response to my recent blog entry about anti-intellectualism in mass culture. His comment regarded the word, “nerd”: “The term ‘nerd’ is often worn as a badge of honor these days by a substantial subset (myself, included). In the digital age, being a nerd is actually kind of cool. The […]
I’m not going to mince words: It was a grave mistake for our country to lead a military action against the forces of Libya’s ruler since 1969, Muammar Gaddafi. And after the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was also a sign of collective lunacy among our policy makers and politicians. Here’s what’s wrong with […]
When a Guy Chapman responded to my blog entry on ending nuclear-generated electricity by citing a 1975 Chinese Dam accident in which 26,000 died and another 140,000 may have starved to death later, I thought I would ignore it. But yesterday in many newspapers across the globe, Gwynne Dyer, a legitimate international journalist, repeated the […]
I like to collect examples of the ideological subtext hidden in mass media documents such as TV shows, advertisements, movies, cartoons and news stories. Today I would like to share some recent examples of one ideological message embedded in the mass media for decades: anti-intellectualism and anti-learning. The mythology of anti-intellectualism has been alive since […]