Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same everyday, in organizations where people were interchangable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made this system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power, but of story. If their emp...

I am leaving this board because, very recently, far too many of my posts are being locked by moderators who shoot first and ask questions later. I have been at this board for over six years; I have many popular threads. But only in the last month have I had MANY posts locked for nit-picking and inconsistent reasons. The final straw for me was being locked for saying that (gasp) there ARE concern trolls at DU. (I did not name any topic or any person in particular.) I removed the offending ...

The blatant media bias displayed by the "mainstream" news organizations is more than matched by the shameful cover-up of Georgian atrocities by the mainline "human rights" organizations, first and foremost Human Rights Watch. In the most brazen display of willful ignorance since Walter Duranty overlooked the Soviet gulags, HRW spokeswoman Anna Neistat told the Guardian that Ossetian claims of Georgian atrocities were "suspicious": "The figure of 2,000 people killed is very doubtful. Our finding...

After eight years of Bush mis-rule, you might have thought America had had its fill of neocon military adventurism in Middle East oil fields. You might have thought it had seen through the dangerous nonsense that is the Global War on Some Terrorists - a profitable fraud for contractors, and a civil rights disaster for citizens. You might have thought we had realized that we needed to spend a few dollars patching up our own country before it falls down in a rusting heap. And maybe, for five or te...

This is what I get for tuning out the whole Hillary/Barack food fight during the two-year long Permanent Campaign. Now that BHO has seemingly finally won, I have been asking myself: so who is the power base behind this guy? Who backed him against the Clinton machine? It took just one Google: {obama, brzezinski} to sort that out. Here are just two items from the hundreds of thousands that my google pulled up. The first is from a year ago; the second from last month. Let’s call Barack Obama wha...

John McCain increasingly sounds like a right-wing blogger. His arrogance in claiming that he speaks for the American people during a dangerous crisis demonstrates greater hubris than anything he will accuse Obama of doing. Brent Budowsky, "John McCain on Russia: Angry, Bellicose, Belligerent and Extreme" (Link)/ The following reference may go right past younger folks here; but anyone who remembers the Reagan presidency remembers this arrogant chump - a Kissinger protege, of course. In 1981, ...

Question 1. How does one remain sane in the face of a delusional society? By sticking to testable facts and by telling the truth about those facts, and asking others to do the same, and accepting this will make some people quite upset at you. Here are some of the more obvious, testable facts that the American elites want ignored: --- There are more humans than the planetary ecosphere has capacity to carry. This population overshoot is destroying the environment, which (in a vicious circle) lo...

Franchising refers to the method of practicing and using another person's philosophy of business. The "franchisors" authorize the proven methods and trademarks of their businesses to "franchisees" for a fee and a percentage of gross monthly sales. Various tangibles and intangibles such as national or international advertising, training, and other support services are commonly made available by the franchisor. Agreements typically last five to twenty years, with premature cancellations or termi...

...Obama's father-in-law? Jim Hensley and his older brother Eugene first began working in the liquor distribution business before World War II, being in the employ of Kemper Marley, Sr., an Arizona rancher who had become wealthy in the liquor distribution business in Phoenix and Tucson following the end of Prohibition. Following his discharge in 1945, Hensley and his brother went back to work for Marley in his United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson. In 1948, both bro...

After 28 years of counter-revolution by the radical right, I live in a country where my basic expectation is to be lied to, cheated, and outright betrayed by businessmen, politicians, media personalities, and government officials. As a member of the non-elite 99%, my designated role is to be a victim and to shut up. I expect HMOs to shaft me. I expect credit card companies to have the ethics of loan sharks. I expect all kinds of businesses to "nuisance shift" me, chisel me, and stick me in a ...

“In all dictatorships targeting the free press begins with political pressure—loud, angry, campaigns for the news to be represented in a way that supports the group that seeks dominance. Attacks escalate to smears, designed to shame members of the press personally; then editors face pressure to fire journalists who are not parroting the party line. A caste of journalist and editors who support the regime develops, whether out of conviction, a wish for advancement, or fear. - Naomi Wolf, "The ...

I heard this on Tom Ashbrook's "On Point" radio show on NPR yesterday. I would guess you can download the entire show. The most important part for me was not the horrible labor law violations or the immigration issues. It was the DELIBERATE and MASSIVE machinery put in place OUT OF PUBLIC VIEW to take away the Due Process rights of these lowly private people. Folks, this is exactly how the fascists did business. Round em up, lock em up, and deport them. July 14, 2008 INTERPRETING AFTER THE L...

Article 1: The Unitary Executive Section 1: The executive branch shall consist of the unitary executive (UE) Section 2. The UE is composed of the President, the Vice-President, and various spooks, bagmen, weaseling Constitutional lawyers, and hitmen. Membership on the UE team is not formally announced, merely inferred by a truculent insolence and the presence of armed guards. Section 3. The UE shall not be responsible to Congress. Members of the UE can ignore Congressional subpoenas, and refu...

The most common way in which flexible, responsive systems of thinking about reality become rigid, dead dogmas/ideologies is by reductionism. Christianity reduced to the Ten Commandments. Class conflict reduced to Marxism. Capitalism reduced to the Invisible Hand. Psychology reduced to behaviorism. 1. Biological Science avoids reductionism At least, in science, they seem to understand the risk of reductionism. They understand the difference between useful abstractions and dangerous reductionis...

I'm sure I can just snap up another middle class job at this moment in this economy. :sarcasm: And, you can be sure that it was this economy's effect on our funding source that vaporized my job. Someone needs to Abner Louema-ize Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernacke, and the corpse of Ken Lay. May they all rot in hell. Back when I'm employed again. Have a good time, play nice. arendt

Mods, this is about "wedge issue" politics. I would understand if you moved it to the gun forum, but I posted it in GD for a less biased audience. -------------------------------- One man with a briefcase can steal more money than a hundred men with guns. - Don Corleone 1. QUESTIONS Let me begin with a set of questions. How have gun rights slowed or prevented: - Bush's war on the Constitution? - his trumped-up wars of aggression for oil? - his hiring of vast numbers of heavily armed merc...

Whether or not we will be able to restore democracy to the United States will be decided well before the November election. It will be decided by whether or not the FISA/immunity bill passes. It will be decided by whether or not Cheney manages to attack Iran. It will be decided by whether or not Congress decides to use OR LOSE its inherent contempt powers to rein in a rogue DOJ and WH. Most of all, it will be decided by citizen activists using their rights to get craven, corporate-bought Democ...

From reviews of "The Servant", a British "kitchen sink cinema" classic: (This is a tale) of an upper class businessman Tony (James Fox) who hires a manservant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) to set up home for him in a Chelsea townhouse. Vaguely uneasy from the start, their relationship begins to strain when Barrett takes against Tony's fiancé Susan (Wendy Craig). 

Bogarde is excellent as the brooding Northern servant Barrett and a young James Fox is equally mesmerising as the louche Tony, ...

The very structure of American entertainment bears minstrelsy's imprint. The endless barrage of gags and puns appears in the work of the Marx Brothers and David and Jerry Zucker...The stump speech is an important precursor to modern stand-up comedy. The 1830s American stage, where blackface first rose to prominence, featured similarly comic stereotypes of the clever Yankee and the larger-than-life Frontiersman; the late 19th- and early 20th-century American and British stage where it last prosp...

CLARIFICATION so this thread doesn't get locked: I will hold my nose and vote for this charming, intelligent, up-from-poverty candidate - who just happens to be a triangulating, corporate/military shill and a panderer to homophobe Christians - in November; but I will be damned if I will say anything but that he is the lesser of two evils in America's descent into corporatism. Yes, I will vote for Obama. But only because his opponent is a bat-shit crazy warmonger, a sleazy crooked politician who...

Five and a half years ago, I essayed that our middle class was being decimated: We are at war all right. It is war on the American Middle Class and the American Constitution; and it has been going on for two years already. If you haven't noticed, the middle class is losing without putting up a fight. In fact, it is voting for the people who are shooting at them. That makes it about as clueless as the Polish Jews who allowed themselves to be stuffed into cattle cars, hoping for the best. Some m...

Louisiana House Passes Anti-Evolution Bill; Enactment Expected. The Louisiana House of Representatives, by a vote of 94-3, last week passed an "academic freedom" bill that singles out evolution and other theories or fields of science and implies that they are controversial. Because of an amendment, the bill must now go back to the Senate, which previously passed it unanimously. Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) is expected to sign it. AAAS had sent a letter to all House members last Tuesday, June 10, oppo...

"Like water to fish, or air to birds, so is language to humans." - anon. (on edit: moved the introductory history into Appendix 1 to shorten this.) LANGUAGE IN THE CORPORATE MEDIA The topic of this essay is language - specifically, the impoverished and biased language foisted upon us by the corporate media. (Can you say "double-plus ungood"?) This language is identifiable by its blatant over-simplification of complex issues, its lack of historical and social context, its black-and-white choic...

Crush depth is the submerged depth at which a submarine's hull will collapse due to the surrounding water pressure. - Wikipedia We often speak of the Bush White House as being "in a bubble". At a larger scale, we talk of "inside the beltway" thinking. Both phrases are meant to suggest a detachment from reality, a bastion of privilege. But, that situation is not limited to Washington, D.C. The whole of American society today is out of equilibrium with the economic reality of massive, structural d...

This is an essay about our economic situation. There is nothing in this essay that hasn't been said before. It has been said forty years ago, in the abstract: One of the most expensive things an economy can buy is economic trial, error, and development. "Expensive" of course does not mean "wasteful"... when the development of a formerly strong economy is neglected, so much capital becomes available for unproductive purposes that it is almost an embarrassment. People are hard put to devise ways...

Livingston sounded a call for a worldwide crusade to open up Africa...(he proposed) the "three Cs": Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization...Trade not the gun would liberate Africa... That was not the way Africans perceived the Scramble. There was a fourth "C" - conquest - and it gradually predominated. At first European expeditions were too weak to challenge African rulers. It was safer to use blank treaty forms, explained away by an empire-minded missionary, than to use live ammunition...Bu...

Fareed Zakaria is an insufferable apologist for our corporate overlords. His arrogance makes me ill. It grates my ass how much Jon Stewart sucks up to this slick snake. The financial elitism of this man practically oozes from the TV screen. All snips from: "The Future of American Power" By Fareed Zakaria (Link) U.S. military power is not the cause of its strength but the consequence. The fuel is the United States' economic and technological base, which remains extremely strong... The Unite...

The "politics as usual" attitude of the Democratic candidates is preventing necessary measures for saving our country from being planned and publicized. The "as usual" I'm referring to is the ASSUMPTION that a candidate who is not a sitting president plans to hold the office for TWO TERMS. In 2008, for a Democrat, this makes no sense. First, everyone has said that this is an election that no one wants to win, which is why the GOP are satisfied to have the deeply flawed and controversial-to-the...

DISCLAIMER: I will support the Democratic nominee, whoever it is. I have endorsed no candidate. But, its hard to ignore the media mugging that Obama is getting. And, as usual, I got carried away by the analogy. -------- ...something happened in "Black Rock" ,something that its inhabitants are anxious that it remains in the shadow.Enter Spencer Tracy who seems to know too many things he should.Then all the inhabitants all stand together ,and their conspiracy of silence becomes threatening... T...

"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain. Everyone at DU will agree that the GOP have placed party before country; half of DU will agree that Hillary Clinton has placed herself before her party. But, I bet only a small percentage will agree that this entire Permanent Campaign is a fraud, a sham, part of a system of social control. The reason I will win my bet is that the study of history has been expunged in this country. It is square, quaint, not cool, worse than geeky...