Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.
–Karl Kraus

Much has been made of how the mainstream media is obsolete, and that the internet not only provides a greater volume of coverage, but also provides for a wider range of voices in the media. In addition, if one wishes to enquire into a news source, one can check it oneself, even viewing official statements from the Whitehouse, and viewing videos os the related events in real time, so there is no opportunity of deniability. This of course varies with one’s access to online media (i.e. pay-for-view news, a la Wall Street Journal, or access to a Lexis-Nexis account). Meanwhile the mainstream media is complaining that sites such as Craigslist (as well as free online media) is undermining their traditional revenue sources, and are being forced to cut back on salaried staff, as well as investigative journalism, and are increasingly being forced to rely on a limited choice of wire services to fill their pages (or news programs, as the case may be).

But what is the effect of all this?

From the Atlantic Monthly, October 2009:
Mark Bowden

the Incestuous Mass Media

The Story Behing the Story

If you happened to be watching a television news channel on May 26 [FOX News], the day President Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, you might have been struck, as I was, by what seemed like a nifty investigative report.

First came the happy announcement ceremony at the White House, with Sotomayor sweetly saluting her elderly mother, who as a single parent had raised the prospective justice and her brother in a Bronx housing project. Obama had chosen a woman whose life journey mirrored his own: an obscure, disadvantaged beginning followed by blazing academic excellence, an Ivy League law degree, and a swift rise to power. It was a moving TV moment, well-orchestrated and in perfect harmony with the central narrative of the new Obama presidency.

But then, just minutes later, journalism rose to perform its time-honored pie-throwing role. Having been placed by the president on a pedestal, Sotomayor was now a clear target. I happened to be watching Fox News. I was slated to appear that night on one of its programs, Hannity, to serve as a willing foil to the show’s cheerfully pugnacious host, Sean Hannity, a man who can deliver a deeply held conservative conviction on any topic faster than the speed of thought. Since the host knew what the subject matter of that night’s show would be and I did not, I’d thought it best to check in and see what Fox was preoccupied with that afternoon.

With Sotomayor, of course—and the network’s producers seemed amazingly well prepared. They showed a clip from remarks she had made on an obscure panel at Duke University in 2005, and then, reaching back still farther, they showed snippets from a speech she had made at Berkeley Law School in 2001. Here was this purportedly moderate Latina judge, appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president and now tapped for the Supreme Court by a Democratic one, unmasked as a Race Woman with an agenda. In one clip she announced herself as someone who believed her identity as a “Latina woman” (a redundancy, but that’s what she said) made her judgment superior to that of a “white male,” and in the other she all but unmasked herself as a card-carrying member of the Left Wing Conspiracy to use America’s courts not just to apply and interpret the law but, in her own words, to make policy, to perform an end run around the other two branches of government and impose liberal social policies by fiat on an unsuspecting American public.

Holy cow! I’m an old reporter, and I know legwork when I see it. Those crack journalists at Fox, better known for coloring and commenting endlessly on the news than for actually breaking it, had unearthed not one but two explosive gems, and had been primed to expose Sotomayor’s darker purpose within minutes of her nomination! Leaving aside for the moment any question about the context of these seemingly damaging remarks—none was offered—I was impressed. In my newspaper years, I prepared my share of advance profiles of public figures, and I know the scut work that goes into sifting through a decades-long career. In the old days it meant digging through packets of yellowed clippings in the morgue, interviewing widely, searching for those moments of controversy or surprise that revealed something interesting about the subject. How many rulings, opinions, articles, legal arguments, panel discussions, and speeches had there been in the judge’s long years of service? What bloodhound producer at Fox News had waded into this haystack to find these two choice needles?

Then I flipped to MSNBC, and lo!… they had the exact same two clips. I flipped to CNN… same clips. CBS… same clips. ABC… same clips. Parsing Sotomayor’s 30 years of public legal work, somehow every TV network had come up with precisely the same moments! None bothered to say who had dug them up; none offered a smidgen of context. They all just accepted the apparent import of the clips, the substance of which was sure to trouble any fair-minded viewer. By the end of the day just about every American with a TV set had heard the “make policy” and “Latina woman” comments. By the end of the nightly news summaries, millions who had never heard of Sonia Sotomayor knew her not only as Obama’s pick, but as a judge who felt superior by reason of her gender and ethnicity, and as a liberal activist determined to “make policy” from the federal bench. And wasn’t it an extraordinary coincidence that all these great news organizations, functioning independently—because this, after all, is the advantage of having multiple news-gathering sources in a democracy—had come up with exactly the same material in advance?

They hadn’t, of course. The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance.

This process—political activists supplying material for TV news broadcasts—is not new, of course. It has largely replaced the work of on-the-scene reporters during political campaigns, which have become, in a sense, perpetual. The once-quadrennial clashes between parties over the White House are now simply the way our national business is conducted. In our exhausting 24/7 news cycle, demand for timely information and analysis is greater than ever. With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery.

What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism—the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight…

…But while the Internet may be the ultimate democratic tool, it is also demolishing the business model that long sustained news­papers and TV’s network-news organizations….

What people have seemed to overlook in this debate is that investigative reporting is a very capital-intensive endeavor (frequently to compensate for extremely hazardous semi-clandestine investigation). Most of what appears in the seemingly more-diverse-than-it-appears internet “press”, is that most amateur sleaths (myself included) tend to largely reprint that which is being reported elsewhere. It’s like an enormous echo chamber.

Morgen Richmond, for one—the man who actually found the snippets used to attack Sotomayor. He is a partner in a computer-consulting business in Orange County, California, a father of two, and a native of Canada, who defines himself, in part, as a political conservative. He spends some of his time most nights in a second-floor bedroom/office in his home, after his children and wife have gone to bed, cruising the Internet looking for ideas and information for his blogging. “It’s more of a hobby than anything else,” he says. His primary outlet is a Web site called VerumSerum.com, which was co-founded by his friend John Sexton. Sexton is a Christian conservative who was working at the time for an organization called Reasons to Believe, which strives, in part, to reconcile scientific discovery and theory with the apparent whoppers told in the Bible. Sexton is, like Richmond, a young father, living in Huntington Beach. He is working toward a master’s degree at Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), and is a man of opinion. He says that even as a youth, long before the Internet, he would corner his friends and make them listen to his most recent essay. For both Sexton and Richmond, Verum Serum is a labor of love, a chance for them to flex their desire to report and comment, to add their two cents to the national debate. Both see themselves as somewhat unheralded conservative thinkers in a world captive to misguided liberalism and prey to an overwhelmingly leftist mainstream media, or MSM, composed of journalists who, like myself, write for print publications or work for big broadcast networks and are actually paid for their work.

Richmond started researching Sotomayor after ABC News Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos named her as the likely pick back on March 13. The work involved was far less than I’d imagined, in part because the Internet is such an amazing research tool, but mostly because Richmond’s goal was substantially easier to achieve than a journalist’s. For a newspaper reporter, the goal in researching any profile is to arrive at a deeper understanding of the subject. My own motivation, when I did it, was to present not just a smart and original picture of the person, but a fair picture. In the quaint protocols of my ancient newsroom career, the editors I worked for would have accepted nothing less; if they felt a story needed more detail or balance, they’d brusquely hand it back and demand more effort. Richmond’s purpose was fundamentally different. He figured, rightly, that anyone Obama picked who had not publicly burned an American flag would likely be confirmed, and that she would be cheered all the way down this lubricated chute by the Obama-loving MSM.

“The goal is to develop original stories that attract attention,” he told me. “I was consciously looking for something that would resonate.”

But not just anything resonant. Richmond’s overarching purpose was to damage Sotomayor, or at least to raise questions about her that would trouble his readers, who are mostly other conservative bloggers. On most days, he says, his stuff on Verum Serum is read by only 20 to 30 people. If any of them like what they see, they link to it or post the video on their own, larger Web sites.

Richmond began his reporting by looking at university Web sites. He had learned that many harbor little-seen recordings and transcripts of speeches made by public figures, since schools regularly sponsor lectures and panel discussions with prominent citizens, such as federal judges. Many of the events are informal and unscripted, and can afford glimpses of public figures talking unguardedly about their ideas, their life, and their convictions. Many are recorded and archived. Using Google, Richmond quickly found a list of such appearances by Sotomayor, and the first one he clicked on was the video of the 2005 panel discussion at Duke University Law School. Sotomayor and two other judges, along with two Duke faculty members, sat behind a table before a classroom filled with students interested in applying for judicial clerkships. The video is 51 minutes long and is far from riveting. About 40 minutes into it, Richmond says, he was only half listening, multitasking on his home computer, when laughter from the sound track caught his ear. He rolled back the video and heard Sotomayor utter the line about making policy, and then jokingly disavow the expression.

The rest of Richmond’s take can be found HERE on the Atlantic Monthly website. But let me point out the primary reason for my interest in the story. Again, we take you back to Mark Bowden’s insight into the (potentially dangerous) phenomenon taking place here (and this is not to be considered something peculiar to the neo-conservative wing of the greater (if one includes the blogosphere in this context) Mass Media.

I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view. We accept the harshness of this process because the consequences in a courtroom are so stark; trials are about assigning guilt or responsibility for harm. There is very little wiggle room in such a confrontation, very little room for compromise—only innocence or degrees of guilt or responsibility. But isn’t this model unduly harsh for political debate? Isn’t there, in fact, middle ground in most public disputes? Isn’t the art of politics finding that middle ground, weighing the public good against factional priorities? Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes blood sport.

Television loves this, because it is dramatic. Confrontation is all. And given the fragmentation of news on the Internet and on cable television, Americans increasingly choose to listen only to their own side of the argument, to bloggers and commentators who reinforce their convictions and paint the world only in acceptable, comfortable colors. Bloggers like Richmond and Sexton, and TV hosts like Hannity, preach only to the choir. Consumers of such “news” become all the more entrenched in their prejudices, and ever more hostile to those who disagree. The other side is no longer the honorable opposition, maybe partly right; but rather always wrong, stupid, criminal, even downright evil. Yet even in criminal courts, before assigning punishment, judges routinely order pre­sentencing reports, which attempt to go beyond the clash of extremes in the courtroom to a more nuanced, disinterested assessment of a case. Usually someone who is neither prosecution nor defense is assigned to investigate. In a post-journalistic society, there is no disinterested voice. There are only the winning side and the losing side.

There’s more here than just an old journalist’s lament over his dying profession, or over the social cost of losing great newspapers and great TV-news operations. And there’s more than an argument for the ethical superiority of honest, disinterested reporting over advocacy. Even an eager and ambitious political blogger like Richmond, because he is drawn to the work primarily out of political conviction, not curiosity, is less likely to experience the pleasure of finding something new, or of arriving at a completely original, unexpected insight, one that surprises even himself. He is missing out on the great fun of speaking wholly for himself, without fear or favor. This is what gives reporters the power to stir up trouble wherever they go. They can shake preconceptions and poke holes in presumption. They can celebrate the unnoticed and puncture the hyped. They can, as the old saying goes, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. A reporter who thinks and speaks for himself, whose preeminent goal is providing deeper understanding, aspires even in political argument to persuade, which requires at the very least being seen as fair-minded and trustworthy by those—and this is the key—who are inclined to disagree with him. The honest, disinterested voice of a true journalist carries an authority that no self-branded liberal or conservative can have. “For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote. Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth. Those who forsake it to shill for a product or a candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power. They are missing the most joyful part of the job.

I’ve always found that the quickest way to piss off a fundamentalist (which I must distinguish from Christians who actually practice what their messiah preached) is to actually read the Bible to them, especially the Gospels. They always seems to be wrenching selected passages, frequently out of context, and usually from the epistles of persecutor-turned-self-appointed-infallible-interpretor-of-Christianity Paul (any of you gals read the books of Timothy lately?), and a handful of obscure passages from Leviticus. I’ve always wondered why the actual words of Christ seemed to agitate these people so. Now I know.

by Leonard Pitts Jr.
Syndicated columnist, Miami Herald

SO WE may soon have ourselves a conservative Bible. Besides Fox News, I mean.

This new Bible is from Conservapedia, a Web site that bills itself as a conservative alternative to the perceived liberal bias of Wikipedia, the user-edited online reference.

I was thinking they should call it “Wackipedia”.

You may judge Conservapedia’s own bias by reading its definition of liberal: “someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing.”

Now, having protected unwary Americans from — ahem — Wikipedia’s bias, Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly (son of Phyllis) tackles perceived bias in the Good Book. He proposes to correct the Bible by creating a new translation based upon 10 principles, including: concision (as opposed to “liberal wordiness”); an emphasis on “free market parables” and the exclusion of “liberal passages” he says were inserted into the original text. One such would be the well-known story of the adulterous woman brought before Christ by a crowd eager to see her punished; Jesus says the one without sin should cast the first stone.

[This ]is part of an ongoing crusade to delegitimize any institution, any information source, any inconvenient “fact” that contradicts conservative beliefs. Rather than trust those beliefs to stand or fall in the free market of ideas, some conservatives now apply a kind of intellectual protectionism. So now you have your conservative newspaper, your conservative radio station, your conservative university, your conservative “facts,” and, apparently, your conservative God, and you may build yourself a conservative life in a conservative bubble where you need never contend with ideas that challenge, contradict — or “refine” — your own.

And HERE, from the horse’s mouth, is the entry from Wackipedia– excuse me– Conservapedia:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other modern emasculation of Christianity
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent; Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”. [My note: obviously the scholars that King James rounded up to translate the Bible into English were a bunch of peace & love commies]
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”; using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

For all you wordy liberals out there: they’d probably blow a gasket if they knew that the Hebrew name Elohim, the first name in the Bible translated as “God”, is actually plural! (oh, and then there’s that business of the name “God” being a derivative of the German word for “good”, a concept which actually derived from the neo-Platonism of Plotinus, etc.)

Thus, a project has begun among members of Conservapedia to translate the Bible in accordance with these principles. The translated Bible can be found here.

Or perhaps I’m mistaken. Perhaps Dick Cheney represents the second coming, and the Iraq War is ushering in a new millennium of peace and prosperity, and Halliburton will use their ill-gotten trillions to watch over us from Heaven (now referred to as “Dubai”)

The Police State is HERE!

MIKE BAKER
Associated Press Writer

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) —

In its search for fugitives, the FBI has begun using facial-recognition technology on millions of motorists, comparing driver’s license photos with pictures of convicts in a high-tech analysis of chin widths and nose sizes.

The project in North Carolina has already helped nab at least one suspect. Agents are eager to look for more criminals and possibly to expand the effort nationwide. But privacy advocates worry that the method allows authorities to track people who have done nothing wrong.

“Everybody’s participating, essentially, in a virtual lineup by getting a driver’s license,” said Christopher Calabrese, an attorney who focuses on privacy issues at the American Civil Liberties Union

Earlier this year, investigators learned that a double-homicide suspect named Rodolfo Corrales had moved to North Carolina. The FBI took a 1991 booking photo from California and compared it with 30 million photos stored by the motor vehicle agency in Raleigh.

In seconds, the search returned dozens of drivers who resembled Corrales, and an FBI analyst reviewed a gallery of images before zeroing in on a man who called himself Jose Solis.

“Running facial recognition is not very labor-intensive at all,” analyst Michael Garcia said. “If I can probe a hundred fugitives and get one or two, that’s a home run.”

Facial-recognition software is not entirely new, but the North Carolina project is the first major step for the FBI as it considers expanding use of the technology to find fugitives nationwide.

So-called biometric information that is unique to each person also includes fingerprints and DNA. More distant possibilities include iris patterns in the eye, voices, scent and even a person’s gait.

Calabrese said Americans should be concerned about how their driver’s licenses are being used.

Licenses “started as a permission to drive,” he said. “Now you need them to open a bank account. You need them to be identified everywhere. And suddenly they’re becoming the de facto law enforcement database.”

Gone are the days when states made drivers’ licenses by snapping Polaroid photos and laminating them onto cards without recording copies.

Now states have quality photo machines and rules that prohibit drivers from smiling during the snapshot to improve the accuracy of computer comparisons[!!!].

North Carolina’s lab scans an image and, within 10 seconds, compares the likeness with other photos based on an algorithm of factors such as the width of a chin or the structure of cheekbones. The search returns several hundred photos ranked by the similarities.

“We’ll get some close hits, and we’ll get some hits that are right on,” said Stephen Lamm, who oversees the DMV lab.

MORE from original article…

“Stanford Coins & Bullion, a member of the Stanford Financial Group, their name as good as gold“
–Sean Hannity

BEN FOX, Associated Press:

ST. JOHN’S, Antigua – Panicky depositors were turned away from Stanford International Bank and some of its Latin American affiliates Wednesday, unable to withdraw their money after U.S. regulators accused Texas financier R. Allen Stanford of perpetrating an $8 billion fraud against his companies’ investors.

Some customers arrived in Antigua by private jet and were driven up the lushly landscaped driveway of the bank’s headquarters, only to be told that all assets have been frozen pending an investigation by Antiguan banking regulators.

“I don’t know what to think. I have my life savings here,” said Reinaldo Pinto Ramos, 48, a Venezuelan software firm owner who flew in by chartered plane from Caracas Wednesday with five other investors to check on their accounts. “We’re waiting to see some light.”

Banking regulators and politicians around the region are scrambling to contain the damage after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against the billionaire on Tuesday. Regional Director Rose Romero of the SEC’s Fort Worth office called it a “fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world.”

Sean Hannity: Allen Stanford Fan, Recommends Companies On Radio Show

Mention ‘Sean Hannity’ to Stanford Coins & Bullion and get a free guidebook.

Yup, that’s Stanford as in Stanford Financial Group, or Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire fugitive whose currently missing after being charged Tuesday in connection with a multi-billion-dollar fraud.

“Stanford Coins & Bullion, a member of the Stanford Financial Group, their name as good as gold,” Hannity intones on advertisements that regularly run on his radio show.

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard the advertisement,” said Michael Levine, a regular Hannity listener from Westchester County, New York.

He called the radio station on Tuesday to inform them Stanford had been implicated in what the SEC termed “massive, ongoing” fraud. “They told me they had no idea what I was talking about,” Levine told the Huffington Post.

The nearly century-old debate about whether the passenger liner Lusitania was transporting British war munitions when torpedoed by a German U-boat is over. Physical evidence of just such a cargo has been recovered from the wreck, which rests 12 miles off the Irish coast in 300 feet of murky, turbulent water.

Lusitania was sunk off County Cork on May 7, 1915. The attack killed 1,198 people, including 128 Americans, and helped push the United States into World War I. Ever since the ship went down, there have been suspicions that Lusitania was carrying live munitions. Under the rules of war, that would have made the liner a legitimate target, as the Germans maintained at the time.

If the U.S. had never involved itself with World War I, and just let the European powers duke it out amongst themselves, we never would have heard of the name Adolf Hitler, and there probably would never have been the slaughter of millions of Jews and other innocent civilians across Europe, and…

More of the story at archaeology.org

Mormons For Proposition 8 Donors

There are about 770,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in California, according to the most recent statistics published in its 2007-2008 Almanac. These LDS Church members account for about 2% of California’s population. In a letter dated June 29, 2008, Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City called for church members to work hard to pass Proposition 8 in California. Proposition 8 is a proposed Constitutional Amendment that would change the state constitution to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Many, if not most, Mormons have responded to the church leaders’ request for assistance on this matter by actively campaigning for and donating to protectmarriage.com. All donations of $1,000 or more are reported daily to the California Secretary of State. Smaller donations are reported less often.

How much money have LDS donors provided to this campaign? That is what this website is all about. Can a small stone make a big ripple as it rolls forth? Are Mormon contributors a significant source of money and manpower in this election?
…
Click here to see a complete list of donors of amounts over $1,000 to Proposition 8 and to identify LDS donors.

‘Zack and Miri’ Banned in Utah

by Jonathan Crow | October 30, 2008

If you’re looking forward to seeing Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks in director Kevin Smith’s new R-rated comedy “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” this weekend and you live in Salt Lake City, you might be out of luck. Utah Jazz and Megaplex Theaters owner Larry Miller has refused to book the film. The chain’s spokesman Cal Gunderson expressed concerns about the film with The New York Post, citing the film’s “graphic nudity and graphic sex” and that it was “too close to an NC-17.”

The company’s standards seem a little odd considering that the chain had no problems screening ultra-violent fare like “Saw V,” which features beheadings and explicit self-mutilation. When asked why Megaplex Theaters did not object to the gory horror sequel, Gunderson had no comment.

Reminds me of the old joke about the difference between a PG & X-rated movie:

“If a man touches a woman’s breast, it’s X-rated. If he cuts it off with a chainsaw, it’s PG…

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Reunification of Courthouse Square

Courthouse Square, the heart of Santa Rosa, doesn’t actually contain a courthouse. And it’s not really a town square. And, if the truth be told, it’s not much of a “heart of the city” either. [They are planning a] reunification plan, which is estimated to cost around $5.3 million.

Insane Situation: Sonoma County’s Mental Health System is Nothing But Crazy-Making

Nowhere to Go

Sonoma County’s mental healthcare system made headlines recently over the closures of two acute psychiatric inpatient facilities. Last June, the county shut down Santa Rosa’s Psychiatric Emergency Services, known more familiarly as the Norton Center… And this February, Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital closed its psychiatric hospital on Fulton Road… That leaves the county with no inpatient care for people facing acute mental health problems.

With at least three police killings of mental health patients in less than a year, the county is experiencing a mental health crisis of its own. Families of two of the victims have filed suit in federal court. Chass’ family is suing the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department, and both the wife and mother of the late Richard De Santis, a bipolar man killed by police in September 2007, are suing the Santa Rosa Police Department.

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite locations: Sonoma County

The degraded feelings or moral depravity suffered by Hitchcock’s aggressively pathetic brood of malefactors appear in the form of divesting other people of their basic humanity. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) justifies his serial murders on the idea that the widows have outworn their right to stay alive. How did he develop such a feeling?

…the entire movie keenly illustrates the sham of orderliness working through Santa Rosa, the quintessential American suburb. A seemingly benevolent form of stunted feeling for people is exhibited at the dinner table (everyone sits at the same place each evening) where Mr. Newton and Herbie Hawkins (Henry Travers and Hume Cronyn) dream up exotic ways to murder people.

for more, go to Everyone’s a Critic…

Red Cross warns of food riots over soaring prices

By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer
Tue May 27, 4:44 PM ET

The Red Cross warned Tuesday of a possible surge in “food-related violence” because of soaring prices that are increasing hunger around the world.

Most of the debate surrounding the global food crisis has focused on boosting aid to poorer countries, but there is also concern about the potential for violence as people become desperate for food, said Jakob Kellenberger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Kellenberger, whose agency serves as the guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the rules of war, said fallout from rising prices has already sparked violence, alluding to food riots that erupted in Haiti, Egypt and Somalia.

It’s not just a matter of higher prices, [Kellenberger] said. “It becomes a question of survival, of just having access to food.”

from AlterNet:

Food riots are erupting all over the world. To prevent them and to help people afford the most basic of goods, we need to understand the causes of skyrocketing food prices and correct the policies that have fueled them.

World food prices rose by 39 percent in the last year. Rice alone rose to a 19-year high in March — an increase of 50 per cent in two weeks alone — while the real price of wheat has hit a 28-year high.

As a result, food riots erupted in Egypt, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. For the 3 billion people in the world who subsist on $2 a day or less, the leap in food prices is a killer. They spend a majority of their income on food, and when the price goes up, they can’t afford to feed themselves or their families.

But this state of affairs did not come about by accident. Many factors have converged, many based on decisions of corporations and national governments. Said Raj Patel, in democracynow.org:

…there are [a few] factors. One of them, one of the issues, is that governments, particularly the US government, is very keen on biofuels. Biofuels are fuels that are derived from corn, from sugar cane, and they’re being presented as a way of achieving energy independence. The trouble is, of course, that the biofuels drive up the price of these commodities, which means that poor people can’t afford them anymore.

…And finally, I think one of the major issues is, of course, the price of oil. I mean, one of the problems with the way our food reaches us today is that it is industrial, it is very fossil fuel-intensive, not just to the distance the food travels, but also in the fertilizer. You know, fossil fuel is required to produce fertilizer, pesticide, these sorts of things. And so, when the price of oil is over $100 a barrel, that combines with all the other factors to make a perfect storm where food prices are absolutely beyond the means of the poorest people.

AMY GOODMAN (democracynow.org): Ethanol has been posed as an alternative to oil. What is your response to that?

RAJ PATEL: It’s an alternative to oil if you’re in the grain business. It’s an alternative to oil if you are one of the large industrial grain processors who are looking and lobbying very hard to make money out of the transformation of grain into ethanol.

The world has lost Iraq’s oil

By Youssef M. Ibrahim, USA Today, 10/5/2004

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The costs and benefits of America’s occupation of Iraq vary, according to proponents and opponents, except when it comes to oil exports. The U.S.-led invasion has resulted in the loss of an average of 2 million barrels a day of Iraqi oil from world markets. That is a significant number with huge consequences for economies around the globe.

Instead of rosy promises by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration who pushed for the invasion — partly on the premise that they would turn it into America’s private gasoline-pumping station — the contrary has occurred.

The world has lost Iraq’s oil.

The impact is slowly taking its toll as the price of everything related to petroleum rises (from the food on the supermarket shelves to the gasoline in your car to the plastic chairs on your lawn).

The consequences have been evident in the past few months. Oil prices stand at 20-year-high records with no relief in sight. Indeed, should the ongoing disruption of Iraqi oil exports be compounded with an interruption of production elsewhere — Russia, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or any member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries — we could be looking at prices far above $50 a barrel, perhaps $60 or more. Indeed, the sky is the limit.

This was written in 2004! Consider for a moment the fact that the price of oil was just under 29 dollars a barrel when the US invaded Iraq in March of 2003. Then consider that the price of oil peaked recently at about 135 dollars a barrel.

That’s nearly a 450% price increase in just over five years!!!

Now consider this, from market analyst site bloomberg.com:

Oil $200 Options Rise 10-Fold in Bet on Higher Crude

by Grant Smith

Jan. 7 (2008) — The fastest-growing bet in the oil market these days is that the price of crude will double to $200 a barrel by the end of the year.

Options to buy oil for $200 on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose 10-fold in the past two months to 5,533 contracts, a record increase for any similar period. The contracts, the cheapest way to speculate in energy markets, appreciated 36 percent since early December as crude futures reached a record $100.09 on Jan. 3.

I can just see our glorious leader, at his daughter Jenna’s wedding in the heavily guarded compound in Crawford, Texas, toasting his guests via satellite at Haliburton’s shiny new corporate headquarters in Dubai (paid for with all those enormous overruns on those fabulous no-bid contracts for staging the Iraq War)– with the words, “Let them eat sand…”