Reminder

WSWS (World Socialist Website) has some of the best political and economic analysis going. It doesn't always jibe with consensus, and that's a good thing.

'Nother Note on Information Sources

Just so you know, I don't watch cable "news" and I will not allow cable TeeVee in my home. I occasionally watch Democracy Now!, one or more network news broadcasts, PBS Newshour, and various foreign news outlets that are on my PBS station,. That doesn't include RT or Aljazeera, though I will sometimes check them online.

I do not do Twitter and I do not do Facebook, though occasionally I will look at bits of postings to either platform if I find an interesting link somewhere. Usually, I don't.

I have two Win10 news feeds, neither of which are comprehensive but they do provide a quick glance at events. I will look at the New York Times and WaPo online if not daily, at least every other day, and I also read the LA Times online, but probably only once a week. My local news sources are fairly slim, and they include KXNM radio, which has an outstanding London-based news roundup hourly. I occasionally read the Albuquerque Journal online and pick up whatever "alternative" news papers I see in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

I have really limited the websites I visit. They include DKos (I've been a member since 2003, and I along with a whole raft of Old Timers was horrified by Markos's dicta and his inappropriate Hillary fluffing. It was nauseating, but I long ago concluded that Markos was running a con, basically with the intent of rebuilding the Republican Party along the lines it once had before the crazies took over. I don't think he cares about Democrats at all) the Intercept, Naked Capitalism, and Ian Welsh's Place. Inappropriate Trump fluffing is still common at NC and Ian's place, for reasons I can only imagine are due to cognitive capture. NC has backed off its incessant Trump boosterism, but in my view they're still captive to the con.

I do follow links if the information looks interesting and/or compelling.

Otherwise, there are random sites I visit now and then.

I'm not a shut in yet, so I still have a fairly active life out and about; that means I'm not glued to the news 24/7 and I wouldn't want to be. I tend to be an early riser, so my news consumption is generally between 4am and 7am. Then it's on to whatever is on the activity calendar for the day. This is one of the times I don't have anything scheduled for this afternoon.

I think I'll take a nap.

If anybody has any good news sources, let me know!

[Note: I forgot to mention MoA (Moon of Alabama) which I check daily for the latest Inappropriate Trump Fluffing from overseas. Bernhard is I believe German living in Germany. His analyses of Syria and other conflicts is usually very good, but his absolute devotion to Trump -- which he denies -- shows his own susceptibility to falling for the blandishments of a conman. Oh well.]

I Saw The News Today, Oh Boy

Well, yesterday. I haven't looked at the news today, so I'm not at all caught up with overnight events, but what I saw yesterday helped illuminate just how far from reality much of our news media typically is.

I was, for example, watching the CBS Evening News and the NewsHour, that PBS stalwart, and CBS and Gwen and Company were quite taken up with events in Ferguson and elsewhere as well they should be, but a good deal of the "news" was wrong, false, lies, and what have you. That's a problem. That has been a problem for many a long year, but came into stark focus during the reports of "rioting" in Ferguson in response to the Grand Jury failure to indict the Warrior Sheepdog and Demon Destroyer Darren Wilson.

First of all, the "rioting" was a construct of Authority and the media working in concert, as my ground-eye  view via Bassem Masri's and Rebelutionary_Z's livestreams amply demonstrated. There was no rioting, not by the demonstrators. And the police, typically, were lying about what was going on.

I also watched Amy Goodman's report from the ground in Ferguson, and she basically confirmed with her own eyes what I was seeing on the livestreams and twitter pictures. There were no police and no National Guard on the streets of Ferguson beyond the police headquarters area on South Florissant which is basically in the White Area of Florissant. The 20-some-odd businesses that burned were on West Florissant, in the Negro District. All of the police (and apparently later, the National Guard, though that's not certain) in Ferguson were deployed to protect "The Fort" as I call it; none were assigned to guard or protect businesses along West Florissant. So businesses burned, and it's sad.

The crowd of protesters was assembled at "The Fort" and they were gassed  and largely driven away by a pincer-action of heavily armed and militarized police. Two police cars were burned. How that happened is still a mystery, but both cars were behind police lines when they caught fire. Those were, so far as I could tell, the only incidents of "violence" in that area of Ferguson, apart, of course, from the extensive use of teargas and flash-bangs by the police.

The crowd initially was several thousand strong protesting in front of "The Fort," but it dwindled to a few hundred, perhaps only a few dozen, after repeated the application of teargas.  The crowd was not violent, they were not rioting. A few individuals were vandalizing one of the police cars, a car someone said was left in the street for just that purpose. Could be. But others pointed out that the vandals were unknown, and at least some were white.

By the time Bassem's phone was stolen -- he said by a "police agitator" -- the crowd was small and relatively dispersed in the area of "The Fort." There were very few people on the streets elsewhere in Ferguson. I saw a few pictures taken at the memorial to Mike Brown on Canfield Drive, for example, and it looked very quiet. Amy Goodman stopped by there too, and there was no sign of riot or crowds.

The fires on West Florissant need to be investigated and explained. I'm sure there is some security camera and other video that would show how they started and who was responsible. It's really quite amazing that so much police presence could be deployed to suppress nonviolent protest at the police station but none at all was available to protect people and property along West Florissant, where vandalism and arson had occurred in August.

That was one thing. According to the narrative pushed by Authority and the media, however, rampaging rioters were battling with police all over. And it simply wasn't true. Police were attacking nonviolent protesters at the police headquarters in Ferguson and they were letting businesses be looted and burned along West Florissant without any police or the fire department. When this fact was noted, it was "copsplained" by saying "it wasn't safe" for police or fire responders to go to West Florissant. Rampaging Negroes and all... Bullshit bullshit bullshit.

Meanwhile, a huge contingent of police, I discovered through Rebelutionary_Z's archived videos from the previous night, had been deployed at the intersection of Grand and Shaw Arsenal in the South County. They fired teargas at the relatively small crowd that gathered there, and apparently they twice fired teargas at the MoKabe coffee house, a designated "Safe Space" Police were out in force in this area of Shaw/Tower Grove, unlike the case along West Florissant in Ferguson,  and were issuing contradictory and absurd commands, arresting people pretty much at random, and having a fine old time with their crowd suppression toys.

Rebelutionary_Z had traveled to this area from the safe house where he'd rested after the freeway shut down. Reports were coming in that that safe house (a church) had been raided by police and tear gas had been used. In the area of MoKabe's, along Grand Avenue, Z documented several broken windows and one pawn shop merchant clearing the broken glass from his place was pissed. He confronted Z for "profiting off his pain" -- I thought that was odd, because it's hard to say that Z is "profiting," but Z did not respond. And he didn't mention the incident again.

Meanwhile, the police were behaving in an arbitrary manner, sometimes appearing in force and riot gear to confront the chanting crowd, other times withdrawing, only to return, firing flash-bangs and tear gas and ordering dispersal -- which for some was not possible because they were trapped.

"Negotiations" were conducted to allow people to leave MoKabe's, but the "negotiations" seemed odd, forced, and largely false. People were told they could leave -- with their hands up -- and head toward the church that had been raided and gassed. That didn't seem like much of a resolution to the dilemma of how to disperse when they were not allowed to, and by this point, few people had any trust in the word of the police, word which had already been repeatedly broken.

Nevertheless, people did leave with their hands up and headed toward the other safe place -- that wasn't safe at all.

There was a "clergy" woman (I don't know who she was, I'd never seen her before) mediating between the crowd and police and she often stood and walked between them, almost always with her hands up as a kind of sacrificial lamb, and I'm convinced that her presence defused some of the potential for police violence.  But she couldn't do anything but shrug about the arbitrary nature of police commands. It's their culture, you know?

I spent all morning yesterday watching that and other archived videos of the previous night's events, and I was quite moved by the dedication and determination of the protesters and their almost completely non-violent militance.

It's clear that these demonstrations, which have now spread all over the country and seem to be focusing actions on shutting down freeways (a time honored way to discommode the apathetic and comfortable), are well-coordinated and planned as opposed to some of the Occupy actions which they sometimes resemble.

The issues being raised in these actions -- police abuse and killing with complete impunity -- are much closer to the reality the victims face in this country than the somewhat abstract though no less destructive issues Occupy grappled and grapples with. The chord that has been touched in so many places with regard to police abuse and murder is one that can't be untouched, as practically everywhere, and every day, people -- often children or completely innocent people -- are being shot down by police, many of whom are terrified of their own shadows.

This has got to stop. The only way for people without power to force this or any other issue is to discommode those with power, and make their voices heard, whatever it takes. That means persistent protest (the Mike Brown protests have been going on daily for three months, after all) and creative discommoding. Shutting down bridges and freeways is a good tactic, but causing financial pain to those in power can be even better.

It's a long haul process. Occupy burrowed in to communities and is now a leading volunteer service outlet in communities all over the country. It's as radical as ever, but not so much a public spectacle. Participants do good works and help enable oppressed communities to take control of their own fate.

In the case of these police accountability demonstrations, it's more difficult to achieve objectives because the police don't work for the people, and there is often no easy way for the people to force change on the institution -- or to withdraw from interaction with it.

The police serve their masters, and that means they behave like an army of occupation because that's what their masters want. The occupation can be lifted, but only when their masters say so. Sometimes the occupation can be subverted or crippled, but that's a long-haul and highly risky endeavor. The actions taking place have a cumulative effect, especially the ongoing national demonstrations, but the result may not be quite what anybody hopes for.


Nevertheless, Onward! and Solidarity!

This Just In!

Apparently Pierre's media baby called "The Intercept" hasn't been entirely shut down, as another old story has appeared within the last few minutes penned by Murtaza Hussain  -- who sometimes sat in for Greenwald when he went on vacation from  Salon.

It's about the grotesque ordeal Rahina Ibrahim, a former Stanford University student and citizen of Malaysia, has been put through for the last nine years by an out of control "no fly list" held by some sub-agency of the FAA and maintained by the DoJ to interfere with the travel of tens of thousands of people world wide, often with neither cause nor accountability.

Ibrahim has been fighting to find out why she was placed on the no-fly list for the past eight years, and recently a judge ordered that she be told: it was a clerical error. However, she is apparently still on the no-fly list and denied a visa to return to the US, as those who put her name there, and those who maintain her name there, have consistently refused to correct their error, no doubt fearing that to do so would set a bad precedent -- or something. And of course, the government continues to invoke the state secrets privilege in the matter. After all, fuck ups must remain secret or the Apocalypse will be nigh.

It's nice that Hussain has somehow found the time to cover the story of Rahinah Ibrahim's ordeal for "The Intercept," I suppose, but the second comment under the article points out that "Papers, Please!" has been covering it extensively, for years. Not only have they been covering it, they've actually been posting documents and other ephemera connected with the case.

Observe:

The price of justice: 9 years, $3.9 million, and counting

On January 2, 2005, Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim found out she was on the US government’s no-fly list when she was denied boarding, arrested, handcuffed, and locked in a cell for two hours when she tried to check in for a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii.

Just over nine years later, on January 14, 2014, a Federal judge entered judgment in Dr. Ibrahim’s favor following the trial in her lawsuit challenging her placement on the no-fly list, her mistreatment by Federal and San Francisco government employees and contractors, and the denial of her right to due process of law.

Dr. Ibrahim’s pro bono lawyers have now applied to Judge William Alsup for reimbursement by the government defendants of their costs: $3.6 million for 11,000 billable hours of attorneys’ and paralegals’ time, plus more than $300,000 in out-of-pocket expenses (including fees charged by the defendants to Dr. Ibrahim’s lawyers for obtaining clearances to see evidence alleged by the defendants to contain Sensitive Security Information).

The total price of justice: Just under $4 million dollars — and counting.  The government defendants have until February 13th (30 days after the entry of Judge Alsup’s judgment) to decide whether to appeal that judgment to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where they have already lost two appeals of pre-trial rulings in Dr. Ibrahim’s lawsuit.  If the government appeals the judgment, payment of their fees and expenses (which depends on Dr. Ibrahim having “prevailed” in the litigation) will be further delayed while more costs accrue.

There's much more at the site, and I urge anyone who is interested in the soft police-state of denial to wander over to "Paper, Please!" and have a gander at the lengthy and detailed coverage they've been doing of this and other cases for a long, long time.

Well, well, well. According to the Twitter, Baby Doc was just arrested

Taken from his luxury hotel by police. Well, well, well.

Of course, it's Twitter. So you can't ever be sure.

http://twitter.com/MacMcClelland

-----------------

As we say, things may not be what they appear. From the Twitter:

Decoy! UN soldiers cleared a path to the waiting police truck, then took Duvalier out a different door. less than 20 seconds ago via tweetymail

Stay tuned!

Concepts

I used to joke that mine was the last generation to actually be "educated" in public school. In California, radical changes in the nature and purpose of public education began in 1967 with the Governorship of Ronald Reagan, the point being to make it impossible for students to rise up ever again.

It seemed fairly clear early on that the objective was to eliminate the teaching of -- and thus knowledge of -- critical thinking. Given the nature of the student uprisings of the '60's, based as they were on the realization that much of what were were being told was lies, a realization driven by the widespread ability to think critically, eliminating that ability understandably became a prime objective.

Today, it seems the very idea of critical thinking is unknown to almost anyone under 60.

Not only that, but there is a nearly universal misperception of the difference between speculation and fact.

There seems to be little or no knowledge of how to evaluate information; it is all a jumble that one sorts through based entirely on principles of Authority: who says the thing determines its factual truth.

During December, for example, an immense amount of "news" -- and hysteria -- was generated over the curious case of Julian Assange and what he might or might not have done to get himself in trouble with the Law. It was widely purported that the accusations against him in Sweden for those "sex crimes" were a set up by the CIA to entrap him so as to make his extradition to the USA for trial on any number of Espionage and other charges possible.

Charlie Savage's December 15 report in the New York Times laid the groundwork for much of the hysteria over what the Department of Justice was doing to build a case against Assange. His reporting was taken as gospel, fact, indisputable, partly because Charlie Savage is a widely trusted Authority, and partly because it was in the New York Times, which -- of course -- is Assange's Media Partner in the United States (except for their spat over the John Burns profile, of course.)

But if you read the article critically, there are no named sources, there is no support for the assertions made by Savage regarding what the Justice Department is or is not doing except for very vague statements and "authorizations" by AG Eric Holder, there is no factual evidence of any grand jury proceeding, and there is extensive speculation about what the DoJ "could be doing."

In other words, the entire piece, which has been taken uncritically as "fact," has very few facts in it, whereas it is filled with speculation, unsupported assertion, quotes from named and unnamed interested parties, and suspected future potentials.

Perhaps it's not an entirely useless story, but it doesn't tell you what is really going on -- because it can't.

All it does is keep a pot stirred -- and likely is a conduit for propaganda. It is the New York Times after all.

But people who don't understand critical thinking cannot look at a story like this that way. They look at who wrote it, they look at where it was published, they look at what is being said. As long as those things fit with their perceptions of "truth", the story is "true" and "factual."

Yes, it's factually speculative. Beyond that? Nothing.

Except that it made the Assange defense go into hyperdrive -- for fear, apparently, that Assange was going to be rounded up and put on trial in the US for Evility -- or something.

That fear and chaos and panic is useful for someone. But who?

Sunshine

Cloud formations during monsoon weather in Mountainair, NM, August 2008

Since I don't have teevee here and haven't picked up a paper for a while, and since my internet connection is a slow dialup, I'm kind of cut off from the concerns of The World. The News comes from the radio, primarily NPR, but over the weekend, there wasn't a lot of news on the radio. Instead, there were a lot of features, some of which were very interesting (such as the crypto-Jews of Bernalillo), but which didn't really touch on the Big Stories, like the earthquake in Chile.

I've noticed since the weekend that reporters are having to struggle with the difference between their Narrative of What Happened in Chile, and what they're finding on the ground. The First Narrative was that though the earthquake was far more severe in Chile, there was little damage, hardly any compared to Haiti, because the building standards were so much higher in Chile (subtext: they're White, you know). The Narrative insisted that these Chileans were so much calmer and so much better behaved than those dirty Negroes in Haiti, and they were so much better organized to provide the necessary assistance to the affected regions, they didn't really need international assistance. (subtext: so much better to be Chilean than Haitian, what luck, eh?)

The initial reports were coming from Santiago, where apparently some older buildings collapsed, but the newer ones were mostly fine, and everyone was very well behaved, even snarky, about the earthquake and its aftershocks, and this sanguinity was assumed to be the way things were throughout the country.

The major area of damage and disruption was in and around Concepcion, which of course was inaccessible. Nevertheless, because the Narrative said that things were mostly fine in Chile, reporters took their time getting to the region. Besides it was hard. The roads were impassable. Bridges were down. The airport was closed. They had to go through Argentina. It took a while.

But everything was fine.

They saw little damage, and they heard the death toll was modest, a few hundred. Nothing like the massive death toll in Haiti. So it was like sightseeing for the reporters.

Who finally got to Concepcion, and said: WTF?

Damage in some areas was severe. Hundreds of thousands were homeless. There were no services of any kind. The Government was not providing any food or water, no shelter, nothing, and big aftershocks were continuous. Looting had commenced, and some of the reporters were referring to the looters as "gang members," or "gang leaders." The people were angry and frightened.

The military was sent in to establish order and stop the looting. Most of which was food and water from the markets, but some of which was teevees and toaster ovens. Which can't be tolerated, not in a civilized society. The military arrived, and still provided nothing -- except a show of force to keep the people from salvaging food and water and teevees and toaster ovens from the debris.

The reporters were grateful, as they always are, for the military presence to keep the people at bay, but still they were confused, because their Narrative was that there were no serious problems and destruction was modest, and the people were behaving. And that isn't what they were seeing on the ground, and they didn't know how to report it.

Rather than abandon the Narrative, they tried to blend it with what they were seeing with their own eyes and with what they were hearing from the population. Often their reports were hesitant to say the least, as they groped for words to express their understanding of conditions and what was really going on without violating the Narrative they were supposed to be reinforcing.

There was a tsunami, for example, that did terrible damage along the coast, but there was nothing at all said about it for many days, in part, perhaps, because the Narrative said that the tsunami warning was cancelled and people around the Pacific were annoyed and upset that they had had to prepare for a tsunami that never came.

Of course, I understand that my news is filtered through many layers while I'm here, and much of it is fragmentary at best. And of course by now everyone should be aware of how dominant The Narrative is in the news business, for everything, not just major disasters.

But it's still something of a shock to see it so bare in the case of Chile, and to hear how hard it is for reporters to actually report what's going on when what is really going on diverges so much from The Narrative.

So my question is, what will it take to bring the Sunshine of Truth into the news business? Or is it hopeless? Is it necessary to report on the basis of a Received Narrative to begin any big story, and then adjust it as "more facts come in?" Is this the way it has to be? Has it always been this way?

We fret about the propagandistic nature of much of our news. Yet so far, there isn't really another model that has any traction. The alternative media, including the blogging media, provides a different perspective (sometimes) but it is often as locked into its own narrative, and struggles just as hard with the Truth and telling the Truth if the Truth diverges from the Alternative Narrative.