The gaping disconnect between newspaper and television journalism is on full display in the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war controversy. Television, and cable news in particular, would have us believe that the story is about posting 90,000 documents on the Internet and not what the documents themselves say. Television would have us believe that the Pentagon’s outrage [...]
Read More...Here we are, a graying nation overlooking what may be one of our most spectacular natural resources, the aging. Instead of imagining what they can do for us, we can’t imagine how to care for them. It has been many years since idealism was a vital force in our newsrooms and the offices of media [...]
Read More...In the Year of the Mad Dogs, 2001, rabid fanatics murdered nearly 3,000 Americans in cold blood, Americans responded by irrationally attacking the wrong country, and the Germans made a film metaphor for how cruel security states arise from fear and disinformation. Das Experiment, the March 2001 film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, is based on [...]
Read More...Siege mentality is the foundation of a military state. Democratic ideals, social programs, quality of life, cultural and scientific achievement—all constitute clutter that gets in the way of the primary purpose of the state, which is to wage war and thereby enrich bankers and politicians’ cronies. War becomes an ideal in itself. Every other ideal [...]
Read More...Surely a measure of the dysfunctionality of our federal legislative branch is that when Republican Scott Brown of Massachusetts was sworn in as a senator the other day it was front-page news, even though it brings his party’s minority to only forty one. This is because his presence now enables his party to block legislation [...]
Read More...Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough. —Franklin D. Roosevelt Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th Century author of The Social Contract, which revolutionized Western political thought, believed that a corrupt society betrays the individual and grinds him [...]
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