Right-Wing Extremists Organize and Promote Violence on Facebook -- Should the Feds Bust Them Or Leave Them Alone?

AlterNet / By Justine Sharrock

From militias to white supremacists, right-wing groups are using social networking to organize and spread propaganda. Should the government do something?

With all the concern about the lack of privacy on Facebook, one would think that the online social networking site would be the last place that paranoid, right-wing extremist groups would organize. But a wide range of groups, from patriot organizations to militias and even white supremacists, are using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube to organize and even espouse illegal activities.

Click to read more ...

We're All Watching the BP Disaster, But Who Is Taking Action?

techPresident / By Micah L. Sifry

How the catastrophe in the Gulf is a quintessentially 21st century spectacle.    

 

Depending on your perspective, the Gulf oil spill is many things: a reminder of human fallibility, an indictment of corporate greed, a painful example of government regulatory failure, a portrait of the power of big money in politics, a wake-up call about our continuing addiction to cheap oil. Arguably, it is proof that America has become very good at making what we once imagined as rare accidents, "black swans" in the parlance of Wall Street, into high probability events. Assuming you've been paying attention to the news, by now you probably think it is some combination of all of those things.

Click to read more ...

Glenn Beck's Favorite Smear Tactic: Call What He Doesn't Like 'Nazi'

AlterNet / By Simon Greer

The author makes an argument for the common good -- and Beck calls it 'exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany.'

June 2, 2010  |  

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

Editor's Note: Below Simon Greer's op-ed is a hilarious video of comedian Lewis Black's send-up of Glenn Beck's Nazi Tourette Syndrome, and Media Matters' video showing Glenn Beck's hypocrisy over Nazi comparisons.

Last week, Glenn Beck told me I was a bad Jew. And not just any bad Jew. An op-ed I wrote in the Washington Post included, according to Beck, "exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany."

Click to read more ...

*FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*
May 31, 2010
1:08 PM

*CONTACT: Veterans for Peace <http://www.veteransforpeace.org/> *
Mike Ferner 419-729-7273
Dennis Lane 314-306-0024
Veterans For Peace's Response to Armed Attack on Aid FlotillaVFP member Ret.
Colonel Ann Wright is one of the members of the Flotilla

WASHINGTON - May 31 - The world is reacting in righteous outrage at this
moment to Israel's high seas attack on an international aid flotilla,
reportedly killing up to 20 people escorting tons of humanitarian aid to
Gaza in an effort to break Israel's three-year blockade. "Made in the
U.S.A." is stamped on the weapons commandos used to kill and wound the
international peace activists.

We are saddened and we are angry.  At least one of our own members, retired
Army Col., Ann Wright, is among the 700 people aboard the boats attacked in
the middle of the night.  But we cannot say we are very surprised.
Palestinians die quietly and unnoticed every day in Gaza, the world's
largest open air prison, as a result of Israel's blockade and violent
repression.

Veterans For Peace Board Member, Cherie Eichholz, traveled to Gaza in May
and had this to say about the situation in Gaza, "Surrounded by a massive
wall and a naval blockade, Gazans are imprisoned, suffering without the most
basic of necessities, including enough food and safe drinking water. The
situation on the ground is grave."

Another Board Member, Elliott Adams, also traveled to Gaza in May said, "On
our Memorial Day we veterans are presented with the ugly specter of  US
citizens having their lives threatened and being held captive in an act of
piracy.  Making it more painful, this is being done with US weapons.  While
the people of Gaza cry out for basic humanitarian needs, a neighboring
nation is willing to kill to deny them basic life support."

Many of our 7,000 members in over 100 chapters are already organizing or
will soon join the protests being organized across the U.S.  We urge our
members to use every nonviolent tactic available in the streets and in local
Congressional offices to protest this attack.  At the same time we demand
Congress cut off U.S. military aid to
Israel<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=3F6OkB%2B%2BHqLemY2KajBAu1s304qYhcTZ>
which
has totaled over 32 billion dollars since
1997<http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=XADMakTEGbm6c8izlmbDGls304qYhcTZ>
.

For interviews about what life is like in Gaza, please contact Cherie
Eichholz at 206-227-6095 or Elliott Adams at 518-441-2697.



###
Veterans For Peace is a national organization founded in 1985. It is
structured around a national office in Saint Louis, MO and comprised of
members across the country organized in chapters or as at-large members. The
organization includes men and women veterans of all eras and duty stations
including from the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), World War II, the Korean,
Vietnam, Gulf and current Iraq wars as well as other conflicts.

Gaza Aid Convoy Attack: Israel’s Murderous Sea Piracy a Horrendous Moment of Truth for US Policy

By Finian Cunningham

Global Research <http://www.globalresearch.ca/>, May 31, 2010

This time, the Israeli war machine may have gone too far for international
public opinion to stomach.  In the early hours of 31 May, before daybreak,
Israeli commandos stormed the international civilian aid convoy heading for
Gaza. Between 20-24 volunteers onboard have been killed and at least 50
injured, according to various reports, but the number of casualties has
risen rapidly from the initial reports of two dead. The final death toll
could be greater.

The actions by Israeli forces have been condemned by governments around the
world. European governments, including those of Belgium, Ireland, Italy,
Germany, Norway and Sweden have summoned their respective Israeli envoys
over the incident. Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan is reported to have
cut short a trip toSouth America and his country is said to have recalled
its ambassador to Israel in protest.

Click to read more ...

Did an American Mine Sink the South Korean Ship?

By Yoichi Shimatsu

Global Research <http://www.globalresearch.ca/>, May 31, 2010
New America Media <http://newamericamedia.org/> - 2010-05-27

BEIJING - South Korean Prime Minister Lee Myung-bak has claimed
"overwhelming evidence" that a North Korean torpedo sank the corvette
Cheonan on March 26, killing 46 sailors. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton claimed that there’s "overwhelming evidence" in favor of the theory
that North Korea sank the South Korean Navy warship Cheonan. But the
articles of proof presented so far by military investigators to an official
inquiry board have been scanty and inconsistent.

Click to read more ...

Half a Million Displaced Iraqis Face Grim Future In Squalid Squatter CampsBy Ali Kareem, Institute for War and Peace Reporting

Posted on May 27, 2010, Printed on May 31, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147021/

The alarming spread of illegal squatter settlements has aid groups fearful
of a looming social crisis, one which a senior United Nations official
considers "the greatest humanitarian problem facing Iraq."

Recent reports from two international agencies found that of Iraq's 1.5
million internally displaced people, or IDPs, at least 500,000 have been
forced to dwell in squalid squatter camps without access to health care or
public services.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR, has recorded a sharp
increase in squatters since 2009, and activists are demanding the United
States and UN stem the problem before it surges out of control.

Click to read more ...

The Infuriating Cell Phone RacketBy Scott Thill, AlterNet

Posted on May 29, 2010, Printed on May 31, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147037/

If you're not angry with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint -- America's

four national wireless providers that reportedly control 90 percent of the
market -- then here's some ridiculous news to raise your righteous ire.

Perhaps you'd be interested to know about one of the most outrageous cell
phone scams? It's simple: Charge customers for being forced to listen to 15
seconds of unnecessary voicemail instructions reminding them how to leave a
message after the beep. According to *New York Times* technology writer
David Pogue, if Verizon customers leave voicemails or check their messages twice a day,
the mammoth New Jersey-based telco takes in around $620 million. In return,
you lose wasted hours of your life and have to pay for it.

Click to read more ...

Allan Wall, a longtime VDARE contributor, spoke with Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy on Monday about immigration

Southern Poverty Law Center

Allan Wall, a longtime VDARE contributor, spoke with Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy on Monday about immigration.

A columnist for the white nationalist website VDARE appeared as a guest on Fox News this week.

As Media Matters reported, Allan Wall, a longtime VDARE contributor, spoke with Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy on Monday about immigration. Doocy introduced Wall as a U.S. citizen who lived in Mexico for 17 years while teaching English. At the end of the interview, Doocy mentioned that Wall writes for VDARE but failed to provide any information about the website.

In fact, VDARE features articles by extremists such as Jared Taylor, editor of the racist American Renaissance magazine; Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University, Long Beach, who argues that Jews are genetically driven to undermine the power of whites; and the late Sam Francis, who edited the newspaper of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens. Founded in 1999, VDARE raised about $53,000 from donors during an emergency appeal this spring after a major foundation cut off its funding.

Click to read more ...

Is Hanks and Spielberg's $150 Million Mini-Series a Recruiting Poster for More War?

CounterPunch / By Clancy Sigal

Can you make an anti-war statement, and pay tribute to the courage of soldiers in the Second World War at the same time?

I love war movies. Scenes of fighting men shooting the crap out of other fighting men nails me to the seat, goggle-eyed and excited as a kid. No matter how grisly the soldiers' wounds, how suffocating the jungle heat and nasty the maggots crawling over their shattered bodies, I'm seduced. Whether it's the seemingly unsentimental but ultimately glamorous Hurt Locker or John Wayne in that recruiting poster for the military, Sands of Iwo Jima or the faux-realistic Saving Private Ryan, I can't look away. It's a blood-and-guts thing, like the emotions evoked by Patton (Ronald Reagan's favorite movie). As the old TV beer commercial used to say, it reaches parts of you that others don't. Specifically, the bowels not the mind.

Click to read more ...

We Are Living in a Screenworld -- Reality Isn't in the Real World Anymore

Psychotherapy Networker / By Michael Ventura

Not so long ago, I taught a graduate writing seminar in which I got caught in an argument about virtual vs. "real" experience. Two students—among the brightest in the class—insisted that they could go to Rome via a computer program through which they could view every street, turn this corner and that as they pleased, look at every ruin and work of art, and their experience would be as real, as engaged, as if they'd actually been there. n "But," said I, "a pigeon couldn't shit on your head."

Granting that any experience can be called "real," in that it is an experience, I argued that there are differences in the nature of virtual and actual reality. For one thing, on your walk through a virtual Rome, you aren't even walking: you're sitting. And what's Rome without the wonderful smells of food? Even if your virtual Rome is accompanied by recorded sounds of Rome, that's nothing like the sounds of racket, traffic, music, and language, the melodious cacophony of Italian, spoken all around you. A flat screen gives you no sense of Rome behind you, and to the side of you. The rain won't rain on you, and you won't have to dodge crazy drivers.

Click to read more ...

Fox News' John Stossel Calls For Repeal of Part of Civil Rights Act

Media Matters for America / By Matt McLaughlin

The Fox News commentator called for the repeal of the public accommodation section of the Civil Rights act, saying "private businesses ought to get to discriminate."

On the Thursday edition Fox News' America Live, Fox analyst John Stossel discussed the 1964 Civil Rights Act with host Megyn Kelly. Kelly asked, "How do you know that these private business owners, who owned restaurants and so on, would have said, 'You know what? We will take blacks. We'll take gays. We'll take lesbians,' if they hadn't been forced to do it?"

Click to read more ...

Celebration: My 20 Years Without Television

By Rev. Carole Hallundbaek / PRN Host, GODSPEED

I will never forget the last time I watched television:

I was living in an apartment in mid-town Manhattan, watching CNN’s ongoing coverage of the Gulf War – the first Gulf War, mind you, under George Bush Sr.

Red tracers were shooting across the night sky, scud missiles were flying, falling, incoming, incoming, and… BOOM!

My TV set blew.

Click to read more ...

How LSD Destroyed God's (and Dad's) Rigid Authority and Ended the Dull 1950s

By Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner, Brain Waving
Posted on May 20, 2010, Printed on May 21, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146942/

The following is adapted from the Foreword to Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties, by Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner with Gary Bravo, from Synergetic Press.

LSD is a drug that produces fear in people who don’t take it. –Timothy Leary

Click to read more ...

Why Privacy on Facebook Is 'Virtually Impossible'

Miller-McCune.com / By Erik Hayden

Controversy grows, as Facebook's lack of privacy control = goldmine for marketing companies.

Editor's Note: The controversy over Facebook's aggressive attempts to cash in on information about its members is heating up. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that "anti-Facebook sentiment is surfacing in highly visible places, from the halls of Congress to the blogs and podcasts of influential technology experts like Leo Laporte of Petaluma."It seems to me that ultimately their goal is to funnel all Internet traffic through Facebook.com," said Laporte, who deleted his Facebook profile during a recent podcast and donated money to Diaspora, a project to create a more open and private alternative to Facebook. Laporte was inspired to put an end to his Facebook account by a recent blog post by Jason Calacanis, chief executive officer of Mahalo, a question-and-answer Web site. He accused Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg of trading users' privacy for profit. ... Facebook convened a staff meeting Thursday to discuss the backlash, although some staff members described it as a routine gathering. ...

Click to read more ...

The 21st Century Soldier: Supports Gay Rights, Clean Energy and Is Often Progressive

AlterNet / By Daniela Perdomo

Votevets is making waves educating the public about a very different kind of soldier.

There are two ads out on national cable networks these days that you may have seen.

One depicts a U.S. military truck blowing up as it winds its way down a dirt road, presumably somewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan. The cause? An explosively formed projectile, hailing from Iran and specially designed to destroy American military vehicles, we're told. The image of the always-creepy Mahmoud Ahmedinejad flashes on the screen and the word "enemies" is oft-repeated. The second ad also invokes Iran as America's foe, while a trailer-voiced narrator tells us that nation makes $100 million every day "selling oil around the world and peddling hate."

Click to read more ...

Virtual Living

by Linh Dinh

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/15-2

Last week, the president warned a graduating class against a few gadgets and toys, iPods, iPads, Xboxes and PlayStations, where "information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," but this could easily describe nearly all of our media, with Obama, like the rest of our ruling class, a prime beneficiary. As our entire society unravels and the Gulf of Mexico becomes a dead sea, what do you find on television but singing and dancing contests, huge people losing weight, pregnant teens and endless sports? That is, the usual stuff, all noise and no consequences.

Click to read more ...

Lost on the Fearless Plain

Big Brother's got that ju-ju, Gaia's got the blues -- hologram, carry me home

Joe Bageant
May 11, 2010   http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/05/lost-on.html

I've spent most of his week watching American television and movies. I leave the TV on all night long. I toss and turn with my bad back, and bad lungs, catch a rerun episode of Two and a Half Men, or CSI, and conk out again. Then I awaken to the U.S. morning talk shows. It's a grueling regimen, only for the strong. Or the lonely. For periodic relief, I switch to Mexican television (be patient, I really am going somewhere with this). Mexican TV is not one iota better than US television, but is veeerrry heavy on the booty. More than heavy. Astronomical. Think all-but-bare tits and ass close-ups every fifteen seconds, straight through commercials, dramas, comedy shows, history shows, and even the news where possible.  Every show but the bullfights and that old nun who comes on at ten PM, who invariably drives me back to the U.S. channels.

Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world's a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state's 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.

This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.

Click to read more ...

FCC to Seek Net Neutrality Using New Legal Framework

by Tony Romm

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski on Thursday announced his agency would seek to regain its lost grip on broadband by applying some of the rules that govern phone companies to Internet providers.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski testifies in Washington, DC, in March 2010. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Chip Somodevilla)

One month to the day since a federal court stripped the FCC of that authority, setting back the agency's dual goals of expanding broadband access and instituting tough rules to ensure open Internet, Genachowski took the first steps in restoring what he described as "the shared understanding" that the FCC should protect broadband consumers.

Genachowski's announcement is sure to satisfy net neutrality proponents -- from public-interest groups to companies like Google and Skype, which have long called on the commission to enforce open Internet rules. But the move will likely put Genachowski, the FCC and the Obama administration on a collision course with broadband providers -- like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon -- which have long questioned the FCC's authority to regulate broadband using its internal, rule-making process.

Click to read more ...

Is Obama Abandoning Net Neutrality?

It appears Obama's head of the FCC is wavering to pressure from the largest cable and phone companies, against universal internet access.

 

 

Is the Obama FCC siding with the largest cable and phone companies, and against Net Neutrality and universal Internet access?

The Obama administration has long vowed to protect Net Neutrality and bridge the digital divide, and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski picked up this baton when he took up his post last year. But now Genachowski appears to be wavering.

According to an article in the Washington Post, Genachowski may sit on his hands rather than "reclassify" broadband to make sure the FCC can protect Internet users. The decision not to reclassify would be a grave mistake - one that would threaten the Internet as we know it.

A recent federal appeals court decision jeopardized the FCC's authority to establish Net Neutrality protections and carry out its National Broadband Plan.

Chairman Genachowski can fix this by reclassifying broadband as a "telecommunications service" under Title II of the Communications Act - where it was in the first place before a Bush FCC changed it, creating the mess we're encountering now.

If Chairman Genachowski fails to re-establish the FCC's authority to protect Internet users, he will be allowing companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to slow down, block or censor content at will. And it will cripple the FCC's ability to ensure universal Internet access for rural, low-income and disabled Americans.

If he doesn't reclassify broadband, the phone and cable giants will be able to block any website, blog post, tweet or outreach by a political campaign - and the FCC will be powerless to stop them.

Basically, without reclassification, nearly every broadband-related decision the agency makes from here forward will be aggressively challenged in court by companies who know the FCC stands on shaky legal ground, and the FCC will likely lose.

Which means, we could lose the Internet as we know it - the only remaining open communications platform where we all have a voice.

Genachowski's inaction would be an outrage. But we can't just grimace, sigh and resign ourselves to yet another broken promise, one more Washington letdown. We have to draw the line.

Tell the FCC chairman to stand up to the industry pressure, keep his promises and do the right thing: Reclassify broadband, protect Net Neutrality and promote universal Internet access.

Megan Tady is a National Political Reporter for InTheseTimes.com. Previously, she worked as a reporter for the NewStandard, where she published nearly 100 articles in one year. Megan has also written for Clamor, CommonDreams, E Magazine, Maisonneuve, PopandPolitics, and Reuters.