Last week, a major censorship controversy erupted when Facebook began deleting all posts containing the iconic photograph of the Vietnamese “Napalm Girl” on the ground that it violated the company’s ban on “child nudity.” Facebook even deleted a post from the prime minister of Norway, who posted the photograph in protest of the censorship. As outrage spread, Facebook ultimately reversed itself — acknowledging “the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time” — but this episode illustrated many of the dangers I’ve previously highlighted in having private tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google become the arbiters of what we can and cannot see.
Category: Head Stories
… Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind reported that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 … and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq. And see this and this Time magazine points out that the claim by President Bush that Iraq was attempting to buy “yellow cake” Uranium from Niger: had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it. Everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. More The entire torture program was geared towards obtaining false confessions linking Iraq and 9/11 CIA agents and documents admit that the agency gave Iran plans for building nuclear weapons … so it could frame Iran for trying to build the bomb The “humanitarian” wars in Syria, Libya and Yugoslavia were all justified by exaggerated reports that the leaders of those countries were committing atrocities against their people. And see this
As the latest nuclear test shows, economic embargos are counter-productive. Bullying will not bring change, but trade and cultural exchange just might. The latest nuclear test by North Korea proves that economic sanctions against the regime have failed utterly. So how is the west proposing to react? It is debating how to extend sanctions. Embargos of increasing ferocity have been imposed on North Korea since 1992. While they were undermined by Beijing, they ostracised Pyongyang from the outside world, effectively freezing any rapprochement with the south. Sanctions are intended to hurt an economy as a lever to induce political change.
A new mini-crisis erupted in late August near the Strait of Hormuz when small patrol boats from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intercepted and continued to sail within a few hundred yards of a U.S. destroyer, the USS Nitze. The Nitze responded by firing warning shots. U.S. officials immediately condemned the incident as a terrible provocation, a theme that members of the American media obediently echoed. No one seemed to question why it was not provocative for the United States to sail a heavily armed destroyer (along with other warships) six thousand miles away from the American homeland to operate within a few miles of the Iranian coast. Yet Iran’s interception of that warship was automatically deemed provocative.
… [the] renewed Philippines nationalism, … The explanation by the Western corporate media, which caters to a very basic secondary school level of education, about the reasons behind the recent war of words between U.S. President Barack Obama and Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, had little to do with the leader of the Philippines calling Obama a «Putang ina» or «son of a whore» in Tagalog. The breakdown in relations between the Philippines, a former and much-abused American colony, and the United States is based on renewed Philippines nationalism, a disgust by Duterte for the selective human rights agenda of the Obama administration, and the Philippines leader’s antipathy for those schooled in Muslim beliefs in neighboring Indonesia.
American People, Please Help Us! “I am Syrian… living in Syria in the middle of everything. We have seen horrors. It was never a revolution nor a civil war. The terrorists are sent by your goverment. They are al Qaeda Jabhat al Nusra Wahhabi Salafists Talibans etc and the like extremists jihadists sent by the West and the Saudis and Qatar and Turkey. Your Obama and whoever is behind him or above him are supporting al Qaeda and leading a proxy war on my country. We thought you are against al Qaeda and now you support them. The majority here loves Assad. He has never committed a crime against his own people…the chemical attack was staged by the terrorists helped by USA and UK etc.. everyone knows that here. American soldiers and people should not be supporting barbarian al Qaeda terrorists who are killing Christians, Muslims in my country and everyone. Every massacre has committed by them. We were all happy in Syria= we have free school and university education available for everyone, free healthcare, no GMO, no fluoride, no chemtrails, no Rothschild IMF- controlled bank, state owned central bank which gives 11% interest, we are self-sufficient and have no foreign debt to any country or bank.
An EU summit without the UK prime minister on 16 September in Bratislava will kick off the discussions on the EU’s future. The summit is «informal», because the UK has not yet left the Union, but its prime minister is not invited. Slovakia, whose positions on Europe’s migration policies have diverged sharply from those of the Commission and western European powers, holds the EU’s rotating Council presidency. The decision to meet outside Brussels is intended to send a signal that Eastern European countries will be given more of a say on issues that have traditionally been the domain of core European powers like the UK, France, Germany and Italy.
in Town. . … Not only has the Saudi-led Coalition slumped in its efforts to achieve even its most basic objectives but a second and much more imposing rival coalition have evolved, making the Saudi’s cultural war sword look more like wet spaghetti in comparison. The new coalition backed by Iran, Russia, China[ii], even India and now possibly Turkey are all lining up to join! China recently announced that it will up its involvement in the Syrian war by stepping up personnel training and humanitarian assistance to President Bashar al Assad’s Syrian government. Syrian President Assad, after meeting the Indian minister, said: “India has a role to play in meeting the challenge of terrorism”
We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
What a mess! In the crazy Syrian war, US-backed and armed groups are fighting other US-backed rebel groups. How can this be? It is so because the Obama White House had stirred up the war in Syria but then lost control of the process. When the US has a strong president, he can usually keep the military and intelligence agencies on a tight leash. But the Obama administration has had a weak secretary of defense and a bunch of lady strategists who are the worst military commanders since Louis XV, who put his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, in charge of French military forces during the Seven Year’s War.