Point Lookout
Musings from the hillside

First Matt Simmons, now Ali Bakhtiari, in EnergyBulletin.net’s Peak Oil News Clearinghouse article, he calls Peak Oil passing in 2006 and Bakhtiari’s artice (linked to in this article) is quite explicit and concerned.

This article on RIA Novosti makes too much sense. I wonder if it gets at the deeper truth.There is no reason for the missile site. There never was. It is an excuse to deploy the toys somewhere, to put another permanent base somewhere, to create a command for another Colonel or General somewhere, and to establish a need for logistics and resupply parts to keep suppliers happy and create retirement jobs for the military planners. No worries. There isn’t a nation on earth except Russia with the ballistic missiles to defend against. Not one.

So the whole thing is purely chicken manure. High energy bad smell.

This is about what we would expect from USATODAY.com, a paid? commercial announcement of an upcoming television program by another “journalist”. And it’s almost exclusively information from the show in question.

Just a quick review of the clips chosen tend to have me run screaming obscenities or epithets of a morally more uplifting style. It might better have been for “Selling the War”! Or for corporations rushing to be the official propaganda arm of the Department of Defense (”Please, please, let my reporter get put into the propaganda seat in the front of your selected tank/truck/helicopter so we can report what you tell us to say!”).

As Moyers well knows, media consolidation and corporatization has been going on for well over a century. The media in the days of Vietnam was as corporately controlled and government-worshiping as they are now, but there were a few more players at the table. No matter. They were as ready to toe the line as those who consolidated.

There is no question that the journalism profession in the United States is completely dependent on the government itself for all of the information they consider worthy of mention. There is virtually no investigative reporting going on and try to find reporters reading (listening to, viewing) primary material and interpreting for themselves (think the Congressional Record, the published speeches of the President and his minions, try C-Span or some of the lovely reporting on PBS that merely shows town meetings and the like). Worse yet, none of our sainted outlets could sully their hands reading and/or reflecting on the myriad views and stories on non-US outlets. An occasional hand-wave, perhaps.

The US corporate media giants are too busy creating and promoting the stars of their various media ventures. The publicity requirements of the movie and music industry stars drive a significant amount of what passes for news. Politicians, in general, are stars as they and their roadies and groupies staff are the grist for so many bits of information that corporate reporters can pass off as valuable information or news.

This star system is important. It creates valuable branded assets which are easily remembered and monetized. The assets need not be good, just good enough that the marketing machine can make them appear terrific. Among the pigs we’ve put rhinestone tiaras on, Don Rumsfeld (a multi-time loser) and Al Sharpton, two nasty conniving liars (only one was convicted of slander, though). But the minute something happens and one of them stands up, watch the media show up with sharpened pencils and bright lights … after all, they’re STARS.

The media needs to trivialize its news problem. They need to dumb it down for two reasons. First, real news is hard to sell. And the media only want to make money. So they want to minimize the hard part and sell as many gas-guzzling cars, obesity-enhancing foods, and worthless faddish household or fashion products as possible. That means maximizing the easy part (entertainment, sports, and all the other fluff). Second, making the hard stuff easy and doing it honestly means calling government propaganda government propaganda. And that frightens corporate managers who only want to sell soap.

Why we continue to pay any attention to the soap-selling industries is beyond me. And Bill Moyers is as much a hack today as he was when he was selling soap on the corporate television networks. Bill Moyers is as busy selling soap today on the semi-commercialized PBS. And his revisionist history of the last fifty years will look like it is critical of the government and the corporate media but in the end, it will be toothless and harmless. But PBS and friends will point to it for years, claiming the toothless old lion told those corporate weasels a thing or two.

And he won’t tell a real inconvenient or annoying truth all through the show. Not one.

An article by Aijaz Ahmad in the Monthly Review. Not just an opinion but a collection of useful information as well.

It’s a negative viewpoint but a strong one.

The Corporate Media loves Al Sharpton and, to a lesser degree, Jesse Jackson. You can always count on them to rise up out of their fat-cat existences when some public figure says something unseemly about the US African American community (that’s an OK thing to say, right?). And the media makes sure there are microphones, cameras, lights, and reporters nearby at all times in case there’s a juicy bit of ranting to capture and splash onto the Editorial space in between the ads selling soap.

Apparently, it’s good for business.

It’s pretty bad theater. The Reverend Al and Mr. Jackson should spend some time with their constituents. They should spend some time listening to the poetry of their community, and it’s popular music. They should meditate on the heroes raised out of that community and thrust by their fan club (the global media transnationals) on the world stage as performers or characters.

In fact, they should go sit in the stands at one of those Rutgers woman’s basketball games. They should get recordings of the speech among the players. They should further listen to the speech on the court of the professional game, the role models for the up and coming in the sport.

Neither of these pompous, self-important, hypocrits has a clue. Neither of them is qualified to speak for a community. Their outrage is as much against those they claim to represent (and don’t) as against Mr. Imus, an urepentantly vulgar and insensitive person who has made his employers many millions of dollars in profits and who has a larger and more loyal following, one suspects, than either Reverend Sharpton or Mr. Jackson.

Remember, this is the same Reverend Al Sharpton who was one of the three folks made to pay $345,000 in damages in findings of slander in the entirely bogus Tawana Brawley case in the early 1970s. I have never figured out how anyone would believe a word out of his mouth after that one.

Poor Don Imus, 66 and out of work. I’m sure someone wants to tap into the millions more to be garnered for putting him back to work somewhere, running his mouth off to the great joy of his fans.

The problem is that that whole thing plays into the hands of those who are happily abridging our rights of free speech. There will now be a chill in the air when a white guy of any age wants to use the words of the non-white community on the air. The specter of the Reverends rising from their gilded couches and from among their rich white supporters to put on the robes of sanctimony will linger in our subconsciousness.

One can only hope that CBS and NBC miss their revenue targets and that Imux gets picked up, again, for even more than they were paying him.

And I don’t like him or his show.

Scotto Horton reminds us that a Pulitzer Prize Winning Photojournalist Completes One Year in U.S. Military Custody in Iraq. He makes the Kafka (The Trial) reference.

We should be using the Kafka reference more frequently and very regularly. It lacks the horror of torture that has been added by these latter-day adherents to the philosophy. But Kafka, like Orwell, saw it coming.

Hmmm, do I have a copy around?

FT.com reports that, facing rising complaints from within, India is having to give in and open up enterprise tax free zones. They’re not doing as well as China and some segment of the population is getting restless.

For some reason, the folk in West Bengal got upset about the government displacing some smallish number of folk to clear land for a small zone. The money guys want big zones. It’s a story with a hole in the middle and that’s where the information is.

The title of a eweek.com article on a Duke U. Study: There Is No Shortage of U.S. Engineers. Their findings are that offshoring is only and all about cost savings.

The funny part is that they cut custs by moving x jobs to India or China without asking if they need x / y people. There is a theory that states that most of these giants could achieve the same cost savings by reducing US staff by a similar percentage. It would be smart to keep the smart and/or productive ones but that’s something of a refinement on the strategy.

Tom Whipple’s take on both the report and the reaction, in a Falls Church News-Press article. Pretty amusing stuff, actually. How to report a cataclysmic disaster and get ignored. Unfortunately, it doesn’t link to the report … but the PDF can be downloaded from here.

Counterpunch runs aPatrick Cockburn article US’s Bungled Plan to Kidnap Iran’s Top Spook Prompted Hostage Taking. Who’da thunk it?

Amazing that Cockburn has to be the first to mention the obvious. Or not.