Media

Zionist cabal tries to hijack Wikipedia

January 9, 2014
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CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) is the Orwellian name of a pro-Israel media watchdog group that monitors, influences, and seeks to control all mainstream media coverage of issues affecting public opinion on all matters related to Israel. It has some 1000 members and chapters in several major American cities. It’s staffers scour all media coverage of Israel and “engage and directly contact” (some would say “harass”) reporters, editors, producers and publishers concerning what they regard as “distorted or inaccurate coverage” (some would say “the truth”) about Israel. They also offer “factual information” (some would say “propaganda”) to…

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Fukushima and the mainstream media

October 12, 2013
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Fukushima and the mainstream media

On March 11, 2011, the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant was severely damaged as a result of a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami that wreaked havoc along parts of the eastern Japanese coastline. Numerous equipment failures at the power plant led to nuclear meltdowns, a rapid loss of coolant inside the facility, and the release of large quantities of radioactive material. It was the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl and is one of only two disasters (the other being Chernobyl) to be classified as a Level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale. In the days and weeks following…

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Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance (article)

June 27, 2013
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The recent revelations by Edward Snowden of the global surveillance of internet communications by the American NSA was a vivid reminder of the need for everyone to think much more carefully about their online behavior. However, many people seem to regard Snowden’s revelations as interesting or curious but not startling. Such people seem to think that they would never be the target of US government surveillance or that, even if they were, there would be nothing to fear as they are law-abiding people. This article, written by Moxie Marlinspike for WIRED challenges these comfortable assumptions. It is well worth reading. Some notable paragraphs:…

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Another hero

June 10, 2013
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A recently created Wikipedia entry on Edward Snowden read as follows: Edward Joseph Snowden (born 1984) is an American technical contractor, a former CIA employee, and a traitor. Snowden released classified material on ­top-secret United States National Security Agency (NSA) programs including the PRISM surveillance program to The Guardian and The Washington Post in June 2013. PRISM is a top-secret government surveillance program, in operation since 2007, that enables the NSA to access the servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook, to collect data on the emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, and connection logs of not only Americans but also billions of people around the world…

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Why Poverty? (a documentary series)

May 31, 2013
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Steps is a partnership of two non-profit organisation (one in Denmark, the other in South Africa) that commissions documentaries to raise awareness about important social issues. For it’s most recent project, called Why Poverty?, it commissioned eight documentaries and 30 short films on the topic of poverty. These are powerful and thought-provoking films that really help to shed light on the issue of poverty. One of the great documentaries in this series, Park Avenue: money, power, and the American dream, is a fascinating look into the lives of the people living at 740 Park Ave., the most exclusive address in New York City.…

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More reasons not to trust Fox News

March 1, 2013
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More reasons not to trust Fox News

There are of course many controversies surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s obnoxious Fox News, but it is no secret that Fox is very much a mouth-piece of American conservatism. According to a recent poll done by Public Policy Polling, Fox News currently enjoys the confidence of about 41% of American voters, which is basically the percentage of Americans who support the Republicans. In fact, Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling, points out that: “We continue to find that Democrats trust most TV news sources other than Fox, while Republicans don’t trust anything except Fox. News preferences are very polarizing along party lines.”…

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The internet revolution (lecture by Alexander Bard)

January 9, 2013
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Alexander Bard’s provocative keynote speech at Next Berlin 2012 challenges the way history is taught, with industrialization presented as the climax of human history. He believes we need to contextualize history not in terms of the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Industrial Age, but rather in terms of information, such as spoken information, written information, printed information, broadcasted information and finally the Internet as participatory information. Trained in sociology, Bard examines technology in the context of the paradigm changes that are taking place in society. His observations on identity shifts in today’s youths is especially compelling. Young people are…

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The week the world stood still (by Noam Chomsky)

November 5, 2012
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In his article “The week the world stood still,” published originally on TomDispatch, Noam Chomsky reminds us how close the world came to thermonuclear apocalypse in 1962 and also provides some insight into what really happened behind closed doors during the standoff between the US and the Soviet Union. It is of great importance to get the facts right about this dark moment in human history right, especially since the majority of people on earth were not alive in 1962 and can only learn about it through historical scholarship. Noam Chomsky therefore does us a great service in this article; his…

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The US presidential beauty contest

October 6, 2012
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The good news in the 2012 US presidential election is that there are some decent candidates running on platforms that address serious issues, people like Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. The bad news is that most of the American electorate will not even be aware of these people, much less know what they stand for. And that, it seems, is the primary function of the nationally televised  presidential debates–to focus attention, not on, but away from the real alternatives to the status quo in US politics. How else to explain the absence…

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Sex, Lies and Julian Assange (documentary)

October 6, 2012
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Julian Assange and Wikileaks continue to be popular topics for the media, although  most of the media coverage is either biased or superficial. Sex, Lies and Julian Assange, reported by Andrew Fowler and presented by Kerry O’Brien, is an exception to this trend. In the brief space of 43 minutes, the investigative documentary revisits the advent of Wikileaks and the controversy surrounding its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange. Through well-selected interviews and detailed research, especially on the sexual offence allegations in Sweden, the documentary presents the story of Wikileaks and Julian Assange in a remarkably clear, unbiased way. It states what the mainstream…

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Julian Assange interviews Cypherpunks (The World Tomorrow)

July 28, 2012
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In the 8th and 9th episode of RT‘s The World Tomorrow, Julian Assange is joined by cypherpunks from the US, Germany, and France to discuss the future of our increasingly digitalized world.  What is the ultimate purpose of Twitter, Facebook and other social media? What is the current state of online privacy and data protection? These are some the questions examined in this excellent two-part discussion with people who understand perhaps better than anyone else the challenges that cyberspace poses to human freedom. Part I: Part II:

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Freedom of thought and open-source software (lecture by Eben Moglen)

July 28, 2012
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Eben Moglen, professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, as well as founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center and long-term supporter of organizations like the Free Software Foundation, is a lecturer and free software/open-source advocate. Though the following lecture and interview only covers so much, they do serve as a good introduction to his extensive body of work. Why Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media and Why Free Media Require Free Technology This lecture was held during the Re:publica 2012 conference in Berlin. It describes in detail why the current societal model, in which proprietary…

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Stiglitz on economic inequality

June 30, 2012
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The issue of economic inequality has been receiving quite a lot of attention in the past few months–at least in the progressive media. This is no doubt due in part to the Occupy movement and to the anti-austerity protests in Europe, which have really thrust the issues of inequality and economic justice into the spotlight. More so than at any point in the last several decades, there is a real public thirst for understanding the causes and consequences of economic inequality and what can be done to reverse it. The Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is one of several academics who have…

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Recent thoughts on the climate crisis

June 27, 2012
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A small sample of some the important things that have been said recently on the state of the climate crisis and the failures of political leaders to address the root causes or even acknowledge the seriousness of the problem: 1. Democracy Now interview with Bill McKibben (environmentalist, author, founder of the remarkable grassroots climate campaign 350.org) 2. Approaching a state shift in the Earth’s biosphere (ground-breaking article in Nature written by over 20 environmental scientists) 3. Is humanity pushing Earth past a tipping point? (a simplified, less technical summary of the aforementioned article in Wired magazine) 4. Democracy Now interview…

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Does Google censor the internet?

June 19, 2012
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The answer is “yes.” The evidence for this comes from a report prepared by Google itself, which will be released next week. According to the Wall Street Journal, the report shows that: Google received more than 1,000 requests from governments around the world in the second half of last year to take down items such as YouTube videos and search listings, and it complied with them more than half the time, according to information provided by the company. One example of the sort of censorship Google engages in concerns a request by the Thai government to remove YouTube videos insulting the…

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Julian Assange interviews Rafael Correa (The World Tomorrow)

June 3, 2012
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In the sixth episode of RT‘s The World Tomorrow, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador discusses the media, government corruption, and his country’s relationship with the United States. The interview opens with the circumstances surrounding the attempted coup in Ecuador in 2010, during which the president was taken hostage. Following the attempted coup, Correa embarked on a furious and controversial counter-offensive against Ecuador’s media. In this interview he explains the media’s role in the events of 2010 in terms of the vested interests of media corporations. He claims that corporate owners of the media “disguised as journalists, are trying to do politics,…

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Tracking the trackers (TED lecture by Gary Kovacs)

May 27, 2012
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As you surf the internet, information is being collected about you. Web tracking is not 100% evil — personal data can make your browsing more efficient; cookies can help your favorite websites stay in business. But, says Gary Kovacs in this TED lecture, it is your right to know what data is being collected about you and how it affects your online life. He unveils a Firefox add-on to do just that.  Gary Kovacs is the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, where he directs the development of Firefox.  [I am] not even two bites into breakfast, and there are already nearly…

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Dear Germany: It’s okay to criticise Israel (by Mark Levine)

April 18, 2012
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Irvine, CA – My parents would never buy a Mercedes. Period. They couldn’t understand Jews who would (legitimate adults didn’t buy Volkswagons either back in the 1970s, at least where I lived). In fact, aside from long-dead German composers and pastries from the local German-American bakery – whose owners were probably Jewish – Jewish-Americans wanted nothing to do with Germany. For obvious reasons. Even today, it’s very hard for non-Jews to understand the trauma Jews born in the post-Holocaust generation experienced related to Germany. Our family lived in a strange zone between the past and present. At regular moments throughout the…

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Can You Understand the Republican Brain? (Mark Karlin interviews Chris Mooney)

April 18, 2012
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Scientific American lauds author Chris Mooney “as one if the few journalists in the country who specialize in the now dangerous intersection of science and politics.” Having interviewed Mooney about his first book, the highly praised, “The Republican War on Science,” Truthout/BuzzFlash interviews Mooney about his latest release, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality.” Truthout and BuzzFlash readers can directly obtain “The Republican Brain” and support uncompromised journalism by clicking here. Mark Karlin: Progressives often say of Fox that they create facts to bolster their opinions. Is this true of the Republican mind set in general? Chris Mooney: This…

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Move over SOPA & PIPA: Here comes CISPA (by Anne Sewell)

April 6, 2012
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In the wake of SOPA and PIPA, there is yet another terrifying bill on the table. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA for short) which is currently being discussed by Congress.   In Washington, Congress is discussing the best way to avert the ongoing cyberattacks and some legislators have put forward a new act which, if it passes Congress, will allow the government access to personal correspondence of any person of their choosing.   Much like the Big Brother tactics in the United Kingdom recently, this bill will likely cause an outcry of condemnation and criticism, as…

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