The waning power of truth

by Paul Craig Roberts
June 22, 2009

David Ray Griffin, the nemesis of the collection of disinformation known as the 9/11 Commission Report, has taken up the question of Osama Bin Laden, dead or alive?

On the basis of the available evidence, Griffin concludes that bin Laden died in December 2001, most likely of kidney failure. He has been kept alive in the media by US government PSYOPS as a useful bogyman to justify America’s illegal wars of aggression. The messages received from bin Laden since his death appear to be conveniently timed fabrications designed to advance US government purposes.

Osama bin Laden is likely to become a mythical person, like the Georgia Tech student, George P. Burdell, who will be sighted from time to time over a period that exceeds the length of a human life.

It was less than one year ago that Americans were subjected to PSYOPS disinformation from their government concerning the Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia.

Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin incorporated South Ossetia, formerly a part of Russia, into his home province of Georgia. When the Soviet Union broke up, Georgia became independent and retained South Ossetia. Secession movements arose in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia. These secession movements were the reason European members of NATO rejected the US government’s attempt to make Georgia a NATO member in order to extend the US/NATO military presence on Russia’s borders in contravention of previous US government agreements with Russia.

To terminate the secession movement and, thereby, remove the barrier to Georgia becoming a NATO member, the US, with Israel’s help, trained and equipped the Georgian military and gave the American puppet ruler, installed in the aftermath of one of the US-orchestrated “color revolutions,” the green light to attack South Ossetia.

Under mutual agreement, Russia and Georgia both provided peace-keeping troops in South Ossetia to prevent violence by secessionists. On the night of August 7-8, 2008, Georgian troops attacked South Ossetia, destroying a town and killing many Russian Ossetians and some Russian soldiers who were part of the peace-keeping force. Large numbers of South Ossetians fled across the border to Russia.

The US government, in its hubris, assumed that Russia would accept the ethnic cleansing of Russians from South Ossetia. Instead, Russian troops arrived and quickly destroyed the American-trained and equipped Georgian army and could easily have taken control of Georgia, but refrained.

Defeated in its aim, the US government unleashed a PSYOPS disinformation war against the Russian government, claiming falsely that Russia had initiated the conflict by attacking Georgia. The US government’s blatant and transparent lies were force-fed to the American public by the US media.

British disinformation services cooperated with their American masters, but the rest of the world blew the whistle. The real facts emerged, and an American disinformation campaign experienced a rare failure.

Now 10 months later, US “black ops” is at it again, pumping out disinformation about the “stolen” Iranian election. The US media is again serving the government’s disinformation campaign. This despite the fact that on May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell . . . ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

The Iranian election protests, essentially led by the westernized youth of Tehran who wish to be free of Islamic moral codes, have the hallmarks of orchestration. The protesters are color-coded with green wristbands. Their protest signs are in English and are obviously directed at the Western media. Their chants are propagandistic and bear no relation to facts known by every Iranian.

And again, the US media and various experts, whose ambitions depend on government-related careers, are force-feeding the American public the disinformation designed to further isolate and weaken, if not overthrow, the Iranian government.

Until 1978 the US ruled Iran through the Shah. The US intends to again rule Iran through puppets. The only two remaining independent governments in the region are Iran and Syria. If the US doesn’t first bankrupt itself, both countries will fall to US black ops destabilization.

The limitless gullibility of the American people guarantees carte blanche to the US government’s schemes. Americans seemingly cannot put two and two together. They have already forgotten the lies about weapons of mass destruction that have resulted in the destruction of Iraq. They have forgotten Secretary of State Colin Powell’s publicly expressed remorse at the lies he told the UN. Americans blithely accept the conflation of Taliban with al Qaeda and terrorists and the new war that the Obama regime has started in Pakistan, a war that has already produced 2 million refugees.

It can fairly be said that there is not much difference between the American public and the fictional one under Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. The few independent voices that do exist are simply drowned out by the constant flow of disinformation.

The US government’s success in spinning 9/11 guaranteed the government’s success in pursuing a hegemonic agenda under a cloak of lies. Although a large percentage of the US population does not believe the government’s account and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of experts and informed and well-connected people have challenged the government’s tale, the US media have shown no interest despite the official account of 9/11 bearing every known hallmark of a cover-up.

High-ranking fire marshals have complained that legally required forensic procedures were not followed by authorities entrusted with investigation.

The testimony of more than 100 policemen, firemen, and maintenance personnel who were in the towers at the time and report hearing and experiencing a series of explosions was ignored and withheld from the public until the government got its story in place.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology studiously avoided testing for evidence of explosives. The severed steel beams were quickly collected and sold abroad as scrap.

As a number of observers have complained, the crime scene was destroyed, not investigated.

The government’s story of the destruction of the towers is based on computer simulations that produce results in keeping with the assumptions.

The collapse of the third building is not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

No one abroad believes the US government’s story. Europeans have produced documentary films that laugh at the official explanation.

Recently, an international team of scientists reported on their two-year examination of dust samples from the debris. They report that they found nano-thermite in the samples. To my knowledge no mainstream US media reported the finding.

One would think that such a finding would lead to a real investigation. Instead, within the US the finding is dismissed by debunkers of “conspiracy theories” (except of course the government’s own conspiracy theory) with the charge that the dust samples have not been in controlled environments since collected and could have been contaminated by those who volunteered the samples. In other words, the nano-thermite, if actually in the samples, was planted.

One wonders how residents of lower Manhattan obtained nano-thermite with which to contaminate the dust. Indeed, who has access to nano-thermite other than government?

Why doesn’t the National Academy of Science choose a team to examine the samples? If the finding of nano-thermite is verified, the issue of contamination can be investigated. If it turns out that the people who volunteered the samples have no possible access to nano-thermite, the case for a real investigation is established.

There is little prospect of such a development in the US. American science and the careers of scientists are heavily dependent on US government funding. It would be a career-ending event for American scientists to get involved with this matter other than as a contributor to a cover-up. Professor Steven Jones, a physicist at BYU who first raised the issue of explosives being used to bring down the three WTC buildings, was terminated, despite his tenure, by BYU. Many believe Jones was terminated because of political threats to the university’s funding.

In the US truth is an ineffective means by which to hold government accountable. Consider, for example, the fate of whistleblowers. Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers was perhaps the last successful whistleblower and that was three decades ago. Since then the government has put in place many defenses against whistleblowers.

The American public has looked to government for its salvation since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Government provides education, health care (Medicare, Medicaid), pensions (Social Security), food stamps, housing subsidies, child care and protects Americans from a long list of demonized villains ranging from spouse abusers and child molesters to terrorists. Americans see themselves and their government as the salt of the earth, an image supported by American generosity to other peoples who suffer natural calamities. Most Americans believe that their government does stupid things, but not evil things except perhaps by accident.

The right-wing believes that America was attacked on 9/11 because we are so good, hubris to which Bush successfully played with his statement that “they hate us for our freedom and democracy.”

The left wing finds emotional satisfaction in its belief that 9/11 was deserved blow-back from peoples oppressed by US foreign policy who rose up and struck back.

Truth is so impotent in America that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty 42 years ago is still covered up by the US government despite the best efforts of Admiral Tom Moorer, who was Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by decades of effort by the Liberty survivors.

This raises the question: Why do some people blow whistles? Why do those few write books and columns that challenge the lies and deceptions? There is probably more than one answer. For some, hope springs eternal. Others naively destroy their careers thinking that truth will be honored. Still others speak from a sense of responsibility to truth and not from a hope that anything will actually change.

In October 1987, John Stockwell, a former CIA cover operative who ran the CIA’s covert war in Angola, gave a lecture in which he said he abandoned his career when he realized that CIA covert operations resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people and were totally unconnected to any US national security interests. “I concluded that I just couldn’t see the point.”

Nothing has changed. What was the point of the US invasion of Iraq? Even President Bush eventually conceded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

What was the point of the US invasion of Afghanistan and what is the point of Obama’s escalation of the war there? The Taliban is not al Qaeda and was totally focused on unifying Afghanistan under an Islamic government. The US was not on the Taliban’s radar screen.

What is the point of the war that the US has started in Pakistan?

What is the point of the destabilization of the Iranian government? After the stolen elections of the Karl Rove/Bush era, why does the US think it must overthrow the Iranian government because of allegations that Ahmadinejad stole an election?

If the answer is that these wars and interventions serve the interest of US hegemony, the obvious reply is that US hegemony is more likely to be lost from the massive red ink in the government’s budget that is likely to be monetized, thus destroying the dollar as reserve currency, the main source of US hegemony.

If the US wants to have an empire in the Middle East or elsewhere, the government should come out and say so. At least then Americans could revel in the glories of empire. As it is, the pleasure must be gained surreptitiously under the table, pretending that we are protecting the world from evildoers while we do evil ourselves.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Project Censored Modern Media Censorship - September 11, 2008

Stephen Lendman and Connie Fogal, "The Security and Prosperity Partnership", Modern Media Censorship, Lecture 2. Only part of Lendman's lecture is included, within the first 7 or so minutes, after which Fogal's topnotch lecture begins. Click here for the Project Censored webpage which introduces these two lectures, and which includes an .mp3 link for Lendman's full lecture.

I, Thomas Paine, Two Hundred Years Hence*

It is Monday, 8 June 2009, two hundred years to the day since my miserable death, though I should add that while death was, indeed, miserable it was a swim in the sea compared with my life as it finally turned out. However, I have been dead for too long to want to harp on those wretched final years of my life—the assassination of my character, of my person, the unspeakable hypocrisy of it all, my freefall from grace and renown, the poverty, ill health, my seeking refuge in a bottle. But if there remains even one son or daughter of Liberty and Democracy in this present day—that is, the person to and for whom I write, as opposed to those who celebrate the cartoon Tom Paine, never thinking to read my works or to carry forth the struggle—then I should think that such a son or daughter of Liberty is unlikely to protest my assuming the privilege of penning this brief posthumous account. If not a single such person remains who is, in word and deed, committed to Liberty and Democracy—the only fit state for a human being who wishes to live as a whole person and who refuses to be infantilised—then rather than to assume the privilege, if there’s none worthy to grant it, I shall steal it back as rightfully my own.

I can quite quickly sum up what befell me and what has befallen countless other revolutionaries over the course of history; however, I do so not out of a desire or need to explain myself, but rather as a word of warning to those whom I consider my rightful progeny. My task is made easier by the fact that my rightful progeny, by the nature of the task which lies before them, shall already have apprised themselves of the historical accounts of revolutions, failed and successful, if in fact there has ever been an example of the latter. In brief, revolutionaries with integrity—those who hold, still, to the original stated aims of the revolution, the aims of Liberty and Democracy—are, at the point of the revolution’s failure (as opposed to the success touted in history books), quickly stripped of their honours, hollowed out, and hung safely out to die so that the ‘revolutionaries’ who were merely playing a part can usurp The Powers That Were to become those That Be. This perverted outcome must be avoided, and it shall not be avoided unless those who are in the struggle forever keep this near-inevitable outcome in mind, day in and day out, and for ever more, as the innumerable false actors lie constantly in wait.

My good friend Benjamin Franklin did his best to warn us. In response to being asked at the close of the Constitutional Convention, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?’, Dr. Franklin said, simply, ‘A Republic, if you can keep it.’ A prescient warning, indeed. And it is clear even, or perhaps particularly so, in this post-Obamamania, post-Democratic-controlled-Congress present day that the Republic has been lost, for the Republic cannot coexist with an undermined Constitution. The Republic is dead when the State itself no longer abides by the rule of law, no matter what pseudo-legislation is ushered through Congress, usually unread, in an attempt to provide a cover of legitimacy which no one is fooled by, certainly not the politicians nor their corporate paymasters.

The situation is at least as bad in Britain—Closed Circuit TV capital of the world—but in both the U.S. and the UK, the rule of law, any protection against the State, has been wilfully obliterated under the false pretext of National Security, which rightfully understood covers anything which might threaten not the well-being of the people, the mock citizenry, but the powers of the State. And, so, blatant lies which have been proven to be lies have enabled myriad murderous and treasonous crimes to be committed by the State, including the supreme international crime of wars of aggression, the murder of one-million-plus innocent civilians, numerous political assassinations, international kidnappings, torture, widespread domestic surveillance, and other intrusions into our civil liberties. And those persons who repeatedly and blatantly lied to the public and who committed the crimes which followed from those lies stand not in prison but remain protected by the full powers of the State under the pretext of National Security.

Let me state now that revolutions never end, and that it is not a fixed state which we are shooting for but, rather, an asymptotic ideal which requires a never-ending commitment to process rather than an end, for the ideal end is hogwash if the process does not remain. Democracy—very far, indeed, from what nauseatingly passes for it today, as I write—cannot be institutionalised, it cannot be spoken of as an objective achieved, it cannot reside, ever, in the State, and it can never be brought to bear upon a people by a foreign occupier, the very idea of which is absurd and oxymoronic. Democracy and its sacred sister, Liberty, reside within the individual, and such an individual who is committed to protecting these innate ideals from those who would usurp them from without must pursue, always, an anti-authoritarian way of life, a mode of being, which requires that we be adults, not overgrown children.

We shall no longer look to the State as provider, as head of the family, or as Big Brother, but shall, instead, seek to govern ourselves, the very act of which shall nullify in an instant any presumed pretensions of the State as our benefactor. We shall act in our own best interests, for we have all witnessed everywhere around us what happens when the State purports to so provide—the law is used against us to empower and enrich the State and those within its favour, and we, the people, pay the price. We must also—if we are to become and remain free—disassemble the myriad mechanisms by way of which the rotten State derives and attempts to maintain its rotten powers, as opposed to the only legitimate source of government—that is, through the will of the people, fully realised.

Such mechanisms which must be abolished include, but are not limited to, the various agencies and machinations of the secret State, the State (and the corporate-State) media as its controlled propaganda arm—the primary means by which, in conjunction with the ‘education’ system, the mock citizenry is kept under heel, ignorant, and wholly uneducated irrespective of the attainment of virtually meaningless university degrees—the corrupted courts of justice, the torture centres, the criminalised military, and the militarised police forces which do far more to tyrannise than to protect the people.

For those who might wonder, still, whether they are free, whether this account seems too strong, too reactionary—as no doubt many in America, England and Europe thought my words too strong, too reactionary more than two centuries ago—then there exists a simple litmus test which tells us immediately whether we are, in fact, a free people or enslaved. If the majority finds itself in the demeaning position of having to ask the State, to beg of it, to plead with it, to protest against it, then we are no longer free, but in chains and fetters. This is true even when the State obliges us and fulfils our request, which it should be noted typically permits the transfer of power from us to the State, a dynamic which is unfortunately lost on so many, who think they’re getting something for nothing. But, if a majority of the people finds itself asking the State to serve it or to abide by the rule of law, and it either refuses outright or deliberates and finally fails to deliver, then we live not in a democracy but under the dictates of a despotic and authoritarian regime which has no rightful place amongst us but which has over the years, decades and centuries slowly stolen our Liberty because we ceded it, in exact measure.

If we are to live as adults rather than as children, each and every one of my rightful progeny must hold a truth within their innermost selves which must always be kept alive, for in dark times such as those presently upon us the flame of Liberty shall surely flicker, waver, and without a steady stream of fresh air, fresh energy and fresh commitment it shall die, first, within you, and then as surely as we ourselves are mortal, Liberty herself shall be frog-marched to her death. That aforementioned truth is this: The State is not and shall never be your friend, its intentions are not yours. You are its enemy.

In authoritarian regimes like the ones which I see have befallen all of you, the State, of course, spares no horses in co-opting the terms of Democracy, of Liberty, of Freedom, but those words have been drained of life, of meaning; worse, they’ve been inverted just as George Orwell prophesied—Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength. They’ve become, in short, tools of oppression which, while some of us might more readily accept the truth that these emptied-out concepts are being used to justify unjust wars against the peoples of lands outside our own—Iraq and Afghanistan come readily to mind; however, this is but the tip of the iceberg, for there’s nary a land beyond which the State and the State of its Ally-in-Arms is not overtly or covertly oppressing, tyrannising at this very moment—while there are, I know, quite a few of you who might more readily accept this truth, there are unfortunately many more of you who might find it more difficult to recognise that these same emptied-out concepts are being deployed against the State’s more foundational enemy—those of you who live within its borders.

Do you really think that those CCTV cameras which are multiplying more quickly than springtime bunnies are there to protect you? Do you think the War OF Terror is being fought to protect you? Do you think that the news which you watch, which you listen to, which you read, exists to inform you? Did the State protect you on 9/11, or did it, in fact, commit the crimes? Did the State protect you during the 7/7 London bombings, or did it, in fact, commit the crimes? Did the State prove to you beyond any reasonable doubt who actually perpetrated those acts? Were independent investigations forthcoming, or were they precluded and the facts buried by those guilty of or complicit in the crimes? Were the politicians readily forthcoming, or did they, too, seek to bury the facts? And were such facts buried in large part by the State’s media-propaganda-arm? With CCTV cameras ubiquitous in airports and Tube stations even in 2001-2005, there would be video footage which demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt who committed these inhuman crimes. But why have we not seen such critical footage? Why has it been kept from you—the public—the bedrock upon which any good government gains its legitimacy?

These are just a few of the many questions you must ask yourself, if you are to carry on the struggle which I gave my life and my creative energies to more than two centuries ago, and if you are to remain amongst my rightful progeny who desire Liberty and Democracy not only in word but in deed as well. I shall leave off with something I said a long time ago: ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.’ And, lastly, a corollary quip from Henry David Thoreau: ‘That government is best which governs least.’ Is this, rightful progeny, what you have, here, in this moment?

* Transcribed by Sean M. Madden on 8 June 2009. Thomas Paine also transferred the copyright to Sean M. Madden, 2009.

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was a British pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, inventor, intellectual, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.^[1] He lived and worked in Britain until age 37, when he emigrated to the British American colonies, in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series.

Later, Paine greatly influenced the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), a guide to Enlightenment ideas. Despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention in 1792. The Girondists regarded him as an ally, so, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), the book advocating deism and arguing against institutionalized religion, Christian doctrines, and promoted reason and freethinking, for which he would become derided in America.^[2]

In France, he also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.

Paine remained in France during the early Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed".^[3] At President Jefferson's invitation, in 1802 he returned to America.

Thomas Paine died at 59 Grove Street, Greenwich Village, New York City on June 8, 1809 at the age of 72. Alienated by his religious views, only six people attended his funeral.^[4] He was buried at what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage in New Rochelle, New York, where he had lived after returning to America in 1802. His remains were later disinterred by an admirer, William Cobbett, who sought to return them to England and give him a heroic reburial on his native soil. The bones were, however, later lost and his final resting place today is unknown.

(Source: Wikipedia, “Thomas Paine” entry.)

Sean M. Madden is an American writer-educator living in East Sussex, England. His articles have been headlined by a wide range of online media outlets, including Information Clearing House, United Press International’s ReligionAndSpirituality.com, After Downing Street, Guerrilla News Network, Online Journal, Atlantic Free Press, Scoop, OpEdNews.com, Thomas Paine’s Corner, Carolyn Baker’s popular website and the Populist Party of America’s website. Sean also edits and writes for his iNoodle.com and MindfulLivingGuide.com blogs, and welcomes correspondence from readers. His email address is sean@inoodle.com.

Revealing the Secrets in Room 101 ...

Harper's Magazine

Literature? What's in it?

photo by sean, © 2009

Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

The below popped into my inbox this morning from Eric Larsen, prize-winning novelist, non-fiction author, critic, retired English professor, and topnotch friend and correspondent.

And here's a related post which Rebecca published on our Mindful Living Guide site earlier today. The topic and the post itself are inspired by Anne Frank: Why writing ( ... and literature) matters!

*****

by Eric Larsen
February 13, 2009

Dear Readers, Reviewers, Editors, Publicists, Fellow Writers, Patriots, Friends,

Here for your perusal is a piece that will doubtless seem purely literary, lacking any element, content, or implication whatsoever that might touch on today's politics. In short, by clicking here, you'll find a short story that I published in 1971, again in 1975, and that then, I thought, had for the next thirty-five years slept in the same unmarked grave where it would surely fade away to dust.

But if you do decide to go inside and have a look, you'll find that the story has been resurrected. A Professor of English by the name of Elizabeth Hodges has given it new life by introducing it to her students who, in turn, have sent me questions, twenty-one in all, that they found themselves interested in hearing the answers to.

Inside, you'll find everything: The story, the questions, the answers – and then something more.

The "something more" will be my "conclusion," in which I announce that I'm signing off on political writing – for now, maybe, maybe for good. I'm returning to literary writing. But I'm doing it with a very, very serious project in mind.

I'm proposing that this piece – containing the little story "Feast" along with Elizabeth Hodges' students' questions and my answers – I'm proposing that it take its place as the first in a series. This series will make a strenuous effort to answer this question: "Can the Literary Life Still Exist in a Post-1984 Nation?"

Our own poor and dying nation is without the least hint of any doubt whatsoever a "post-1984" nation. I've spent the last two and a half years or more hammering at the door of 9/11 truth, thinking all along that exposure of the truth of what really happened on that day would be a powerful tonic in helping set the U.S. back, say, to 1948 instead of 1984, at least insofar as truth versus lies in the governance and freedoms of its people might be concerned. Now, I'm not so sure. I myself know more than perfectly well what really happened on 9/11, as do many, many others. And yet, not even on the basis of that knowledge will the nation act. Even with the truth evident and obvious and plainly placed in front of it, the nation either will not or can not act in meaningful response to that truth.

So I'm not going to bang on that door any longer, at least not for now, but I'm going to propose another approach. As I've said elsewhere many more times than once, any nation that lacks a genuine, living cultural life is by default and by necessity a dead nation. The question now is whether ours is dead or not dead. If it is in actuality dead, then we, too, are all dead along with it, every one of us, looking forward to a future of noting more than hollowness and ruin.

On the other hand, do you think it's remotely conceivable that I could prove that there still is – say – a LITERARY LIFE inside the United States, a life that a person could LIVE and that many, many others could live WITHIN?

My proposal is this: I'm going to set about, however vastly against the odds, trying to prove exactly that. If I can do it, maybe there's hope for us, for our children, for our nation, for our future. If I can't? If I can't, we're goners, all of us.

Stay tuned. Pray fervently, daily, hourly.

With my hopes and every best wish,

Eric Larsen

House of Lords: Rise of CCTV is threat to freedom

Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV, says report published today.
(Photograph: Getty Images)

Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

Note that while the Lords appear to be critical on this issue their report serves as a limited hangout (or smokescreen) which leaves the most egregious surveillance practices untouched, unaccounted for.

*****

World's most pervasive surveillance undermines
basic liberties, say peers

by Alan Travis
The Guardian
February 6, 2009

The steady expansion of the "surveillance society" risks undermining fundamental freedoms including the right to privacy, according to a House of Lords report published today.

The peers say Britain has constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world in the name of combating terrorism and crime and improving administrative efficiency.

The report, Surveillance: Citizens and the State, by the Lords' constitution committee, says Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV, with an estimated 4m cameras, and in building a national DNA database, with more than 7% of the population already logged compared with 0.5% in the America.

The cross-party committee which includes Lord Woolf, a former lord chief justice, and two former attorneys general, Lord Morris and Lord Lyell, warns that "pervasive and routine" electronic surveillance and the collection and processing of personal information is almost taken for granted.

Although many surveillance practices and data collection processes are unknown to most people, the expansion in their use represents "one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the second world war", the report says. The committee warns that the national DNA database could be used for "malign purposes", challenges whether CCTV cuts crime and questions whether local authorities should be allowed to use surveillance powers at all.

The peers say privacy is an "essential prerequisite to the exercise of individual freedom" and the growing use of surveillance and data collection needs to be regulated by executive and legislative restraint at all times.

Lord Goodlad, the former Tory chief whip and committee chairman, said there could be no justification for this gradual but incessant creep towards every detail about an individual being recorded and pored over by the state.

"The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state and other organisations risks undermining the long-standing traditions of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy," he said. "If the public are to trust that information about them is not being improperly used there should be much more openness about what data is collected, by whom and how it is used."

The constitution committee makes more than 40 recommendations to protect individual privacy, including the deletion of all profiles from the national DNA database except for those of convicted criminals and a call for the mandatory encryption of personal data held by public and private organisations that are legally obliged to hold it.

But the report is silent on proposals from Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for a "superdatabase" tracking everybody's emails, calls, texts and internet use and from Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to lower barriers on the widespread sharing of personal data across the public sector.

But the peers are critical of whether local authorities should continue to exercise their surveillance powers under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. They say examples of local councils using covert surveillance operations to stop fly tipping, reducing dog fouling, and investigate fraudulent school place applications led them to question how they acquired such powers. Ministers should examine whether local authorities, rather than the police, are the appropriate bodies to mount surveillance operations, the peers say. If they are, then their use should be confined to crime investigations that carry a minimum two-year prison sentence.

The peers say individuals targeted by such operations should be informed when it is completed, as long as no investigation is prejudiced.

Sycophancy at its cringiest (and most criminally complicit): Blair, Obama and the Media

(headline, of course, by Sean@iNoodle.com)

by Lee Glendinning
guardian.co.uk
February 6, 2009

BLAIR MEETS OBAMA

The political sphere has been abuzz for weeks about just who will be the first foreign leader to meet Barack Obama. The early phone calls and the order they were placed were well documented, so too the analysis of every raft of legislation. But what's this? Turning every expectation on its head - it's not Nicolas Sarkozy or Gordon Brown but Tony Blair. The former prime minister became the first foreign statesman since the inauguration to spend quality time with the Obamas at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The Telegraph - complete with page one photo, couches it in these terms: "If you're Gordon, look away now", while the Independent goes with "Eat your heart out Gordon". Blair offered Obama words of advice, with many having drawn similarities between his sweep to power in 1997 with Obama's victory last year. "Mr President you are fortunate, as is your nation, that you have already shown in your life, courage in abundance. But should it ever be tested, I hope your faith can sustain you and your family. The public eye is not always the most congenial." John Rentoul, Blair's biographer, wrote in the Independent: "There is an afterlife: religion does have its uses after all. After you have left office it gets you to the front of the line of foreigners queuing up to be the first to meet the new President of the United States."

Independent: Religion has its uses, like jumping the queue

Telegraph: Barack Obama meets Tony Blair before Gordon Brown

Deborah Orr: A Tribute to the Propaganda Box

ADDENDUM (31 Jan 09):

In good conscience, and beyond satire, I would like to write and archive an addendum to this iNoodle.com post – not a retraction as there is no inaccurate fact to retract – but, rather, a heartfelt addition to my glib references concerning Deborah Orr and her husband.

My opinion concerning the article itself stands as, likewise, being heartfelt.

However, my closing suggestion – immediately following the close of Orr's article – that "she and her husband get a life" (left intact, below, for the record) was, in retrospect, careless. Of course, social critics with public platforms, like Deborah Orr and her husband Will Self, should not, themselves, be beyond reproach. However, when I wrote the piece I had no idea, or cared, who Orr's husband was.

It was not until yesterday, the morning after I published this post, that I looked up Orr's Wikipedia entry and learned that she is married (since 1997) to Self. And given Self's life – his body of work (e.g., fiction, journalism, criticism), his wealth of experience, and his philosophy education – it is ludicrous, in retrospect, that I suggest, even satirically, that he get a life and, by extension given their shared lives together, Deborah Orr, as clearly their off-the-couch lives are rich, and their respective sources of knowledge existing well beyond television.

I, therefore, offer a sincere apology to them both.

*****
Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

Is there anyone left out there who hasn't been sucked into TV Land – British (or American) style – who can still attest to life devoid of the culturally (politically) requisite 3.75 hours of daily TV watching, or 26.25 hours per week? It's worth noting that Deborah Orr tells us within her below article, published in today's Independent newspaper, that these figures only include broadcast television, not watching DVDs, films in cinemas, YouTube or other internet-broadcast content.

According to Al Gore the American equivalent of this knucklehead phenomenon is "an average of four hours and thirty-five minutes every day," or "almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has."

Like many things transatlantic, there exists little difference, despite what many Britons blindly believe, between the two criminal-war-waging nations and the complicit cultures they breed.

Once upon a time parents used to be so parental as to limit their kids' TV watching in order to avoid their offspring turning into pliable goo instead of developing as physically, intellectually and emotionally engaged children. Nowadays you're a social pariah if as a grown adult you choose not to hook up along with the kids' grandparents and the kids, of course, to passively imbibe the prescribed daily dose elixir of mindrot, propaganda and advertising. Three generations melded into one brainless heap in one fell swoop! This is the stuff of advertisers' and criminal politicians' wet dreams. Four generations – can you imagine four generations hooked up, hypnotized and in sync!?! – should qualify the head of any such household for an OBE. (Americans might one day have OAEs bestowed upon them should the US political elite ever decide to come out of the closet and embrace imperial language and hierarchy with the same vehemence as they do empire-building in practice.)

And why stop at the prescribed (minimum) dose required to demonstrate good (nominal) citizenship? Whether the corporate land you couch in – or on behalf of which you might be willing to commit war crimes – is the cutting-edge-in-conformity UK or US, the more boob tube you watch, presumably, the better brainwashed citizen you will be.

In my experience as an American living in England, the UK wins hands down (and the US is, it needn't really be emphasized, a tough act to follow) in the production of homogenous nonthinkers who would be at a loss for words (and nonthoughts) without the previous night's, let alone the previous season's, programming having been uploaded, via TV, to their cerebral cortices. Britons even pay a TV licensing fee for the privilege, in a very real sense funding the corporate-government's propagandizing of their own, and their childrens', minds. Now that's good, indeed superb, (nominal) citizenship!

Social optimists (and the propagandists whom they tend to be unable to see as propagandists, incapable as they often are of distinguishing between fact and fiction, the two having been stirred into one war-on-terror solution) like to refer to this mutually imbibed TV experience as the social glue which keeps us stuck to one another so that we can do culturally crucial things like chatter empty phrases at "the apocryphal water-cooler". In other words, to keep us from the dangerous society-splintering activity of having – and sharing – serious, meaningful thoughts.

Anyway, without further ado, here's Deborah Orr singing the Sirens' call for more of that which ails us, and who seems as shameless in her glorifying all things TV as Bush, Blair and Brown (Obama too?) were in spreading freedom and democracy. To check in with how the latter benevolent pursuit is going, click here for the latest Iraqi death count. I'm afraid, however, that you'll have to look elsewhere for evidence which gives a sense of the literally countless deaths in Afghanistan, to say nothing of Gaza, Pakistan and the various other places where our Anglo-American lifestyle apparently requires continual mass murder.

Do yourself, your family, and democracy (an as yet far-from-attained vision; don't let Obama, his Israeli chief of staff, or the compliant US/UK press convince you otherwise) a favor and pull the plug on your TV. Far better yet, throw the damn thing away. Whatever you do don't give it as a hand-me-down gift to someone you love. Consider sending it, instead, to Deborah Orr and her husband. I'd much rather they continue to dummy themselves down, not you.

By the way, the below headline and subheading come directly from The Independent. As the saying goes, I couldn't make this stuff up.

*****
Suddenly, we are all taking television more seriously

There is a desire for TV that can be shared around the apocryphal water-cooler

by Deborah Orr
The Independent
January 29, 2009

For me, one detail in the messy, horrible death of the rock star Jimi Hendrix at 27 years old, has always stood out. Early in his distress, he left a message asking for help on the answering machine of his agent. An answering machine! In 1970! How modern.

No one really needs answering machines any longer. In fact, if you leave someone a message on an answering machine, particularly at their home, they are likely to call you back weeks later, explaining that they are dreadfully sorry, but they have got out of the habit of listening to their messages. If you need to impart some significant information to someone these days, then you call them on their mobile or email. I don't even have an answering machine any longer.

I am not, in the parlance, an early adopter. I can – and have – resisted technologies until they have been overtaken by obsolescence. Perversely, I take some pride in this. So I felt only mild shame last Sunday, when it became apparent that my husband and I didn't have the technology we needed to be able to watch Generation Kill on FX.

Generation Kill is a drama about the invasion of Iraq and is written by the team that made The Wire, which was also broadcast in this country by FX. The Wire is lauded by many as one of the finest television drama series ever to have been created, and it is a pity that it was initially seen, communally, by such a small number of viewers.

Yet while my husband and I had been quite happy to watch the The Wire on DVD, we surprised ourselves this weekend by making an urgent call to our supplier, asking for our cable package to be immediately updated, because we just didn't want to wait to watch at our own leisure.

Yesterday, the reason for our sudden shift in viewing priorities became crystal clear. It's a reaction to the recession. A report this week from the TV marketing organisation, Thinkbox, confirmed that 2008 has been a record year for television watching, with British viewers watching an average of 26-and-a-quarter hours of broadcast television each week.

The report suggested that the popularity of the X Factor, which reached ratings highs last year, had been a contributing element, along with bad weather. But other statistics, such as BSkyB acquiring 171,000 new customers over Christmas, are being explained as the consequence of a heightened reliance on television for entertainment during the economic downturn.

For Sky, this is great news. The satellite broadcaster announced a 26 per cent increase in first-half profits, and also said it planned to recruit 1,000 engineers and call centre staff in a push to get more people to sign up for high definition TV. So, jobs for people to do, things for them to buy with their wages, and healthy audiences for advertisers to target their wares at. It makes a change from news of unremitting gloom on all these fronts.

Certainly, there are many people who might query the idea that more people at home on their sofas slumped in front of the telly could ever be a cause for celebration. But there are signs that the trend might turn out to be culturally beneficial as well as economically positive. The chief executive of Thinkbox, Tess Alps, is mainly interested in numbers. "The broadcast audience may not always be watching the same programme at the same time, as it did when there were a handful of channels," she says. "But viewers haven't gone anywhere."

Alps also noted that the huge growth in viewing online and on-demand, through services such as the BBC's iPlayer, has been in addition to traditional viewing habits, usually to catch up on programmes that have been missed. The effect of digital video recorders, such as Sky+ was the same. The technology increased TV viewing, rather than just moving it about.

All this evidence conspires to suggest that viewers might be taking their television more seriously. Early on in the rise of satellite and cable television there was a sense that viewing had become atomised, and conditional. Trawling though pages and pages of listings seemed like a fag, and people tended to plan less what they wanted to watch. The habit of knowing when notable new shows were being broadcast became so unusual, that some newspapers dropped their television review pages completely.

Less serious viewing, one could argue, led a demand for less serious programming. For a long time, when I wanted to watch TV, I would just plonk myself down, pick up the remote, and surf until something appealed to me. Usually, this would mean watching something that was already familiar – like a repeat of Friends – or something that was easy to get into – like a conventionally formatted makeover show. The tailend of documentaries I'd missed the start of, or a drama in mid-series, anything that looked, at a glance, hard to get into, was rejected.

Gradually, though, as the media itself has got to grips with multi-channel telly, and has started to run features about upcoming shows, such as Generation Kill, that are being broadcast on relatively obscure channels, I've begun tailoring my viewing again, and it makes for a more satisfactory relationship with the medium.

This might be part of a more general trend. It is acknowledged that one of the things that people love about the X Factor, or Strictly Coming Dancing, is that the whole family watches it, and enjoys the fact that this communality spills over into other aspects of life. Sure, it was a bit barking that John Sergeant's resignation from Strictly was urgently discussed on Newsnight. But the frenzy around this one story might also speak of a more general desire for television that can be shared and discussed round the apocryphal water cooler.

Teenagers, for example, insist that the real must-see appeal of late-night comedy-drama Skins is not the sex and the drugs but the experience the next day, of having a cultural reference point that everyone can enjoy talking about. Presumably, the online or digital recorder viewing allows those who missed out on the night to slide seamlessly back into next week's conversation.

Yet the move towards more committed viewing is not confined to the young. The trend is reported among all ages. It would be good, for example, if the flurry of interest in Generation Kill that was fanned by widespread advance exposure in the press, persisted through the series in the form of week-to-week commentary.

I don't believe that listless channel-surfing is going to disappear, any more than the answering machine has disappeared. But the response to multi-channel TV, when it was a novelty to be tackled with the help only of a remote control and the baffling Videoplus, might be tempered as our brief reliance on the answering machine was, by further technologies that make targeted or sustained viewing less complicated. Perhaps the recession will give us time to get to grips with it all, and perhaps quality television that offers something valuable to the general debate will be the beneficiary

d.orr@independent.co.uk (Please feel free to write and suggest to Deborah that: 1) she and her husband get a life and 2) she stop trying to convince the rest of us to give ours up to the propaganda box.)