TEN YEARS in the making

I think it's time to put this to bed... or at least give it a rest...

I am mostly still an Idealist but in these times it is tough to believe in inherent goodness of humans because so many are so willfully ignorant and others are so willfully deceitful, and further others willingly go along or remain apathetic. Not to mention those motivated by fear (hate).

And the worst are the self centered who believe they know all the answers and express their opinions based on nothing but rhetoric or conspiracy theories, and claim their opinions to be fact.

It's a tough time indeed, and I will not outright quit this endeavor but it has been EVERY DAY for just over TEN YEARS NON STOP and I think it's time to slow down on this platform or at least not pressure myself every evening before I go to sleep to find one morsel that might be as much of interest to me as it is to others or to inspire or entertain others.

You can comment below to get me to keep on or not, I assume few if any will write. These days it seems only trolls go out on a limb and make public statements in these types of forums. If you sincerely check this out you know where I stand on a lot of issues, and I am happy i have been here to spread some information, positive propaganda, and fun.

We've gone from a bout 10,000 page views a week to maybe 2,000. I'll try to keep off the habit, of this hobby, for my own piece of mind and apologize in advance to those who come here everyday for a break or inspiration or information if i am letting you down. I'll try not to stop altogether, but as of today I am letting you know the daily stream may become less frequent.

Thanks for your support of good ideals - continue to practice kindness.
I'll try my best too.

GEF


total page views to date: 2,392,655

Modern art was CIA 'weapon'

from the INDEPENDENT

Revealed: how the spy agency used unwitting artists such as Pollock and de Kooning in a cultural Cold War

By Frances Stonor Saunders

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.

Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.

The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.

The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Until now there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it.

"Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I'd love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!" he joked. "But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.

"In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another."

To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. "Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," Mr Jameson explained, "so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."

This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.

This organisation put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, "The New American Painting", visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included "Modern Art in the United States" (1955) and "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" (1952).

Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows.

The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.

Now in his eighties, Mr Braden lives in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a house packed with Abstract Expressionist works and guarded by enormous Alsatians. He explained the purpose of the IOD.

"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."

He confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."

If this meant playing pope to this century's Michelangelos, well, all the better: "It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognise art and to support it," Mr Braden said. "And after many centuries people say, 'Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!' It's a problem that civilisation has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or pope who supported him. And yet if it hadn't been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn't have had the art."

Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.

But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.

* The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first programme in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War.

Covert Operation

In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London.

The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds.

So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. "We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device."

Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as did several powerful figures close to the CIA.

The Putin and Oliver Stone interviews

19 Teasers should play back to back once you hit play.





But this Steven Colbert interview may also give some insight...

13 Logical Fallacies and How Conservatives Use Them to Distort the Facts

via Americans Against the Tea Party:

How do conservatives keep winning the public debate, when their agenda is so cruel, destructive and unworkable? By using 12 sneaky tricks that are logical fallacies, but devastatingly effective ones that work almost every time.

If you’re anything like me, you can’t resist commenting on links from sites like Mediaite or HuffPo, where you are likely to get replies from conservatives and/or Teabaggers. Every time this happens, I find myself rolling my eyes at their comments because 9.9 times out of 10 it will contain a logical fallacy (the other .1 are just name-calling). Face it, most righties just can’t make a sound argument. This is usually because they either don’t have the facts or don’t understand the premise. So they resort to logical fallacies.

Ground rules: what is an argument?

Despite what our ideological opponents believe, an argument is more than just naysaying (as Monty Python showed us). A real argument presents a conclusion and then, using empirical, and sometimes anecdotal, evidence goes on to prove it. There are two kinds of argument: a deductive argument is one in which all evidence completely supports the conclusion. For (a very simplistic) example:

Premise: If I am not a conservative, then I am a liberal
Premise: I am not a conservative
Conclusion: I am a liberal

The second kind of argument is inductive, in which the premises appear to lend some degree of support for the conclusion. Another rather simplistic example:

Premise: Most liberals are Democrats
Premise: I am a liberal
Conclusion: I am a Democrat

An incorrect conclusion can easily be supported via either kind of argument. If a basic premise is wrong — such as President Obama is a socialist — it will lead to a faulty conclusion: Obama wants to ruin America. One cannot support a conclusion with the wrong premises as a starting point.

13 techniques conservatives use to win arguments.
The following are logical fallacies we see a lot:

13. Ad Hominem. Latin for “against the man,” this logical fallacy is a favorite among the Teabagger crowd. The ad hominem attack will first go after the character of the person, then against the claim being made. For example, climate change deniers malign Al Gore then maintain that, since he is obviously unreliable (or greedy, or whatever), then his claims about climate change are invalid. Of course, a person’s character, actions or circumstances have no bearing on the facts of the argument being made. An extension of ad hominem is ad hominem tu quoque, or the “you too” fallacy. Rand Paul used this to discredit Rachel Maddow and her exposing him as a plagiarist.

12. Appeal to the consequences of dis/belief. This posits the conclusion is true/false because if it were not, there would be negative consequences. Or that the conclusion is true/false because I want the conclusion to be true/false. That last one is wishful thinking and we see it a lot. Birthers live by this fallacy: “I want Obama not to be President.” So they believe that he was not born in America because it supports their faulty conclusion. As we can see, the consequences of belief or disbelief have nothing whatever to do with whether a point is true or false.

11. Appeal to authority. This is a fallacy that uses perceived authority to support a claim. The Wall Street Journal‘s publication of an op-ed by Suzanne Somers in its “The Experts” section is a great example. They set her up as an authority on the American health care system and the ACA, when she is nothing of the kind. The talking heads on cable news are often referred to as “an authority” or “expert” on an issue when, in fact, they are a paid shill or someone with an axe to grind or agenda to promote. Any claim made by a self-identified expert must be in their area of expertise, which must be a generally recognized discipline. Being an expert in one area, doesn’t automatically make you an expert in everything.

10. Appeal to Fear. You might say that this one of the right’s go-to strategies. They present a claim that is intended to produce fear — say, that Obama will take away your guns. Then present another claim (that may be related to the first, but need not be): the Administration will be rounding up and imprisoning gun lovers. It’s easy to get fearful people to believe anything that validates their fear. Just ask Fox News.

9. Appeal to Ridicule. Here, mockery is the substitute for reasoning. For example, Rush Limbaugh makes fun of Sandra Fluke, calling her a slut and opening her to ridicule. Therefore, covering birth control is a bad thing. He expects his listeners to say, “That’s ridiculous!” And they do. This is a specious argument because making fun of someone who holds a position does not affect its validity. If it did, Limbaugh would be unemployed.

8. Appeal to popularity. This one always crops in in relation to Fox News. “Well more people watch Fox than watch MSNBC.” You can almost the added, “Nyah!” That’s fine and good for them. But that does not make the information they present factual. This is best summed up with a quote from Anatole France: “If 50 million people believe a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.”

7. Begging the Question or Circular Reasoning. The premise is put forward in which the truth of the conclusion is assumed, therefore the claim is true. The best known example of this is using the Bible to prove that the things in the Bible are true. For the right, many things are true because one conservative cites another conservative as proof. For example, Sean Hannity might “prove” his conclusion that President Obama is weak by citing Bill O’Reilly, who may cite Hannity at some later point. This is the basis of the right-wing echo chamber.

6. False choice. This presents only two choices when there are, in fact, many. The right often does this with instances of aggression. For example, when Putin took the Crimea, it was either go to war or be weak and this is how most of them presented the situation. As we know, diplomacy and sanctions were also, and sanely, in play. This fallacy is best demonstrated in the right’s tendency to see any issue in a bad/good paradigm, ignoring reality and eschewing nuance.

5. Straw Man. Oh, the many times this appears in comment threads… These sort of fallacies are similar to the “slippery slope” but are more subtle. With a straw man argument, the original position against which the argument is made is misrepresented (usually to make it sound weaker), or exaggerated. Then the misrepresentation is refuted. By refuting the weaker, made-up position, the original position is seen as having been refuted. For example, you argue that we ought to spend more money on infrastructure to which your opponent responds with questioning why you don’t want America defended properly. She then can argue why the defense budget shouldn’t be cut while you are still on infrastructure.

4. Generalization. You know how this one goes: “Obama wasn’t born here because his birth certificate is fake!” your Teabagger friend spouts. Let’s see… jumping to a huge conclusion? Check. Based on little or no evidence? Check. Or maybe it’s “All Muslims are terrorists!” A stereotype based on a few examples? Check. Sometimes known as painting with a big brush or a blanket statement. No matter what you call it, it’s lazy thinking.

3. Slippery Slope. Here’s Rick Santorum’s favorite. If we allow gays to marry, then the next thing you know people will be marrying their dogs. Or horses. Or their car. Whatever. There is no actual connection between the premise and the feared outcomes. Also known as leapfrog logic.

2. Shifting the burden of proof. Hugely popular on Fox News, this argument often begins, “Some say…” or “It’s commonly known…” Anytime someone begins with those or something similar prepare for the burden of proof to be shifted to you. Some say that climate change is a myth. Over to you to prove that it’s not. Don’t fall for it. Demand they prove their position with facts.

1. False Cause. In this fallacy, it is claimed that because event B happened after event A, it actually caused event B. To which the smart liberal replies, “Correlation does not indicate causation.” For example, Obama went golfing just before the Malaysian jet was shot down over Ukraine. The conservative will say that the jet was shot down because Obama went golfing, a patently ridiculous claim. This is often used in climate change debates so be on your toes.

These are just a handful of logical fallacies you are likely to see when debating with a conservative. Sometimes you’ll see many all at once, sometimes it will be the only method they use. It’s good to know about as many as possible. This website is a great resource for identifying logical fallacies. If you know which fallacy you’re dealing with, this website is useful. Knowing about logical fallacies is an important tool for liberals now, what with so much utter bull being lobbed our way daily. Be good at argument and you may win the day. Or at least the comment thread.

Minister of Culture for the Black Panther PartyEmory Douglas - a Mini Documentary Spiritual Sunday Special

A few months back we posted a piece on Black Panther artist Emory Douglas.
Today I just found this great mini- documentary on Emory and his art and the Panthers, dig it!

Emory Douglas was the Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. Through archival footage and conversations with Emory we share his story, alongside the rise and fall of the Panthers. He used his art as a weapon in the Black Panther Party’s struggle for civil rights and today Emory continues to give a voice to the voiceless. His art and what The Panthers fought for are still as relevant as ever.

The Century Of The Self Part 4

An incredible
BBC documentary about the use of Freud's theories in the use of propaganda to control the masses. Excellent! Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, and his "public relations" were instrumental in shaping the consumer mindset of the 20th century.

Part 1 HERE.

The Century of The Self Part 3

An incredible
BBC documentary about the use of Freud's theories in the use of propaganda to control the masses. Excellent! Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, and his "public relations" were instrumental in shaping the consumer mindset of the 20th century.

Part 1 HERE.

The Century Of The Self - The Engineering of ConsentPart 2 of the BBC Documentary series

part two of the incredible BBC documentary series The Century Of The Self.



Thanks Deborah!

The Century Of The Self A truly incredible BBC Documentary

An incredible
BBC documentary about the use of Freud's theories in the use of propaganda to control the masses. Excellent! Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, and his "public relations" were instrumental in shaping the consumer mindset of the 20th century.

thanks Deborah!

"Toys" : Grizzly GI Joe stop-motion animation from 1966 takes a dark look at war toys

from Dangerous Minds

Last week Donald Levine, the man who brought GI Joe to millions of little boys, died at the age of 86. A Korean War veteran, Levine introduced the first-of-its-kind action figure to the market in 1964 while working for the company that would later become Hasbro. While GI Joe was initially a runaway success, the Vietnam War soon soured much of public opinion on war toys and sales quickly took a hard hit. Production was actually halted in 1976 and it was six years before GI Joe was relaunched.

There’s little evidence to suggest that war toys encourage violence and far more to suggest that dolls socialize children. When you consider the fact that GI Joe still has the distinction of normalizing doll-play for millions of little boys, it could be argued that he is inherently transgressive, maybe even feminist. For many adults though, the idea of war toys is at least vulgar, if not insidious, and “Toys,” the 1966 short by Grant Munro, articulates those feelings with brilliant GI Joe stop motion animation.

The film begins with a nauseating cacophony of childhood cheer, as the kiddies gaze into a window display of toys. Then there’s a switch—the kids become as static as the playthings they covet and the GI Joes come to life, reenacting gory scenes of a brutal war. It’s pretty evocative stuff especially considering it’s all plastic toys staged on simple diorama sets.

It’s difficult to say whether or not the film is directly condemning war toys, but I suspect the ambiguity is purposeful and that Munro intended to inspire critical thought rather than propagandize directly. Like Levine, Munro was a Korean War veteran, and as a member of the Canadian Forces, he even received the Presidential Unit Citation for his service in the Battle of Kapyong. It’s interesting that the film came out only two years after the release of GI Joe—“Toys” was, ironically, the very first GI Joe animation, proceeding even the Saturday morning cartoons that doubled as half-hour commercials for this iconic toy. 

Classic Cold War propaganda cartoon ‘Destination Earth’

from Dangerous Minds




An amazing piece of 1950s oil industry propaganda called Destination Earth tells the story of Colonel Cosmic, a spy from Mars sent to Earth. Martian society, y’see, was one of lockstep conformity and oppression under the hyper-statist rule of authoritarian great leader Ogg, and couldn’t be more obviously an analogue for the Soviet Union. Ogg has sent Colonel Cosmic to Earth to learn how we solved the problem of friction in moving parts, but instead, he learns all about the utopian joys of free markets and the miracle of GASOLINE, THE MOST EFFICIENT MOBILE POWER SOURCE ON EARTH! Naturally, revolution ensues. The squeamish needn’t worry, it’s bloodless.




The short was directed by Carl Urbano, and DM readers of a certain age have seen plenty of his work. As a director for Hanna-Barbera, he worked on shows like Super Friends and Laff-A-Lympics among dozens of others. A collection of his Cold War propaganda is available on DVD, as is—to my surprise—a collection of his petroleum industry work going back as far as the 1930s, and the collection includes Destination Earth. But you can enjoy that one in its entirety right here.

 

Apple - Designed By Apple - Intention

yeah. nice.

How Fox News Misleads Its Viewers

from Daily Kos / By Laura Clawson
via AlterNet:

John Stossel's revisionist history of the Great Depression.

Last week, John Stossel gave a master class in how Fox News keeps its viewers misled and misinformed on economic issues, concluding with the bombshell "fact" that "think about the Depression. That was before there was any welfare state at all. How many people starved? No one."

Whoa, really? No, actually. [4]

President Herbert Hoover declared, "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they have ever been." But in New York City in 1931, there were 20 known cases of starvation; in 1934, there were 110 deaths caused by hunger. There were so many accounts of people starving in New York that the West African nation of Cameroon sent $3.77 in relief.

Also, breadlines. Also, an increase in the suicide rate. But before Stossel even got to that claim, he'd unleashed quite the load of right-wing economic messaging disguised as homespun folksy common sense.

The starting problem was the national debt, of course. Stossel opened with a man-on-the-street segment asking "what would you cut?" The people (all women, coincidentally or not) he showed attempting to answer were stumped. But of course the question needed to be challenged. What would I cut? I'd cut tax expenditures that favor the wealthy, but most people don't yet understand that exclusions from taxable income, itemized deductions, preferential tax rates on capital gains and dividends, and tax credits could be counted as government expenditures that could be cut as opposed to the dread "raising taxes." But even that aside, I'd also just plain raise revenue. That's not an option that exists in Stosselville. No, Stossel would start by cutting "whole departments. Why do we have a Commerce Department? Commerce. Just Happens. Agriculture, farmers do that, you don't need bureaucrats." One of the women on the street said don't cut education? Pshaw! "Almost all [education] has been done at the local level. Now they spend at the federal level almost $100 billion a year, scores haven't improved."

Let's look at that. The Commerce Department includes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You like knowing there's a hurricane coming? That's the Commerce Department, not that John Stossel wants you to know that. Agriculture? Well, if you like to know that the meat you eat has been inspected, that's the USDA. Also, too, food stamps and nutritional assistance for low-income mothers and their children. Not that Stossel probably approves of poor children being fed. And education? That number includes things like Head Start, school breakfast and lunch for low-income kids, Pell Grants, and more. Do you want to join Stossel in waving that all off as stuff that the federal government doesn't need to be doing because education can happen at the local level? Well, your answer doesn't really matter, because if you're getting your information from Stossel, you don't even know about all that.

Wait, though! Before Stossel even got to those cuts, he unleashed a version of the federal budget as family budget that we've all seen our conservative family and friends smugly post on Facebook. And oh, wow, the U.S. has debt and no family in the history of ever had any debt without it being because they were irresponsible deadbeats. There is absolutely no such thing as investing in your family's future through a mortgage or educational loan or small business loan, is there? Not according to John Stossel, there isn't.

Then there are the government benefits. Astonishingly, John Stossel found out he is eligible for 55 government benefits for things like being a stutterer. Even though he has a job and health insurance and is "doing well in life." Except, sort of in a parenthetical aside he admits that "I don't know that I would get all of them ... but according to this website I could try and I'm in the game, I bet I could get some." Because people, those soft-hearted, soft-headed people, think the government should be helping people. And that brings us back around to the end, with the zero people who starved in the Depression, back when the government didn't help anyone and it made us all stronger or something. Except the people who actually did starve, or committed suicide, or survived only by standing on breadlines getting help fromsomeone, even if it wasn't the federal government in the early days of the Depression, before Herbert Hoover and his view that the hoboes were really well fed were resoundingly kicked out of office.

See more Alternet stories tagged with:fox news

Anti-war ads from the 1930s

from BoingBoing

On the Vintage Ads LiveJournal, a fascinating set of anti-war ads from the 1930s protest group World Peaceways (see the full-sized version to read the text). They ran an anti-imperialist anti-war campaign that described soldiers as pawns in the corrupt games of the rich and powerful, and called on everyday people to refuse to involve America in future wars.

World Peaceways (1930s pacifist/anti-war organization) produced some of the boldest propaganda posters of that era, largely aimed at looking at what had come about in the aftermath of the First World War, including the Depression, and death on a scale the world had not seen before, as well as lasting enmity that was quickly brewing into the Second World War.

The name "World Peaceways" was used in the famous Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever" to represent the pacifist movement that Edith Keeler belonged to. The story claimed that her peace work would keep America out of the war for too long and thus lead to Germany winning and taking over the United States. Kirk HAD to let her die - because if he saved her (as he apparently had) then all of history would change.

Sunday Sampler of Anti-War Ads

First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Transcript:

If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons:

A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore - it's about them, plural. Notice he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

The 2nd follower is a turning point: it's proof the first has done well. Now it's not a lone nut, and it's not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is news.

A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers, because new followers emulate followers - not the leader.

Now here come 2 more, then 3 more. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point! Now we've got a movement!

As more people jump in, it's no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there's no reason not to join now. They won't be ridiculed, they won't stand out, and they will be part of the in-crowd, if they hurry. Over the next minute you'll see the rest who prefer to be part of the crowd, because eventually they'd be ridiculed for not joining.

And ladies and gentlemen that is how a movement is made! Let's recap what we learned:

If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you.

Be public. Be easy to follow!

But the biggest lesson here - did you catch it?

Leadership is over-glorified.

Yes it started with the shirtless guy, and he'll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened:

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.

There is no movement without the first follower.

We're told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

Slimy Grinning Scum Piece of Shit, Guilty As Fuck, Conservative "film maker" Passes Out Bongs To Occupy Wall Street Protesters to Discredit Movement

from MEDIAite

Conservative filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney was spotted at Occupy Wall Street allegedly passing out bongs and Che Guevara rolling papers to demonstrators.

Video blogger Joey Boots caught Maloney purportedly distributing the drug paraphernalia at the demonstration and interrogated him about what he was doing with the items. “Do you have bongs and marijuana leaf pictures and stickers and Che Guevara?” Boots grilled Maloney. “Are you giving it out? Do you have it in that backpack?”

“Over there they gave out bongs,” exclaimed an Occupy Wall Street protester. “He’s like, ‘You answer, here’s a bong.’ Trying to get that one shot. All they had was bongs, peace signs with marijuana and Che Guevara rolling papers. Three things when Fox News gets it, they’ll just clip that then it’s just like protesters accept it.”

“Are we going to expect to see those pictures on Fox News?” Boots yelled out.

“I don’t know if they’ll pick it up, maybe you’ll see it on CNN,” responded the rabble-rousing conservative filmmaker. “I’m giving them away because I’m a nice guy and I like giving stuff away.”

Maloney is most notable for producing the James O’Keefe-esque documentary Indoctrinate U about political correctness at American universities.

Watch Maloney get caught on tape apparently trying to punk protesters below, via JoeyBoots.com:

The CIA funded the famous animated film of Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ you saw in school

one of my top ten favorite books of all time...

story from DangrousMinds

Until videotapes replaced 16mm film projectors in the classroom in the mid-1980s, there was a very good chance that if you were British or American, that at least once, if not twice or more, you were going to see the animated 1955 version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm during your education. I can vividly recall being absolutely incredulous during a post-film discussion in high school, that the teacher we had seemed to have no idea, as in none at all, that Animal Farm was quite specifically a satire of the Russian revolution and the rise of Joseph Stalin. After I raised my hand to object and explained, no doubt with the cocky annoyance of a teenaged autodidact, that “Old Major” was a Karl Marx/Lenin figure, that “Napoleon” was Stalin, “Snowball” was Trotsky and so forth, she blithely dismissed what I said (she clearly had no idea of what I was talking about and so therefore had nothing to add) and remarked that “it could be one theory.”

No my dear, that would be the only fuckin’ theory. If you think American public schools are bad now, I put it to you that they’ve always been pretty shitty…

Animal Farm was directed by the husband and wife animation team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor. It is considered one of the greatest British films, something akin to a “serious” work from Disney. The film does not follow the events of the book very closely, especially the “hopeful” ending that Halas felt necessary to tack on. Orwell’s book ends with the animals numbly resigned to their exploitation by the porcine politburo in cahoots with the humans. This was considered too bleak and Halas wanted an upbeat ending. “You cannot send home millions in the audience being puzzled,” he said about the film in 1980.

But there is an interesting back story of how Animal Farm came to be made that most people are probably unaware of: The most famous British animated film ever made was in fact financed by the American CIA in an effort to encourage a negative view of the Soviet Union.

In 1951, using American taxpayer dollars, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination carried out obtaining the rights to the book from Sonia Orwell, the author’s widow, in an operation run by future Watergate criminal E. Howard Hunt. Two members of the Psychological Warfare Workshop staff who were working in undercover in Hollywood made the arrangements. To thank Mrs. Orwell, the CIA arranged for her to meet actor Clark Gable.

Hunt chose as the film’s producer, Louis De Rochemont, the creator of the famed “March of Time” newsreel journalism films and De Rochemont had final say over all creative matters (Hunt worked for De Rochemont when he was younger). Over 80 animators worked on the film, including three Disney animators who were not credited, probably because they didn’t want to piss off Uncle Walt. Two of them went on to work on Yellow Submarine and Watership Down.

Vivien Halas, the daughter of the film’s directors, believes that her parents were innocent of knowing that the CIA was involved with the project:

“I don’t believe that my parents were aware of any CIA involvement at the time. Frances reminded me that, in the early 1950s, the CIA was not regarded with the same scorn as today. My father dismissed the idea, but my mother felt annoyed.” John Halas and Joy Batchelor would go on to do the Jackson 5ive and The Osmonds cartoons. Louis De Rochemont became paranoid about the CIA bugging him late in his life.

The film was completed in 1954 and distributed worldwide the following year, the first British animated feature ever to be so widely seen. Prints were made for schools and libraries the world over by the United States Information Agency (USIA). If you are over the age of 35 and saw the film in school, there is a very high likelihood that US taxpayer’s dollars paid for the print you saw. The animated Animal Farm, due to the whole “pigs are unclean” thing, was also thought to be effective anti-Soviet propaganda in the Middle East.

On the flip-side, the Soviet spin on Orwell’s 1984 is that the book’s nightmarish depiction of constant state surveillance was about everyday life in America.


 

Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm

The cartoon that came in from the cold (The Guardian)

How Big Brothers used Orwell to fight the cold war (The Guardian)

How to Make the World a Better Place Despite the Roadblocks and Naysayers

Adapted from Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists, by Courtney E. Martin, Copyright © 2010. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press. via AlterNet

Save the world.

Where were you the first time you heard those three little words?

It’s a phrase that has slipped off the tongues of hippie parents and well-intentioned teachers with a sort of cruel ease for the last three decades. In Evangelical churches and Jewish summer camps, on 3-2-1 Contact and Dora the Explorer, even on MTV, we (America’s youth) have been charged with the vaguest and most ethically dangerous of responsibilities: save the world. But what does it really mean? What has it ever really meant -- when uttered by moms and ministers, by zany aunts and debate coaches -- to save the whole wildly complex, horrifically hypocritical, overwhelmingly beautiful world?

Social scientists and the media seems to have made an ugly habit in the last few years of labeling my generation as entitled, self absorbed, and apathetic. Psychologist Jean M. Twenge argues that, largely because of the boom in self-esteem education in the '80s and '90s, young people today “speak the language of the self as their native tongue,” in her book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Tom Friedman dubbed us Generation Q for quiet in the pages of The New York Times, writing, “Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good.” And morning shows can’t resist a segment on how entitled Gen Y is in the workplace and what their bosses can do to tame their positively gargantuan egos.

I think they’ve got it wrong. They’re missing a class analysis. And they’ve mistaken symptoms for the disease. We are not, on the whole, entitled, self absorbed, and apathetic. We’re overwhelmed, empathic, and paralyzed. The privileged among us, are told over and over that it is our charge to “save the world,” but once in it, we realize that it’s not so simple. The less privileged are gifted their own empty rhetoric -- American Dream ideology that charges them with, perhaps not necessarily saving the whole damn world, but at the very least saving their families, their countries, their honor. We are the most educated, most wanted, most diverse generation in American history, and we are also the most conscious of complexity.

In Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer writes: “Absolutism and relativism have ravaged not only the things of the world but our sense of the knowing self as well. We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves, but the outcome is always the same: a distortion of the humble yet exalted reality of the human self, a paradoxical pearl of price.” In other words, we know that -- simply by virtue of being born at this time, in this place -- we are privileged, and furthermore, responsible to share that privilege. But we also know that making good on either promise -- saving the world or saving our families -- is not nearly as simply as our kindergarten teachers or our aspirational parents made it sound.

We know that soup ladling isn’t enough, that Western values are sometimes imposed on other cultures in the guise of good works, that charity often serves to disempower a person in the long run, that too many nonprofits are joyless and ineffective places, that we have so much to give and yet so little. We’ve watched our own parents -- many of them immigrants with big American Dreams in bright lights -- be disrespected by the supposed promise land. We’ve taken human rights and women’s studies classes where first world arrogance was put in sharp relief to third world ingenuity. We’ve experienced the painful irony of walking our donation check, earmarked for Indonesian hurricane relief, to the mailbox in our own poor Oakland neighborhood, which we were gentrifying by our mere existence.

I marched against the Iraq War, along with upwards of six million other people across the world, and President George Bush called it a “focus group.” Despite all of my phone banking and wonky obsessing, he was re-elected for a second term. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq raged on. Abu Ghraib hit the headlines. The wealth disparity yawned larger and larger. My first nonprofit job was one long exercise in disillusion and freelance writing was often alienating. I felt as if I had been sold a bill of goods. The world was a cruel, unjust place and, far from saving it, I felt stuck in it.

Looking for solace, I had lunch with my favorite professor from Barnard College, where I’d been an undergrad just a few years earlier. Professor Dalton was the one whose gospel of a true calling or arête (Plato), of a social contract (Rousseau), of the power of love (King), had set me on fire at 20 years old. I would leave his class vibrating with grand notions of what it meant to live an ethical, examined life, and how I might shape mine to reflect all this learning. Just five years later, I felt extinguished. The real world was not a place of perfect forms and pat answers. It was messy, bureaucratic, painful.

But instead of soothing me, it seemed that my professor had his own desperation to battle. “Where is your generation’s outrage?” he asked me. He told me stories of lecturing on the Holocaust, only to have one of his student’s ask, “Is this going to be on the test?” When I visited his classroom, slipping into a seat in the back, I saw laptop screens alight with Facebook and Zappos as he spoke passionately about the “miracle, mystery, and authority” of Dostoevsky.

The conspicuous lack of outrage, however, was not limited to the privileged. Consumerism and celebrity worship distracted the students that I worked with two afternoons a week at a low-income public high school. They were more interested in brand name bags and tight sneakers than fighting inequity. They wanted to know how they could get rich, not how the rich perpetuate systems of oppression.

And I couldn’t really blame them. The political and cultural landscape circa 2005 prized status over courage, safety over innovation, and pre-professionalism over finding one’s true calling. Anyone stubbornly dedicated to social change was destined for a harsh lesson in what Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness” -- when one has grand expectations, and finds them repeatedly unfulfilled, the unavoidable next stop is Despair. It was a time when the wind was knocked out of our collective sails. I, for one, was left standing on the shore of my own good intentions wondering what ever happened to my dreams of “doing good.”

And then a new day dawned.

It would be hard to overstate Barack Obama’s significance in terms of his influence on young people and our notions of good works. I’m not talking exclusively about the thousands upon thousands of young people that joined his campaign, knocking on doors, sending text messages, descending on Iowa and Florida. Of course, those kids were transformed forever by their experience of standing up with a leader they finally believed in.

But there is a broader, even more profound effect that his leadership has had on us. It’s given us an opportunity to see our own sensibilities, our own idealism, our own complex identities reflected at the highest level. Barack Obama is the America we dreamed about when we were little kids sitting in that classroom with Dorito cheese under our nails. He is the grand symbol, the big victory, the fireworks that we so longed for.

Which is a blessing and a curse. On one hand, his election has made a lot of young people believe in the political process again, reflect on their own civic duty, and learn more about community organizing. On the other hand, all the hype that has surrounded his candidacy has revived one of our more dangerous delusions -- that “saving the world” is about heroics. In fact, the world will not be saved. It will be changed. It looks more like your mom -- her palm on your fevered forehead, her handwritten schedule for sharing childcare with neighbors, her letter to the editor to the local newspaper -- than it does your president. Activism is a daily, even hourly experiment in dedication, moral courage, and resilience.

We must abandon the “save the world” and American Dream rhetoric for a language that is still inspiring, but also pragmatic, a language that we can use like a bridge over the chasm between what our parents and teachers told us about good deeds, about success, and what the real world needs every day. We must transcend school-required community service and resume-padding activities in favor of the kind of work that keeps you up at night because you believe in it so deeply. We must resist paralysis and the sort of numbing our generation has made ourselves infamous for (drinking, drugging, shopping). We must soothe the critics and pessimists in their own heads and act.

Jane Addams once said, “We may either smother the divine fire of youth or we may feed it.” I believe that outlandish expectations, crushing bureaucracies, out-of-touch political leaders, doomsday media coverage, and empty rhetoric about service and success only serve to suck the oxygen out of our hugely promising generation.

Instead we must look to one another for the spark. We must integrate lessons from the visionaries and pavement-pounders of yesteryear, but not become burned by waiting for their version of social change to manifest. Nor must we be relegated to sanitized point-and-click activism alone. Technology aids us, but it doesn’t define us. Our work, our hearts, our ingenuity are what determine our legacy.

The strangest thing happened on the way to my thirties. I realize that I wasn’t going to live forever. And it made the prospect of paralysis -- the option of overthinking and wallowing in my own disillusion about what I’d been told, in contrast to what I was observing and experiencing -- all seem like a whole lot of wasted time. Certainly there is need for reflection, research, and self-examination before we just too enthusiastically into “doing good,” but we are also a generation with a tendency to stew.

We’ve learned how to analyze well, perhaps too well, thanks to our curricula in critical thinking and our hard-working teachers. We can intellectualize any solution into tatters with our finely sharpened swords of cultural relativity. And it’s honorable that we’ve got those skills and that we’re not afraid to use them.

But as George Jackson says, “Patience has its limits. Take it too far and it’s cowardice.” We must be fearless in our analysis and our action. We must accept that we will fail and try anyway, try to fail always more exquisitely, more honestly, more effectively. We must wake up in the morning naively believing in the power of our own dreams and the potential of our own gifts, and go to bed exhausted and determined to do it all over again -- with maybe just a bit of a different tactic, a little less ego, a little more help.

What else are you going to do? Give up?

Of course you’re not. You’re not going to do that, because you are part of a long line of people who didn’t do that, because you live in a country that was actually founded on the assumption that you would be audacious and rebellious and inexhaustible in your pursuit of a more perfect union. You’re not going to settle, because you’ve seen how that kills people, how resigning and consuming and forgetting are surefire ways to deaden a soul. You’re not going to give up, because it would be terribly boring. You’re not going to give up, because you owe the world, this nation, yourself, bravery in the face of suffering, vision in the face of stagnancy, and blood, sweat and tears in the face of injustice. The good failure is your debt for being here. Now. In this beautiful, horrible place.

We have the opportunity to live our lives consciously in spire of all the soporific influences, to act even when we know how complex the prospect of doing so is. Our charge is not to “save the world,” after all; it is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble. As children of the eighties and nineties, we are uniquely positioned to fail. The bureaucracy we face, the scale of our challenges, the intractable nature of so many of our most unjust international institutions and systems -- all of these add up to colossal potential for disappointment. No matter. We must strive to make the world better anyway. We must struggle to make our friendships, our families, our neighborhoods, our cities, and our nation more dignified, knowing that it might not work and struggling anyway. We must dedicate ourselves each and every morning to being the most kind, thoughtful, courageous human beings who ever walked the earth, and know that it still won’t be enough. We must do it anyway.

Viral Video Commercials of the Month

Serious


Humor


And let's throw in a trailer for a movie that also looks hilarious:
THE OTHER GUYS

I just uploaded a bunch of photos for people to use, NOT companies or theives.

I've opened a flickr account and have posted a bunch of photos free to use on any web pages or websites that don't sell anything, a link to my books page www.burningflags.com/books/ would be nice in return. Thanks and enjoy!