not be disillusioned by the media

“You will be ever hearing, but never understanding; you will be ever seeing, but never perceiving. This people’s has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”

it is nice to get some good news every now and then

is anyone else picking up on the media’s explanation of the 3 inmate suicides at guantamo?

i’ve heard everything from “it was a publicity stunt” to “it’s to further the war on terror” and only a whisper of “well, the conditions are so shitty at that place that these men, one of whom was scheduled to be released in the next few days, lost it entirely and could take no more”

i am in no way saying which one is right…i did not know those men, i do not know why they killed themselves or if they were even responsible for their deaths…however, to hear the words “publicity stunt” come from the media in reference to a group suicide infuriates me…i just have a very hard time buying that 3 inmates in a prison reknowned for it’s horrendous conditions and illegitimacy as a UN supported facility (or, fuck the UN, supported by ANYONE except our insane government) offed themselves as a publicity stunt

this quote says it best:

“It’s hard to understand why when three people kill themselves, that is an attack on America. Something has to change in the American mentality,” Jean Asselborn said, according to Reuters.

fuck the media man, fuck ‘em right in the ear

http://medialiteracy.net/pdfs/hooks.pdf

in the words of MarieStarDust, a pox on both their houses (that of marketing and advertising)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4417024.stm

apparently, we’ve been using white phosphorous on civilians in iraq…this is equivalent to using chemical weapons on total innocents…whit phosphorous is considered by OUR military to be nothing but an incendiary devices…the fact of the matter is that when this stuff makes contact with human flesh, it causes incredibly painful 2nd and 3rd degree burns very very quickly…your clothes, however, remain untouched

i try to be objective…”maybe the rest of the world is just trying to demonize us further, because they’re sick of us dominating the world” or maybe our government is a lying sack of unadulterated shit. the russian news that my boyfriend reads showed pictures of people that he said resembled geiger paintings by the time the attacks were over…i didn’t want to see them…i have enough scary things on my mind to see melted children in iraq

while i don’t want to be disillusioned by the media, i also don’t want to think that i simply turn my back on these types of atrocities…i read every day how close humans are to erasing the rainforest, how greedy we are for oil at the cost of countless ecosystems…how many children we’ve wiped off the planet due to corporate…excuse me “American” interests…

should i even bother reading the news if all it does is infuse disgust in me for my fellow man while making me feel powerless to do anything about these problems??

buh.

if you haven’t seen Wag the Dog, it’s definitely worth it…dustin hoffman and robert deniro are some of the finest actors i have ever seen…the movie details how easy it is for the media to manipulate the truth (and history!!)

the question is raised “did the gulf war ever really happen?” people associate events with images and the image everyone remembers from that is the missile going down the chimney…could that footage have been fabricated??

the movie is incredibly dark and stars Willie Nelson as an insane composer…so.awesome.

on the cover of USA today, a big article was on the front that said “Have we hit Peak Oil?”

holy crap on a stick.

also this bird flu stuff is scarier than hell…i think of all the things the news SHOULD be monitering, this is actually a really important one…it showed up in Greece today…

not to freak anyone out of anything, but i’m buying a 10lb bag of lentils once a week for the next few weeks to save up an emergency supply of food in case it gets to the point where i can’t leave my house…gah…

i remember someone called in on CSPAN and made the point that the media really ought to be ashamed of itself for not calling the president out on his non-answers or reporting his utter incoherence. when not scripted, president bush sounds like a stuttering, brain-dead (or possibly drunk) doofus. why does no one bring this up in the news? instead they sugar-coat and gloss over everything the president says to attempt to give him some semblance of eloquence…or at least to show that he has some idea of what’s going on…

the only news source i’ve found that actually quotes him word-for-word is the new york times…

bah.

that the karl rove scandal was virtually erased from the airwaves after only a few days to make way for the supreme court justice drama. you know…cuz treason clearly just doesn’t hold people’s attention like it used to.

tom delay’s actions of stepping down from his position also only showed up on the front page for … a few hours?

funny that huge republican scandals are so easily glossed over with more arbitrary news. funny that bush’s approval ratings are going up again, when violence in Iraq is at a peak, and oil prices are still completely shitty, and while his cronies are discovered to be total criminals.

hooray.

after my fiance dissected a cereal box and pointed out every single evil marketing trick there was (this took an hour), i can’t fucking trust anything EVER. the media is one loud voice that yells into our ears every day, and who the hell knows what is true and what isn’t? one must experience things for themselves, because if the news gave a crap about reporting life for how it really is, the startling evidence of an incredibly poor part of our country (we’re talking 3rd world levels) would have been blaring over the airwaves years ago