Showing posts with label sanctions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sanctions. Show all posts

Friday, March 5, 2010

Psychopaths With Occam's Razor



New World Notes News
Vol. 3, No. 10 -- March 5, 2010

This Week in New World Notes, radio program #105, March. 9:

Psychopaths With Occam's Razor

Exeutive summary

Hierarchies (government, military, & Wall Street) become top-heavy with psychopaths--all of whom are capable of harming others without feeling the slightest guilt, empathy, or remorse. The Official Explanation of each outrage they commit is always convoluted. The principle of "Occam's Razor" posits that (all else equal) simpler explanations are more likely to be true than explanations worthy of Rube Goldberg. An example of the latter is the Official Story of why there was no air defense on 9-11-2001.

Here's a simple, Occam-friendly explanation of U.S. foreign policy since 1990: The psychopaths are running the show for their own benefit.

In this program, various observers discuss the decade-long genocidal sanctions against the Iraqi people (1990s, mostly under Clinton), Jewish Nazi-collaborator George Soros, 9/11, and General S.L.A. Marshall's groundbreaking discovery of soldiers' extreme reluctance to kill other humans, even "enemy" troops.

We even end on a note of hope and optimism. After all, the normals still outnumber the psychopaths 20-to-1, and the psychos haven't yet succeeded in grabbing complete control of the Internet!

Top: The Anti-occam: Rube Goldberg (1883-1970)
Bottom: Goldberg's soup-cooling machine


And the winners are . . .

Rube Goldberg Award-winning byzantine Official Explanations include

  • How 2 airplanes caused 3 steel skyscrapers to collapse, each onto its own footprint, at near-freefall speed, while mimicking every characteristic of a controlled implosion
  • Why, on 9-11-2001, there was no air defense of "the Homeland" and no missile defense of the Pentagon
  • How giving a trillion dollars to private Wall Street corporations--no strings attached--will create jobs and reduce home foreclosures
  • Why U.S. forces are killing people in Afghanistan

Notes and credits

Thanks to James Corbett (http://www.corbettreport.com/ -- episode #113) for the audio on George Soros. Thanks to Tereza Coraggio (http://www.thirdparadigm.org/) for the article by Dr. Kevin Barrett, "Twilight of the Psychopaths." Regular podcasts by both Corbett & Coraggio are archived on radio4all.net.

New World Notes is produced under the auspices (Latin for "counter") of WWUH-FM, a community service of that beacon of light in darkest Connecticut, the University of Hartford. Feedback to kdowst at hotmail period com.

See last week's installment (#104) for more on psychopaths in power (and the predictable results).

On the show I've condensed--and in the process toned down --Kevin Barrett's essay, "Twilight of the Psychopaths." Here's the full text (in .pdf).

As Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeline Albright (then a brunette) famously
defended, on TV, the Administration's murder of 500,000 Iraqi children by
its oppressive regime of sanctions. The equal number of adult civilians
murdered didn't bear mentioning. Here, in February 2004, she arrives in
Berkeley to plug her published memoirs. And no, the sign on the window
isn't exaggerated, inflammatory rhetoric. Even so, the buck stops with her
boss, the Psychopath-in-Chief. Apologies to Sassacus, Black Elk, & Sitting Bull.

Coming Soon

  • March 16 -- The Second Coming (in American imagination & popular culture)
  • March 23 -- Airport Security & Other Scams

Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern):

Could a teenaged Jew in Hungary, ca. 1944, actively assist the Nazi
Occupiers in robbing other Jews of their wealth and shipping them off
to extermination camps . . . and--decades later--feel not the slightest
guilt or remorse? Easy as goulash to a psychopath!


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    Thursday, April 9, 2009

    Independent Journalism (I): Jeremy Scahill




    New World Notes News

    Volume 2, Number 14 -- April 14, 2009


    This week in New World Notes, #58 -- April 14 &17:

    At every opportunity, we have given the corporate-controlled media all the brickbats and spitballs we had available. But in keeping with the show's new Corporate Motto--Always Look On the Bright Side of Life (see last issue)--this week we let a smile be our umbrella. As my auto mechanic keeps advising, Positive to positive, and negative to ground! Cheerful chap, wot?

    Some fine print-journalism and fine photojournalism are being done today, especially by "independent journalists." The term is hard to define. As a very rough definition, consider the category to include all journalists who don't receive a regular paycheck from a mainstream, corporate-owned "news-gathering organization."


    Jeremy Scahill at work: abroad and at home.


    New York Times reporters are Out. Veteran correspondents Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn are In (Britain's Independent being owned by a nonprofit foundation). Seymour Hersh is In (works for Conde' Nast). Anyone on network TV is decidedly OUT.

    Needless to say, In are many talented young journalists who are freelancers or practically so. Notable among these many talented people are three award-winners who have done some fine reporting on (and in) the Middle East: Dahr Jamail, Mohammed Omer, and--our focus this week--Jeremy Scahill.

    Scahill--author of the recent book, Blackwater--is a very good reporter and a perceptive and often funny storyteller. I'll read aloud his fine story about a police riot in Miami that the mainstream media pretended not to notice.

    L to R: Print journalist Dahr Jamail (U.S.), documentary
    filmmaker     John Pilger (Australia), print journalist and
    photojournalist Mohammed Omer (Palestine)--in London,
    June 2008, where Jamail     and Omer shared the year's
    prestigious Martha Gellhorn Award. On his way home to
    Rafah (Gaza Strip), Omer was detained, beaten and seriously
    injured by Israeli security forces in the Occupied West Bank.


    Then Scahill will talk about how he stumbled into the "Alternative" press, about what happened when he appeared on cable news shows and began condemning the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and--less amusingly--about the U.S.'s decade-long unreported war against the people if Iraq (throughout the 1990s).

    Yes, Clinton killed nearly as many Iraqi civilians as both Bushes combined. Scahill and Kathy Kelly (NWN #39, December 2, 2008) were both reporting from the scene, trying to get Americans to see what was happening.

    Alas, a black former football player was charged with killing a pretty white woman.

    Amateurs like Scahill and Kelly can waste their time however they like. Serious, professional corporate journalists know the real Story of the Decade when it comes down the pike in a white SUV!


    Top: Seymour Hersh (U.S.). Bottom: Robert Fisk (Lebanon & U.K.)


    So you might have missed the story about the million Iraqi civilian deaths. our "leaders" caused. Deaths from malnutrition. Deaths from diseases that should have been prevented and could have been treated, but for the US-UN "embargo." Deaths from the bombing that never stopped between the two official Gulf wars. Deaths ordered by Clinton--whom we eventually impeached for ejaculating without a license.

    Song played: David Rovics, Miami

    Soon to Come -- Date of first scheduled broadcast [on WWUH] listed:

    • April 21 -- Men and War
    • April 28 -- The Things They Don't Tell You! (Lies, distortions, and propaganda in your American History courses and textbooks. No wonder you hated History class!)

    The late, great I. F. Stone (right).


    Catch New World Notes (all times Eastern) . . .


    Top illustration:     The antithesis (and possibly Antichrist): corporate hack Roland Hedley.

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