We Cannot Reverse the Damage Done by Poor Pandemic Reporting, but the Fourth Estate Must Do Better
by Nolan Higdon / April 14th, 2023
The following article is another installment in Project Censored’s long-form Dispatches series. It is a detailed examination of establishment media coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. It critiques the missteps, censorship, and establishment propaganda that often passed for real investigative journalism during a crisis when the American public needed truly independent media the most. This is not a piece that takes a position on the efficacy of masks, vaccines, or virus origins, though those are discussed, but rather, a critique of how the corporate media often botched reporting on such crucial matters, censored legitimate counter-narratives that posed important questions, and ultimately diminished its …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / April 13th, 2023
Finnish President receives Nobel Peace Prize in 2008. Photo Credit: Nobel Prize
On April 4, 2023, Finland officially became the 31st member of the NATO military alliance. The 830-mile border between Finland and Russia is now by far the longest border between any NATO country and Russia, which otherwise borders only Norway, Latvia, Estonia, and short stretches of the Polish and Lithuanian borders where they encircle Kaliningrad.
In the context of the not-so-cold war between the United States, NATO and Russia, any of these …
Donald Trump, whose numerous lies go over well with conservative Americans notwithstanding that lies are falsehoods (so Trump’s falsehoods are evidently not damaging his support among Republicans), appeared with Tucker Carson on April 12th, and the interview-clip opened:
Iran gets together with Saudi Arabia through China, and I hear people say of China “we’ll never lose the dollar standard,” are they kidding? China wants to change the standard, the currency standard. And if that happens that’s like losing the World War. We’ll literally be a second-tier country if that happens. Now, you’re losing Brazil. You’re losing Colombia, …
On April 11, 2002, there was an attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez’s democratically elected government in Venezuela. Chavez had prioritized programs to improve living conditions for those who were previously unrepresented, and established an independent foreign policy in favor of the nation’s interests.
Chavez’s stance conflicted with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which laid the groundwork for the use of U.S. military force and other forms of intervention to oppose any government, be it foreign or regional, that jeopardized U.S. interests. The Monroe Doctrine became the ideological basis for US hegemony in the region, justifying the violation of the rights of …
Here’s the premise. If anyone can find a flaw in this logic, please let me know …
• The majority of US citizens want an end to war and reduced military spending.
• The defense budget can and must come way down.
• The DOD is not going to defund itself.
• Congress is not going to defund the DOD.
• The wealthy ruling elite makes huge amounts of money from war.
• As a captive of big money politics, Congress exclusively serves the ruling elite.
• Thus, Congress and …
Films featuring animals as screen filled protagonists, often in an imperfect, callous human world, have been made before. There was Robert Bresson’s 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar, which introduced audiences to a saintly donkey subject to the terrible things human beings are so often prone to inflict.
In recent times, the documentary black-and-white film Gunda, directed by Viktor Kossakovsky (executive producer Joaquin Phoenix), stripped of human dialogue, featured the farm life of an impressively large sow and her piglets. To their lives were added cows and a chicken with one leg. In such a film, livestock are seen as breathing, living …
The sham that is the Assange affair, a scandal of monumental proportions connived in by the AUKUS powers, shows no signs of abating. Prior to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese assuming office in Australia, he insisted that the matter dealing with the WikiLeaks publisher would be finally resolved. It had, he asserted, been going on for too long.
Since then, it is very clear, as with all matters regarding US policy, that Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a constipated, non-committal position. “Quiet diplomacy” is the official line taken by Albanese and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a mealy-mouthed …
In my seventy-plus years from 1946 to now, the chorus of fear-mongering bullshit has never ceased – only grown louder. The joke is on us. Ha Ha Ha.
– Oliver Stone, Chasing the Light
Perhaps silence is the best response to the endless cavalcade of official lies that is United States history. The Internet and digital technology have allowed those lies to increase exponentially in number and frequency with the result that people’s minds have become like 7-Eleven stores, open 24/7 for snack-crap “news.”
But once you become conscious that it’s lies night and day, it sets your head aswirl and plunges your …
From Competition to Chance, From Mimicry to Vertigo
by Bruce Lerro / March 29th, 2023
Orientation
What is play? What are its types and its psychological impacts?
In what way is play different from other human activities? In what ways is play different across the life cycle, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood? Do people ever stop playing? How many kinds of play are there? What is the difference in the psychological states between playing in a baseball game, playing with crossword puzzles, entering the lottery, watching a puppet show, or rolling down a hill? A child riding on a carousel in not in the same state as one who is in a state of suspenseful anticipation …
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / March 29th, 2023
Capitalism, Marx said, is unceasingly prone to crisis. His observation applies as much to financial capital as to industrial capital, as the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank of New York attest. In their pursuit of profits, banks make loans that borrowers cannot repay or back the loans with assets that lose value. Why has this scenario become so deeply rooted in American capitalism and what is the state’s role in restabilizing the financial system once the house of cards begins to tremble?
This banking crisis seems to have ebbed as federal regulators decided to guarantee all deposits, …
Should they be taking them? Ukraine is desperate for any bit of warring materiel its armed forces can lay their hands on, but depleted uranium shells would surely not be a model example of use. And yet, the UK, in an act of killing with kindness, is happy to fork them out to aid the cause against the Russians, despite the scandals, the alleged illnesses, and environmental harms.
An outline of the measure was provided by Minister of state for defence Baroness Annabel Goldie’s written answer to a question posed by Lord Hylton: “Alongside our granting of a squadron …
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 23: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. The hearing was a rare opportunity for lawmakers to question the leader of the short-form social media video app about the company’s relationship with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and how they handle users’ sensitive personal data. Some local, state and federal government agencies have been banning use of TikTok by employees, citing …
While many base Pakistan’s enmity towards Israel on the latter’s post-1948 transgressions such as occupying Gaza and West Bank, military incursions in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of Arabs, building unlawful Israeli settlements, and innumerable other events, this is an incomplete story. Pakistan’s opposition to Israel can be traced back to Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, two of Pakistan’s founders, when the two nations were nonexistent.
Mr. Iqbal, Mr. Jinnah, and their political party worked selflessly toward the cause of Palestine after World War I, despite chasing the dream of Pakistan. They sent Indian …
by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin / March 25th, 2023
Starbucks workers at over 100 sites greeted Spring and the company’s new CEO by walking off the job. Some pundits hail this action as a reflection of labors’ growing new strength. Public approval of unions is at a fifty year high, petitions for union elections are on the upswing, and the recent well-publicized organizing victories at Trader Joes, Amazon, outdoor outfitter REI, and almost 300 Starbucks stores, among others. suggest that unions are on the rise. But glowing reports of the resurgence of the American labor movement are premature. The organizing efforts by Starbucks workers illustrate the many obstacles produced …
To the unbiased eye, Israel’s true colors are not obfuscated due to its innumerable crimes against the Palestinians whether in the form of innocent Gazans being killed or the proliferation of illegal settlements in the West Bank. It is interesting to note that the state of Israel and the IDF’s (Israel Defence Forces) terrorist proclivities are nothing new – instead, they are rooted in the ideologies and actions of Jewish pre-independence terror groups, the Irgun and Lehi. The article describes the Irgun and Lehi’s origins, sheds light on their …
On CNN March 14, Roger Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, said that American banks were on the verge of being nationalized:
What the authorities did over the weekend was absolutely profound. They guaranteed the deposits, all of them, at Silicon Valley Bank. What that really means … is that they have guaranteed the entire deposit base of the U.S. financial system. The entire deposit base. Why? Because you can’t guarantee all the deposits in Silicon Valley Bank and then the next day say to the depositors, say, at First Republic, sorry, yours aren’t guaranteed. Of …
Private First Class Chelsea Manning received the harshest punishment any United States military officer or federal government employee has ever received for leaking classified information to the press. Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over her court-martial, sentenced Manning to thirty-five years at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.
She was found guilty of six charges under the Espionage Act, five stealing charges, one charge involving the “wanton publication” of “intelligence,” multiple charges of “failure to obey an …
I’m back at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport Oregon, part of the Oregon State University campus harboring marine mammal-fisheries-benthic-ocean researchers and students.
The topic: How humans decimated whale populations through hundreds of years of industrial whaling, leaving some species and populations on the brink of extinction. But despite these impacts, many whale populations have made remarkable recoveries, demonstrating the ability of threatened and endangered species to bounce back from intense human pressure.
The presenter: Joshua Stewart, a new faculty member at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, PhD from Scripps Institute of Oceanography….
A new report by the EPA’s internal watchdog has exposed Trump administration appointees that meddled in the agency’s science to weaken “the toxicity assessment of PFASs.” If not for the Biden administration, which discovered this egregious complicity by political appointees and the chemical industry to weaken standards of toxicity, Americans would be unnecessarily exposed to dangerous chemicals beyond the abhorrent levels of exposure already extant.
Shortly after taking the oath of office, Trump grabbed a baseball bat and waddled over to EPA, eviscerating the agency created under President Richard Nixon’s …
“The hypocrisy in … the Bush administration’s overall national security strategy – is monumental. If having weapons of mass destruction and a history of using them is a criteria, then surely the United States must pose the greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed … While the U.S. is massively expanding its biological weapons research capabilities – for example by upgrading its bioresearch facilities at the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons labs to aerosolize live anthrax and genetically modify bio-organisms – it is blocking a protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow international inspectors into U.S. …
This criminal gaslighting ends when enough of us say NO.
Starting with next year’s Oscars, the Academy will require that a film meet two of the four inclusion standards above to be eligible for a best picture nomination.
In Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, the character Dr. Stockmann says:
The majority never has right on its side. Never I say! That is one of those social lies against which an independent, intelligent man must wage war. Who is it that constitute the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk or the stupid? I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over. But, good Lord!—you can never pretend that …
In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the …
What a coup. Nakedly amoral but utterly self-serving in its saccharine minted glory. India’s showman Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who otherwise appears to have clerkish, desk-bound qualities, had what he wanted: an accommodating, possibly clueless guest in the form of the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; a common interest in India’s national sport cricket, and a show illuminating him as supreme Hindu leader presiding over a new age of politics. For Albanese, this was ill-fitting and disturbing but all in keeping with the occasion.
This month, Albanese, who has been held to the bosom of great powers of late, found himself …
Robin Waples: University of Washington (NOAA Fisheries, retired)
Topic: On the shoulders of giants: Under-appreciated studies in salmon biology with lasting influence.
In 1675 Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
This idea epitomizes the way that science progresses by incremental steps, punctuated occasionally by major breakthroughs. But often it is the case that neither these ‘giants’ nor their research are well-known or even routinely recognized.
Arnold Bo?cklin (Switzerland), Isle of the Dead, 1880.
What constitutes a crisis worthy of global attention? When a regional bank in the United States falls victim to the inversion of the yield curve (i.e., when short-term bond interest rates become higher than long-term rates), the Earth nearly stops spinning. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) – one of the most important financiers of technology start-ups in the United States – on 10 March presaged wider chaos in the Western financial world. In the days after …
