by chycho

Recently I came across the following video from President Obama, at the time a Senator, answering some questions regarding hip-hop, its message, and its potential.

Obama states:

“… honestly, I love the art of hip-hop, I don’t always love the message of hip-hop. There are times where even with the artists I named, the artists I love, there is a message that is not only sometimes degrading to women, not only uses the N word a little too frequently but also something I’m really concerned about is always talking about material things. It’s always talking about how I can get something.”

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Daniel Taylor

As the world moves further into economic chaos, eugenics, an old idea cloaked under modern terminology, is making a comeback. During these times it is easy to see how a resurgence and re-packaging of eugenics could come about. Do you have more than two children? Your carbon footprint has been deemed unacceptable. Your economic burden on society cannot be tolerated during unprecedented economic times. The growing population of elderly individuals will be an incredible burden on a faltering system, we are told. Some governmental think tanks see younger generations pursuing euthanasia policies as an option.

Eugenics "went underground" after WWII, but continued under the guise of population control and environmentalism, proceeding partly with the aid of Rockefeller family wealth. Rather than focus on "quality control" the emphasis was on "quantity control". One of the first books to tie these ideas together post-WWII, titled Our Plundered Planet, was written by Fairfield Osborn, who in 1921 served as the President of the Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York.

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M.Idrees

‘The BBC cannot be neutral in the struggle between truth and untruth, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, compassion and cruelty, tolerance and intolerance.’

Thus read a 1972 internal document called Principles and Practice in News and Current Affairs laying out the guidelines for the BBC’s coverage of conflicts. It appears to affirm that in cases of oppression and injustice to be neutral is to be complicit, because neutrality reinforces the status quo. This partiality to truth, justice, freedom, compassion and tolerance it deems ‘within the consensus about basic moral values’. It is this consensus that the BBC spurned when it refused to broadcast the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC)’s video appeal to help the people of Gaza.

The presumption that underlies the decision is that the BBC has always been impartial when it comes to Israel-Palestine. An exhaustive 2004 study by the Glasgow University Media Group – Bad News from Israel – shows that the BBC’s coverage is systematically biased in favour of Israel. It excludes context and history to focus on day-to-day events; it invariably inverts reality to frame these as Palestinian ‘provocation’ against Israeli ‘retaliation’. The context is always Israeli ’security’, and in interviews the Israeli perspective predominates. There is also a marked difference in the language used to describe casualties on either side; and despite the far more numerous Palestinian victims, Israeli casualties receive more air time.

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PulseMedia

The following letter was published in a full-page advertisement in The Irish Times on 31 January 2009:

The original ad, including signatures may be downloaded here. [PDF]

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed over 1,300 Palestinians, a third of them children. Thousands have been wounded. Many victims had been taking refuge in clearly marked UN facilities.

This assault came in the wake of years of economic blockade by Israel. This blockade, which is illegal under international humanitarian law, has destroyed the Gaza economy and condemned its population to poverty. According to a World Bank report last September, “98 percent of Gaza’s industrial operations are now inactive.”

The most recent attack on Gaza is only the latest phase in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and appropriation of their land.

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ScamTypes

Mention the Federal Reserve (FED) and most people, including Americans, will think that you are talking about the financial arm of the US government.

That assumption, however, would be well off the mark. The Federal Reserve is in fact a private company.

Many Americans also believe that the FED is part of their Constitution.

UNCONSTITUTIONAL

However, that assumption is also far from true. In fact, Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution actually outlawed such an entity from ever existing -

‘only Congress shall have the power to create money and regulate the value thereof’.

In stark contrast to this statement, the Federal Reserve Bank is owned and run by private individuals and international bankers.

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Jason Miller

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.”

—Agent Smith from The Matrix

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by Walter and Rosemary Brasch

Every House Republican and 11 Democrats voted against President Barack Obama's $819 billion stimulus package. It still passed by a vote of 244 to 188.

There are enough votes in the Senate to pass the bill, but the obstructionist Republican minority, still nursing the wounds inflicted by the public in the November election, can block it by endless political maneuvering and a filibuster.

The Republicans wail that the President's stimulus package is laden with spending proposals that don't directly attack the recession. However, instead of debating the merits of the package, instead of proposing amendments to add to or subtract from the $819 billion, the Republicans ganged up, voted as a bloc, and placed party loyalty above the needs of the nation.

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Chris Floyd

"[In this work]...the lunacy of trying to fool the self is set aside at some point, salvation and the needs of mankind are prominent & hegemony takes a breathing spell." -- Bob Dylan, liner notes, "World Gone Wrong"

Something momentous is happening over at "Once Upon a Time." Arthur Silber has at last begun his long-awaited series on "Tribalism": the deep-rooted, deep-rutted, largely unconscious mental-emotional structures that lock human beings into such horrifically destructive modes of behavior, on every level, from the most intimate and individual to the most public and universal.

The first two parts of the series (here and here) are up at his blog now, and both are marvelous, trenchant, and moving works. Here you will find that rarest of things: a human voice -- distinct, unique, authentic -- speaking to you directly, with integrity, of deeply meaningful things. Here you will find a dimension of depth that has few if any parallels in political commentary anywhere today. For while politics is the immediate context of Silber's visionary analysis, as he says, rightly:

"Politics is only a symptom of a more fundamental condition. Unless we address these more fundamental concerns, the symptom will never be altered in a lasting way."

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William Blum

I've said all along that whatever good changes might occur in regard to non-foreign policy issues, such as what's already taken place concerning the environment and abortion, the Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away — Barack Obama's first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we'll never know the names of all the victims — It's doubtful that even Pakistan knows — or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

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Stephen Lendman

Founded in 1971, the Geneva-based World Economic Forum (WEF) meets annually in Davos, Switzerland to bring together top business and political leaders as well as mostly neoliberal minded intellectuals, economists, journalists, and others.

WEF calls itself "an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging leaders in partnerships to shape global, regional and industry agendas." It aims for "world-class governance (read dominance)." Its motto is "entrepreneurship in the global public interest (read for the top 1%)." This year's theme - "Shaping the Post-Crisis World" - a tall order addressing what they caused that's heading the world for a calamitous depression.

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