D. Aram Donabedian & John Carey - Pirates and Librarians: Big Media, Technology, and the Role of Liberal Education

http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/

Library Philosophy and Practice 2011

ISSN 1522-0222

D. Aram Donabedian

Hunter College Library

Hunter College, City University of New York

New York, NY

John Carey

Hunter Health Professions Library

Hunter College, City University of New York

New York, NY

Because the new processes of domination to which people react are

embedded in information flows, the building of autonomy has to rely

on reverse information flows.

—Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity

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Lawrence Weschler - The Art of the Shakedown, from the Nile to the Potomac

Posted on November 1, 2011, Printed on November 1, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175461/

How Corruption in the U.S. Puts Everyday Corruption in Africa to Shame 
By Lawrence Weschler

A bit over an hour into the five-hour drive across the ferrous red plateau, heading south toward Uganda’s capital Kampala, suddenly, there’s the Nile, a boiling, roiling cataract at this time of year, rain-swollen and ropy and rabid below the bridge that vaults over it.  If Niagara Falls surged horizontally and a rickety bridge arced, shudderingly, over the torrent below, it might feel like the Nile at Karuma.

Naturally, I take out my iPhone and begin snapping pics.

On the other side of the bridge, three soldiers standing in wait in the middle of the road, rifles slung over their shoulders, direct my Kampalan driver Godfrey and me to pull over.

“You were photographing the bridge,” one of them announces, coming up to my open window.  “We saw you.”

“Taking photos of the bridge is expressly forbidden,” the second offers by way of clarification, as the first reaches in and grabs the iPhone out of my hand.  “National security.  Terrorists could use such photos to help in planning to blow up the bridge.”

“Do I look like a terrorist to you?” I ask.  “And anyway,” I shout as Soldiers One and Two walk off with their prize, oblivious, “I wasn’t photographing the bridge.  I was photographing the rapids.  The bridge was precisely the one thing I wasn’t photographing!” 

To no avail.  I open my car door and begin to get out -- but the third soldier pushes me gently back and then leans into the window, peering amiably. “And besides,” I continue, “there were no signs forbidding such photographs.  Anyway, if it’s such a big deal just give me back the phone and I’ll delete the photos.  You can watch.”

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International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis - 7 billion people are not the issue - human development is what counts

Public release date: 27-Oct-2011

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-10/iifa-7bp102711.php
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis 

As the global media speculate on the number of people likely to inhabit the planet on Oct. 31 an international team of population and development experts argue that it is not simply the number of people that matters but more so their distribution by age, education, health status and location that is most relevant to local and global sustainability.

Any realistic attempt to achieve sustainable development must focus primarily on the human wellbeing and be founded on an understanding of the inherent differences in people in terms of their differential impact on the environment and their vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are often closely associated with age, gender, lack of education, and poverty.

These are some of the messages formulated by twenty of the world's leading experts in population, development and environment who met at IIASA in Austria in September 2011, with the objective of defining the critical elements of the interactions between the human population and sustainable development. The Laxenburg Declaration on Population and Development, as prepared by the Expert Panel, describes the following five actions as necessary to address sustainable development, achieve a 'green economy' and adapt to environmental change:

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"Tom Jacobs" - Misinformation in TV Drama Can Gain Credibility

Miller-McCune, October 10, 2011

New research finds we’re more likely to believe a piece of false information conveyed in a television drama after two weeks have passed.

By Tom Jacobs

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/misinformation-in-tv-drama-can-gain-credibility-36845/# #

Our beliefs about the world are shaped by many factors. The courses we took in college. The lessons we learned from our families.

And, of course, the prime-time courtroom drama we watched a couple of weeks back.

Newly published research suggests nuggets of misinformation embedded in a fictional television program can seep into our brains and lodge there as perceived facts. What’s more, this troubling dynamic seems to occur even when our initial response is skepticism.

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"Jim Hightower" - Something Big Is Happening: #OccupyTogether

To paraphrase one of Bob Dylan's songs of youthful protest, "Something's happening here, and you don't know what it is, do you Ms. Bellafante?" A New York Times writer, Ginia Bellafante, is but one of many establishment reporters and pundits who've been covering the fledgling "Occupy Wall Street " movement — but completely missing the story. Instead of really digging into what's "happening here," they've resorted to fuddy-duddy mockery of an important populist protest that has sprouted right in Wall Street's own neighborhood. In a September article, Bellafante dismissed the young people's effort as "fractured and airy," calling it a "carnival" in an "intellectual vacuum." Their cause is so "diffuse and leaderless," she wrote, that its purpose is "virtually impossible to decipher." No wonder, she concluded, that participation in the movement is "dwindling."

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"Danny Schechter" - Unions Promise Support As #OccupyWallStreet Enters Third Week

#OccupyWallStreet has yet to attract the 20,000 militants they had hoped for but its growing and, more importantly retaining its sense of community, non-violence, and sense of a tolerant community. Most important is that similar actions are already taking place in other cities like a March on Friday in Boston against the Bank of America. An even bigger one is being planned for Washington in October. Other organizations are supporting this emerging movement. Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union say they “applaud the courage of the young people on Wall Street,” and are planning to turn out their members next week. I saw T Shirts of UAW members and met some activists from the Salvadorian community. Already #OccupyWallStreet sent over a hundred people to back a protest by postal workers trying to save their jobs and the Post Office. The longer this lasts, and is allowed to last, the more it is likely to grow.

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"Henry Giroux" - Corporate Media and Larry Summers Team Up to Gut Public Education: Beyond Education for Illiteracy, Vulgarity and a Culture of Cruelty

Tuesday 27 September 2011

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/beyond-education-illiteracy-vulgarity-and-culture-cruelty/1317131147

NOTE: This article is based on the preface of Henry A. Giroux's latest book, "Education and the Crisis of Public Values: Challenging the Assault on Teachers, Students and Public Education" (Counterpoints: Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education), published by Peter Lang Publishing; First printing edition (July 30, 2011).

Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of "reform" to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatuses as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.

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"Peter Van Buren" - Freedom Isn’t Free at the State Department

Posted on September 27, 2011, Printed on September 27, 2011
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175446/

The Only Employee at State Who May Be Fired Because of WikiLeaks
By Peter Van Buren

On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and told I was under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information. The evidence of my crime? A posting on my blog from the previous month that included a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the Web.

As we sat in a small, gray, windowless room, resplendent with a two-way mirror, multiple ceiling-mounted cameras, and iron rungs on the table to which handcuffs could be attached, the two DS agents stated that the inclusion of that link amounted to disclosing classified material. In other words, a link to a document posted by who-knows-who on a public website available at this moment to anyone in the world was the legal equivalent of me stealing a Top Secret report, hiding it under my coat, and passing it to a Chinese spy in a dark alley.

The agents demanded to know who might be helping me with my blog (“Name names!”), if I had donated any money from my upcoming book on my wacky year-long State Department assignment to a forward military base in Iraq, and if so to which charities, the details of my contract with my publisher, how much money (if any) I had been paid, and -- by the way -- whether I had otherwise “transferred” classified information.

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"Russ Baker" -Is the Saudi Royal Family Connected to 9/11 Hijackers?

WhoWhatWhy has found evidence linking the Saudi royal family to Saudis in South Florida who reportedly had direct contact with the 9/11 hijackers before fleeing the United States just prior to the attacks. Our report connects some of the dots first laid out by investigative author Anthony Summers and Florida-based journalist Dan Christensen in articles jointly published in the Miami Herald and on the nonprofit news site BrowardBulldog.org.

In early September of this year, Summers and Christensen reported that a secret FBI probe, never shared with Congressional investigators or the presidential 9/11 commission, had uncovered information indicating the possibility of support for the hijackers from previously unknown confederates in the United States during 2001.

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"Eric Alterman" - The Problem of Media Idiocy, Why Do MSM Media Stars Pretend to Be Stupid?

By Eric Alterman, The Nation
Posted on September 19, 2011, Printed on September 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152463/the_problem_of_media_idiocy%3A_why_do_msm_media_stars_pretend_to_be_stupid

There is a specter haunting America today. It is the specter of stupidity. A few months ago, I wrote a column I called “The Problem of Republican Idiots.” Believe me, this problem has not gone away. Rick Perry, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner right now, believes the phenomenon of man-made global warming to be a conspiracy by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.” No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious. The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.

I have in mind two examples, both involving, as it happens, David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press. Neither one is exactly new, but I picked them because not only is Gregory host of television’s highest-rated Sunday morning news show, by far, but his program is also considered to be the most influential and important of all TV news programs. As the alleged gold standard of television interviewing and discussion, it sets the tone for much of the rest of the week’s reporting. Also, I just can’t get these two examples out of my head, they are so damn stupid. See if you agree.

I. On August 13, discussing the Ames, Iowa, straw poll, Gregory made this observation on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown: “You know, Perry talked about potentially seceding from the union. You think that’s extreme. Well, people on the other side think introducing healthcare reform for the whole country is akin to European socialism.” To be honest, in the space allotted to me I’m not sure I can do justice to the multiple forms of stupidity this comment manages to combine. But let me try. To begin with, we have the stupidity of lavishing so much attention on the wholly meaningless Ames straw poll in the first place. Leave that aside. Gregory was trying to create a sense of moral and intellectual equivalence between Rick Perry’s 2009 suggestion that Texas might secede from the United States—an action that set off the Civil War when South Carolina did it in 1860—and Obama’s proposal and Congress’s passage of a healthcare reform bill modeled on the one put in place by Mitt Romney when he was the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Given that Obama dropped the bill’s public option, the legislation relies entirely on private healthcare providers and does not create any significant new government bureaucracies to help implement it. When all is said and done, the program is a modest—and in many ways disappointing—version of a vision that has been part of American debate since Teddy Roosevelt proposed it in 1912 and Harry Truman made it a central part of the Democratic Party platform since 1948.

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