"Malcolm Harris" - The Get Lost Generation

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/21

Published on Sunday, August 21, 2011 by Shareable

by Malcolm Harris

Ask a headline writer at any paper of record and they’ll tell you that today’s young people are “The Lost Generation.” They tend to use this label as if Hemingway and Fitzgerald hadn’t stumbled their way through half the bars in Paris under the same flag. Unfortunately, the youths of today aren’t lost in a morass of sex, art, booze, and politics (not necessarily in that order), but rather can’t find a path through the haze of economic insecurity and impending ecological catastrophe. The current use of the term draws less from those charmed ex-pats than from “The Lost Decade”, the name given to Japan’s period of economic stagnation during the 90′s. But the two uses point towards different aspects of sociohistorical lostness: one is about a generation not knowing what to do with its capacity within society, the other about a society that doesn’t know what to do with its capacity for generation, a world that seems to have already made too much of everything. It is unclear in which way my generation is lost, whether it refers to the seemingly misdirected lives of 20-somethings or our potential that may go unrealized due to the employment crisis and over-production - unless we open new paths. Having read the essays that follow, I think it’s a bit of both.

Of course the absent jobs that could make us “productive” members of society go a long way toward answering the question of direction. Young people are semi-autonomous when it comes to our life choices, but we are subject as a population to economic and environmental conditions; one could say we are lost because we have been lost. Even so, we don’t seem to be going anywhere. The new phase of “emerging adulthood” described in the now infamous New York Times Magazine article on 20-somethings involves a return to the parents’ home, (as in Lauren Westerfield’s “Flexible Lives, Flexible Relationships.”) Nothing could be more found. There is also some irony in calling the most connected generation in the history of mankind “lost.” The phone in my pocket can not only tell me where I am, but where I might want to go next and how to get there. There are ways in which we could not get lost if we tried.

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Russ Baker: Who–and What–Are Behind the “Official History” of the Bin Laden Raid?

Published on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 by WhoWhatWhy.com

http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/08/17/raidbinladen/

by Russ Baker

The establishment media just keep getting worse. They’re further and further from good, tough investigative journalism, and more prone to be pawns in complicated games that affect the public interest in untold ways. A significant recent example is The New Yorker’s vaunted August 8 exclusive on the vanquishing of Osama bin Laden.

The piece, trumpeted as the most detailed account to date of the May 1 raid in Abbottabad Pakistan, was an instant hit. “Got the chills half dozen times reading @NewYorker killing bin Laden tick tock…exquisite journalism,” tweeted the digital director of the PBS show Frontline.  The author, freelancer Nicholas Schmidle, was quickly featured on the Charlie Rose show, an influential determiner of “chattering class” opinion. Other news outlets rushed to praise the story as “exhaustive,” “utterly compelling,” and on and on.

To be sure, it is the kind of granular, heroic story that the public loves, that generates follow-up bestsellers and movie options. The takedown even has a Hollywood-esque code name: “Operation Neptune’s Spear”

Here’s the introduction to the mission commander, full of minute details that help give it a ring of authenticity and the most intimate reportorial access:

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"Martin Dusinberre" - After Fukushima, Japan's 'authority myth' is crumbling

Ordinary people in Japan are starting to wonder whether to trust what politicians and the media tell them

Martin Dusinberre

guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 August 2011 11.25 BST

Several weeks after the Japanese tsunami, I asked an acquaintance in the country whether the electricity shortfall resulting from the Fukushima crisis would affect his lifestyle choices. "Not at all," he said breezily. "Osaka's on a totally different grid from eastern Japan. Even if we saved electricity, we couldn't send the surplus to Tokyo. So it's not really my problem."

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"Tim Dickinson" - How the Head of Fox News Is Making Americans More Right-Wing, More Ignorant and Ever More Terrified

By Tim Dickinson, The Guardian
Posted on August 10, 2011, Printed on August 14, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151980/how_the_head_of_fox_news_is_making_americans_more_right-wing%2C_more_ignorant_and_ever_more_terrified

At the Fox News Chrismas party the year the network overtook arch-rival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful. The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network's founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.

"It was as though we were looking at Mao," recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. "It's like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders," says a former executive with the network's parent, News Corp. "There are people who turn people in."

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Ron Jacobs: Empire of the Mind, Subversion Through Art

Subversion Through Art

By RON JACOBS

http://counterpunch.org/jacobs08052011.html

Let's consider the empire of the mind.  You know, that method to the advertiser's madness that somehow incorporates messages into our consciousness about the nature of freedom.  An Army of One or the freedom to buy a truck that looks like everyone else's.  Freedom of choice as a replacement for genuine freedom.  And so on.  Beyond the obvious insidiousness of advertising is the much more insistent nature of what is called culture  in the modern society of capital.  There is no enlightenment involved in the merchandise presented to us by car companies, banks, and other commercial failures whose primary intent is to convince us that our future involves us spending our money on their products.  Indeed, there is not even a pretense or supposition that there should be any enlightenment in the equation.  So, we spend our time watching and listening to these entertainment products while we work out how we'll get that new car shown to us every ten minutes during the commercial break.

Trotsky wrote that "every ruling class creates its own culture, and consequently, its own art."  While one might be hard pressed to justify most television shows and most pop music as art, they are what pass for culture.  Once, a conversation with a friend who worked as a college faculty member turned to the question of whether film and music reflected or created popular trends and thought.  In other words, does the culture we absorb influence us or do we influence it.

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"The Telegraph UK" - Hackers target 72 organisations in 'biggest cyber attack in history'

Security experts have discovered the biggest series of cyber attacks to date, involving the infiltration of the networks of 72 organisations including the United Nations, governments and companies around the world.

The Telegraph UK BST 03 Aug 2011

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8678492/Hackers-target-72-organisations-in-biggest-cyber-attack-in-history.html

Security company McAfee, which uncovered the intrusions, said it believed there was one "state actor" behind the attacks but declined to name it, though one security expert who has been briefed on the hacking said the evidence points to China.

The long list of victims in the five-year campaign include the governments of the United States, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Vietnam and Canada; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the International Olympic Committee (IOC); the World Anti-Doping Agency; and an array of companies, from defence contractors to high-tech enterprises.

In the case of the United Nations, the hackers broke into the computer system of the UN Secretariat in Geneva in 2008, hid there unnoticed for nearly two years, and quietly combed through reams of secret data, according to McAfee.

"Even we were surprised by the enormous diversity of the victim organizations and were taken aback by the audacity of the perpetrators," McAfee's vice president of threat research, Dmitri Alperovitch, wrote in a 14-page report.

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"Tim DeChristopher" - I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me

Tim DeChristopher, who was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine for 'disrupting' a Bureau of Land Management auction in 2008, had an opportunity to address the court and the judge immediately before his sentence was announced. This is his statement:"… those who write the rules are those who profit from the status quo. If we want to change that status quo, we might have to work outside of those rules because the legal pathways available to us have been structured precisely to make sure we don’t make any substantial change." (Portrait by Robert Shetterly - Used with Permission) http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org

Thank you for the opportunity to speak before the court.  When I first met Mr. Manross, the sentencing officer who prepared the presentence report, he explained that it was essentially his job to “get to know me.”  He said he had to get to know who I really was and why I did what I did in order to decide what kind of sentence was appropriate.  I was struck by the fact that he was the first person in this courthouse to call me by my first name, or even really look me in the eye.  I appreciate this opportunity to speak openly to you for the first time.  I’m not here asking for your mercy, but I am here asking that you know me.

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"Andrew Bacevich" - How The Military Became Our New Civic Religion

Fenway Park, Boston, July 4, 2011.  On this warm summer day, the Red Sox will play the Toronto Blue Jays.  First come pre-game festivities, especially tailored for the occasion.  The ensuing spectacle -- a carefully scripted encounter between the armed forces and society -- expresses the distilled essence of present-day American patriotism.  A masterpiece of contrived spontaneity, the event leaves spectators feeling good about their baseball team, about their military, and not least of all about themselves -- precisely as it was meant to do.

In this theatrical production, the Red Sox provide the stage, and the Pentagon the props.  In military parlance, it is a joint operation.  In front of a gigantic American flag draped over the left-field wall, an Air Force contingent, clad in blue, stands at attention.  To carry a smaller version of the Stars and Stripes onto the playing field, the Navy provides a color guard in crisp summer whites.  The United States Marine Corps kicks in with a choral ensemble that leads the singing of the national anthem.  As the anthem’s final notes sound, four U. S. Air Force F-15C Eagles scream overhead.  The sellout crowd roars its approval.

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#f@ckyouwashington hashtag takes Twitter by storm

RAW STORY
Sunday, July 24th, 2011 -- 10:46 am

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/07/24/fckyouwashington-hashtag-takes-twitter-by-storm/

Most suddenly-popular Twitter hashtags refer to events or celebrities that currently are in the news. But every once in a while, one erupts out of nowhere to capture the mood of the Twitterverse.

The hashtag #fuckyouwashington is currently making the rounds in just that fashion. As explained in a post at tagdef.com, "Thousands of tweets erupted in a matter of hours on #Jul23 protesting the US's failed debt ceiling talks and general policies. Spurred by @JeffJarvis . Seen by some as part of #WorldRevolution or #USRevolution."

A second post helpfully adds, "Our discontent with the way things operate. It's gross."

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"Darren Naish"-As a mysterious skeleton is washed up on a British beach... Do sea monsters REALLY exist?

For centuries they’ve been a part of maritime legend, inspiring curiosity and terror in equal measure. Lurking in the depths of the oceans, shocking in size and appearance, gigantic serpents and prehistoric monsters are as much a source of fascination as ever, especially in Hollywood.

In the past two or three years alone, attacks by huge undersea beasts have provided the centrepiece battles at the ends of blockbusters such as Pirates Of The Caribbean, Clash Of The Titans and The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader.

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