"The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion"

I'm pretty conflicted about abortion, but I am crystal clear about egregious and unambiguous hypocrisy. This article (originally published in 2000 but recently posted to DailyKos) is a fascinating read:

Abortion is a highly personal decision that many women are sure they'll never have to think about until they're suddenly faced with an unexpected pregnancy. But this can happen to anyone, including women who are strongly anti-choice. So what does an anti-choice woman do when she experiences an unwanted pregnancy herself? Often, she will grin and bear it, so to speak, but frequently, she opts for the solution she would deny to other women - abortion.

...

"We too have seen our share of anti-choice women, ones the counselors usually grit their teeth over. Just last week a woman announced loudly enough for all to hear in the recovery room, that she thought abortion should be illegal. Amazingly, this was her second abortion within the last few months, having gotten pregnant again within a month of the first abortion. The nurse handled it by talking about all the carnage that went on before abortion was legalized and how fortunate she was to be receiving safe, professional care. However, this young woman continued to insist it was wrong and should be made illegal. Finally the nurse said, 'Well, I guess we won't be seeing you here again, not that you're not welcome.' Later on, another patient who had overheard this exchange thanked the nurse for her remarks." (Clinic Administrator, Alberta)

...

"Recently, we had a patient who had given a history of being a 'pro-life' activist, but who had decided to have an abortion. She was pleasant to me and our initial discussion was mutually respectful. Later, she told someone on my staff that she thought abortion is murder, that she is a murderer, and that she is murdering her baby. So before doing her procedure, I asked her if she thought abortion is murder - the answer was yes. I asked her if she thought I am a murderer, and if she thought I would be murdering her baby, and she said yes. But murder is a crime, and murderers are executed. Is this a crime? Well, it should be, she said. At that point, she became angry and hostile, and the summary of the conversation was that she regarded me as an abortion-dispensing machine, and how dare I ask her what she thinks. After explaining to her that I do not perform abortions for people who think I am a murderer or people who are angry at me, I declined to provide her with medical care. I do not know whether she found someone else to do her abortion." (Physician, Colorado)

...

Many anti-choice women are convinced that their need for abortion is unique - not like those "other" women - even though they have abortions for the same sorts of reasons. Anti-choice women often expect special treatment from clinic staff. Some demand an abortion immediately, wanting to skip important preliminaries such as taking a history or waiting for blood test results. Frequently, anti-abortion women will refuse counseling (such women are generally turned away or referred to an outside counselor because counseling at clinics is mandatory). Some women insist on sneaking in the back door and hiding in a room away from other patients. Others refuse to sit in the waiting room with women they call "sluts" and "trash." Or if they do, they get angry when other patients in the waiting room talk or laugh, because it proves to them that women get abortions casually, for "convenience".

As an interesting side note, this is completely parallel to the stories of Christian ministers who end up hiring gay prostitutes.

Most vote machines lose test to hackers

According to an article in SFGate:

State-sanctioned teams of computer hackers were able to break through the security of virtually every model of California's voting machines and change results or take control of some of the systems' electronic functions, according to a University of California study released Friday.

The researchers "were able to bypass physical and software security in every machine they tested,'' said Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who authorized the "top to bottom review" of every voting system certified by the state.

Memetix Report on the State of America

OK, it's time for me to switch gears and present links to a dozen representative articles that reveal the mimetic state of the United States, as of June 2007.

On reality cognition: First, what everybody already knows about SUVs ... it's all about vanity, and the illusion of safety without any of the reality:

In the history of the automotive industry, few things have been quite as unexpected as the rise of the S.U.V. Detroit is a town of engineers, and engineers like to believe that there is some connection between the success of a vehicle and its technical merits. But the S.U.V. boom was like Apple's bringing back the Macintosh, dressing it up in colorful plastic, and suddenly creating a new market. It made no sense to them. Consumers said they liked four-wheel drive. But the overwhelming majority of consumers don't need four-wheel drive. S.U.V. buyers said they liked the elevated driving position. But when, in focus groups, industry marketers probed further, they heard things that left them rolling their eyes. As Keith Bradsher writes in "High and Mighty"—perhaps the most important book about Detroit since Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed"—what consumers said was "If the vehicle is up high, it's easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking behind it. " Bradsher brilliantly captures the mixture of bafflement and contempt that many auto executives feel toward the customers who buy their S.U.V.s. Fred J. Schaafsma, a top engineer for General Motors, says, "Sport-utility owners tend to be more like 'I wonder how people view me,' and are more willing to trade off flexibility or functionality to get that. " According to Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford's S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing "fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls. " Toyota's top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles "an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills. " One of Ford's senior marketing executives was even blunter: "The only time those S.U.V.s are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3 a. m."

Speaking of the illusion of safety: when the EPA discovered asbestos in their Little League fields, the residents of idyllic El Dorado Hills rushed to protect themselves—from reality:

The civic leaders of El Dorado Hills had spent many months trying to stave off [asbestos] tests, scrambling to protect the community not from potentially toxic substances, but from the EPA's potentially toxic information. Taking the lead was Vicki Barber, the superintendent of schools. A stout woman with compressed lips and an unwavering gaze, she recently won an award for being "a person who does not accept the word 'no'...when it comes to what is good for students." After asbestos was found during the construction of a high school soccer field in 2002, Barber questioned a costly epa-mandated cleanup. When a citizen formally asked the epa to test the town's public areas for asbestos in 2003, Barber quickly emerged as the agency's most determined local foe. Before the study was even under way, she began writing to the epa as well as to senators and congressmen, questioning whether the agency had the "legal and scientific authority" to conduct what she called a "science experiment" with "limited benefit to the residents." At least four state legislators and one congressman responded by putting pressure on the epa, which in turn agreed not to declare El Dorado Hills a Superfund site, regardless of what it might find there.

And while we're on the subject of environmental disconnects: Massacres and paramilitary land seizures are behind the "Biofuel Revolution":

Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Oh shoot, while we're here, we might as well deal with the externalization of environmental costs to developing nations:

It was once a gently flowing river, where fishermen cast their nets, sea birds came to feed and natural beauty left visitors spellbound. Villagers collected water for their simple homes and rice paddies thrived on its irrigation channels. Today, the Citarum is a river in crisis, choked by the domestic waste of nine million people and thick with the cast-off from hundreds of factories.

See the picture above. That's a river, not solid ground! A related article: Polymers Are Forever. Don't even get me started on China and Walmart.

On the illusion of anonymity: Kevin Flaherty reports on the ugly truth about online anonymity:

So, you want to be anonymous in a world that was thought up by the U.S. Department of Defense? Most computer users don’t have what it takes, in terms of technical skills, or discipline, to pull it off. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s absolutely true.

...

As you might already know, I studied information warfare in college and I did several years of time in corporate IT environments. I knew about the types of surveillance and control that are possible at the client, server and network levels. I looked at the challenge as all IT people look at all IT related challenges: Assume the absolute worst. I went even further with this. I made irrationally negative assumptions. I assumed that everything I did online was compromised. I assumed the worst tinfoil nightmares about commercial operating systems. I assumed that my ISP was a subsidiary of the NSA, etc.

Got the idea?

As if Kevin were prescient, EFF released unredacted court documents related to the ATT/NSA intercept case. Kevin summarizes:

A company called Narus has developed the NarusInsight Intercept Suite: a purpose built network surveillance system that is capable of analyzing (in real time) ALL of the data passing through the largest network nodes in existence. This system is capable of applying sophisticated targeting rules to the traffic, as well as recording entire, individual sessions for later analysis.

This leads us to our next topic...

On the snarling police state: Man faces seven years in prison for videotaping traffic stop; woman faced jail time for “staring” at a police dog.

On appreciation of beauty: The Washington Post arranged to have one of the best classical musicians in the world play some of the most difficult and beautiful music in history on a three million dollar Stradivarius, anonymously in a DC Metro station. And almost nobody noticed, except... every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

On terrorism and security: The head of Arkansas GOP openly states that we need more ‘attacks on American soil’ so people will better appreciate GW Bush. Read that again...

Fog of War

No doubt, this is old news to you by now:

A former U.S. Army soldier was charged yesterday with the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman and the slayings of three of her family members in their home south of Baghdad in March, federal prosecutors said.

The Cunning Realist has an observation with a subtle point hidden within:

The idiots who continue to insist that "these things happen during war" have stumbled unwittingly onto a partial truth. Yes, this is part of every war, and that's exactly why preemptive wars carry a unique risk. When the inevitable atrocities occur, they can be just as damaging to the aggressor as defeat on the battlefield---particularly for a nation that defines itself by moral exceptionalism.

In response to atrocity, this meme -- "these things happen during war" -- is being promoted by the apologists of the war in Iraq, more-or-less the same people who promoted the war before it turned into the quagmire and disaster it is today. But they would have you forget their eagerness to start the war in the first place.

If "these things happen during war", that makes the aggressor nation (us) no less culpable.

Security dimension

This topic must be active in the collective unconscious. Kevin at Cryptogon gets what I'm talking about. Mincing no words:

I haven't read this book [Gardening When It Counts : Growing Food in Hard Times], but I have read the introduction and the contents. As far as I can tell, the book ignores the security dimension of the situation that "backyard gardeners" will be facing in a collapse situation. If you live in a city and actually had to use this book, the local warlord would take a look at your backyard garden, rub his stomach and think, "Yummy!"

Then what are you going to do?

This is where the Berkeley vegans, Kerry-2004-bumper-sticker-on-the-hybrid drivers and other associated crackpot liberals will try to change the subject.

[...]

You take the state out of the picture for a day or so in an urban environment and someone is going to be pointing a gun at your head, making demands that you will probably find less than appealing. (I breathed the smoke of Los Angeles burning during the 1992 riots. I saw troop carriers and U.S. Marines on the streets. I didn't see any free love ecotopia breaking out.)

[...]

If you're not surrounded by neighbors who already have the mind-set that you have.... good luck trying to sway converts when armed men, taking orders from their stomachs, are roaming the streets. You either need to work on building a collective security plan with your neighbors now, or you need to find new neighbors who already get it; meaning, you need to move.

[...]

So, having said all of that, if you are planning on staying put, with your idiot, Jesus fish-embellished-SUV driving neighbors and their ADHD kids, sure, why not learn how to grow a backyard garden?

I'm always accused of being negative, probably rightly so. But if we're going to look at the future squarely in the face, we need to deal with at least the possibility of collapse, and not recoil from the full implications.

I agree with what Zac at Alchemical has to say about this: ultimately the solution has to involve the (for lack of a better term) spiritual dimension of the problem. Without that we are completely fucked.

Meme creep: redefining "wiretap"

Man charged after videotaping police:

NASHUA [, New Hampshire] – A city man is charged with violating state wiretap laws by recording a detective on his home security camera, while the detective was investigating the man’s sons.

Michael Gannon, 49, of 26 Morgan St., was arrested Tuesday night, after he brought a video to the police station to try to file a complaint against Detective Andrew Karlis, according to Gannon’s wife, Janet Gannon, and police reports filed in Nashua District Court.

Police instead arrested Gannon, charging him with two felony counts of violating state eavesdropping and wiretap law by using an electronic device to record Karlis without the detective’s consent.

Meme creep: redefining "organic"

Apparently there is a growing trend to label as "oranic" milk from cows that live in feedlots but are fed organic grain:

A different kind of organic dairy farm is emerging out west _ corporate-owned feedlot operations with thousands of cows that are fed organic grain but, according to critics, get little chance to graze.

Fears that big operations will muscle out family farms have produced a backlash, including a boycott by the Organic Consumers Association against the country's biggest organic milk brand, Horizon Organic.

Organic farmers and consumer groups are hoping the U.S. Department of Agriculture will level the field. The agency is considering whether to mandate that milk bearing the "USDA Organic" seal come from cows that have significant access to pasture, a move smaller producers say would give them the protection they need.

I suppose organic grain is an improvement over the standard industrial practices. But feedlots clearly violate the spirit of "organic". (For an entertaining lesson on industrial beef, see the McDonalds game.)

[Via Cryptogon]

Two tales of memetic pathology

I have two stories that are essentially unrelated except that they came to my attention today:

The first story is that a Hardball guest says the NYT editor is guilty of treason. From ThinkProgress:

The White House has launched an assault on the New York Times for publishing a story about the administration’s secret program to monitor bank records. Yesterday, President Bush said the paper’s conduct was “disgraceful” and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow implied they were undermining Americans’ “right to live.”

The right-wing echo chamber is taking the argument a step further. Appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball, talk show host Melanie Morgan said that New York Times editor Bill Keller is guilty of treason and that “Keller and his associates” should be thrown “in prison for 20 years. Watch it.

[Via Atrios, who argues that this is the consequence of years of failure to stand up to GOP encroachments on journalism.]

In other news, Media Matters reports how Newsday's James Pinkerton says that the media frame Iraq coverage by portraying the U.S. military as "evil", "bad people", and "killers". Arguing that proper coverage would factor in the harsh realities of war, Pinkerton says:

[T]he correct frame, I believe, [...] it’s a minority view, but it’s correct, is [exemplified by a] fellow named Gary Brecher, who writes a [...] column called “War Nerd” for a Russian magazine online. And he makes the point, “Look, this is a war. What do you expect? This is not a police action, this is not a humanitarian mission. This is a war, and you’re going to get Hadithas.”

Unfortunately, as Sadly No! points out, War Nerd is a parody. Another passage from War Nerd states the following:

I’m a war nerd. A backseat sergeant. I know what I am. All I have to do is look down at the keyboard and there’s my hairy white gut slopping over it, and there’s crumbs between the keys from the fake homemade soft’n'chewy big cookies in the vending machine downstairs.

So why am I calling attention to this? The reason is that I think these are two distinct symptoms of serious late-stage memetic pathology settling into our collective psyche. On the one hand, it is now a matter of serious debate to discuss whether a story on the invasion of privacy and related abuses by our elected government constitutes treason, and on the other, there are people who are seriously advocating positions that are so extreme that they exceed the realm of parody.

We're circling the drain, folks.

Enforcing the boundary: illegal memes

GOP Congressman Calls for Criminal Charges Against New York Times:

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee urged the Bush administration Sunday to seek criminal charges against The New York Times for reporting on a secret financial-monitoring program used to trace terrorists.

Rep. Peter King blasted the newspaper's decision last week to report that the Treasury Department was working with the CIA to examine messages within a massive international database of money-transfer records.

"I am asking the Attorney General to begin an investigation and prosecution of The New York Times -- the reporters, the editors and the publisher," said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous."

[via Americablog]

NetVocates

Speaking of PR, which is an important tooll in memetic engineering and a key weapon in memetic warfare, there is apparently a company called NetVocates which is a PR firm focused on blogging. Steve Lagavulin summarizes Robin Hamman at Cybersoc.com:

I won't steal all of Robin's thunder, and you should definitely take a peek over at his weblog for a better take on what his research dug up. But the gist of it is that NetVocates appears to offer a service whereby they will target weblogs which might "impact an organization and its products and image in uncontrolled and often unexpected ways", and they then hire individuals to post comments on those weblogs which will, presumably, help to create more "controlled" and "expected" impacts.

Chip Griffin, founder of NetVocates, offers his side of the story:

NetVocates was founded earlier this year to provide online analysis and advocacy services to clients. What does this mean? NetVocates gathers data about blog posts of interest to its clients, uses proprietary software to blend multiple data sources and electronically sort the information. We then have a staff of experts who review the information to provide reports to clients outlining trends in the blogosphere of interest to our clients.

... For some – but not all – clients, NetVocates works to develop advocacy programs. These programs can take many different forms – steps the client might take to communicate more proactively through its own blog, to work with bloggers to provide information on products and issues, or to address misinformation published in blogs.

Steve has a followup article on the issue. He call attention to the silver lining:

But as a counter-point, let's look at the bright side of NetVocates as well: they pay people to surf the web! Does that sound like your idea of a dream job?

Fear meme watch: Sears Tower

The Independent reports on the underwhelming truth behind the Sears Tower Plot: Tall stories: The plot to topple Chicago's Sears Tower was not all that it seemed.

The alarming news flashed across America's TV screens on Thursday evening: government agents had thwarted an al-Qa'ida plot, using home-grown American terrorists, to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago in a ghastly repeat of 9/11.

When the dust had settled barely 24 hours later, a rather more modest version of events had emerged. The seven young black men arrested at a warehouse in Miami and Atlanta had never been in touch with al-Qa'ida, and had no explosives. Their "plan" to destroy America's tallest building was little more than wishful thinking, expressed by one of them to an FBI informant purporting to be a member of Osama bin Laden's terrorist organisation.

[...]

That did not deter the US Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, from summoning a press conference in which he denounced an attempt to "wage war against America". But the threat, even he admitted, was not immediate - and those who posed it were in fact merely a few semi-unemployed men, most of them petty criminals, from Liberty City, a poor black neighbourhood close to the centre of Miami.

If the case has any significance in America's "war on terror", it is not as a present danger, but as a harbinger of possible future risks.

[Via Americablog]

Labor camps

Republican gubernatorial candidate has called for creation of a forced labor camp for illegal immigrants:

Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a Mexican news service, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them "as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting."

The article described Goldwater's plan as a "concentration camp" for migrants.

Goldwater, a candidate for governor in Arizona, said in a statement Friday that his comments were taken out of context. He said he was calling for a work program for convicted nonviolent felons, similar to "tried and tested, effective and accepted practices" used by state and local jails

True, labor camps for immigrants may be no worse than using felons as slave labor. But as Miriam at No Capital comments, "A Final Solution... Perhaps not THE final solution".

This brings to mind the conspiracy hysteria over "FEMA detention camps", which flared up a few months back when USACE expanded a contract by Haliburton subsidiary KBR to build facilities for "foreign-born refugees". Rotten has a good historical perspective, ending with the following warning :

After a flurry of public protest, the "detention camp" discussion went sub rosa. But under existing presidential authorities and executive orders issued both before and after 9/11, there is no need for public discussion. The camps could (under the sketchy legal justifications drafted by current and previous administrations) be open for business without a word ever being spoken in public.

I'm not going to reach for my tinfoil hat just yet, but it is very worrying that the idea of labor camps is now acceptable enough that a candidate for governor can openly espouse it.

(Cross posted to Round Earth League)

Following up on reactions to South Central...

Steve Lagavulin has a commentary on the South Central farm. In essense, he agrees with Ran (as do I). He also has a similar story from his home town:

It reminds me in a way of a local restaurant here in Minneapolis called The Loring, which was such an innovative and cool place that it became a legendary hipster-scene here in the city for young bohemian artists (and the people who love them...). The Loring single-handedly rejuvenated a failing city-central Loring Park area, and brought great prosperity to a full city-block of real estate. And over time the restaurant expanded into an entertainment lounge, and then a theatre/performing arts space. But alas The Loring is no more, because as successful as it had become the owner never actually bought the building it was housed in. So that all the while Loring Park area was becoming regentrified and trendier, the real estate there was becoming more and more desireable. Finally, about three years ago, The Loring was booted out in favor of a more mainstream-kind-of-trendy restaurant, with deeper pockets.

And so it goes. As always.

Enforcing the boundary: Anglicans and Homosexuality

Enforcing the boundary of acceptable Christianity: U.S. vote triggers more trouble for Anglicans [note the slight ideological slant of the headline]:

Anglicans faced a new crisis on Monday after the U.S. branch of the church elected a liberal female leader who said she believed homosexuality was no sin and homosexuals were created by God.

One English bishop warned that Anglicanism was in danger of splitting into "two religions" after the election in the United States of Katherine Jefferts Schori to lead the 2.3-million-strong U.S. episcopal church.

This is really an old and stale drama, and I barely care about it. Back when I was a Christian, I attended an Episcopal church, and the parish itself was a great place. But conventional Christianity, with some exceptions, is mostly about the panopticon God, now essentially irrelevant to my spiritual concerns.

One would think that positions on war, human rights, economic and environmental justice, ethical government -- the kinds of issues that would seem to resonate with the mythic Jesus -- would be more prominent than the sexual proclivities of a relatively small percentage of individuals. Instead, it is almost a fetish with Christianity to micromanage sexual behavior. When one Christian sect dares to suggest that perhaps energies are better spent focusing on other problems, we have a theological crisis.

Whether you think homosexuality is moral or not is beside the point. Its effects on any society are minor. It is a total nonissue when its destructive potential (if there is any at all) is compared with, oh, say, the Enron scandal or the war in Iraq.

I'm almost sure I'm preaching to the choir here. But I think it needs to be said again. [/end rant]

Deathmobile

I can't figure out which is more disturbing: the fleet of mobile execution vans deployed by the Chinese government, or the fact that 48% of AOL readers think this is humane.

And, anyway, why do they have to be mobile? This isn't like spaying your cat or getting screened for STDs.

[via PopOcculture]

Enforcing the boundary: Smithsonian removes electric-car exhibit

Enforcing the boundaries of acceptable discourse: Smithsonian removes electric-car exhibit:

Just weeks before the release of a movie about the death of the electric car from the 1990s, the Smithsonian Institution has removed its EV1 electric sedan from display.

The National Museum of American History removed the rare exhibit yesterday, just as interest in electric and hybrid vehicles is on the rise.

...

GM happens to be one of the Smithsonian's biggest contributors.

[Via Cryptogon]

On concentration of media ownership

Matthew Yglesias, with whom I often agree, has a post about media concentration. He argues that the media has become less concentrated than ten years ago, and that the internet has opened up new sources of information to the general public:

[T]he media's become less concentrated. They're up to six giants from just four -- General Electric, Disney, Time Warner, CBS (which I believe is the successor to Westinghouse), plus new entrants Fox, and Viacom. So that's six.

Six is a reasonably small number, but compared to what? What do the top six American car companies control? Oh, right, there are only two. And only two operating system makers. And so on and so forth. The tendency in any field would be for the top six firms to control a large portion of the aggregate.

...

On top of all this, the Internet is greatly enhancing peoples' range of options. Actual "new media" -- blogs, etc. -- play a relatively small role in this. The main thing is that, unlike it past eras, it's now really, really easy for somebody living in St. Louis to read The Los Angeles Times or The Boston Globe or, for that matter, The Guardian or The Independent if they're interested in a different perspective on world or national affairs.

...

This is getting very longwinded. But suffice it to say that while I have major -- major -- complaints with the reality of most media content, I don't find it especially plausible to attribute these problems to overconcentration.

Well, okay. But, as one of his commenters observes,

I don't think it's about how many companies, I think it's about how many viewpoints. It is ENTIRELY the corporatist viewpoint now.

The problem is that the boundaries of acceptable discourse are now more narrow than ever before. One concrete example: a recent rejection by three major networks of a paid advertisement by the United Church of Christ. Apparently the ad was too inclusive, thereby violating the strictly enforced public definition of Christian morality. An older Alternet opinion piece reflects on the previous time a UCC ad was rejected (oddly in a hopeful tone):

[The UCC] commercial has more power to shock us — into either agreement or rage — than the most erotic sucking of food or miming of the sexual act; the grossest feat of survival; the most lurid tale of incest on The Jerry Springer Show. We're as shallow as we can get, as a society, yet we're still capable of being engaged by the deepest questions of community, sacredness, and ethics.

Corporatist media strictly enforces which viewpoints are acceptable (laissez-faire Capitalism, short-term profit over long-range benefit, materialism, mindless hedonism, human chauvanism) and which are not (environmental concsiousness, the complexities of spirituality, respect for all life). And while the internet is currently a rich marketplace of information and knowledge, how long will that last when net neutrality is imperiled? And how can you be sure that NSA isn't watching what you view?

Another problem is the impact of various kinds of media. Moving images constitute an incredibly powerful form of communication. Podcasts notwithstanding, the ability to broadcast such images is concentrated within a handful of large corporate media outlets that conform to a narrow ideology. Their carefully crafted images are ubiquitous, and succeed in formatting a large segment of the public consciousness. All the reasoned arguments on a thousand alternative blogs have but a miniscule effect against the force of these images. The medium is indeed the message.

I agree with Yglesias that the problem is more complex than concentration of media ownership per se. But it is definitely part of the problem. I'm not naive: I realize we have little control over dealings in the corporate stratosphere. However, to the extent that we constitute the marketplace of eyeballs, we have some influence over our corporate masters. In particular, we can demand a richer menu of offerings, simply by seeking out a wider range of ideas and sources of information.

South Central Farm

The latest brouhaha at the fringes of the blogosphere involves the destruction of the South Central urban farm:

The struggle to save an urban farm that has drawn celebrities and media from around the world came to a halt on Tuesday as 100 police evicted farmers and their supporters from the site.

Ran Prieur gets it right, I think. Since he doesn't have a permalink, I'll just lift what he has to say, in its entirety:

I've been withholding my attention from the issue because I recognized it as a psychological operation designed to reinforce our subconscious awareness that we're in hell, while our conscious minds refuse to accept it and we go gradually insane. Our chance to save the farm was exactly the same as the chance that the audience of a performance of Hamlet can convince the actors to not have everyone die at the end.

I often feel like I'm in the trenches of WWI, and the other side is fighting effectively, while half the people on my side are saying, "They're shooting at us! I can't believe they're shooting at us!" There is a fucking war on. The forces that destroyed the farm have no empathy, and are not subject to reason, unless it's reason about how to more aggressively exterminate and dominate. Tree-sitting is masochism, and I think even sabotage is masochism, until most ordinary people understand and agree with it.

If people without jobs want to be self-sufficient in food, the first thing we need to understand is that the world is ruled by a satanic collective consciousness that cannot stand for anyone to live outside its control. Then, instead of offering up a highly visible urban farm for ritual sacrifice, we'll fight effectively, with subtle edible landscaping and guerrilla gardens. The domination system does not have the skills or resources to go around the city killing tens of thousands of berry bushes and edible weeds.