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For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him. ~ Karl Marx

The US media really loves to hype up a non-story and milk it for all it’s worth. Take the latest sordid little escapade to hit the headlines this week – some guy working as a college football coach is caught touching up little boys in the showers and NBC Nightly News runs with it for five nights in a row as its main story.

Not content with over-reporting the story, NBC arranged a lengthy interview with Jerry Sandusky (the accused coach), asked him leading questions, then broadcast it to the nation.

In the once-Socialist country of my birth, such an act would be considered sub judice and any person or organization attempting NBC’s little stunt would be held in contempt of court, and heavily fined or imprisoned.

Not so in America, where the “First Amendment” takes precedence over justice.

Proving Sandusky guilty or innocent should never be the responsibility of the media. Today, the big corporations who own the TV companies use them as instruments of propaganda; a means to sway the populace to their view. Focusing on stories like this one allows Americans the opportunity to ‘tut-tut’ and express their righteous indignation (which they possess in abundance), while more vital and disturbing news issues are swept under the corporate media carpet.

Many of us have lived our lives in awe of the great naturalist and wildlife presenter, Sir David Attenborough. In his native Britain he is almost an institution.

Now eighty-five years of age, his latest epic series, “Frozen Planet”, is presently being screened on British television. It runs for seven episodes, and records the seasonal changes for animals and fish in both the Arctic and the Antarctic continent.

Despite his advanced years, Sir David was keen to make the series. He saw it as a historic record of an area of the planet that was rapidly changing. He knows, like many scientists, that the ice sheets and the life they support may well be gone in another fifty to one hundred years.

The last episode, “On Thin Ice”, deals extensively with the effects of global climate change. The Discovery Channel is screening the series in the US, but it will be exercising censorship and not broadcasting the last episode. It’s excuse: “scheduling issues”.

How can the Discovery Channel possibly have “scheduling issues” when ninety percent of its programs are repeats, and repeats of repeats?

Britain’s newspaper, the Daily Mail, suggests another reason:

An episode of the BBC’s Frozen Planet documentary series that looks at climate change has been scrapped in the U.S., where many are hostile to the idea of global warming.

British viewers will see all seven episodes of the multi-million-pound nature series throughout the Autumn.

But U.S. audiences will not be shown the last episode, which looks at the threat posed by man to the natural world.

It is feared a show that preaches global warming could upset viewers in the U.S., where around half of people do not believe in climate change…In the U.S., Frozen Planet is being aired by Discovery. They were involved in the joint-production of the series. Yet they are still refusing to accommodate Frozen Planet in its entirety…The timing of a one-sided global warming programme could be particularly sensitive in the U.S., where climate change is an issue in the presidential race.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry accuses climate scientists of lying for money.

A poll earlier this year found that the majority of Americans believe that if climate change does exist, it is not caused by humans.

Fifty-three per cent of Republicans say there is no evidence of climate change, while the number is far higher among Tea Party supporters, with 70 per cent saying the theory is ‘junk science’ pushed by groups with a vested interest.”^[1]

The Daily Mail has got it partly right.

The truth is that corporations have spent millions of dollars convincing the US public that climate change is not happening. They’ve used their media outlets, like NBC, to great effect. They’re not going to have all their hard work undermined by some trumped-up British knight who just happens to know what he’s talking about, and can voice it very persuasively.

Consequently, US viewers will be allowed to view images of cute creatures doing their thing, for six episodes. They will be deliberately prevented from hearing and seeing what will happen to those same creatures, and many others elsewhere on the planet before the end of this century, as climate changes destroys their habitat, because those who own and manipulate the Discovery Channel don’t wish them to know.

Apparently, the First Amendment doesn’t cover, ‘Freedom to See and Hear’.

^{[1] “Climate change episode of Frozen Planet won’t be shown in the U.S. as viewers don’t believe in global warming” Daily Mail, November 15th 2011}

Filed under: Brainwashing

Take a tour round the NBC Nightly News website, or suffer thirty minutes of their evening program, and you’ll be left with more questions than answers. For twenty minutes of the show Brian Williams will display to you all the nasty things currently occurring in or around America. But the last short segment always praises some lone US individual doing something ‘good’ or unselfish, even if usually irrelevant, for some other lone US individual, or small group of US individuals. It’s all designed to make you feel it’s ‘Making A Difference’, even if, in the great scheme of things, it’s making absolutely no difference at all.^[1]

Have you noticed how, whenever the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protestors come up in the media, (or, are deigned to be noticed by right-wing politicians) one of the key questions raised is: “What do they want?”

Recently, NBC Nightly News drew on the services of an ‘expert’ in the field to assess the potential impact of this large group camping out in a New York park, and elsewhere around the country. His assessment was that, ‘they needed to identify what it is they want’. They all seem, he said, to want different things.

What the f**k! No, they all want the same thing. They all want a fair and just society. They all want to stop being shafted by greedy wankers whose sole purpose in life is to rob the ordinary people of their hard-earned cash, so said greedy wankers don’t have to do a day’s honest labor in their lives.

They all want back their tax money that was given away, first by George W Bush and then Barack Obama, as so-called ‘bail-outs’ to a load of stinkingly-wealthy bankers whose immediate reaction was to pay themselves and their buddies obscene amounts of said tax money as ‘bonuses’ for doing sweet F.A., while congratulating themselves on how bloody clever they’ve been at swindling the government into giving them so much of other people’s cash.

They all want an end to the blatantly immoral practices of price-hiking and profiteering that puts profits before people.

Tonight, NBC Nightly News ran a segment explaining how a congressional investigation had revealed shortages in vital cancer drugs, caused by certain companies buying up these drugs at cut-price ($12 per phial), pushing up the price by creating a shortage, then selling them to cancer centers and hospitals at highly inflated prices ($950 a phial).

It doesn’t just happen with cancer drugs, such practices are prevalent throughout America and condoned by politicians, many of whom are happy to assist in pocketing the profits. It’s become ‘clever’ to make a buck (or, maybe, a million) at someone else’s misfortune.

“Fuck you, Jack, I’m alright.” I think I’ve written about that before.

One piece of ‘cheering’ news tonight, according to NBC, was recent action by the government to force cell phone companies to ‘inform’ their customers when they’re about to go over their monthly ‘limit’. Now, they’ll have to let you know if you’ve texted your boy/girl friend too many times, before charging you horrendously for daring to use their product too frequently. Anchor Williams was fairly brimming with public bonhomie as he cheerily passed on this news. Nowhere was there any suggestion the cell phone companies might, perhaps, simply lower their grossly inflated charges. Oh, no, that wouldn’t be American.

The good people occupying a New York park have had enough. They want an end to it. They all want an end to it. They want to live in a decent, fair, society. They want back their houses that the crooked bankers stole from them with worthless mortgages; they want some of the debt repaid that greedy finance houses imposed on them with credit card rates in excess of twenty-five percent, when the bank rate was 2% or less; they want to visit a doctor or a hospital without having to bankrupt themselves; they want to go to college and university without a lifetime of debt hanging over their heads; they want back the income stolen from them by racketeers and pension fund managers who bought out their workplaces for a quick profit then closed them down, or the corporates who sacked them and moved their factories to cheap-skate China.

Most of all, they want back the America, and its values, their fathers and grandfathers fought and died for in World War II.

What part of that does NBC and its ilk not understand?

^{[1] NBC Nightly News (No need for any date – it’s the same every night!)}

Filed under: Hear no sense, see no sense, speak no sense

Pay a visit to the ‘100-Acre Wood House’ and savor some more titbits of rural life on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s only a ‘click’ away.

The 100-Acre Wood House

I’d love to meet the Chinese gentleman whose only identity, to those of us in the West, is ‘L22’. I’d love to kick his sorry butt all around the Oriental workplace where he’s employed as a quality control inspector.

‘L22’ works in a Chinese generator factory. He must have been taking a nap when ours came along. Though, he woke up just long enough to slap his sticker, “Inspected by: ‘L22’,” on it as it passed him by…

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