John Pilger has a great new documentary called “The War You Don’t See” and it’s up on YouTube in its entirety. I highly recommend it, as a lot of the subject matter is what I’m covering in my new book “You Are Blind”. Pilger interviews a wide range of people, including Dan Rather and a plethora of journalists, about how the western media were accomplices in spreading lies and misinformation in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. He also explains how this isn’t a new meme – the media have been spinning lies to justify war during the entire 20th century. We tend to think this happened back the “olden days” and doesn’t happen today but the opposite is actually true. It happens more now than ever – in the era of 24-hour news and media organisations with incredible wealth and concentrated power, the wool is pulled over our eyes more than ever. Of course, the lies don’t stop with the reasons we go to war – it’s much more widespread than that. We are fed corporate propaganda all day, every day, about every aspect of living in our so-called democracies. The propaganda isn’t just the stories we are told, it’s also about the absence of the stories we are NOT told. We may think we have a free media but when your media is owned by corporations with their own agenda – maintaining their own wealth and power – the stories we are told will always reflect the version of the truth that they want us to think.
Instead of watching more crap reality TV tonight, I suggest you watch this instead.
The 2011 Census results are out and of course the first section I opened up pertained to our religiosity as a nation.
First the good news:
The number of people reporting ‘No Religion’ also increased strongly, from 15% of the population in 2001 to 22% in 2011. This is most evident amongst younger people, with 28% of people aged 15-34 reporting they had no religious affiliation.
Three cheers for young people!
The Christians are continuing to lose ground steadily too:
There has been a long-term decrease in affiliation to Christianity from 96% in 1911 to 61% in 2011. In the past decade, the proportion of the population reporting an affiliation to a Christian religion decreased from 68% in 2001 to 61% in 2011.
If Christianity continues to lose 10% of its membership every decade, we will see it wiped out altogether in 50 years. The ACL’s days are numbered.
Unfortunately, the “no religion” answer doesn’t really give an accurate indication as to whether or not these people believe in other fluffy concepts like astrology, spirit guides or anything else that doesn’t fit neatly into traditional religions, so it’s hard to get a handle on whether or not we’re really getting smarter and more scientific, or if we’re just drifting away from monotheism.
“Big Bang Theory a Bust” is the way News Corp is peddling this two-year old story about Roger Penrose’s “Conformal Cyclic Cosmology” model for explaining concentric circles of cosmic background radiation. Why run the story two years late? I have no idea. But it’s the headline that is the true story.
It’s obviously written by a sub-editor to a) be sensationalist and b) discredit science in the minds of the general public. I’ve already seen people in Facebook picking up the story and using it to start discussions about how science is equal to faith.
Very similar to the HeraldSun’s approach to the now-discredited neutrino experiments out of CERN last year.
Sensationalist and anti-science. Of course, any intelligent person understands that the scientific method is a process of refinement – one experiment or, in Penrose’s case, theory, in no way “upends” or “busts” anything, especially not time-tested theories such as the Big Bang or the speed of light being the speed limit for relativity.
But I’m pretty sure News Corp cares not about such things as accuracy. It’s about sensationalist yellow journalism and trying to discredit science. Why would they want to discredit science? Because it helps them rally the Christian Right vote. Fox News has turned itself into a profitable political power house in the USA by pandering to the Christian Right, anti-science demographic and it looks like News International wants to try the same trick here in Oz.
The U.S. government is upset about Pakistan’s recent sentencing of Dr Shakil Afridi – the man who helped them run a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad, Pakistan which allegedly led to the capture and summary execution of Osama bin Laden – to 33 years in prison for high treason. The recent escalation in drone attacks in Pakistan might be seen as a bid to punish Pakistan for conviction of Dr. Afridi as well as its reluctance to reopen NATO supply routes. (CMC)
Of course, American has nothing against throwing people in jail for life for treason – ask Jonathan Pollard, a Texan who is still in jail after receiving a life sentence in 1987 on charges of spying for America’s close ally, Israel, or Bradley Manning.
It’s the same old story – if you spy against us, you’re a traitor who deserves life in jail. If you spy for us, you’re a hero who deserves a medal.
One of Gina Rinehart’s closest advisers has argued that the Fairfax Media board should have the right to influence the editorial direction of the company’s media outlets, especially if the actions were designed to increase Fairfax profits, according to a Fairfax report…..Channel Ten board member, and Hungry Jacks founder, Jack Cowin told ABC Radio that newspapers are a business, not a public service, and that preventing board members from influencing Fairfax newspapers “would be like Qantas not allowing its directors to talk about aeroplanes,” Fairfax reported.
So much for even pretending to have “editorial independence” which has usually been an illusion anyway. Cowin (and we assume Rinehart) don’t want to pussyfoot about when it comes to telling any media assets they might have control over what to write about or how to write it. Hey – it’s a BUSINESS, dummy.
As if we needed reminding.
Meanwhile… for those of you who are Mad Men fans, here’s Enoch Light’s original version of “Autumn Leaves”, as sampled by RJD2 on his track “A Beautiful Mine” which is used as the Mad Men theme.
