Category Archives: Big Brother

Convergence of communications

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The radio news today stated that Frontier Communications was down…internet and phone service, so if the listeners were being served by that company, they would be out of service until Frontier came back online.

They went on to say that the police in the town of Huntington were affected by this, and if people needed to contact the police, they need to call the Indiana State Police and then they gave an 800 number to call.

WTH?  Can you imagine the chaos this has caused?

It’s another glaring example of the dangers of consolidating all communications into one company.  Even if I had the money, I would not have all of my phone, internet, and cable service from one provider.  (I’m saying that without checking into what’s available in the area–I briefly looked at what was available when I moved here, but haven’t lately–so for all I know, there isn’t separate service available.)

When one company has all of that, and they fail for whatever reason (no reason has been given for Frontier’s issues), it can have serious repercussions, as with a fire breaking out, or someone having a heart attack and cannot call “911” or a crime in progress…and on…

Why is consolidation never considered from the consumer’s point of view??

Numbers of importance

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(Okay, feeling a little more lucid today…back to business…)

People who starve in America per given year.

More statistics on the world here.

More debate about the *cough* non-issue here.  Repeat after me:  “If you don’t acknowledge there’s a problem, then there’s no problem.”

Deaths from prescription drugs here--a whopping 100,000 people die every year from prescription drugs and 2 million are seriously injured…but you wouldn’t know that by the lack of attention it receives.  I’m sure that the drug companies buying advertising on the TV networks has *nothing* to do with the lack of sunlight on the issue.  /snark

But those same TV nooz stations will begin (if they haven’t already, since I’m cable-less, I don’t know and I don’t have time to search the web to find out) their onslaught of dire warnings to the American public on the upcoming flu season and how they better get on the stick and get those poisonous vaccines shot into their already beleaguered bodies.  The radio stations here are doing their best to get the hype going on West Nile again…today they announced that horses have died of West Nile, so owners are being urged to get their horses vaccinated.  Wanna know how many horses have died?  Three.  Yep.  I wonder if those horses die from the vaccine if it will be duly noted and reported to authorities? Nah, we can’t have that.  That would be responsible and accurate.

Other deaths by pharmaceutical companies here.  Keep the kleenex handy.  A story of a mother’s heartbreak over the belief she was doing what a good mother does…

More on vaccine deaths here.    Note the similar blanket excuse of SIDS. Here’s a site that blames the parents (mother) for SIDS…oldest trick in the book–that way, she’ll feel guilty for being a poor parent instead of questioning the vaccines the child received. More blaming here…by National Polite Republican.

More parents’ stories here.  But the public is going to be urged to put this poison into their children…and then be blamed if their child dies as a result.  This is criminal.  I can’t even read them all because it’s just too hard.

I’m struggling with this issue with my own kids now–they’ve been brainwashed to believe vaccines are okay and I’m being an alarmist.  I’ve seen how they have affected a sibling’s grandkids and how the child changed dramatically after receiving these horrible shots.  I can’t convince my kids that there is a connection.  I don’t have grandchildren yet, but I’m trying to prevent a tragedy.

And thanks to Senator Frist, you can’t touch Big Pharma.   Profit$ without penalty nor accountability. More here.

…let’s not forget Frist killing kittens for “medical research”.   Paragraph here:  http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/usa/bill-frist/

And more here.

And speaking of cruelty to animals, the FW radio stations were reporting this morning that allegedly a man had tied a firecracker to a kitten’s tail, and it appears that he allegedly threw the kitten into a fire.  The story went on to say that the man’s girlfriend owned the cat and she was quoted as saying that the boyfriend was complaining that the “cat was always around.”    Sounds like a great guy. /snark

 

They’re buying air, land, water…

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Good God, it’s come to fruition…

…how in the hell does one, in good conscience, try to make a profit off of something one had no hand in creating…?  What kind of soulless being thinks it’s okay to do such a thing?

From the story:

Like other aspects of neoliberalism, the commodification of nature forestalls democratic choice. No longer will we be able to argue that an ecosystem or a landscape should be protected because it affords us wonder and delight; we’ll be told that its intrinsic value has already been calculated and, doubtless, that it turns out to be worth less than the other uses to which the land could be put. The market has spoken: end of debate.

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Exactly.  Once the price tag has been set, the $$$ will trump all other values…because one cannot put a price tag on beauty, on value to other beings besides two-leggeds (because all the rest don’t matter, according to these folks), nor can a value be assigned when the benefits are unknown, as most of the natural world’s benefits aren’t known until they’re lost…

Greenwald on Extremism Normalized

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…continuing to boil the frog…

From the comments section, a few posters are arguing about the uninformed public making poor choices because…they’re uninformed.  SiouxRose makes the point that a single mother with 2 kids doesn’t have the time to do what we do–looking for the news on the internet…because she sure the hell isn’t getting the information she needs to make an informed decision on the network news.

Then another poster comments that people need to take responsibility.

The problem with that is  with media consolidation into the rightwing mania, the information access is extremely limited.  It’s difficult to get accurate, mostly unbiased (there’s no such thing as un-biased) news reported by intelligent individuals with a grasp of the subject at hand.  Like I reported earlier, the only station that reports news like it used to be reported, prior to Reagan’s assault on the Press and Marketplace of Ideas, is a rightwing station.  They report every half hour.  The other stations?  You’re lucky if you get the news in the morning, and then you’re SOL for the rest of the day.  Nothing. Nada.  And when the storm hit my area, there was nothing the next day–Saturday–to tell folks what was happening and where they could go for a cooling center.  But you can be sure that there will be half-hour segments when/if a ter__ist event is happening.

So…to blame the public for not getting access to information is blaming the wrong folks–they already have very little power.    And if you’re like me, you only get access to news through the internet.  As has been said before–you control information, you control people.

I just wish there were as much outrage over the consolidation of media and the end of the Fairness Doctrine as there is against war.

Following the trail…

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I picked up an old copy of The Nation over the weekend, the date:  10-1-2001.  It was the first issue after 9/11, and prominently featured the twin towers on the cover.  In it was a story that I don’t recall reading, and given the upheaval of that moment in time, I probably didn’t read it.

However, the story was worthy of the cover had it not been for the tragedy of the weeks before–

The report by Amy Bach, an attorney, was on the Federalist Society and its infiltration into law schools all over the country.

In it, she showed the web of connections that this “society” was constructing–conservative law students (Antonin Scalia was one) who didn’t like their liberal law professors’ point of view, and wanted to do something about it.  That something was the Federalist Society to encourage conservative students to organize, and then make connections to the power players in the White House and the Supreme Court.

Bach names names and one of them is Jeff Sutton.  He argued the cases Alexander v. Sandoval and University of Alabama et al v. Garrett. (link here: http://www.civilrights.org/monitor/vol11_no4/art1p1.html)

I did a search to see where Sutton was now–here:  http://www.onu.edu/node/34771

and here:  http://abovethelaw.com/tag/jeffrey-sutton/

Well, of course he was nominated to a judge position by Bush.

From the article:

“…it [Federalist policy] benefits big business, it’s anti-egalitarian, it shuts plaintiffs like the poor and disabled out of courts, and it rolls back the New Deal notion that the courts have a role to play in helping the downtrodden.”

However, Bach noted organizations of progressive and centrists, one of which is the American Constitution Society.  The problem with getting organized is that progressives are not as narrow-minded, but independent in thought.  It’s soooo much easier to organize when your targets are the poor, disabled, women, minorities, etc.–you know, people who have less power to fight back.

DN, revisited

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Gah, I don’t believe this entire post was eaten in cyberspace! Arrgh!

Okay, since I don’t know which website caused the error, I’ll try adding one at a time…

You’ll have to go to the DN website to see what stories I’m commenting on…

President Obama is once again promising that he will let the Bush Tax Cuts for the rich to expire…yeah, well, we’ve heard that before…

…and we all know the rich don’t want to pay for anything…

Okay, if these two posts hold up, I might have time to put the other links up in the next post…