....LMB: "Where Are We Going, and What Am I Doing in This Handbasket?"....

January 27, 2003

Well, let's start off with a light one.

"Moneyline" of Fire- okay, I don't like taking potshots at celebrities' family's, but this one's just too wierd. Debbi Dobbis is the wife of Lou Dobbs, host of CNN's financial news show Moneyline. On Wednesday, Debbi Dobbs was arrested when she tried to board an airplane with a loaded handgun in her purse. Yes, look at that again. They won't let you on a plane with fucking nail clippers these days, what the hell was she thinking carrying a loaded fucking semi-automatic pistol? Her story is that she put it in her purse for protection while at the Dobbs family farm, and forgot about it. I do dumb absent-minded things too sometimes, but aren't guns heavy? Wouldn't you pick up your purse and say "Jesus, why is this purse is heavy? Oh yeah, it's heavy because it's got a big fucking gun inside it."

Regime Change- this should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. It's not news, it's a history lesson. It has short summaries of 14 such interventions that the U.S. has undertaken since the 1950s: Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Chile, Grenada, Libya, the Philippines, Panama, Somalia, Hait, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. It cites an "analyst" who claims that the U.S. only has less than a 20% success rate with regime change.

VA to pay ex-GIs harmed by Agent Orange contact- during the Vietnam (Indochina) war(s), the U.S. dumped almost 15 million gallons of an herbicide called Agent Orange onto the jungle-- and any people that might happen to be inside. Surprise surprise, the chemical turned out to be a dangerous carcinogen. 30 years later, the military agrees to give medical treatment to American veterans who got leukemia from the chemical (note: the herbicide Agent Orange was manufactured by the Monsanto corporation, and is nothing nothing nothing like the herbicide Roundup Ultra that the U.S. and Colombia have been spraying on the Colombian countryside in an attempt to eliminate the coca crop. Well, maybe it's kinda similar).

Bush Moves to Restore Military Ties With Indonesia- this is despicable. The Indonesian army is known for two things: corruption and massacres. "'The Indonesian military has sabotaged international efforts to attain justice for crimes against humanity committed in East Timor, exonerated itself of the strong implication that its elite Special Forces recently murdered two U.S. teachers and beat a U.S. nurse - yet the Senate voted to give the military a level of support not seen in more than a decade,' said Kurt Biddle, Washington coordinator of the Indonesia Human Rights Network (IHRN). 'Why is the Senate rewarding this behaviour?'"

Kiss My Axis!- I'm mainly intrigued by the first sentence "As the war on Iraq got down to business last week with the heaviest air bombardments in 10 years..."

The Guilt-Free Soldier- medical researchers are working on pills that could help minimize the mental and emotional effects of trauma on human beings. But it also works to minimize feelings of guilt, and the author worries that such anti-guilt medication could be used by soldiers on the battlefield, allowing them to do horrific things without felling any consequences.

Posted by Jake at 10:47 PM
Comments

I don't know her, but I've always suspected Debbi Dobbs is a terrorist. Shoot her.

Posted by: Eric at January 27, 2003 11:21 PM

Right on, Eric,
I know if my arab-looking ass walked into an airport with a pistol in my carry-on, I'd be meat in the corner of an 'interview room,' before I could say 'second ammendment.' It's about time that white people started becoming enemy combatants.

I kid, because I love.

Posted by: jeremy at January 28, 2003 08:53 AM

Bush family genes have been bio-engineered to produce the anti-guilt medication, making unlimited numbers of wars possible.

Posted by: Bob at January 28, 2003 10:43 AM
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Lying Media Bastards is both a radio show and website. The show airs Mondays 2-4pm PST on KillRadio.org, and couples excellent music with angry news commentary. And the website, well, you're looking at it.

Both projects focus on our media-marinated world, political lies, corporate tyranny, and the folks fighting the good fight against these monsters.

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Media News

November 16, 2004

Tales of Media Woe

Senate May Ram Copyright Bill- one of the most depressing stories of the day that didn't involve death or bombs. It's the music and movie industries' wet dream. It criminalizes peer-to-peer software makers, allows the government to file civil lawsuits on behalf of these media industries, and eliminates fair use. Fair use is the idea that I can use a snippet of a copyrighted work for educational, political, or satirical purposes, without getting permission from the copyright-holder first.

And most tellingly, the bill legalizes technology that would automatically skip over "obejctionable content" (i.e. sex and violence) in a DVD, but bans devices that would automatically skip over commericals. This is a blatant, blatant, blatant gift to the movie industry. Fuck the movie industry, fuck the music industry, fuck the Senate.

Music industry aims to send in radio cops- the recording industry says that you're not allowed to record songs off the radio, be it real radio or internet radio. And now they're working on preventing you from recording songs off internet radio through a mixture of law and technological repression (although I imagine their techno-fixes will get hacked pretty quickly).

The shocking truth about the FCC: Censorship by the tyranny of the few- blogger Jeff Jarvis discovers that the recent $1.2 million FCC fine against a sex scene in Fox's "Married By America" TV show was not levied because hundreds of people wrote the FCC and complained. It was not because 159 people wrote in and complained (which is the FCC's current rationale). No, thanks to Jarvis' FOIA request, we find that only 23 people (of the show's several million viewers) wrote in and complained. On top of that, he finds that 21 of those letters were just copy-and-paste email jobs that some people attached their names to. Jarvis then spins this a bit by saying that "only 3" people actually wrote letters to the FCC, which is misleading but technically true. So somewhere between 3 and 23 angry people can determine what you can't see on television. Good to know.

Reuters Union Considers Striking Over Layoffs- will a strike by such a major newswire service impact the rest of the world's media?

Pentagon Starts Work On War Internet- the US military is talking about the creation of a global, wireless, satellite-aided computer network for use in battle. I think I saw a movie about this once...

Conservative host returns to the air after week suspension for using racial slur- Houston radio talk show host (and somtime Rush Limbaugh substitute) Mark Belling referred to Mexican-Americans as "wetbacks" on his show. He was suspended for a couple of weeks, and then submitted a written apology for the racial slur to a local newspaper. But he seems to be using the slur and its surrounding controversy to boost his conservative cred with his listeners.

Stay Tuned for Nudes- Cleveland TV news anchor Sharon Reed aired a story about artist Spencer Tunick, who uses large numbers of naked volunteers in his installations and photographs. The news report will be unique in that it will not blur or black-out the usual naughty bits. The story will air late at night, when it's allegedly okay with the FCC if you broadcast "indecent" material. The author of this article doesn't seem to notice that Reed first claims that this report is a publicity stunt, but then claims it's a protest against FCC repression. I'd like to think it's the latter, but I'm not that much of a sucker.

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Jake's first attempt at homemade Mongolican barbecue:

Failure.

What went right: correctly guessing several key seasonings- lemon, ginger, soy, garlic, chili.

What went wrong: still missing some ingredients, and possibly had one wrong, rice vinegar. Way too much lemon and chili.

Result: not entirely edible.

Plan for future: try to get people at Great Khan's restaurant to tell me what's in the damn sauce.

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