Or "I can go without pot longer than you can go without TV. Part 1
Hello Everybody!
It's time again to hammer away at relegalizing the cannabis plan, which basically means confronting the false beliefs implanted in Americans brains for the last 50 years.
This is Part I of a 2-part effort. This part focuses on describing the intertwining of "journalism" and propaganda and the evolution of the "mainstream media". Cannabis prohibition is founded on propaganda and exceptionally dishonest journalism.
Specifically, I want to introduce a term I will be using from now on and yes, I want to encourage others to use it: The Old Media Cartel or OMC.
This term will supersede the use of the old "mainstream Media" or MSM label.
I am switching to using this term to acknowledge the recent shift in the balance of information sharing and dissemination. There are a variety of "threads" one can trace that point to this change coming but I want to highlight one of the most important, very recent "watershed" events.
Follow me down the rabbithole....
Recently Bill O'Reilly, the host of a very right-leaning entertainment program on FOX called "The O'Reilly Factor", elected to attack a very popular Democratic website called "Daily Kos".
Daily Kos was about to have it's yearly meeting, YearlyKos 2007. O'Reilly attacked a company called JetBlue for providing some travel vouchers for the DKos management (I assume it's management: there were reportedly only 10 vouchers but O'Reilly still went apoplectic.
Man.... did THAT backfire!
Kossacks and other liberal/progressive activists organized VERY quickly and within 2 weeks got Lowes and Home Depot to drop advertising on O'Reilly's FOX TV program.
This is one of the clearest instances of which I am aware where the "Mainstream Media" failed to denigrate the internet. Not just failed, it lost ground. And a program lost money.
The OMC vs The Netroots
Daily Kos, among others, can take credit for the Democratic sweep in November 2006 as well as for exerting an evermore powerful influence over Democratic Party politics.
This is the impetus behind the O'Reilly attack on Daily Kos. The issue is really larger than it appears.
It's very serious because it is about power and money and InterNet Neutrality.
they want to be the GATEKEEPER and that means limiting access to Internet Content through deregulation. And by now you have probably guessed who is on the other side of the table, pushing for open access.
"High-speed Internet will open up access that might be slowed down by traditional media ownership concentration," Malone says. "Anybody who wants to set up an Internet broadcast can do it. And there will be cross-platform convergence between the television and the personal computer."
Turner agrees the regulators may need to step in to protect the public interest. "There is no company out there — not Viacom, News Corp. (which owns Fox) or Disney, the big television powers — that really has the public interest primarily at heart," he says. "They have their own selfish financial interest at heart, and they would do just about anything for a buck. I hate to say that, but it's true.
As kossacks and others hammered back successfully at O'Rielly (who's just a sockpuppet for Murdochs News Corp.) The net gained more power, more influence and, worst of all for these dinosaurs, more credibility, a fundamental shift occurred. The net is no longer the red-headed step-child.
So I have dubbed Bill O'Reilly "O'Relic", and I now call the "mainstream media" the Old Media Cartel.
The Evolution of the Old Media Cartel.
As Rupert Murdoch takes over the Wall Street Journal the media Americans have access to, aside from the internet, are now controlled by a very tiny handful of people, perhaps 5 or so. it's an intensification of what has been an effort to influence American minds from the word go.
The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda
Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called "professional journalism" was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, "entirely bogus".
For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism. I am not suggesting that independent journalism was or is excluded, but it is more likely to be an honorable exception. Think of the role Judith Miller played in the New York Times in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work became a scandal, but only after it played a powerful role in promoting an invasion based on lies.
This excerpt is from a long article by John Pilger, an extraordinary person and journalist. He was talking about the build up of modern propaganda journalism and, in a nutshell, points out that propaganda and modern journalism grew up Siamese twins.
End of Part 1
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As I said at the beginning, this is just Part 1 of a 2 part effort.
Part 2 will focus on how the OMC has filled American's heads full of nonsensical information, lies, and utter bullshit and how it keeps the topic so emotional that facts are rendered useless.
When I post part 2 it will come with a challenge, which is stated at the beginning of this essay: I can go without pot longer than you can go without TV.
I am now getting into 3 months of unemployment and its not looking good. So I have stopped smoking pot for the time being as the most important credential for getting any job in The Land of the Free is not education or experience or hard work: it's pee free of marijuana's thc metabolites. This is more important than anything else.
Hyperbole? I think not.
Go get laid off and see how many places are pee-testing now. You cannot get a job watering the flowers at Home Depot without passing a drug test. Many unbelievably shitty jobs require pre-employment drug testing.
Drug testing predominantly detects marijuana - specifically "thc metabolites" which stay in your system for up to 30 days. Alcohol and other hard drugs are flushed from your body in a mater of a few hours to a couple days. The pee-testers don't care that your tobacco habit causes cancer or the cases of beer you swill down over the weekend.
It's so irrational and out of touch with reality that the FBI has had to change it's policy on hiring people who have smoked the evil weed.
Well, you say, we need to screen out drug addicts.
How can I argue with that?
Cannabis isn't "addictive" in the true sense of the term. Lots of people misuse this term egregiously, but, technically, addiction is rather permanent and a very powerful behavior modifier. Heroin is the definitive example, followed by tobacco, alcohol and benzodiazipines (Xanax, valium). Cannabis does NOT meet that criteria even remotely.
Now, it IS habit-forming without a doubt. But so are many things in this life and TV is one of them.
The Challenge
Here's the deal: I can go without pot smoking longer than many folks can go without watching TV. I will not smoke until after I get my next job. I'll pass the pee test and I will resume smoking. I believe a significant number of people cannot go without TV that long and that we will hear some very entertaining rationalizations about it.
Think about that for a few days and when I post Part 2 we'll see if we can get a few people to go a week without watching TV. I will post rules and such so we can get a fair and decent anecdotal experiment going.
Apologies for this being so bleeding long but there's really a lot to include in trying help people see past 3 generations of systematic lying.
Thanks for reading and see ya soon!
Doc.
Update [2007-8-9 14:33:20 by xxdr zombiexx]: A Feast of Bullshit and Spectacle: The Great American Media Mind Warp: Just came across this and felt it blended in perfectly.
having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today's system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things -- the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process.
All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind's interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.