Humpday Humor: AIPAC Propaganda

Student body presidents being indoctrinated into AIPAC's world view:

interview by Max Blumenthal

Humpday Humor: Orwellian Speak

There is a long history of Orwellian speak during times of war.  Joe Rogan explains the manipulation of language goes all the way back to Genghis Khan...

Listen to the full podcast with Abby Martin here.  

Humpday Humor: Beer is a Drug

It turns out that drugs are already legal.  Some of them at least.

The late, great Bill Hicks explains more to CNN in 1991...

Humpday Humor: The Pledge of Allegiance

"This is not a form of brainwashing.  This is not a form of brainwashing.  This is not a form of brainwashing.  This is not a form of brainwashing.  This is not a form of brainwashing.  This is not a form of brainwashing.  This is not a form of brainwashing.  This is not a form of brainwashing."

Credit: The Whitest Kids U'Know

"They Hate Democracy" so said Bill Clinton

After sending 75 tomahawk cruise missiles in the general direction of Afghanistan and Sudan, Mr. Clinton said this about Osama bin Laden and the "terrorists"....

Mr. Clinton neglected to mention the "terrorists" clearly stated reasons for their hatred towards the U.S.  These include quotes from bin Laden himself which outline his 3 major grievances towards America:

1. "The ordinary man knows that [Saudi Arabia] is the largest oil producer in the world, yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services.  Now the people understand...that our country has become an American colony.  They act decisively with every action to kick the Americans out of Saudi Arabia. 

2. "The evidence overwhelmingly shows America and Israel killing the weaker men, women and children in the Muslim world and elsewhere.  A few examples of this are seen in the recent Qana massacre in Lebanon..."

3. "...and the death of more than 600,000 Iraqi children because of the shortage of food and medicine which resulted from the boycotts and sanctions against the Muslim Iraqi people"

Content and Osama bin Laden quotes from 1996 as reported by PBS Frontline

Humpday Humor: The "Illusion of Choice" by George Carlin

Ten years ago George Carlin sat down with Alan Colmes to discuss voting, the U.S. war of terror and the "illusion of choice".

Colmes was selling the idea that once Democrats were elected to the White House the occupation of Iraq would come to an end.  We are still waiting for John Kerry to come out in strong opposition to the bombing of Iraq.

As you see in this short clip Carlin already knew that Fox News was on the side of the political propagandists....

Humpday Humor: Bad Actors on "The News"

Abby Martin from RT exposes the Mindless Media Parrots:

Humpday Humor: How CIA Sabotages Torture Report

For years U.S. taxpayers have been trying to find out the truth about the CIA's decade long torture program.  In response CIA agents have attempted to sabotage the public's view into their crimes.

The Huffington Post outlines one of their cover-up tactics:

According to sources familiar with the CIA inspector general report that details the alleged abuses by agency officials, CIA agents impersonated Senate staffers in order to gain access to Senate communications and drafts of the Intelligence Committee investigation. 

Humpday Dark Humor: Bill Clinton's Spin on Terrorism

Way back in 1998 Bill Clinton said they hate us because "we act to advance peace and democracy".

By Mr. Clinton's logic if the U.S. were to begin a war or two "the terrorists" will no longer hate us because we aren't peaceful anymore.  

Alternative Media Is Working

In this clip Angela Davis talks about a major U.S. export which gets almost no attention by outcast media outlets like The New York Times or FOX News.  She calls this censored export the U.S. model of mass incarceration.

You may have guessed what Davis was referring to based on the first paragraph of this post.  If so then you are certainly aware of the alternative media.  If after watching the video you are saying "oh yeah, I already knew that" then great!  You are not alone.

Based on audience reaction at Riverside Church in New York there are many, many people aware of the largest open-air prison on earth.

Not only do they know this prison exists but they also have an understanding of which government ensures that the inmates are kept caged in far behind the fence.

The rousing support for her comments are proof that alternative media is working.

Outcast Media Outlets Provide the "Illusion" of Freedom

Will you know totalitarian media when you see it?

In this interview with RT, John Pilger talks media censorship, ISIS, the Pravada and BBC...

Comedian Doug Stanhope on Puppet Leaders

After 9/11 comedian Doug Stanhope put the "leader" of the U.S. back into perspective....

Democracy, Hypocrisy

Saddam Hussein greeting U.S. special envoy Donald Rumsfeld

(Baghdad, 1983) 

Nearly a quarter century ago Murray Rothbard wrote* "Why the Intervention in Arabia?".  In it he ponders the contradiction of the U.S. supporting dictators in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia while Washington was claiming to be spreading "democracy":

"Saddam Hussein is a very bad man, the "Butcher of Baghdad." Absolutely, but he was just as much a butcher only the other day when he was our gallant ally against the terrible threat posed to the Gulf by the fanatical Shiites of Iran." 

...

U.S. Senator John Kerry dining with Assad

(Damascus, 2009 image The Telegraph)

Rothbard continues:

"The fanatical Shiites are still there, by the way, but they--as well as the Dictator of Syria, Hafez Assad, the Butcher of Hama--seem to have been magically transformed into our gallant allies against Saddam Hussein."

Fewer than three years after Kerry and Assad were dining together in Damascus the U.S. began allying with Syria's Muslim Brotherhood to topple Assad and his government.

According to the New York Times funding for Assad's opposition is coming from Turkey, Qatar, U.S. State Department, the C.I.A. and Saudi Arabia.

The victims of regime change in Iraq would ask if this policy of spreading "democracy" is underpinned by hypocrisy?

*Rothbard's article is published at Mises.org

Fair Reporting by the AP on Israel/Palestine?

Israeli soldiers detaining Palestinian children
in the West Bank (2012)

Eleven days into Israel's most recent invasion of Gaza the AP reports that one Israeli soldier has been killed.  He was likely gunned down by friendly fire.  Details can be found in the "The Big Story".

The same story provides the reader with the number of Palestinians killed by the hands of Israel....

...a conflict that has already seen more than 274 Palestinians killed in Gaza, around a fifth of them children.

So if you are scoring at home this "conflict" is 274-to-1.  

In a 2012 school shooting in Connecticut the score was 26-to-1.  Would anyone have called what that shooter did to those poor people a "conflict"?

It's Not the College Degree That Matters

Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight.com posted a piece about research done by Payscale on the value of a college degree.  Of little surprise Payscale found that the total ROI from a degree handed out by a "top" school was significant.  They claim a twenty-year earnings difference of over $800,000 for someone graduating from these "top" schools compared to someone who only graduated from high school.

But there is one major flaw in this comparison.  On average the person who goes to work full-time right after high school versus the person who is accepted into MIT or Stanford will have different personal attributes which dramatically effect lifetime earnings.

Generally, there will be differences in:

• Previous school performance 
• IQ
• Work ethic
• Upbringing
• Household income
• Books read
• Essays written 

Of course there are other differences which are not quantifiable at all.  Many of these factors are determined well before the future high earning college graduate steps foot onto campus.

A more honest (and difficult) study would attempt to estimate lifetime earnings on these multitude of factors as opposed to one blunt outcome like being handed a piece of paper by the dean from MIT.    

The full 538 article can be read here.