Archive for the ‘research’ Category
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Welcome to the world’s first murdochracy
In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger goes back to Australia, where Rupert Murdoch launched his worldwide media empire, and describes how his and Murdoch’s homeland has become a murdochracy – a country where important media, issues and perception are influenced if not dominated by Murdochism: "an inspiration to his choir on seven continents". Adelaide is Australia’s festival city. Its arts festival is currently in swing. Polite debate, aesthetics and high-octane wine are putting the world to rights. With one exception. Adelaide is where Rupert Murdoch began his empire. The voracious trail starts here. No statue stands; his is a spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses. Across Australia, he owns almost 70 per cent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper, and Sky Television, and much else. Welcome to the world’s first murdochracy. What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch’s editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: “What’ll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?” While the veracity of this celebrated remark is sometimes disputed, its spirit is not. Stricken with pneumonia, the former prime minister John Howard dragged himself out of bed to pay obeisance to the man to whom he owed many empty buckets. His successor, Kevin Rudd, scurried to an obligatory audience with Murdoch in New York prior to his election. This is standard across the planet. Before he took power, Tony Blair was flown to an island off Queensland to stand at the blue Newscorp lectern and pledge Thatcherism and media de-regulation to the jowled figure nodding in the front row. The next day, the Sun lauded Blair as one who “has vision [and] speaks our language on morality and family life”.
Another sharp dressed villan….
Murdoch knows that little separates the main political parties in Australia, Britain and America. He plays the man. In 1972, he backed Australia’s Gough Whitlam who revealed a radical reformer, even threatening to expose America’s spy bases. A furious Murdoch swung his newspapers against Whitlam with stories so outrageously skewed that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the street. That has never been repeated. Dominant themes in the Australian murdochracy, sport and celebrity gossip aside, are the promotion of war and jingoism, American foreign policy, Israel and a paternalism toward Aborigines, the world’s most impoverished indigenous people, according to the UN. This antiquated cold warring is not due entirely to the Murdoch press, of course, but the agenda is. When the Indonesian tyrant General Suharto was about to be overthrown by his own people, the editor-in-chief of The Australian Paul Kelly led a delegation to of editors of most of Australia’s principal newspapers to Jakarta. With Kelly at his side, the mass murderer, whom the Murdoch papers promoted as a “moderate”, accepted the tribute of each. Murdoch’s most unabashed, if entertaining retainer is Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian. On one his adoring trips to the United States, home of Murdoch HQ, Sheridan wrote, “The US is the greatest possible argument for media deregulation. Every morning, I flick between Fox, CNN and MSNBC as I eat my cereal… why did it take so long for pay TV to get to Australia?”. He was referring, as if instinctively, to his master’s pay TV company, Foxtel. As for terrorism, Sheridan blames “Pilgerist Chomskyism” for “ideologically fuelling the followers of Osama bin Lenin, sorry Laden.” One of the most effective campaigns in the Australian murdochracy has been the whitewashing of a bloody colonial past, including a series of attacks on the distinguished chronicler of the Aboriginal genocide, Professor Henry Reynolds, and the director of the National Museum of Australia, Dawn Casey, for having dared to present the truth about indigenous suffering. Australia’s great maverick historian, the late Manning Clark, was smeared by Murdoch’s Courier-Mail as a Red agent, then as a fraud, in much the style that Murdoch’s London Sunday Times smeared the Labour MP Michael Foot as a Soviet agent.

Dominant themes in the Australian murdochracy, sport and celebrity gossip aside, are the promotion of war and jingoism
Something similar awaits those who question the manipulation of the remembrance of Australia’s blood sacrifice for imperialism, old and new. Aimed at the young, a maudlin “new patriotism” reaches an annual climax on April 25, the anniversary of the first world war disaster at Gallipoli known as Anzac Day. The message is undisguised militarism promoting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, Prime Minister Rudd says, absurdly, that the military is Australia’s highest calling. Such false flags are flown constantly for Israel, which sees a stream of Australian journalists sponsored and paid for by Zionist groups. The result is apologetic reporting of murderous actions that evokes the great appeasers like Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times in the 1930s. The debate about state war crimes has all but bypassed Australia. That a former and current British prime minister have been summoned before the Chilcot enquiry in London is viewed with bemusement as nothing like it would happen here. Yet John Howard, who also invaded Iraq, holds something of a record for having claimed 30 times in one speech that he knew Saddam Hussein had a “massive programme” of weapons of mass destruction. The national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has long been intimidated by the Murdoch press in the obsessive manner of the campaign waged against the BBC. Funded directly by governments, the ABC has none of the nominal independence and protection of Britain’s system of a TV licence fee as the resource for public broadcasting. Last year, HarperCollins, owned by Murdoch, was awarded a lucrative “partnership” with the ABC’s publishing arm, ABC Books. In 1983, there were 50 major corporations dominating the world’s media. By 2002, this had been reduced to nine. Rupert Murdoch says that eventually there will be three, including his own. If we accept this, media and information control will be the same, and we shall all be citizens of a murdochracy.
The Truth WareHouse:
Tags: Adelaide, america, australia, Blair, Britain, choir, Clark, Dawn Casey, day, empire, empty buckets, General Suharto, Greg Sheridan, inspiration, Israel, Jakarta, John Howard, John Pilger, Kevin Rudd, media empire, minister john howard, MP Michael Foot, Murdoch, Murdoch HQ, Murdochism, Murdochracy, New York, newspaper, Paul Kelly, prime minister john, prime minister john howard, Professor Henry Reynolds, Quot, Rupert Murdoch, seven continents, Sheridan, sky television, Tony Blair, United States, US, war, world Posted in research | No Comments »
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
if your username and email account look like a spam account it will be deleted.
Follow this one rule to be activated
Our forums are set to lock out all new registrants upon approval by admins; Your account is suspended upon review of profile and if the profile looks like spam you wont get in. We have a tasty delete function that removes all of your posts upon deletingt your profile if you are a spammer
use your real name or an acceptable facsimile
If you have something to hide you dont belong here
exceptions cannot be made without express permission from admins. We will be cleaning out the membership on the blog by the same criterion. We asked that members make one post to show they are human and that has only happened in a few cases. Sorry to throw the TOS in everyones face, BUT, we have constant issues with connectivity in chat and the site in general and we suspect a malicious bastard/s/and or bitch/es that needs to be shot.
Were nice to a point and when people abuse that they write the rules that we in trurn choose to exploit to the fullest.
The Ruthless Truth • View topic – The law of activation
Tags: account, approval, Email, exceptions, Facsimile, Look, profile, Review, rule, spam, Truth, username, wont Posted in research | No Comments »
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Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Mar 15, 2010 Climate
An omigosh moment, this. Read Judith Curry’s interview with Discover magazine. (Judith is a senior climatologist, from Georgia Tech).
Some choice excerpts:
Where do you come down on the whole subject of uncertainty in the climate science? I’m very concerned about the way uncertainty is being treated. The IPCC [the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] took a shortcut on the actual scientific uncertainty analysis on a lot of the issues, particularly the temperature records.
…
Is this a case of politics getting in the way of science? No. It’s sloppiness. It’s just how our field has evolved. One of the things that McIntyre and McKitrick pointed out was that a lot of the statistical methods used in our field are sloppy. We have trends for which we don’t even give a confidence interval. The IPCC concluded that most of the warming of the latter 20th century was very likely caused by humans. Well, as far as I know, that conclusion was mostly a negotiation, in terms of calling it “likely” or “very likely.”
…
Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis? Yes.
- Bishop Hill blog – Judith Curry in Discover
Tags: analysis, Bishop Hill, climate, climate science, climatologist, confidence interval, Discover, discover magazine, Field, intergovernmental panel on climate change, IPCC, Judith, Judith Curry, lot, Mar, mckitrick, Read Judith Curry, science, Uncertainty, uncertainty analysis, united nations intergovernmental panel, united nations intergovernmental panel on climate change, way Posted in research | No Comments »
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Monday, March 15th, 2010
Max Blumenthal and Jesse Rosenfeld interview young Tel Aviv residents about Iran, Obama and right-wing laws limiting the speech rights of their Palestinian-Israeli neighbors. The shocking responses reflect the deepening of racist and authoritarian trends in Israeli society. This is the sequel to “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem,” the video banned by YouTube, Vimeo and the Huffington Post after topping 400,000 hits.
Tags: arabs, Barack Obama, Extremism, Hate, Huffington Post, interview, Iran, Israel, Israeli Society, Jerusalem, Jesse Rosenfeld, Jews, Max Blumenthal, Muslims, Nakba, Obama, Palestine, Palestinian, Quot, Racism, Rosenfeld, Sequel, society, Speech, Speech Rights, Tel Aviv, video, Vimeo, YOUTUBE, zionism Posted in Israel, The soon to be former USA, nation, video, war criminals, world | No Comments »
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