So...teabaggers and town-halls became cause for some reflection on the sublimity of our discourse. We now are presented daily with questions so unanswerable that saints and sages have used them for centuries as aids in achieving spiritual transformation.

Consider these ageless imponderables:

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?

Can an omnipotent God create an object too heavy for itself to lift?

How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?

Who is more worthy of ridicule: those who claim the Healthcare Reform Bill will lead to authoritarian socialism, or those who claim the Healthcare Reform Bill will lead to...healthcare reform?

Any possible answer leads to an infinitely recurring series of self-contradictions and paradoxes. The limits of human cognition are reached almost immediately. It's almost...magical.

From Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss:

This past Monday over 200 masked and camouflaged Israeli soldiers swarmed into the West Bank village of Bil’in at 3 a.m. and raided five homes. Eight people were arrested, including Mohammad Khatib a leader of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements (pictured right).

These arrests were part of on ongoing effort by the Israeli military to end the nonviolent resistance in Bil’in by carrying out now routine late night raids. According to the International Solidarity Movement, since the beginning of June Israel has arrested 25 people in the village (most are under 18). The ISM also says that "Israeli forces have been using interrogation techniques to pressure the arrested youth to give statements against Bil’in community leaders."

There are several ways you can help. From the ISM:

1. Many of you have met Mohammad Khatib and perhaps one of the others mentioned above. We need you now to personally testify about your knowledge of them and their commitment to non-violence. Write a letter to the Israeli military judge and please send to bilinlegal@gmail.com.

2. Please Protest by contacting your political representatives, as well as you consuls and ambassadors to Israel to demand the release of Mohammad Khatib, Adib Abu Rahme and all Bil’in prisoners.

3. The Popular committee of Bil’in is in desperate need for legal funds in order to pay legal fees and Bail. Please donate to the Bil’in legal fund by paypal click http://tinyurl.com/lcr6rg . If you would like to make a tax deductible donation in the US or Canada contact: bilinlegal@gmail.com.

h/t DearLeader

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A Pensacola judge has green lighted the government seizure of Pensacola's Dinosaur Adventure Land, a creationist theme park whose owners, Kent and Jo Hovind, owe $430,400 in federal taxes. The Hovinds' excuse for not paying was that they were employed by God and thus could claim zero income and property.

Guess they skipped that part about rendering unto Caesar.

So, holed up in the western PA redoubt, I recently got my annual dose of cable news entertainment.

JHD wrote:

The reason I pay attention to the Times or BBC World or the Guardian more than lefty blogs is precisely that they typically -don't- share my perspective on things, yet are nonetheless read by many more people. I prefer my "media criticism" to come from the ground up, to be based in each article, rather than to comfort myself that there is no chance the New York Times could ever in a million years do competent or useful reporting within its ideological/class strictures. This allows for the shades of gray that I do feel are significant. Hersh at the New Yorker, subsisting among assholes, would be another example.

I'm talking about "media criticism" of the per issue or per article variety. I'm not even talking about "media criticism" at all. What I'm saying is that an analysis of the structure of the media system can be made and is a useful tool for understanding why you get the outcomes you get in the media.

There is a world of difference between the work of a group like FAIR or Media Matters and the work of people like Chomsky, Bagdikian, Herman, McChesney, Norman Solomon, etc. Most of FAIR's work is in fact an application of the Chomsky/Herman model to the particular stories that the media system generates on an week to week basis.

But if you don't have any structural understanding of social phenomena, you're left without any organizing principle with which to analyse particular events. Your stated preference for taking each article as it comes, isn't really a preference at all, you just lack the conceptual tools necessary for seeing things from a more coherent perspective. The question: "how can people like X write things like Y" is the starting point for an inquiry that can lead to the acquisition of those tools. Clearly things don't make sense given the concepts and assumptions you're working with, so perhaps its time to get new concepts. The tools you have are inadequate to the task at hand.

This sort of question was what we all began asking when this blog started. And what other blogs like Atrios, Digby, Kos, etc. continually ask. One of the legacies of the Bush presidency is that it created too much of a gap between how the world actually worked and how many of us believed it to work at the time. Now one can either throw one's hands up in the air and satisfy oneself with having stated the question, as all the pwog blogs continue to do, or you can press deeper and try to answer the question.

What's so ungodly maddening about libloggers is that even through all of this horror, none of it caused any re-examination of basic assumptions, and they seemingly never tire of being confused and outraged about the same things over and over again. And while they continually mock the right for painting them as DFH's, they would rather drink acid than actually bother to attempt an understanding of ideas to the left of the ones they currently hold. This sort of willful ignorance is bad enough on its own, but ultimately it leads to strategic and tactical incoherence that retards progress and keeps the right breathing oxygen.

No one is contesting that NYT can and does occasionally do useful reporting of "facts", whatever the fuck those are. Your original post was about an op-ed, not reportage. I don't really see what a "comfort" it is that the NYT is extremely unlikely to produce something that would fall outside the doctrinal system. The NYT is useful for knowing some things. If you want to know what 1st tier elites want the 2nd tier to think, then you can pick up a copy of the Times and be well-informed about that. If you care to monitor the currents and eddies of elite opinion, NYT is great for that. And that can actually be useful, especially to people who are mapping strategy or devising tactics on how to change things from below.

But the irony of the implication of your paragraph, that your approach is somehow judicious to each individual case, while I'm off in my left-media ghetto unwilling to hear ideas outside the ones I currently I hold, is really astonishing. From my point-of-view, anyone without a structural analysis of social systems cannot see the forest for the trees. I'm telling you there's a whole forest out there if you care to look, and you're staring at a tree insinuating that I'm a victim of parochialism and ideological conformity.

I'd be the last person to deny that there's shades of gray in any aspect of human endeavor. I see shades of gray all the time, we're just working with totally different definitions of black and white. And just because individual things are complex and don't fit neatly into any categories that anyone's devised, doesn't mean that identifiable structures and patterns don't exist.


fwiw: Herman's update and defense of the propaganda model.

Don Boudreaux, chair of the GMU econ department, comments on this sign of the times:

...Uncle Sam is on the verge of paying the City of Los Angeles $30 million to subsidize a ten-year run of Cirque du Soleil.

So it's finally come to pass - America has embarked on the same road down which ancient Rome marched to its ruin: Uncle Sam not only subsidizes bread (by subsidizing wheat production) but now also circuses.

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