In my experience, the most confident and strident defenders of capitalism are the ones who know the least about socialism. I can't fully blame them for this because there is so much intentional misinformation, as well as suppressed information, that it takes a herculean effort to get a more accurate viewpoint.
This essay is a follow-up to this previous one.
First, from Mike Head at wsws.org June 12, 2018: ‘Demands grow that Australian government act to free Julian Assange’
Head writes that last Sunday one of Assange’s attorneys, Australian Jennifer Robinson, was on channel 7’s ‘Sunrise Weekend’ giving a 10-minute interview. He called it a significant break from the long media silence in Australian media on Assange’s seven year detention in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Robbins had apparently issued a clear message to the Aussie government to carry out its responsibility to an Aussie citizen and give him his freedom.
In the 1950s, when the science fiction genre started making itself felt in movies, there was always the pivotal scene where the protagonist discovers the dark secret but no one will believe him: a flying saucer hidden under the sand in a field, truckloads of pod people to replace real people, or that the friendly aliens' book "To Serve Man" wasn't a guide to helping humans, but a cookbook.
Whenever the corporate media start saturation hagiography, I become suspicious. The non-stop lionizing of Anthony Bourdain is the latest instance that set off my dissatisfaction with the conventional narrative. For the record, I have watched some of Bourdain's stuff. I found him to be simultaneously arrogant and self-effacing, simultaneously leftish and rightish - an icon of the rebel consumer crowd that Thomas Franks pilloried so well in the 1990s. In short, To me, Bourdain was just another sardonic bit of consumerist froth with huge dollops of dishabille and attitude, which is so essential in our egocentric, look-at-me society.
(Cascadian National University, Lecture Hall)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX63mUW0-B0]
Good morning again to everyone. Thanks to those who've taken their own time to catch up our new students. Don't worry, I am not going to make you come up here and introduce yourselves, like some of the more traditional professors. Unless you want to of course? No? Never mind then.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH ©1939 by John Steinbeck
Something stinks to high heaven in Washington DC. I mean it stinks even more than the usual compost heap called DC.
I opened up my Twitter account and to what do my shell shocked eyes, do I see?
Imran Awan is currently a suspect in an ongoing criminal investigation into a cyber-breach on congress during the 2016 election.
