Thanks.

I notice a diary making fun of "He kept us safe."
And yet Obama is doing the same thing, he is "keeping us safe."

Here is a comment posted to the article you linked on the Guardian posted on Guardian web site

Well said. This is how advertising and propaganda were always designed to work–in concert. The advent of digital communications puts these capitalist bloodsuckers into our lives every minute of every day and the Guardian is just looking for their piece of the advertising pie.
I also think that advertising is driving the Guardian’s recent move to the right. Quite frankly, they are looking at the demographics and finding that the people with the more expendable incomes are generally right wing in their politics. Let’s face it: ex-hippies, crusty old liberals and true progressives who “challenge” the system don’t waste a lot of money on the types of things they are selling on the Guardian or any of these so-called liberal sites.
By removing most of the better writers from CIF, they will attract the type of people that the advertisers want–non thinking morons who swallow bullshit in gobs, would never vote for a guy like Jeremy Corbyn, think Putin is the anti-christ and have generally never had a cogent thought. They aren’t quite there yet, but they’re making a strong move for an American Audience and my country is full of dumbed-down morons ready to fill the void.

Here is a recent article from NYT about the corporate take over of the university, with the focus on Perdue

This orderliness is just a secondary symptom of a more pernicious trend: the creeping corporatism of the American university. I don’t mean the literal corporations that are taking over more and more of the physical space of universities — the Starbucks outpost, the Barnes & Noble as campus bookstore, the Visa card that you use to buy meals at the dining hall. Enrolling at a university today means setting yourself up in a vast array of for-profit systems that each take a little slice along the way: student loans distributed on fee-laden A.T.M. cards, college theater tickets sold to you by Ticketmaster, ludicrously expensive athletic apparel brought to you by Nike. Students are presented with a dazzling array of advertisements and offers: glasses at the campus for-profit vision center, car insurance through some giant financial company, spring break through a package deal offered by some multinational. This explicit corporate invasion is not exactly what I mean.

No, I’m talking about the way universities operate, every day, more and more like corporations. As Benjamin Ginsberg details in his 2011 book, ‘‘The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters,’’ a constantly expanding layer of university administrative jobs now exists at an increasing remove from the actual academic enterprise. It’s not unheard-of for colleges now to employ more senior administrators than professors. There are, of course, essential functions that many university administrators perform, but such an imbalance is absurd — try imagining a high school with more vice principals than teachers. This legion of bureaucrats enables a world of pitiless surveillance; no segment of campus life, no matter how small, does not have some administrator who worries about it. Piece by piece, every corner of the average campus is being slowly made congruent with a single, totalizing vision. The rise of endless brushed-metal-and-glass buildings at Purdue represents the aesthetic dimension of this ideology. Bent into place by a small army of apparatchiks, the contemporary American college is slowly becoming as meticulously art-directed and branded as a J. Crew catalog. Like Niketown or Disneyworld, your average college campus now leaves the distinct impression of a one-party state.

Why We Should Fear University, Inc. Against the corporate taming of the American college.

from Canada, because Obama continued to block that.

link

This past week, two pieces—one in the New York Times detailing the “finger pointing” over Obama’s “failed” Syria policy, and a Vox “explainer” of the Syrian civil war—did one better: They didn’t just omit the fact that the CIA has been arming, training and funding rebels since 2012, they heavily implied they had never done so.
First, let’s establish what we do know. Based on multiple reports over the past three-and-a-half years, we know that the Central Intelligence Agency set up a secret program of arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces. This has been reported by major outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and, most recently, the Washington Post, which—partly thanks to the Snowden revelations—detailed a program that trained approximately 10,000 rebel fighters at a cost of $1 billion a year, or roughly 1/15th of the CIA’s official annual budget....

The New York Times wouldn’t be alone. Comcast-funded Vox would also ignore the CIA rebel training program in its almost 4,000-word overview of the Syrian civil war. Again, the Pentagon’s program would be the sole focus in regards to funding rebels, along with reports of Gulf states doing so as well. But the CIA funding, training and arming thousands of rebels since at least 2012? Nowhere to be found. Not mentioned or alluded to once.

Reuters and the Washington Post’s reports on the US’s Syrian strategy revamp, while they didn’t fudge history as bad as the Times and Vox, also ignored any attempts by the CIA to back Syrian opposition rebels. This crucial piece of history is routinely omitted from mainstream public discourse.

As the military build-up and posturing in Syria between Russia and the United States escalates, policy makers and influencers on this side of the Atlantic are urgently trying to portray the West’s involvement in Syria as either nonexistent or marked by good-faith incompetence. By whitewashing the West’s clandestine involvement in Syria, the media not only portrays Russia as the sole contributor to hostilities, it absolves Europe and the United States of their own guilt in helping create a refugee crisis and fuel a civil war that has devastated so many for so long.

rental market will be pushed into the streets, to join the growing ranks of the homeless.