Jay_Kumar's Blog

HARPER'S WEEKLY

One million people fled New Orleans to avoid Hurricane Gustav, which landed in Louisiana as a weakened category-2
hurricane and caused relatively little damage.

Mississippi officials ordered people still living in the FEMA trailers erected after Hurricane Katrina to evacuate, and John
McCain canceled opening-day ceremonies for the Republican
National Convention at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint
Paul, Minnesota. "This is a time when we have to do away
with our party politics and we have to act as Americans,"
said McCain. "Not as Republicans."

McCain picked Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, 44, as his running mate. Palin, an evangelical Christian, supports the death penalty, believes that the "jury's still out" on global warming, opposes abortion, and is mother to five children: Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and five-month-old Trig, who has
Down syndrome.

Rumors arose that Bristol, 17, was the actual mother of Trig; in response, Palin announced that Bristol was actually five months pregnant with the child of a man named "Levi" and would soon marry him.

1.2 million people were left homeless by monsoon floods in the Indian state of Bihar.

Foreclosure rates were rising in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. "We've got a housing issue, [but] evidently not in Dallas," said President George W. Bush to a recent gathering of Houston G.O.P. donors, "because Laura's over there trying to buy a house today... I said: 'Honey, we've been on government pay now for 14 years. Go slow!'"

Citibank, facing huge losses, asked its bankers to stop making color photocopies and to start printing internal presentations on both sides of the page, and hip-hop mogul P. Diddy announced that the rising price of fuel had
forced him to give up private-jet travel. "Can you believe
this, I'm actually flying commercial!" he said. "Gas
prices are too motherBLEEPin' high. I want to give a
shout-out to all my Saudi Arabian brothers and sisters and
all my brothers and sisters from all the countries that
have oil. If y'all could please send me some oil for my
jet, I would truly appreciate it."

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda resigned, and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin saved a television crew from attack by shooting an escaped Siberian tiger with a tranquilizer gun.

Putin also announced a ban on poultry imports from 19 U.S. companies, explaining that their chicken failed to meet sanitary standards and that the ban had nothing to do with ongoing political tensions over Georgia.

A pregnant woman sued Jacksonville Jaguars receiver Dennis Northcutt, claiming he arranged for his cousin to beat her up in an attempt to harm her unborn child, and the attorney for a nearly half-ton Texas woman said she could not have beaten her toddler nephew to death because her obesity limits her movement.

An Ohioan named China Arnold was convicted of microwaving her one-month-old baby, Paris Talley, to death.

A United Nations investigation of last week's coalition
airstrikes in Afghanistan found that the United States had
killed 90 civilians, including 60 sleeping children, and
Nigerian religious leader Mohammadu Bello Abubakar, who is
84, accepted an Islamic decree that would force him to
divorce 82, or 95 percent, of his 86 wives.

An Australian plastic surgeon who received oral sex from a patient before providing her with a nose job was fighting to keep his medical license. "Knowing her nose better than anyone else," said Dr. Martyn Mendelsohn, "I was in a unique
position to take care of the problem."

A man concerned that he had injected air into his veins while shooting cocaine tried to amputate his own arm with a butter knife, and then a butcher knife, at a Denny's Restaurant in
California, and European officials warned that Botox
injections could have dangerous side effects, including
death.

Nearly half a million people in developing nations were manufacturing virtual weapons and mounts to sell to players of online video games such as World of Warcraft, and the Pentagon launched a program that aims to create an artificial brain within the next decade.

NASA confirmed that laptops in space had been infected with the virus Gammima. AG, and Australian scientists determined that sponges have the genes necessary to express
nerves.

Scientists studying the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, which annihilated much of life on Earth 251 million years ago, attributed the die-off to floods of reeking Siberian lava, which released carbon dioxide and created a greenhouse effect, thereby starving oceans of oxygen and poisoning the atmosphere. "In the late Permian," said geo-scientist Lee Kump, "Earth itself was the villain. But today we've stepped in as the villain."

-- Gemma Sieff

Barack Obama announced Joe Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, as his running mate, even though Biden voted for the war in Iraq and for NAFTA and once said that Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

The Obama campaign denied that there was anything wrong with Biden's signing a 2005 bill that eliminated many bankruptcy protections for consumers after Biden's lobbyist son Hunter was retained for $100,000 a year by the financial-services giant MBNA, employees of which have donated $214,000 to Biden over the years.

The Democratic National Convention opened at the Pepsi Center in Denver, with later events to be held at Invesco Field. “I have a lot of doubts that this convention is going to be as persuasive as it should be,” said former national Democratic chairman Donald Fowler, “because they've got this damn thing with Hillary.”

The major news networks agreed to share the $100,000 cost of a “flying” wire-guided overhead camera intended to capture such dramatic moments as Obama's acceptance of the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech, and hundreds of protesters marching on the Pepsi Center. “The Democrats,” said one graduate student, “are an imperialist party too.”

John McCain, who does not know how many houses he owns, was expected to choose a running mate who opposes abortion, most likely either former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney or Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, and the United States agreed to an “aspirational timetable” that calls for troops to be removed from Iraq by December 31, 2011; west of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed 25 people at a neighborhood celebration.

North Korean hunger scientists announced a new noodle.

The Russian army was looting Poti, Georgia; planes crashed in Spain, Kyrgyzstan, and Guatemala, and eight climbers were killed in an avalanche on Mont Blanc.

Suicide bombers blew up a munitions factory in Wah, Pakistan, killing at least 63 people.

Three Ghanaian men, one a butcher, were arrested for the ritual murder of a hunchback, someone was torturing feral cats in the Bronx, and police in Brooklyn were looking for a man who, after he was serviced by a one-legged prostitute in the hallway of a housing project, knocked the woman out of her wheelchair, thereby killing her.

Scientists found that dogs can develop a sense of right and wrong, that elephants can do basic math, and that Australian Aboriginal children can count even if their local language has no words for numbers.

Researchers found that women do not have a higher threshold for pain than men do, but actually suffer more, and an elephant in Portland, Oregon, named Rose-Tu gave birth to a 286-pound calf and immediately began to kick it.

France banned TV shows for babies.

Due to water shortages and rising fertilizer costs, 49 million acres of cropland were being treated with human sewage.

The Beijing Olympics ended.

The National Guard was still patrolling New Orleans, and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) acknowledged that its voting machines, used in 34 states, were programmed with a logic error that loses votes, and that the error has been in place for ten years.

Margaret Thatcher, revealed her daughter, has dementia and often forgets that she is no longer the British prime minister. “Oh,” she said in a lucid moment, “how I wish I could do it all again.”

In Kashmir, protests that began two months ago, when 100 acres were granted to a Hindu shrine to build toilets for pilgrims, continued as hundreds of thousands of Muslims rallied against India and demanded independence; in Singur, India, 40,000 people rallied to demand that farmers be returned the land taken from them to build a new Tata Motors factory, where the world's cheapest car is to be manufactured.

Dr. Hugh R. Butt, the coagulation expert who showed that vitamin K could help halt internal bleeding, died at age 98, and Japanese scientists created human stem cells from a little girl's teeth.

Microbiologists found a virus named Sputnik that can infect larger viruses, astronomers suggested that black holes might come in only small and large sizes, not medium, and physicists in Geneva found that quantum entanglement travels over 10,000 times the speed of light.

BY PAUL FORD - HARPERS MAGAZINE

HARPER'S WEEKLY

After more than a week of fighting and one failed cease-fire, Russia and Georgia signed a revised cease-fire agreement, but Russian troops remained within 25 miles of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev promised French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who negotiated the agreement, that Russian forces would soon withdraw from Georgia. He also insisted that troops would remain in the breakaway Georgian territory South Ossetia. "The superpower showed that she was able to defend her people," said Marina Katayeva, a 30-year-old Russian doctor. "Now we will be more respected."

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said Russians were "twenty-first-century barbarians" who had essentially raped his country; "Can you say that, you know the victim of a rape is to be blamed for the rape because she wore a short skirt?"

While reporting live from Gori, Tamara Urushadze, a 32-year-old Georgian TV reporter, was shot in the arm by a sniper. Urushadze looked down at the bloody scratch, then collapsed onto the ground, then, moments later, resumed her broadcast.

In response to the crisis, President George W. Bush postponed a vacation trip to his Texas ranch by one day.

Vesti FM, a Russian state-run radio station, reported that the South Ossetia conflict was part of a plot by Vice President Dick Cheney to prevent Barack Obama from being elected president of the United States, while in the United States it was suggested that John McCain's speech on Georgia was partly cribbed from Wikipedia. Aides to McCain said there are only so many ways to state historical facts.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf resigned.

The United States and Poland finalized a deal that would allow the United States to build a missile-interceptor base on Polish territory, and Ukraine offered the U.S. use of its missile-warning system. Poland, said Russian general Anatoly Nogovitsyn, "is exposing itself to a strike--100 percent."

The musical designer for the Beijing Olympics admitted that Lin Miaoke, the nine-year-old Chinese schoolgirl who, suspended on wires, performed "Hymn to the Motherland" at the games' opening ceremony, lip-synched the song after Chinese officials decided that the actual singer, seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, was too ugly and
buck-toothed to perform before billions.

Michael Phelps, the American swimmer who won eight gold medals in Beijing, revealed that he consumes more than 12,000 calories a day by eating three egg sandwiches with fried onions, a five-egg omelet, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast, three chocolate-chip pancakes, two ham-and-cheese sandwiches, two pounds of pasta, and an entire pizza.

It was reported that few of the 9 million overweight or obese children in the U.S. could afford weight-loss summer camp.

In a joint statement, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton announced that her name would be included in a state-by-state roll-call vote at the Democratic Convention, and economists at the University of Maryland found that more than one million votes for Obama in the Democratic primaries could be attributed to Oprah Winfrey's endorsement.

At a forum for the presidential candidates hosted by Reverend Rick Warren, Barack Obama and John McCain were asked to define "rich." Anyone making $250,000 or more, said Obama. "If you're just talking
about income," said McCain, "how about 5 million?"

British scientists unveiled Gordon, the world's first robot controlled by living brain tissue.

Trustees for a north Texas school district approved a policy change that will allow teachers to carry concealed handguns to class, and data released by the U.S. Census Bureau showed that minorities will become the majority by 2042. "It's important to recognize that this is a choice we're making," said Steven Camarota, a researcher at the
Center for Immigration Studies. "This is not weather that we have no control over."

German researchers raised a giant reflective screen in the middle of the Swiss Alps in an effort to slow the melting of the Rhone glacier, and Australian scientist George Wilson called on people to eat kangaroo instead of beef to reduce global warming.

Penguin Nils Olav, the Norwegian King's Guard mascot since 1972, was knighted in front of a crowd of several hundred people and 130 guardsmen. Nils, who shat himself during the ceremony, was, read the proclamation from King Harald the Fifth, "in every way qualified to receive the honour and dignity of knighthood."

Two Bigfoot hunters said they had killed one such animal and were storing its carcass in a freezer; analysts found that of the two DNA samples that the hunters provided to prove Bigfoot's existence, one was from a human and the other was 96 percent opossum.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, developed a material for use in invisibility cloaks, and a community of Welsh Cistercian monks who had been relying on a dial-up Internet connection opted to get a broadband connection. "Patience is one of the characteristics of monastic life," said Father Daniel van Santvoort, "but even the patience of the Brothers was tested by our slow Internet."

-- Claire Gutierrez

Claiming that South Ossetian separatists had attacked its villages, U.S. ally Georgia sent troops to capture the city of Tskhinvali. Russia retaliated by sending ground troops into Tskhinvali, then into Georgia proper; Georgia claimed that hundreds of troops had been killed on both sides along with “huge numbers” of civilians. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili described Russia's troop actions as “the preplanned, cold-blooded, premeditated murder of a small country.”

The Olympics began in Beijing, heralded on television by fake, computer-generated fireworks. President George W. Bush told Bob Costas that China “is a big, important nation...it is important for this country to show respect for the people of the country.”

The International Court of Justice condemned Texas for executing a Mexican national who had not been advised of his right to consular assistance. “Texas,” replied the office of the state's attorney general, “is not bound by the World Court.”

Under pressure from human-rights groups, Iran suspended death by stoning “for now,” and a U.S. military jury in Guantanamo rejected the 30-year minimum sentence called for by the Bush Administration and sentenced Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, to five more months in prison atop the 61 he has already served.

Australian police reopened 7,000 investigations after realizing that they had mixed up DNAFranz Kafka's secret porn stash was brought to light. “Animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action,” said researcher James Hawes. “It's quite unpleasant.”10 samples and wrongly arrested a man for double homicide and child rape, and

It was discovered that a woman who paid a South Korean company to create five clones of her pitbull Booger was Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who escaped Britishraping him three times. “They are perfectly the same as their daddy,” said McKinney, in Seoul, of Booger's clones. “I am in Heaven here.” authorities in 1977 after abducting a Mormon missionary, securing him to a bed with mink-lined handcuffs, and

After The National Enquirer published pictures of John Edwards holding his “love child,” Edwards admitted that he had had an affair with actress Rielle Hunter in 2006 but said that he did not love her and that her baby couldn't be his. Novelist Jay McInerney said that Hunter was the basis for Alison Poole, a “cocaine-addled, sexually voracious” party girl who appeared both in his novels and in Bret Easton Ellis's “American Psycho.”

A poll by Lifetime Networks found that women would prefer to carpool or vacation with Barack Obama over John McCain by a factor of two to one.

McCain campaigned at a biker rally in South Dakota, at which there is each year a beauty pageant that features topless contestants performing fellatio upon bananas. “I encouraged Cindy to compete,” he told a crowd. “I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.”

It was revealed that days after McCain reversed his position on offshore drilling to one of support, after employees and family members from Hess oil company gave his campaign $285,000.

In New Zealand a 111-year-old tuatara reptile, a remnant from the age of dinosaurs, impregnated his partner for the first time in decades. The lizard-like creature, who now has three consorts, regained his interest in sex after zoologists removed a cancerous growth from his genitals.

A U.S. biologist in Barbados claimed to have discovered the world's smallest snake,snakes can possibly be. Barbadians insisted that they already knew about the animal, which they call a “thread snake.” which, at less than 4 inches long, may be the smallest that

Isaac Hayes, who sang the theme song to “Shaft” (“Can you dig it?”), and comedian Bernie Mac both died.

Rwanda's justice ministry issued a report accusing France of participating in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. “French forces directly assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis,” said a statement from the ministry. “French forces committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors.”

A survey found 125,000 Western lowland gorillas living in a swamp in Congo, double the number of the endangered primates previously believed to exist; nevertheless, due to habitat loss and human encroachment, said a report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, almost half of the world's primate species are facing extinction.

The U.S. Army failed to censor a new medical textbook that teaches updated military surgical practices and depicts blast amputations, dead children, and a suicide bomber's rib embedded in a soldier. “There was never any doubt in my mind that the Army would publish this,” said Dr. Stephen P. Hetz, a retired colonel and the book's co-author. “It was just a matter of getting around the nitwits.”

Sharks were eating polar bears in the Arctic,27 and Greyhound pulled an ad that read, “There's a reason you've never heard of 'bus rage,'” after a Greyhound passenger on the TransCanada highway beheaded and ate his seatmate.

At least 38 Venezuelan Warao Indians had died of rabies after being bitten by vampire bats. “Vampire bats are very adaptable,” said a rabies researcher. “Homo sapiens are a pretty easy meal.”

Weekly Review
By Chantal Clarke

HARPER'S WEEKLY

Senator "Uncle" Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and "Alaskan of the Century," was indicted for seven felonies related to unreported gifts worth $250,000 from an oil-services company. The alleged gifts included a Land Rover, a Viking gas grill, and construction that doubled the size of his home. "There is a lot of comity on our committee," said an unnamed Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. "I don't think any of this is going to have an impact on his earmarks."

A Department of Justice report found that senior aides to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales broke federal law by screening candidates for career positions using political and religious criteria, sexual rumors, and database searches for terms like "abortion," "guns," "homosexuality," and "Florida recount."

American intelligence officials claimed that Pakistani spies helped plan the July 7 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the United Nations agreed to oversee
India's civilian nuclear facilities, a key step toward a
U.S.-India nuclear pact desired by the Bush Administration.

The House Judiciary Committee cited Karl Rove for contempt, and members of the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribes performed a Native American blessing near the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado, site of the upcoming Democratic Convention.

The U.S. unemployment rate continued to rise, as the total
number of jobs lost this year reached 463,000. Housing
prices seemed to plunge, but some critics of the leading
housing-price index said that it exaggerates the market's
downside due to the high number of foreclosures. The White
House projected a $482 billion federal deficit, and thirty
states faced total deficits of $40 billion. "If they gave
out Olympic medals for fiscal irresponsibility," said
Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, "President Bush would take the gold, silver, and bronze."

Conservative rabbis proposed a new kosher certification favoring food companies that provide health insurance and retirement benefits to workers. Wal-Mart warned thousands of its managers that a Democratic president would likely make it
easier for their subordinates to unionize. "I am not a
stupid person," said a customer-service supervisor from
Missouri. "They were telling me how to vote."

Congress voted to adjourn for summer vacation, blocking a vote on a bill to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling. Several
dozen Republicans refused to leave, speaking to tourists
and a troop of visiting Boy Scouts even after the
microphones and lights were turned off. "This is the
people's house," cried Rep. Thaddeus McCotter. "This is
not Pelosi's politburo."

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died, as did Robert "Bob" Hamilton, the model for Norman Rockwell's 1944 portrait of a Boy Scout.

A black bear with its head stuck in a jug was killed by
police in Frazee, Minnesota, after it wandered into the
town's Turkey Day celebration. The starving bear felt
"high anxiety," said Rob Naplin of the Department of
Natural Resources, "and frustration with its predicament."

Nearly 150 people died in a stampede at a Himalayan temple
to the goddess Naina Devi, brought on by the rumor of a
landslide.

Bruce E. Ivins, a top biodefense researcher at
the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, died in an apparent
suicide. Ivins was the prime suspect in an FBI
investigation into the fall 2001 anthrax attacks, which
killed five people and were widely linked at the time to
Saddam Hussein. "He was going to go out in a blaze of
glory," said Jean Duley, a social worker who claimed that
Dr. Ivins shared his homicidal fantasies with her. "He was
going to take everybody out with him." Ivins also wrote
letters to his local newspaper about his religious
views. "You can get on board or be left behind," he wrote
shortly after the 2004 election, "because the Christian
Nation Express is pulling out of the station!" Some
scientists doubted that a vaccine researcher like Ivins
would have the skills needed to make inhalable anthrax,
and others questioned the FBI's methods, which included
using bloodhounds to track the mail. "I think the pressure
got to him," said Ivins' brother Tom. "He's not a man like
I am."

-- Sam Stark

FROM HARPER'S MAGAZINE:

Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade and awaits
imminent extradition to The Hague, where he will face
charges of genocide for his role in the Srebrenica
massacres and the siege of Sarajevo. The former Bosnian
Serb president, a psychiatrist and poet who in 1991
pledged to drive Bosnian Muslims down "the highway of hell
and suffering," had been living in the Serbian capital as
a New Age guru, promoting alternative medicine and "Human
Quantum Energy" under the name "Dragan David Dabic."
Serbia hoped the arrest would hasten its campaign to join
the European Union, and it was reported that Ratko Mladic,
the general who led Bosnian Serb forces during the war and
is believed to be in hiding in Serbia, is protected by two
bodyguards under orders to kill him in the event of his
arrest. Two bombs placed in trash cans exploded in
Istanbul, killing thirteen people, and a bombing in Gaza
killed five Hamas militants and an eight-year-old girl. In
Ahmadabad, India, shortly after television stations
received an email that read, "In the name of Allah, the
Indian Mujahidin strike again! Do whatever you can, within
five minutes from now, feel the terror of death!" 16 bombs
exploded across the city, killing 45 people. Iraqi
officials said that a suicide attack that killed eight
people in Baquba, Iraq, had been carried out by a woman,
as indicated by the pair of feminine legs found nearby,
and four female suicide bombers killed 57 people in
Baghdad and Kirkuk. NASA announced that the lights of the
auroras australis and borealis are caused by magnetic
explosions one-third of the way to the sun.

Congress passed a $300 billion bailout for the mortgage
lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the mortgage
crisis was causing suicides. Wall Street got drunk,
President George W. Bush told an audience at a
fund-raiser. "Now it's got a hangover." Oil prices were
dropping, and the United States Geological Survey
announced that there are 90 billion barrels of oil in the
Arctic. China was paying parents of victims of the recent
earthquake in Sichuan province to sign statements to the
effect that the Communist Party "mobilized society to help
us"; Chinese newspapers were ordered to stop reporting on
school collapses; and a poll ranked China as the most
optimistic of 24 nations surveyed. Barack Obama delivered
a speech to a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin, and John McCain
endorsed a ban on affirmative action in his home state of
Arizona. France abolished the 35-hour workweek. "It's a
specter," said engineer Michel Guyot, who expects to
forsake his weekday trips to the limestone cliffs of the
Calanque de Sugiton. "A cloud over my head." Iran executed
29 drug smugglers, and Iraq was banned from competing in
the Olympics. A locust plague in Mongolia threatened to
spoil next month's games in Beijing. The planet
CoRot-Exo-4b, a ringed gas giant resembling Jupiter and
larger than the sun, was discovered 3,000 light-years
away, in the Unicorn constellation. California Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a bill requiring that
students in the state's public schools be taught about
global warming. Bloggers for the Los Angeles Times
received a memo instructing them not to write about a
National Enquirer story alleging that former Senator John
Edwards was meeting his mistress at an
L.A. hotel. Research showed that men lust for women
whether or not they find them attractive.

During a children's production of "Annie, Jr." at
Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in
Knoxville, 58-year-old unemployed truck driver Jim
J. Adkisson opened fire on a packed sanctuary with a
twelve-gauge shotgun. "We were just, 'Oh, my God, that's
not part of the play,'" said Amira Parkey, 16, who was
playing Miss Hannigan. After killing one man and wounding
seven others (one of whom later died from her wounds),
Adkisson was tackled by John Bohstedt, who was playing
Daddy Warbucks. Actor Christian Bale was arrested in
London for allegedly assaulting his mother and sister, and
actress Estelle Getty died. Seventy-six-year-old Marlene
Mackenzie of North Caldwell, New Jersey, was arrested for
killing her husband by throwing a cocktail glass at his
head. Hot rubber safety mats on New York City playgrounds
were burning children's feet, and lightning struck ten
people in New York and New Jersey, killing one. Edward
"Eddie" Davidson, a 35-year-old "spam king" convicted of
tax evasion and fraud, escaped from a minimum-security
prison in Bennett, Colorado, and killed his wife, his
three-year-old daughter, and himself in the SUV they had
used in the escape. Davidson's 16-year-old daughter
escaped from the vehicle with a neck wound, and a
seven-month-old boy was found, unharmed in a car seat,
with the victims. Two employees at a deli in Brooklyn used
machetes to defeat three armed thieves attempting to steal
$2,000 worth of cigarettes. One of the attackers, said
clerk Sammy Othman, "had a knife on him and he said, 'I
will stab you,' and I told him, 'Don't even think about
it. My knife is more bigger than yours.'"

-- Christian Lorentzen

This is the entire Father's Day speech given by Barack Obama at a church in Chicago - I think whether you support him or not, it is deeply moving and heartfelt - especially towards the end:

Interesting story in this past weekend's New York Times:

Legal Drugs Kill Far More Than Illegal, Florida Says
By DAMIEN CAVE 
June 14, 2008

"...The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids — strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin — caused 2,328.

Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths. Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4,179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466 — fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).

The study also found that while the number of people who died with heroin in their bodies increased 14 percent in 2007, to 110, deaths related to the opioid oxycodone increased 36 percent, to 1,253."

Here are two points of view on a timely topic of conversation in our state - Medical Marijuana:

Argument Against:


Argument In Favor:

This is from the NY Times Editorial page on the Senate Report on Pre-War Intelligence just released on June 5, 2008. Yes they're nominally liberal... but they're also experts in their field interpreting the report as they see it... so PLEASE just read it FIRST, and then make your comments (i.e. interpret the story the way you see it based on the facts presented)? Pretty please? (comments like "its from the NYT - it's a lie" don't past muster - this is thee paper that put out Judith Miller's false stories on Aluminum Tubes after all.)

SUMMARY: "A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda."

June 6, 2008
Editorial
The Truth About the War

It took just a few months after the United States’ invasion of Iraq for the world to find out that Saddam Hussein had long abandoned his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. He was not training terrorists or colluding with Al Qaeda. The only real threat he posed was to his own countrymen.

It has taken five years to finally come to a reckoning over how much the Bush administration knowingly twisted and hyped intelligence to justify that invasion. On Thursday — after years of Republican stonewalling — a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee gave us as good a set of answers as we’re likely to get.

The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports. In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.

The report confirms one serious intelligence failure: President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials were told that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons and did not learn that these reports were wrong until after the invasion. But Mr. Bush and his team made even that intelligence seem more solid, more recent and more dangerous than it was.

The report shows that there was no intelligence to support the two most frightening claims Mr. Bush and his vice president used to sell the war: that Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and had longstanding ties to terrorist groups. It seems clear that the president and his team knew that that was not true, or should have known it — if they had not ignored dissenting views and telegraphed what answers they were looking for.

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

The report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member Senate panel. The five dissenting Republicans first tried to kill it, and then to delete most of its conclusions. They finally settled for appending objections. The bulk of their criticisms were sophistry transparently intended to protect Mr. Bush and deny the public a full accounting of how he took America into a disastrous war.

The report documents how time and again Mr. Bush and his team took vague and dubious intelligence reports on Iraq’s weapons programs and made them sound like hard and incontrovertible fact.

“They continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002, adding that “we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

On Oct. 7, 2002, Mr. Bush told an audience in Cincinnati that Iraq “is seeking nuclear weapons” and that “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” Saddam Hussein, he said, “is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.”

Later, both men talked about Iraq trying to buy uranium in Africa and about the purchase of aluminum tubes that they said could only be used for a nuclear weapons program. They talked about Iraq having such a weapon in five years, then in three years, then in one.

If they had wanted to give an honest accounting of the intelligence on Iraq’s nuclear weapons, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney would have said it indicated that Mr. Hussein’s nuclear weapons program had been destroyed years earlier by American military strikes.

As for Iraq’s supposed efforts to “reconstitute” that program, they would have had to say that reports about the uranium shopping and the aluminum tubes were the extent of the evidence — and those claims were already in serious doubt when Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney told the public about them. That would not have been nearly as persuasive, of course, as Mr. Bush’s infamous “mushroom cloud” warning.

The report said Mr. Bush was justified in saying that intelligence analysts believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But even then, he and his aides glossed over inconvenient facts — that the only new data on biological weapons came from a dubious source code-named Curveball and proved to be false.

Yet Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney persisted in talking as if there were ironclad proof of Iraq’s weapons and plans for global mayhem.

“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us,” Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 29, 2002.

Actually, there was plenty of doubt — at the time — about that second point. According to the Senate report, there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, and the intelligence community never said there was.

The committee’s dissenting Republicans attempted to have this entire section of the report deleted — along with a conclusion that the administration misrepresented the intelligence when it warned of a risk that Mr. Hussein could give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. They said Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney never used the word “intent” and were merely trying to suggest that Iraq “could” do those terrible things.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone drew that distinction after hearing Mr. Bush declare that “Saddam Hussein would like nothing more than to use a terrorist network to attack and to kill and leave no fingerprints behind.” Or when he said: “Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally.”

The Senate report shows that the intelligence Mr. Bush had did not support those statements — or Mr. Rumsfeld’s that “every month that goes by, his W.M.D. programs are progressing, and he moves closer to his goal of possessing the capability to strike our population, and our allies, and hold them hostage to blackmail.”

Claims by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld that Iraq had longstanding ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups also were false, and the Senate committee’s report shows that the two men knew it, or should have.

We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public — or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true — to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.

FOR THE RECORD: The report had bipartisan support: Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel (NE) and Olympia Snowe (ME) endorsed the report and stated that it "accomplished its primary objective." The report concluded that "the Bush administration misused intelligence to build its case [for war in Iraq] in 2003 and misled Americans about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda."

Really interesting post from Juan Cole on the election and Idol... there was a book in the early 70s on how the elections had become like selling two brands of competing toothpastes...

American Idol and American Politics

I find it a little eerie how closely the finale of the television program American Idol resembles the presidential race.

Here you have an older male from the school of hard knocks; a younger, soulful man who inspires his peers; and a woman candidate who shows amazing resilience.

In a way, both Idol and the presidential race exemplify a sort of 'family romance' of American society.

Syesha Mercado was in the bottom three on a number of occasions, but she remained in the competition almost to the end. Don Kaplan wrote of her:

' Every week the bubbly brunette . . . has been on the verge of going home. And every week, it's been someone else who gets the boot . . . "Idol" fanatics have been saying for weeks that each episode of "Idol" would be Mercado's last. "But she keeps breaking through," says Michelle Boros . . . Boros thinks the singer has been underestimated by the experts because "she doesn't quite have that personality X-factor that the 'Idol' people like." . . . Kid Kelly, Sirius radio's vice president of music programming believes Mercado is hanging on because "she's a chameleon. She has this ability to transform herself each week - and at the end of the day, she's very talented."
So you have the woman candidate who is a determined survivor even though it was pretty clear early on that she would not be the winner (winners don't keep being sent to the endangered zone). Ms. Mercado is said to have gotten through the stress of all those close calls by depending on her man.

As for the younger man in the competition, his fans complained that it was unfair to say that David Archuleta was 'inexperienced'. They pointed to his extensive experience on 'Star Search.'

Angie Mohr disagrees, writing:
' David Archuleta, being 17, appeals to younger teens and tweens and that is where his fanbase lies. He is the "pretty boy" of the two and his shy, halting interview responses highlight his youth and inexperience. ' Despite his charisma and almost cult-like following, Archuleta was dogged by controversy and upstaged by a key mentor who proved so disruptive that in the end he had to be banned from the set.

Mohr adds of rocker David Cook:
' David Cook has the rebel just-crawled-out-of-bed, tousled look that draws older teen and early twenties girls but also speaks to the boys-turning-men in the same age range. 'Simon Cowell said of David Cook on Late Night with Jay Leno,
' "Who would I like to win? I'm going to say David Cook," the acerbic judge told Leno. "Only because the guy started off working in a bar. You know, I kinda feel he deserves to win more. Where the other guy, you know, he's 17, cute, you know, hasn't had to work quite as hard as the other one." 'So why do I think there are these, like, cosmic parallels?

Oh, it is just a function of genre. You see, when you cover an election as though it is a talent contest and you zero in on personalities rather than issues, then this is pretty much the sort of melodrama you can construct. It becomes about determined women, less experienced young men, and more hardened older men who know how to mix a stiff drink. You would find these personalities in any tubby novel for sale at an airport bookstore. Mercado, Archuleta and Cook are far more complex and interesting persons than the stock characters that the media has imposed on them. But at least the wrong done them by simplification is minor; they are after all entertainers, and if they attain their potential they will have plenty of opportunity to tell their real stories.

With regard to our political leaders, the infotainment approach obscures the most weighty matters ever to face our Republic, and does a grave disservice to voters whose fate hangs in the balance.

Edward Bernays

I saw a lecture about the father of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, who is famous for convincing women to smoke. And it reminded me of this essay from a Professor Noam at my little brother's college on the mainstream press... I have some issues with the points he makes here... but it's an interesting analysis of how we get news... at least in 1997 - before the advent and power of the internet:

"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream "

October, 1997

Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare yesterday’s version to today’s version. There is a lot of evidence about what’s played up and what isn’t and the way things are structured.

My impression is the media aren’t very different from scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual opinion—there are some extra constraints—but it’s not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite easily among them.

You look at the media, or at any institution you want to understand. You ask questions about its internal institutional structure. You want to know something about their setting in the broader society. How do they relate to other systems of power and authority? If you’re lucky, there is an internal record from leading people in the information system which tells you what they are up to (it is sort of a doctrinal system). That doesn’t mean the public relations handouts but what they say to each other about what they are up to. There is quite a lot of interesting documentation.

Those are three major sources of information about the nature of the media. You want to study them the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule or something. You take a look at the structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure as to what the media product is likely to look like. Then you investigate the media product and see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in media analysis is this last part—trying to study carefully just what the media product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature and structure of the media.

Well, what do you find? First of all, you find that there are different media which do different things, like the entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so on, or even most of the newspapers in the country (the overwhelming majority of them). They are directing the mass audience.

There is another sector of the media, the elite media, sometimes called the agenda-setting media because they are the ones with the big resources, they set the framework in which everyone else operates. The New York Times and CBS, that kind of thing. Their audience is mostly privileged people. The people who read the New York Times—people who are wealthy or part of what is sometimes called the political class—they are actually involved in the political system in an ongoing fashion. They are basically managers of one sort or another. They can be political managers, business managers (like corporate executives or that sort of thing), doctoral managers (like university professors), or other journalists who are involved in organizing the way people think and look at things.

The elite media set a framework within which others operate. If you are watching the Associated Press, who grind out a constant flow of news, in the mid-afternoon it breaks and there is something that comes along every day that says "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front page." The point of that is, if you’re an editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out what the news is, or you don’t want to think about it anyway, this tells you what the news is. These are the stories for the quarter page that you are going to devote to something other than local affairs or diverting your audience. These are the stories that you put there because that’s what the New York Times tells us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow. If you are an editor in Dayton, Ohio, you would sort of have to do that, because you don’t have much else in the way of resources. If you get off line, if you’re producing stories that the big press doesn’t like, you’ll hear about it pretty soon. In fact, what just happened at San Jose Mercury News is a dramatic example of this. So there are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive you right back into line if you move out. If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long. That framework works pretty well, and it is understandable that it is just a reflection of obvious power structures.

The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. "We" take care of that.

What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.

What about their institutional setting? Well, that’s more or less the same. What they interact with and relate to is other major power centers—the government, other corporations, or the universities. Because the media are a doctrinal system they interact closely with the universities. Say you are a reporter writing a story on Southeast Asia or Africa, or something like that. You’re supposed to go over to the big university and find an expert who will tell you what to write, or else go to one of the foundations, like Brookings Institute or American Enterprise Institute and they will give you the words to say. These outside institutions are very similar to the media.

The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It’s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about "Literary Censorship in England" and what it says is that obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian structure. But he said England is not all that different. We don’t have the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.

He talks a little, only two sentences, about the institutional structure. He asks, why does this happen? Well, one, because the press is owned by wealthy people who only want certain things to reach the public. The other thing he says is that when you go through the elite education system, when you go through the proper schools in Oxford, you learn that there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions and if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out. Those two sentences more or less tell the story.

When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, "nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure." Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system.

Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system. What do you expect the news to be like? Well, it’s pretty obvious. Take the New York Times. It’s a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media, it’s big businesses.

Well, what do you expect to happen? What would you predict about the nature of the media product, given that set of circumstances? What would be the null hypothesis, the kind of conjecture that you’d make assuming nothing further. The obvious assumption is that the product of the media, what appears, what doesn’t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power systems that are around them. If that wouldn’t happen, it would be kind of a miracle.

Okay, then comes the hard work. You ask, does it work the way you predict? Well, you can judge for yourselves. There’s lots of material on this obvious hypothesis, which has been subjected to the hardest tests anybody can think of, and still stands up remarkably well. You virtually never find anything in the social sciences that so strongly supports any conclusion, which is not a big surprise, because it would be miraculous if it didn’t hold up given the way the forces are operating.

The next thing you discover is that this whole topic is completely taboo. If you go to the Kennedy School of Government or Stanford, or somewhere, and you study journalism and communications or academic political science, and so on, these questions are not likely to appear. That is, the hypothesis that anyone would come across without even knowing anything that is not allowed to be expressed, and the evidence bearing on it cannot be discussed. Well, you predict that too. If you look at the institutional structure, you would say, yeah, sure, that’s got to happen because why should these guys want to be exposed? Why should they allow critical analysis of what they are up to take place? The answer is, there is no reason why they should allow that and, in fact, they don’t. Again, it is not purposeful censorship. It is just that you don’t make it to those positions. That includes the left (what is called the left), as well as the right. Unless you have been adequately socialized and trained so that there are some thoughts you just don’t have, because if you did have them, you wouldn’t be there. So you have a second order of prediction which is that the first order of prediction is not allowed into the discussion.

The last thing to look at is the doctrinal framework in which this proceeds. Do people at high levels in the information system, including the media and advertising and academic political science and so on, do these people have a picture of what ought to happen when they are writing for each other (not when they are making graduation speeches)? When you make a commencement speech, it is pretty words and stuff. But when they are writing for one another, what do people say about it?

There are basically three currents to look at. One is the public relations industry, you know, the main business propaganda industry. So what are the leaders of the PR industry saying? Second place to look is at what are called public intellectuals, big thinkers, people who write the "op eds" and that sort of thing. What do they say? The people who write impressive books about the nature of democracy and that sort of business. The third thing you look at is the academic stream, particularly that part of political science which is concerned with communications and information and that stuff which has been a branch of political science for the last 70 or 80 years.

So, look at those three things and see what they say, and look at the leading figures who have written about this. They all say (I’m partly quoting), the general population is "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders." We have to keep them out of the public arena because they are too stupid and if they get involved they will just make trouble. Their job is to be "spectators," not "participants."

They are allowed to vote every once in a while, pick out one of us smart guys. But then they are supposed to go home and do something else like watch football or whatever it may be. But the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" have to be observers not participants. The participants are what are called the "responsible men" and, of course, the writer is always one of them. You never ask the question, why am I a "responsible man" and somebody else is in jail? The answer is pretty obvious. It’s because you are obedient and subordinate to power and that other person may be independent, and so on. But you don’t ask, of course. So there are the smart guys who are supposed to run the show and the rest of them are supposed to be out, and we should not succumb to (I’m quoting from an academic article) "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interest." They are not. They are terrible judges of their own interests so we have do it for them for their own benefit.

Actually, it is very similar to Leninism. We do things for you and we are doing it in the interest of everyone, and so on. I suspect that’s part of the reason why it’s been so easy historically for people to shift up and back from being, sort of enthusiastic Stalinists to being big supporters of U.S. power. People switch very quickly from one position to the other, and my suspicion is that it’s because basically it is the same position. You’re not making much of a switch. You’re just making a different estimate of where power lies. One point you think it’s here, another point you think it’s there. You take the same position.

How did all this evolve? It has an interesting history. A lot of it comes out of the first World War, which is a big turning point. It changed the position of the United States in the world considerably. In the 18th century the U.S. was already the richest place in the world. The quality of life, health, and longevity was not achieved by the upper classes in Britain until the early 20th century, let alone anybody else in the world. The U.S. was extraordinarily wealthy, with huge advantages, and, by the end of the 19th century, it had by far the biggest economy in the world. But it was not a big player on the world scene. U.S. power extended to the Caribbean Islands, parts of the Pacific, but not much farther.

During the first World War, the relations changed. And they changed more dramatically during the second World War. After the second World War the U.S. more or less took over the world. But after first World War there was already a change and the U.S. shifted from being a debtor to a creditor nation. It wasn’t huge, like Britain, but it became a substantial actor in the world for the first time. That was one change, but there were other changes.

The first World War was the first time there was highly organized state propaganda. The British had a Ministry of Information, and they really needed it because they had to get the U.S. into the war or else they were in bad trouble. The Ministry of Information was mainly geared to sending propaganda, including huge fabrications about "Hun" atrocities, and so on. They were targeting American intellectuals on the reasonable assumption that these are the people who are most gullible and most likely to believe propaganda. They are also the ones that disseminate it through their own system. So it was mostly geared to American intellectuals and it worked very well. The British Ministry of Information documents (a lot have been released) show their goal was, as they put it, to control the thought of the entire world, a minor goal, but mainly the U.S. They didn’t care much what people thought in India. This Ministry of Information was extremely successful in deluding hot shot American intellectuals into accepting British propaganda fabrications. They were very proud of that. Properly so, it saved their lives. They would have lost the first World War otherwise.

In the U.S., there was a counterpart. Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. The U.S. was a very pacifist country. It has always been. People don’t want to go fight foreign wars. The country was very much opposed to the first World War and Wilson was, in fact, elected on an anti-war position. "Peace without victory" was the slogan. But he was intending to go to war. So the question was, how do you get the pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics so they want to go kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda. So they set up the first and really only major state propaganda agency in U.S. history. The Committee on Public Information it was called (nice Orwellian title), called also the Creel Commission. The guy who ran it was named Creel. The task of this commission was to propagandize the population into a jingoist hysteria. It worked incredibly well. Within a few months there was a raving war hysteria and the U.S. was able to go to war.

A lot of people were impressed by these achievements. One person impressed, and this had some implications for the future, was Hitler. If you read Mein Kampf, he concludes, with some justification, that Germany lost the first World War because it lost the propaganda battle. They could not begin to compete with British and American propaganda which absolutely overwhelmed them. He pledges that next time around they’ll have their own propaganda system, which they did during the second World War. More important for us, the American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.

So what do you do? It’s going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller’s image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.

This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.

His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn’t smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.

Another member of the Creel Commission was Walter Lippmann, the most respected figure in American journalism for about half a century (I mean serious American journalism, serious think pieces). He also wrote what are called progressive essays on democracy, regarded as progressive back in the 1920s. He was, again, applying the lessons of the work on propaganda very explicitly. He says there is a new art in democracy called manufacture of consent. That is his phrase. Edward Herman and I borrowed it for our book, but it comes from Lippmann. So, he says, there is this new art in the method of democracy, "manufacture of consent." By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate. So we’ll have a real democracy. It will work properly. That’s applying the lessons of the propaganda agency.

Academic social science and political science comes out of the same thing. The founder of what’s called communications and academic political science is Harold Glasswell. His main achievement was a book, a study of propaganda. He says, very frankly, the things I was quoting before—those things about not succumbing to democratic dogmatism, that comes from academic political science (Lasswell and others). Again, drawing the lessons from the war time experience, political parties drew the same lessons, especially the conservative party in England. Their early documents, just being released, show they also recognized the achievements of the British Ministry of Information. They recognized that the country was getting more democratized and it wouldn’t be a private men’s club. So the conclusion was, as they put it, politics has to become political warfare, applying the mechanisms of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the first World War towards controlling people’s thoughts.

That’s the doctrinal side and it coincides with the institutional structure. It strengthens the predictions about the way the thing should work. And the predictions are well confirmed. But these conclusions, also, are not allowed to be discussed. This is all now part of mainstream literature but it is only for people on the inside. When you go to college, you don’t read the classics about how to control peoples minds.

Just like you don’t read what James Madison said during the constitutional convention about how the main goal of the new system has to be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," and has to be designed so that it achieves that end. This is the founding of the constitutional system, so nobody studies it. You can’t even find it in the academic scholarship unless you really look hard.

That is roughly the picture, as I see it, of the way the system is institutionally, the doctrines that lie behind it, the way it comes out. There is another part directed to the "ignorant meddlesome" outsiders. That is mainly using diversion of one kind or another. From that, I think, you can predict what you would expect to find.

"...A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public w