"Media: The stupid and the liars choose to serve corporations, not people" (Ava and C.I., THE THIRD ESTATE SUNDAY REVIEW):
We think it's sad news that Oliver Stone has had to revisit the assassination of JFK. It's sad but telling -- and most telling on our media.
58 years ago, then-President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The American people didn't buy the whitewash of The Warren Commission or it's 'expert; staff which included Gerald Ford (later a US president -- an unelected US president) and Arlen Specter (later a US senator). A lot of people got 'lucky' or paid off because of how they responded to the assassination. Lie -- like Ford and Specter -- and you or your children have a career -- Dan Rather, Ethan Hawke (are we really going to be the only ones to point out Ethan's connection?), Harry Connick Jr., Cokie Roberts . . .
There were people and outlets who questioned the nonsense in real time -- Jim Garrison, Mark Lane, and both Mort Sahl and Woody Allen made ridiculing The Warren Commission part of their stand up acts. But the establishment managed to stifle a robust discussion by (a) ignoring it and (b) ridiculing it when they had to acknowledge it. And those who stifle a robust discussion get rewarded. Even by the 'left.' Last year, RISING elected to invite on plastic surgery freak Gerald Posner. Gerald dismissed any questions about the assassination in CASE CLOSED. Since the publication of that book, turns out that Posner isn't just a freak in the mirror, he's a freak on the page. He plagiarizes non-stop. He got fired from THE DAILY BEAST for it. Then, turns out, it was discovered he plagiarized in books and writings prior to joining THE DAILY BEAST. But RISING thought he was an acceptable guest. Lies and all, right, doesn't matter a bit. Doesn't matter to VARIETY's Owen Gleibernman who cited the work of the plagiarist to attack Oliver's new documentary.
We have to wonder -- and we did ask an editor we know at VARIETY -- is that now the standard for the rag? You refute an argument by citing the work of a plagiarist?
And let's be clear, Owen refuted nothing. Owen offered nothing. He just dismissed and cited Twink-Faced-Frankenstein Gerald and added his own crackpot claims. Such as? Life is too damn short so we'll do one and only one:
Speaking of the throat wound, if it was, as the documentary claims, an entrance wound, caused by a bullet coming from the grassy knoll, wouldn’t that bullet have ripped through the side of Kennedy’s neck?
As we asked our friend as VARIETY, "How stupid is this bitch?"
He wrote that. Owen wrote that garbage. Took the time to type it up. If it was a throat wound, it wouldn't have come through the side of the neck. Has Owen ever taken his candy ass to Dallas? Has he been to Dealey Plaza? We asked community members Sabina and Dallas to each go there Saturday and stand in the approximate place where JFK was shot.
Now, per The National Archives, JFK was shot at three times. The first shot missed. Shots two and three struck. As we already knew before we looked at the photos that Sabina and Dallas sent us, the Grassy Knoll is in front of where shots two and third struck. Or, if Own prefers, "Front and to the side, front and to the side." (If you suffered through his piece, you got our joke there.) The car was not parallel to the Grassy Knoll when shots two and three were fired.
Maybe it's not just the stupid and the liars. Maybe in the case of Owen Gleibernman it's possible to be both someone who gets it wrong because their stupid and also because they're a liar.
You know what? I may end up highlighting from Ava and C.I.'s piece all week. I will absolutely be highlighting from the section on the Beatles. They wrote a mammoth piece. In fact, let me do a word count on it.
5,652 -- that's how many words are in their article.
They are covering so much. It's a really important piece. Please read it.
The pandemic now seems to have reached the mythic level of gods who once were blamed for everything that went wrong in life. Africans had Anansi the Spider, while the Norse had the trickster Loki. Both were known to assume different identities to wreak disorder or steal precious things.
For politicians, it is useful to have a lurking Loki to explain that social problems are not really of their making, the result of their failures. The Loki factor was evident in the press conference this week when Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked about the rising lawlessness seen in major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles: “Does the president still think that crime is up because of the pandemic?” White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied that “many people have conveyed that.”
Doocy persisted: “So when a huge group of criminals organizes themselves and they want to go loot a store — a CVS, a Nordstrom, a Home Depot until the shelves are clean — do you think that’s because of the pandemic?” Psaki replied: “I think a root cause in a lot of communities is the pandemic, yes.”
That damned Loki.
It's amazing how Jen Psaki can flat out lie and distort reality and get away with it and she's not the only one.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Those protests are being ignored -- again -- by the western press.
The protests continue this morning. And so does violence against the protesters. AL AHMAD TV reports today:
To mark the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, the Civil Development Organization in Sulaymaniyah launched an event to raise awareness on violence against women. The event featured women dummies lined up in the garden, who represented victims of violence. Visitors can hear their sorrowful stories through microphones attached to those dummies. According to the latest statistics, the number of victims of violence has surged despite deterrent laws. In the last 8 months, 10 women lost their lives in an honor killing.
Why was The #MeToo movement necessary in the US? Because women's rights are given lip service from time to time but not truly honored or recognized. And that is reflected in what US news outlets choose to cover when they cover foreign countries. Certainly, THE NEW YORK TIMES' go-go boys in the Green Zone, while getting really close with Iraqi women (prostitutes) elected to ignore the women of Iraq in print. To read those early year reports is to think that Iraq had no women in the whole country. THanks for all your 'ehlp John F. Burns and Dexy. Will you ever attone for what you did? Your wrok really does qualify as a journalistic crime.
And those crimes continue to this day. The pattern set by the 'golden boys' continues. So when Iraqi women fight for their rights, the western press looks the other way. Over and over. It's really past time that women with spaces -- coumnists like you, Michelle Goldberg -- started using your space to point out how your own outlets disappear women from the coverage.
JINHA WOMEN'S NEWS AGENCY reports:
Women in Southern Kurdistan are subjected to domestic violence. They are subjected to physical, psychological, verbal, and economic violence by their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. Many women set themselves on fire to get rid of violence. Neşmik Resul, a psychologist working at a hospital in Sulaymaniyah spoke to our agency about what causes women to set themselves on fire.
Emphasizing that the rate of women, who set themselves on fire, shows the rate of violence against women, Neşmik Resul said, “Before, we worked on survivors, women, men, and children, of self-immolation. 30% of women living in Sulaymaniyah have set themselves on fire. Some of them died before being taken to hospital. We don’t know exactly how many women and young people have set themselves on fire until now but their number is more than we know.”
Stating that the ages of women, who set themselves on fire, are between 14-35, Neşmil Resul said, “Domestic violence and economic problems are the main reason for women to set themselves on fire. Female survivors have received psychological support at the hospital now. They tell us, ‘If there was another choice, we wouldn’t have set us on fire.’ Women set themselves on fire because they think they don’t have another choice.”
“Female survivors are subjected to more violence”
Mentioning that women are afraid of telling violence against them, Neşmil Resul said, “Women don’t report violence faced by them because they are afraid. Female survivors are subjected to more violence by their husbands. Women have no right to make their decision.
“I am ready to provide psychological support to women”
“The survivors need psychological support and I am ready to provide psychological support to them,” Neşmin Resul told us.
These are stories that mater and they are stories that the few western outlets that bother to cover Iraq now manage to regularly miss.
They certainly missed a death in the region yesterday. Khanzad Organization notes:
A police officer was killed by an armed suspect while responding to a domestic violence call late Saturday in Sulaimani according to officials. Several others were injured.
A person who was subject to a complaint clashed with police units from Sulaimani’s Directorate of Combatting Violence Against Women who were in the process of arresting him, the directorate’s media head Jamal Rasul told Rudaw following the accident.
Police officer Mohammed Latif was killed and three others were injured, he added. The alleged suspect also set the police car on fire, Rasul noted.
