Selling snake oil as news

I long ago stopped watching TV news and talk shows, either on local stations or on the national networks. They never said anything that I did not hear about elsewhere and instead spent a lot of time on mindless blather that was truly irritating. And of course there were the numerous commercial breaks.

But sometimes you cannot avoid them, such as when the TV is on in a doctor’s waiting room or in the boarding areas for flights and then you would often see segments where the host would interview people who were talking about some new product that supposedly has beneficial effects on health.

On his show Last Week Tonight on Sunday, John Oliver dissected such segments, showing how often they were what are called ‘sponsored content’, i.e. essentially advertisements paid for by the manufacturer of the product that the ‘news’ shows presented without clearly disclosing this key fact.

Towards the end of the segment, Oliver’s team pulls off one of the pranks they are famous for and that is worth watching. They clearly plan these shows well in advance of airing.

Judge strikes down anti-BDS law

Part of the strategy of the Israel lobby in the US to suppress the growing criticisms of the Israeli government’s behavior is to get state legislatures to pass laws that punish people for doing so. One approach is to define anti-Semitism so broadly that pretty much anything you say that is critical of Israel would fall under that umbrella. Another is to essentially mandate loyalty oaths to Israel if you want to do any business with state government.

One form that the latter approach takes is that you have to disavow any support fo the BDS movement if you want to engage in any form with a state institution. These laws have been challenged as infringements on the right to free speech and a federal judge in Georgia just struck down such a state law.
[Read more…]

Disgraceful but unsurprising double standards

There has been a huge outpouring of outrage aimed at the Belarusian government for forcing down a Ryanair plane that was flying over its airspace in order to arrest a dissident journalist Roman Protasevich.

The 26-year-old dissident was traveling on Ryanair flight 4978 from Athens, Greece to Vilnius, Lithuania on Sunday when shortly before touchdown the plane was diverted by Belarusian air traffic control to the capital Minsk over a supposed security alert.

Ryanair’s CEO Michael O’Leary accused Belarus of “state-sponsored piracy,” telling Ireland’s Newstalk radio Monday that he believed Belarusian KGB agents were also on the flight that was carrying 26-year-old Protasevich, who is wanted in Belarus on a variety of charges.

[Read more…]

Trump’s last ditch, futile effort to end the US’s ‘forever wars’

Although Trump was a really terrible president and is an awful human being, he should at least receive some credit for not starting any new major wars, which is the low bar we have for US presidents, although he continued the drone strikes and other military offensives in the ongoing wars. He campaigned in 2016 on ending America’s ‘forever wars’ around the globe but here he was unsuccessful, mainly because he lacked focus and got easily distracted by other issues, often utterly petty ones. He was also thwarted by the many military people he appointed to key positions as his chief of staff, defense secretary, and national security advisor who were able to outmaneuver even the tentative movements he made towards ending the wars. In fact, they actually persuaded him to increase the troop levels in Afghanistan as part of yet another so-called ‘surge’.
[Read more…]

More on the Bob Garfield firing

I wrote a few days ago about long-time co-host of the public radio show On The Media for ‘bullying’. He issued a statement on Twitter saying that he had been fired not for “bullying, per se but for yelling in 5 meeting over 20 years” and that “the provocations were just shocking. In time the story will emerge and it is tragic.”

So I listened on Friday to the first show after the firing. Co-host Brooke Gladstone spent a couple of minutes at the beginning about the case.


[Read more…]

Larry Krasner wins re-election in Philadelphia

In the US, the district attorney in any jurisdiction has a huge amount of influence in who is charged, what bail is required, what kinds of plea deals are offered, and what sentences are sought. Philadelphia is a city that has had a notorious past where district attorneys backed by authoritarian mayors and ruthless policing were the norm for decades. When Larry Krasner ran for district attorney and won four years ago, he was one of the first reformists to win such elections such offices across the country who promised to end the way things were done.

KRASNER WAS ELECTED in 2017 on a promise to end mass incarceration in the city and transform the way prosecutors approach crime. At the time, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch described Krasner’s win as “a revolution.” The win by a former criminal defense and civil rights attorney who had never worked as a prosecutor until his election ushered a new era into an office that had been run for two decades by one of the “deadliest prosecutors” in the country, Lynne Abraham, whose office sent 108 people to death row.
[Read more…]

Yoga is ok but saying ‘namaste’ is not?

Alabama has, after nearly three decades, lifted the ban on teaching yoga in public schools.

Alabama has lifted a three-decade-long ban on allowing yoga to be taught in its public schools – though the word “namaste” and chanting “om” will still be barred in classrooms.

Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed a bill which overrides the state’s 1993 ban on yoga instruction and allows local school boards to decide whether students can be taught the ancient practice.

Some conservative Christian groups fought to retain the ban, arguing that allowing yoga in the classroom could result in children converting to Hinduism.
…

The final legislation was amended to include a regulation that parents must sign a permission slip for students to practice yoga.

Another amendment said: “School personnel may not use any techniques that involve hypnosis, the induction of a dissociative mental state, guided imagery, meditation, or any aspect of eastern philosophy and religious training.”

‘Namaste’ is just a form of greeting, a more respectful form of ‘hello’ that is from Sanskrit and means ‘I bow to you’ and is uttered with a slight bow when meeting someone. While ‘om’ is now used in chants in secular meditation practices, its origins do lie in Asian religions . The use of ‘om’ is now so widespread (and the word is so easy to make puns with) that it is often the source of humor.

I cannot see courts upholding the ban on saying words like ‘namaste’ and ‘om’ unless it is ruled that they are religious words. Even with ‘om’. the courts may rule that it has long since been stripped of its original religious meaning and is now just a word and thus exempt from the Establishment Clause. That is similar to the reasoning the US Supreme Court used in deciding that “In God We Trust” on US currency did not violate the Establishment Clause. I have not been able to find out if the ban on using these words has been challenged in court.

Apart from the legal issues, I find it extraordinary how the beliefs of some devout Christians are so fragile that just doing yoga and saying some words can undermine them.

More on police lies

I recently posted about how the initial police reports of incidents that are routinely used by the media in their reports often contain distortions or outright lies, all. designed to exonerate the police from any blame when things go wrong. I used the George Floyd case as one of three examples. A new report in just the state of California shows how widespread the practice is.

A review of police killings in California showed that law enforcement spokespeople frequently publish highly misleading or sometimes false information about the people they have killed. Over the last five years, the Guardian found at least a dozen examples in the state of initial police statements misrepresenting events, with major omissions about the officers’ actions, inaccurate narratives about the victims’ behaviors, or blatant falsehoods about decisive factors.
[Read more…]

One should not have to even say this …

… but in the propaganda world we live in in the US, it has to be constantly repeated.

Run Lula Run!

The former president of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as just Lula, lambasted the current president Jair Bolsonaro as a psychopath who has made Brazil into a global pariah.

In an interview with the Guardian, Brazil’s former leftist leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who is widely tipped to challenge Bolsonaro for the presidency after regaining his political rights – stopped short of explicitly confirming he would run. But Lula, who rose from rural poverty to become Brazil’s first working-class president, left no doubt he was plotting an extraordinary finale to one of the world’s most enduring and dramatic political careers.
[Read more…]