Someone Take Away Thomas Friedman's Computer

[Simulist]

Thomas Friedman is part of an army of opinion-makers in America, whose job appears to be to help deliver his constituency (namely the so-called "left") into the hands of the establishment when it needs help most selling its policies, and keeping what remains of the Left at bay.

He's a son of a bitch.

[psynapz]

I've decided I'm going to start putting all my posts in a slightly larger font than American Dream does. Now you'll have an additional way to tell how strongly I feel about what I say.

[seemslikeadream]

I've decided I'm going to start putting all my posts in a slightly larger font than American Dream does. Now you'll have an additional way to tell how strongly I feel about what I say.

I'd go with bigger, bolder, red and moving

and adding the words IRISH HOLOCAUST NEVER FORGET....cause that's what I am really upset about...Israel...Israel....Israel....like no other ethic group has ever experienced such a thing I've dealt with Irish Holocaust deniers all my life



I've decided I'm going to start putting all my posts in a slightly larger font than American Dream does. Now you'll have an additional way to tell how strongly I feel about what I say......... IRISH HOLOCAUST NEVER FORGET..."Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 - 1945"

[Searcher08]

WARNING!!! FEISTY PADDIES INCOMING!!!!

[AlicetheKurious]

From the OP:

Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

Gee, sounds just like something that...Thomas Friedman would write. In fact, Taibbi's writing, though admittedly superior to Friedman's reads like something you'd find at a casting call for his successor. Personally, I was a lot more impressed with Belén Fernández, who struck me as more of a moral and intellectual antidote to Friedman than Taibbi is.

[ninakat]

Someone take away Matt Taibbi's computer. He's an elitistanti-9/11-truth liberal crusader who thinks he's all that and then some.

Corrected to eliminate bullshit pile-on words.

There's only one reason you have a problem with him, and I agree.

Like Scahill, or Naomi Klein, or Amy Goodman, or Counterpunch, Taibbi provides indispensable real reporting on the subjects he covers. Before you bad-mouth him, match the good that he does first, not by pulling bullshit out his ass, but by covering the financial beat like almost no one else is doing on such a mass platform. Plus he is an excellent writer; the world is full of polemic, but good polemic like the above treatment of Friedman is still rare, if one can even recognize it.

.

I wouldn't lump Taibbi in with those others you mentioned. Not only is he vehemently against 9/11 truth, but he makes unforgivable statements like this one, which help guide public opinion in favor of American military adventures abroad: "I’m not defending Achmedinejad, I think he’s nuts and a monstrous dick and I definitely don’t think he should be allowed to have nuclear weapons..."

In my book, he just did more bad than good. That's simply unforgivable.

[JackRiddler]

Thomas Friedman is part of an army of opinion-makers in America, whose job appears to be to help deliver his constituency (namely the so-called "left") into the hands of the establishment when it needs help most selling its policies, and keeping what remains of the Left at bay.

He's a son of a bitch.

Thomas Friedman's constituency is not the left and not so-called, either. Surely we need not belabor that Democratic politicians are not the left any more than CFR members are "collectivists." The kinds of people who wish Friedman's childish views to be espoused are of the power elite. They may occasionally be called liberal, but then they are of the kind who refuse to be associated with anything leftist. Another example, DLC and DNC, are not "left" and wouldn't pretend to be populist, except as required in primary season and on the last six days before a presidential election. Yet another: If you are for NAFTA, WTO, IMF, and the CIA as a repository of reliable intelligence compared to appointed officials, then you might be counted as a liberal, but you are definitively not left. Whatever right-wing pundit is labeled "left" on shows like Crossfire and Hannity and Colmes is also not left.

.

[Belligerent Savant]

Someone take away Matt Taibbi's computer. He's an elitistanti-9/11-truth liberal crusader who thinks he's all that and then some.

Corrected to eliminate bullshit pile-on words.

There's only one reason you have a problem with him, and I agree.

Like Scahill, or Naomi Klein, or Amy Goodman, or Counterpunch, Taibbi provides indispensable real reporting on the subjects he covers. Before you bad-mouth him, match the good that he does first, not by pulling bullshit out his ass, but by covering the financial beat like almost no one else is doing on such a mass platform. Plus he is an excellent writer; the world is full of polemic, but good polemic like the above treatment of Friedman is still rare, if one can even recognize it.

.

Agreed Re: his sharp observations on the financial turmoil of the last few years.

I recall reading Taibbi back in the early 00's when he was a lesser-known regular at NYPress [back then NYPress was worth reading -- i believe it no longer exists]; always looked forward to his writing back then, but his more recent comments Re: 9 1 1 admittedly disappointed me. Of course, it shouldn't be surprising. He's no longer an unknown: he's a regular contributor to Rolling Stone [among other popular publications] sprinkled with guest spots on Real Time with Bill Maher , none of which inspires turns of phrase against the status quo.

Such is the price for a cozy lifestyle.

Friedman, on the other hand, is not even worth the amount of time spent typing this sentence.

[Belligerent Savant]

I wouldn't lump Taibbi in with those others you mentioned. Not only is he vehemently against 9/11 truth, but he makes unforgivable statements like this one, which help guide public opinion in favor of American military adventures abroad: "I’m not defending Achmedinejad, I think he’s nuts and a monstrous dick and I definitely don’t think he should be allowed to have nuclear weapons..."

In my book, he just did more bad than good. That's simply unforgivable.

I haven't really been following the lad since he went 'mainstream', but it seems he's taken the familiar route of slipping in just enough hints in his ramblings to signal that he's yet another player/stooge in the game, despite some colorful [or prior] commentary to the contrary..

[Simulist]

Thomas Friedman is part of an army of opinion-makers in America, whose job appears to be to help deliver his constituency (namely the so-called "left") into the hands of the establishment when it needs help most selling its policies, and keeping what remains of the Left at bay.

He's a son of a bitch.

Thomas Friedman's constituency is not the left and not so-called, either. Surely we need not belabor that Democratic politicians are not the left any more than CFR members are "collectivists." The kinds of people who wish Friedman's childish views to be espoused are of the power elite. They may occasionally be called liberal, but then they are of the kind who refuse to be associated with anything leftist. Another example, DLC and DNC, are not "left" and wouldn't pretend to be populist, except as required in primary season and on the last six days before a presidential election. Yet another: If you are for NAFTA, WTO, IMF, and the CIA as a repository of reliable intelligence compared to appointed officials, then you might be counted as a liberal, but you are definitively not left. Whatever right-wing pundit is labeled "left" on shows like Crossfire and Hannity and Colmes is also not left.

.

Of course Friedman's constituency is the so-called "left." For the reasons I mentioned. And yes, the power elite want him to remain attractive to them. For the reasons I mentioned.

And no, we don't need to "belabor" that Democratic politicians are not the Left. I'm really not sure why anyone here might want to any longer — unless some still-benighted individual might still be hanging around to propose that they are — since the fact that they are not is now inescapably obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

[82_28]

What this is, is a concerted campaign to take away the left and throw that concept of a "left" into the mixing bin of technocratic normalcy. Still call it what it once was, but have rigid policies of authority dictating what it is to be "left". They got to the idiots of the right first. They were simple. Right wing people are emotional idiots. Now they've gotten around to us lo this past decade.

Give yourselves some applause. Believe it or not, we were the last hold outs. Everything now is going to now be simulated. We held on till the bitter end. Technocracy has been overlaying itself upon us for decades. We kind of won the fucking prize as to the ones going in to this new age, emotionally hurt, but ultimately sane and the last ones to do so. . .

RI FTW!!!!

This is nothing to be happy about.

[JackRiddler]

Whereas I think we're seeing the peak for technocratic ideology. Everything decays.

Oh, and simulist: No need to bring the dick's mother into this!

[82_28]

A Fog of Mendacity

By James Howard Kunstler
on February 27, 2012 9:43 AM
Those frightening sounds, sights, and odors on the wind this foreboding snowless winter - like emanations from some back ward of a global psychiatric hospital - are the signs of a nation going completely mad. The traumatic rise of oil prices above the $100 level is one irritant, prompting a range of people-who-oughta-know-better to gibber and fulminate as though they'd been locked in the nation's attic since Thanksgiving with nothing to do but play with a box of pencils. Meanwhile, several absurd "narratives" circulate around the mainstream media that are sure to cause this country more trouble - as any set of pernicious untruths will.
One popular new lie is that US oil production is suddenly so robust that America is about to become a leading world oil exporter again - which is completely untrue. The lie arises at the intersection of wishful thinking and the willful misuse of statistics. It was trumpeted by the appallingly credulous Tom Friedman in his Sunday New York Times column, of all places, and it shows how effective the oil and gas industry's propaganda campaign has been.
A lot of the wishing comes out of the shale oil and shale gas sectors. Those TV commercials you see around the news hours on the cable networks are designed to extract investment capital from elderly people who have been swindled in the bond markets and don't know where to stick their dwindling retirement funds. Shale oil and gas must seem like a good bet to them, especially the ones marooned in retirement housing clusters in dismal places like Arizona and Florida, where not being able to drive is a virtual death sentence.
The US government is in on this propaganda offensive, especially the Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (EIA), which routinely issues overly optimistic reports about future oil production. The political spin is a quixotic effort to promote another commonly touted lie about the future: that the US is approaching a point of "energy independence." You'll know we got there when you have to walk to your new job weeding the potato fields. The mendacity behind this propaganda is strictly the wish of politicians to avoid telling voters the truth, out of sheer cowardice for the consequences. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu will go down in history as a pathetically passive quisling, who thought he was honest and patriotic by standing in the background and keeping his mouth shut.
In fact, a lot of the propaganda behind the current madness is based on the incapacity of Americans to imagine daily life without all the cars. One very active drummer on the propaganda scene is John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell Oil. About a week ago he debated Tad Patzek, a petroleum engineer from the University of Texas. Hofmeister's rap is based on one central fallacious idea: that American life can only continue if we keep all the cars and trucks running. Any other outcome is unthinkable, off the table. To put a finer point on it, he insists that our national identity and destiny are tied to "personal transportation," code for car dependency. The debate was therefore absurd and Patzek was way too polite. He never challenged Hofmeisiter's core idea.
The public's gross misunderstanding of these issues arises over a set of mis-statements made in recent years especially focusing on the Bakken shale oil basin on North Dakota, the various shale gas plays around the country, and the tar sands of Canada (which so many spinmeisters seem to regard as belonging to the United States). The true state of the US oil industry is that we only barely stalled a 40-year decline in oil production by throwing massive amounts of money (capital) at oil reserves that are very expensive and difficult to get. In so far as we've entered the terminal stage of a long debt cycle, one thing we can be sure of is a shrinking pool of real capital investment. Hence the frantic propaganda effort to funnel remaining available money into the shale plays.
A companion fantasy to all this is that the US has a hundred year supply of natural gas. President Obama is guilty of this whopper. (One commentator, financier Bert Dohmen, made the ridiculous claim in a recent podcast on the Financial Sense News Network, that the US has a thousand year supply.) These are the kinds of irresponsible statements that will eventually inflame a public yet again swindled by authorities they desperately want to trust. The truth is we probably have perhaps a seven-year supply of shale gas, and maybe 20 of all gas including the regular old conventional gas. And even that could easily be reduced by the disorders in capital formation now underway in the destabilizing banking sector.
In any case, all this wishing and lying is about to collide with price volatility to make the American voting public absolutely batshit crazy with dread and anger. That, of course, will only prompt more lying, whopper-spinning, and grievance-flogging in the political arena. It will be nearly impossible for the public to evaluate reality. In the meantime, those disorders in banking and financial markets are close to running out of control. Events are tending ever closer to criticality. I believe they will be expressed in political violence around the major party conventions this summer. Those will be interesting fog-lifting weeks.

http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/02/a-fog- ... acity.html

[NeonLX]

That Kunstler article is damned good. I'm sending it to the teabagger I work with. Should be good for a few yuks.

[semper occultus]

Stumbling into the FBI's Global Footprint
Garrett Graff Book Signing Uncovers the Threat Matrix

Before investigating the FBI's overseas operations, Garrett Graff explained to a captive audience at DC's Poetry and Prose on Saturday evening, "I had a vision of the FBI - of what it no longer was." Over the last three years, Graff has traced a linear path of the FBI's evolution from a domestic law enforcement agency to an international force on the frontlines of global counterterrorism.
Graff's new book, The Threat Matrix , was conceived during a Washingtonian Magazine profile on FBI Director Robert Mueller. During the summer of 2008, Graff meandered down a hallway at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA. Without any introduction, Mueller probed Graff about his most recent piece on author Thomas Friedman, who penned one of Mueller's favorite books, The World Is Flat .

http://voices.yahoo.com/stumbling-into-fbis-global-footprint-8312277.html