Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1344
January 12, 2015
Sticking It to Chomsky
Language: the Cultural Tool
by Daniel Everett
Profile Books Ltd (2012)
Book Review
The purpose of this book is to outline a dispute in the linguistic community between those who believe that language is acquired – that human beings develop language as a cultural tool – and “nativists” who believe that people develop language because of their genetic programming.
Noam Chomsky, who is better known as an activist and dissident, is also considered the founder of modern linguistics. Nativists like Chomsky argue that language development is genetic mainly because all human beings acquire language, regardless of their intelligence, all languages have a similar core grammar, including Creole languages invented by children (actually they don’t, as Everett demonstrates) and all children follow the same developmental stages in learning language.
By examining linguistic research into the structure and function of language, as well as the biological requirements necessary to create it, Everett essentially demolishes all of Chomsky’s arguments – but in a nice way. As a former Wycliffe bible translator, Everett lived for many years in the Amazon and has researched over a dozen indigenous languages of Brazil. He has special interest in the language and culture of the Piraha tribe.
Everett takes the side of Aristotle, who first proposed that language is a tool 2300 years ago. Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) was the first to articulate this view in the modern area. He believed human language was developed and shaped by the needs of social interaction.
I’ve always been troubled the unquestioning adulation Chomsky receives from the activist community, especially in view of his dismissive attitude towards an extensive body of research pointing to a government role in 9-11 and the John F Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. Thus I was intrigued to learn of similar concerns in the linguistic community about the unquestioning embrace of his linguistic theories.
January 11, 2015
Mourning Charlie Hebdo Journalists, While Ignoring that US-NATO State-Sponsored Terrorism is the “Number One Killer” of Journalists
How hypocritical. Why are the lives of eight French cartoonists worth more than the hundreds of journalists killed by US/NATO allies?
Originally posted on Counter Information:
By Julie Lévesque
Global Research, January 10, 2015
In the wake of the terrorist attack by self-proclaimed Al-Qaeda operatives killing 12 people including 8 journalists from the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the Western elite and mainstream media display of compassion and indignation highlights their complaisance towards Western and Israeli state terrorism.
Before exploring the broader issue, it should be noted that while the Paris attacks bear the hallmarks of a possible false flag, such as the ID card left in the car by one terrorist, an examination of the false flag hypothesis is excluded outright, completely ignored by the mainstream media. Moreover, one of the alleged terrorists, Cherif Kouachi told a French news outlet he had been financed by former Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki, an American cleric who dined at the Pentagon a few months after 9/11 and «worked as a triple agent and an FBI asset…
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January 10, 2015
Climate Change-Lite for Kiddies.
Saving My Tomorrow – Part 1 and 2
HBO (2014)
Film Review
I watched this two part film with some trepidation, assuming that an HBO documentary would be full of spin. Sadly it fulfilled my worst expectations. Aimed at age 5-12, the video offers a fairly accurate presentation of the theory of greenhouse warming. Children will also enjoy some great shots of insect life and the devastation Hurricane Sandy caused on Long Island.
That being said, I think a lot of adults will react as I did and feel manipulated. Developmentally, children up to age 18-19 adopt strong political views under parental (and occasionally teacher) influence. Rather than portraying this honestly, Saving My Tomorrow makes it appear as if a bunch of American child prodigies suddenly woke up one morning and decided to protest against oil trains and fossil fuel dependence. Despite being a strong climate activist, I resent being propagandized as much as the next person.
In my case, this sense of manipulation was compounded by the slick packaging, consisting of cute wise-child soundbites, interspersed with celebrity readings and musical numbers written by the kids themselves. In my view, the filmmakers needed to be more transparent by exploring the parents’ behind-the-scenes role in promoting their children’s activism.
The other glaring dishonesty was HBO’s failure to mention the role of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the near demise of the American monarch population (we don’t allow GMO crops in New Zealand and have plenty of monarch butterflies).
While adults will be annoyed by the slick packaging, the documentary is probably a good introduction to climate change for young children. I myself really enjoyed the scene of Long Island children reading their essays on Hurricane Sandy and the energy saving tips kids give during the credits.
***
Since I first posted this review, I note that HBO has had both videos taken down by YouTube. Don’t worry you’re not missing much.
January 9, 2015
US ‘perception management’: CIA’s hidden hand in ‘democracy’ groups
Democracy: America’s number one export. The CIA-funded foundations Freedom House and NED were major instigators in the color revolutions in Eastern Europe (including the most recent coup in Ukraine) and the Arab Spring revolutions. Look out Canada.
Originally posted on Tony Seed's Weblog:
Freedom House, New York City
Special Report: Documents from the Reagan presidential library reveal that two major institutions promoting “democracy” and “freedom” — Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy — worked hand-in-glove, behind-the-scenes, with a CIA propaganda expert in the 1980s, reports ROBERT PARRY*. Both these agencies operate inside Canada and are funded by the Harper government.
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January 8, 2015
When Government Goes to War Against Us
Cointelpro 101: The Sabotage of Legitimate Dissent
By Andres Alegria, Prentis Hemphill, Anita Johnson and Claude Marks (2010)
Film Review
Cointelpro is the name given to the illegal counterinsurgency program FBI director J Edgar Hoover launched in the fifties and sixties against the civil rights movement, the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the Chicano/Mexicano rights movement, unions and different social justice movements. Its various tactics included illegal surveillance, wiretaps and break-ins, extrajudicial assassinations and plots to frame activists for crimes they didn’t commit.
The program had to be kept secret because it was illegal. The American public only learned about Cointelpro after antiwar activists broke into a Philadelphia office the FBI shared with the Selective Service in 1971. Intending to destroy draft registration documents, they accidentally stumbled across Cointelpro-related letters and memos and leaked them to the press.
Hoover’s War Against Black Empowerment
Cointelpro’s most high profile target was the civil rights and black liberation movement. Hoover openly wrote of his goal of “liquidating” the entire Black Panther leadership. Some Black Panther leaders were killed in cold blood. Chicago leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were shot in their sleep in 1969. The same year the FBI assassinated two Los Angeles Black Panther leaders at UCLA and two San Diego leaders while they were selling newspapers.
When Vietnam veteran Geronimo Pratt assumed leadership of the LA branch, the police (in cooperation with the FBI) tried to kill him via the armed assault and bombing of the LA Black Panther office. When this failed, they framed him on a murder charge, despite FBI surveillance records that placed him in Oakland at the time of the murder. Pratt spent twenty-seven years in prison before these records surfaced and exonerated him.
The Church Committee, a senate committed convened in the mid-seventies, identified more than two hundred criminal FBI attacks against Black Panther leaders, including murder, driving people insane and framing them on phony charges. No FBI operatives were ever prosecuted for these crimes, and more than a dozen black liberation activists (including Mumia Abu Jamal and Mike, Debbie and Janet Africa) remain in prison on trumped up charges.
The Reign of Terror at Pine Ridge
Following the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM) to demand enforcement of treaty rights, Hoover launched a reign of terror (1973-76) on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. During this period, death squads killed or disappeared scores of residents who dared to challenge the corrupt tribal leadership. When reservation elders sought the protection of the AIM leadership, one them, Leonard Peltier, was wrongfully convicted of the double murder of two FBI agents. As in Pratt’s case, the FBI deliberately concealed evidence exonerating him. After nearly forty years, he, too, remains in prison.
Cointelpro Never Ended
Contrary to government claims, Cointelpro didn’t end in 1971 when it was exposed. In 1983, documents came to light revealing that the FBI had illegally infiltrated, spied and disrupted the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. The latter, a group I belonged to between 1982 and 1985, was a grassroots organization that campaigned against Reagan’s military support of El Salvador’s right wing dictatorship.
This documentary finishes by pointing out that many previously illegal Cointelpro activities – warrantless surveillance and wiretapping, clandestine break-ins and pre-emptive arrest for dissident political views – are now perfectly legal under the Patriot Act.
January 6, 2015
Doctors Resist Changes to Reduce Medical Errors
Avoidable Errors Third Leading Cause of Death
Preventable medical errors remain the third highest cause cause of death in the US – following heart disease and cancer. They claim the lives of 400,000 Americans every year. In the following TED talk, Boston surgeon and public health researcher Dr Atul Gawande talks about the World Health Organization (WHO) approaching him to research possible methods of reducing avoidable surgical deaths.
What Gawande discovered was that the role of doctors has failed to keep up with the increasing complexity of medical technology. Prior to the discovery of penicillin in 1945, most patients who were ill enough to be hospitalized died. Occasionally a courageous doctor would save a patient with heroic and/or revolutionary treatment. This caused doctors who were daring “cowboys” and “pioneers” to be sought out and rewarded.
In the new millennium, Gawande argues, amazing new technologies, rather than brilliant doctors, are saving patients. Although the increasing complexity of medical technology requires ever larger medical teams, the health system is still oriented around the skill and expertise of individual doctors. We’re still relying on the brilliance of individuals. What we really need is pit crews.
Gawande approached the challenge WHO gave him by looking at other high risk professions, such as skyscraper construction and aircraft manufacture. He wanted to see what they did to reduce the risk of avoidable errors.
He was inspired by the checklists Boeing uses at every stage of manufacturing – for key details that can get forgotten. He developed a similar series of surgical checklists, which he tested in a dozen different countries. The checklists reduced complication rates by 35% and death rates by 45%.
Gawande published his remarkable findings in the New Yorker in 2007 and in a 2009 book, The Checklist Manifesto.
Seven years later the majority of hospitals and surgical teams refuse to implement Gawande’s checklists – for reasons he fails to specify. Apparently their responsibility in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of patients isn’t sufficient to inspire change. I must admit this mystifies me.
photo credit: MilitaryHealth via photopin cc
Also posted in Veterans Today
January 5, 2015
Britain: ‘Toddlers at risk of becoming terrorists’
Under the British government’s latest anti-terrorism bill, nursery school staff and registered child minders are required to report toddlers at risk of becoming terrorists. Senior management must provide training to give staff the knowledge and confidence to identify children and risk of being drawn into terrorism and refer them for help. No kidding. Shades of Hitler Youth.
Originally posted on Tony Seed's Weblog:
Creating an image of an enemy within and “home-grown terrorism” – Children, extremist ideas and the British establishment
Home Secretary Theresa May presented the government’s Counter Terrorism and Security Bill to Parliament on Wednesday, November 26, declaring: “We are in the middle of a generational struggle against a deadly terrorist ideology. These powers are essential to keep up with the very serious and rapidly changing threats we face.”
The website Moon of Alabama contained the following item yesterday:
The British government has been taken over by lunacy reports the Telegraph:
Nursery school staff and registered childminders must report toddlers at risk of becoming terrorists, under counter-terrorism measures proposed by the Government. The directive is contained in a 39-page consultation document issued by the Home Office in a bid to bolster its Prevent anti-terrorism plan.
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January 4, 2015
How Advertising Hurts Women
Killing Us Softly 3
Jean Kilbourne (2000)
Film Review
Killing Us Softly 3 is the third Jean Kilbourne documentary on the advertising industry’s destructive effect on women. It updates Killing Us Softly (1979) and Still Killing us Softly (1987). It’s presented in lecture format, illustrated by dozens of ad images.
The majority of Americans deny being influenced by advertising. Kilbourne challenges this. Modern advertising deliberately targets the unconscious. Ads are everywhere, continuously surrounding us with unconscious messaging about values and attitudes, as well as products.
Advertising has a massive impact on the way women think about themselves and the way they are viewed in society. The number one message pounded home by the ad industry is that women should be judged by the way they look. The expectation is flawlessness (young, thin, white and perfectly proportioned and groomed). Important secondary messages are the hard work it takes to look that way and that women who don’t measure up should feel guilty and ashamed. Sex is used to sell everything. Kilbourne is particularly concerned about the sexualization of children and teenagers in ads deliberately modeled after child pornography.
Only 5% of women have a model’s tall thin body type, with the narrow hips, long legs small breasts (unless they’re enhanced) favored by the fashion industry. This body type is based on genetic inheritance and can’t be achieved by diet, exercise or surgery, no matter how hard the advertising industry tries to persuade us otherwise. Often models are airbrushed to appear thinner and more flawless than they really are.
This constant emphasis on an unachievable ideal also negatively impacts the way men feel about real women, who are pear shaped. In addition, the objectification of women (ie their portrayal as sex objects) is directly linked to increased violence towards women. Viewing people as objects rather than human beings makes it easier to commit violence against them (and is used in military training).
The problem is aggravated by a growing tendency to eroticize violence and male dominance in advertising imagery.
Killing Us Softly 4, produced in 2010, isn’t available on YouTube for copyright reasons. It can be viewed for free on trutubetv (an uncensored noncorporate alternative to YouTube now that it’s been taken over by Google).
Killing US Softly 4 repeats most of the same ad images as number 3 but puts more emphasis on upsurge of appearance medicine (plastic and laser surgery, botox injections, etc). It also bemoans the introduction of size 0 and size 00 clothing, the pressure this places on models to starve themselves and the rise of eating disorders in the industry. Anna Carolina Reston was still modeling in 2009 when she died of anorexia nervosa.
January 3, 2015
The NYPD’s Work Stoppage Is Surreal, by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Furious with Mayor de Blasio, New York police are in the middle of a “slowdown.” Cops have decided to make arrests “only when they have to.” Makes you wonder who, exactly, they were arresting before.
Originally posted on 2012: What's the 'real' truth?:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/27811-the-nypds-work-stoppage-is-surreal
ALSO SEE: Murders Drop to a Record Low, but Officers Aren’t Celebrating
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
01 January 15
In an alternate universe, the New York Police might have just solved the national community-policing controversy.
race yourselves for a weird night. There might be a little extra drama when the ball drops in Times Square, thanks to one of the more confusing political protests in recent memory.
On a night when more than a million potentially lawbreaking, probably tipsy revelers will be crowding the most densely-populated city blocks in America, all eyes will be on the city cops stuck with holiday duty.
Why? Because the New York City Police are in the middle of a slowdown. The New York Post is going so far as to call it a “virtual work stoppage.”
Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief…
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January 2, 2015
Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
Robert Greenwald (2004)
Film Review
Outfoxed makes the case that media mogul Rupert Murdoch is first and foremost a politician – that he uses Fox News and his vast media monopoly* to promote conservative politicians who protect his financial interests. As evidence, it provides dozens of Fox News broadcast clips, samples of Roger Ailes’ daily editorial memos, and interviews with former Fox producers, reporters and commentators.
Murdoch used 21st Century Fox and the six TV stations owned by Metromedia he acquired in 1986 to form the Fox Broadcasting Company. In 1996, he entered the cable news market, hiring Roger Ailes to set up and run the Fox News Channel, a 24-hour cable news stations.
The former reporters and producers featured in the documentary talk at length about Ailes’ daily memos about topics they were required to cover (and avoid) and the spin he expected. Murdoch has a special hatred for the Kennedys, Bill Clinton, anti-war movie stars and Jesse Jackson and Fox employees were expected to invent opportunities to demonize them. The memos they received also heavily emphasized terrorism, fear of terrorism and divisive wedge issues, such as abortion, gay rights and religion, especially in election years. The intention was to distract US voters from issues, like the economy, that were problematic for Republicans.
Reporters and producers who failed to follow Ailes’ directives would be chewed out, demoted or fired. Commentators who failed to follow Murdoch’s party line would have their contracts canceled.
Election and War Coverage
Outfoxed devotes special attention to the biased coverage of the 2000 and 2004 election campaigns and the War in Iraq. In their vicious demonization of John Kerry in 2004, Fox News engaged in a deliberate attack campaign more typical of a political party.
The Fox Effect
Filmmaker Robert Greenwald also examines the effect Fox News has on other TV networks when they feel pressured to report Fox-initiated propaganda as news. The rumor that John Kerry looked and acted French – a pure Fox News invention – is a case in point. Likewise in 2000, ABC, NBC and CBS all declared Bush the winner at 2 am on election night, immediately after the Fox analyst (Bush’s first cousin) did so. Only Associated Press reported, correctly, that the Florida race was too close to call.
The Internet Effect
Produced ten years ago, the film’s call to action – lobbying the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – is totally obsolete. Greenwald had no way of predicted the social media revolution or its negative effect on traditional media. Young people no longer rely on TV for news and information. Young Americans (age 25-54) particularly avoid Fox News – there’s no way a network catering to an older male Republican base can possibly address the issues that concern them. This is reflected in a steady decline in Fox News ratings over the last five years.
*In addition to Fox Networks, Rupert Murdoch owns Harper Collins, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the British Sun, Times and Sky Television, five regional US newspapers and more than 100 national and regional Australian newspapers.
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