Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 120

Cable Guy

Three years ago today, in the middle of my marathon daily blogging of all things WikiLeaks (it went on, rather famously, for half a year), I wrote the following over at Huffington Post, assembling what had already emerged from the "Cablegate" leak.  It's a useful reminder of how important, and varied, these revelations were/are.  Besides the WikiLeaks book mentioned below, I wrote (with Kevin Gosztola) the first book on Pvt. Manning.

***
 Many critics of WikiLeaks still, somehow, claim that there's "nothing new" in the Cablegate releases (now stretching back to November 28), that most of the issues raised raised by the cables are old hat, and the impact (as in Tunisia, for example) overhyped.

So it seems useful here to assemble most of the major revelations. This seems especially valuable because the reporting is now scattered around the globe, often emerging from smaller papers.

At the outset, the cables were published by the media partners, not WikiLeaks itself. The New York Times made good on its promise to cover them hot and heavy for about ten days, while the Guardian did all that and more. But Times coverage quickly grew sporadic, the Guardian fell out with Assange (he has now turned to the Telegraph), while the Norwegian daily Aftenposten picked up some of the slack.

Here are brief summaries, listed chronologically, as they appeared. There are others, and a great deal more, in my new book The Age of WikiLeaks , which is also available as an e-book (also for phones, iPad etc.).
Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda.Yemeni president lied to his own people, claiming his military carried out air strikes on militants actually done by U.S. All part of giving U.S. full rein in country against terrorists.Shocking levels of U.S. spying at the United Nations (beyond what was commonly assumed) and intense use of diplomats abroad in intelligence-gathering roles. U.S. tried to get Spain to curb its probes of Gitmo torture and rendition. Saudi king suggested to Obama that we plant micro-chips on Gitmo detainees.State Dept memo: U.S.-backed 2009 coup in Honduras was 'illegal and unconstitutional.'"Cables showed the UK promised in 2009 to protect U.S interests in the official Chilcot inquiry on the start of the Iraq war.American and British diplomats fear Pakistan's nuclear weapons program -- with poor security -- could lead to fissile material falling into the hands of terrorists or a devastating nuclear exchange with India. Washington was misled by our own diplomats on Russia-Georgia showdown. The UK sidestepped a ban on housing cluster bombs. Officials concealed from Parliament how the U.S. is allowed to bring weapons on to British soil in defiance of treaty. NYT headline: "An Afghan Quandary: Fighting Corruption With Corrupt Officials." Summary: "From hundreds of diplomatic cables, Afghanistan emerges as a looking-glass land where bribery, extortion and embezzlement are the norm and the honest man is a distinct outlier.Afghan vice president left country with52 million "in cash."Potential environmental disaster kept secret by the US when a large consignment of highly enriched uranium in Libya came close to cracking open and leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere. U.S. used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at last year's crucial climate conference in Copenhagen. Details on Vatican hiding big sex abuse cases in Ireland. Vatican cables so "inflammatory" they could spark violence against Catholics in UK. Oil giant Shell claims to have "inserted staff" and fully infiltrated Nigeria's government.Guardian goes nuclear: "The leaked U.S. cables reveal the constant, largely unseen, work by American diplomatic missions around the world to try to keep the atomic genie in its bottle and forestall the nightmare of a terrorist nuclear attack."Cable shows Israel cooperating with Abbas vs. Hamas during Gaza attacks. U.K. training death squads in Bangladesh, widely denounced by human rights groups.Cable finds U.S. criticizing the Vatican for not supporting population control methods. The U.S. ambassador there lamented, "the Vatican will continue to oppose aggressive population control measures to fight hunger or global warming."U.S. pressured the European Union to accept GM -- genetic modification, that is.Hundreds of cables detail U.S. use of diplomats as "sales" agents, more than previously thought, centering on jet rivalry of Boeing vs. Airbus. Hints of corruption and bribes. Millions in U.S. military aid for fighting Pakistani insurgents went to other gov't uses (or stolen) instead. Russia is a "mafia state."Italian leader Berlusconi entertains escorts at "Bunga Bunga" parties Israel wanted to bring Gaza to the"brink of collapse."Extremely important historical document finally released in full: Ambassador April Glaspie's cable from Iraq in 1990 on meeting with Saddam Hussein before Kuwait invasion.Dalai Lama: Action vs. climate change should take priority even over changes in Tibet. Cables on Tunisia appear to help spark revolt in that country. The country's ruling elite described as "The Family," with Mafia-like skimming throughout the economy. The country's First Lady may have made massive profits off a private school. U.S. knew all about massive corruption in Tunisia back in 2006 but went on supporting the government anyway, making it the pillar of its North Africa policy. The U.S. secret services used Turkey as a base to transport terrorism suspects as part of its extraordinary rendition program.As protests spread in Egypt, cables revealed that strong man Suleiman was at center of government's torture programs, causing severe backlash for Mubarak after he named Suleiman vice president during the revolt.Other cables revealed or confirmed widespread Mubarak regime corruption, police abuses and torture, and claims of massive Mubarak famiiy fortune, significantly influencing media coverage and U.S. response. Egyptian torturers trained by FBI--although allegedly to teach the human rights issues.Cables reveal torture of political prisoners and others in Bahrain as it, too, faces revolts. NYT: "In cables made public by WikiLeaks, the Bush and Obama administrations repeatedly characterized Bahrain as more open and reform-minded than its neighbors, and pushed back when human rights groups criticized the government."Several 9/11 conspirators in U.S. fled the country. Mariah Carey, Beyonce, other stars paid sums up to1 million to perform for Gaddafi's son.Others cables reveal wild and/or corrupt behavior by Gaddafi and his family. Other cables on Libya still leaking out nearly every day.

Your Daily Vonnegut

Starting last month,  I've posted a quote a day from Kurt Vonnegut, usually witty and/or political in nature.  My new e-book, Vonnegut and Me details (often in a fun way and just $2.99 for iPad, Kindles, etc.) my "conversations and close encounters of a weird kind" with the famed novelist, starting in 1970 and then over the years.  And see excerpt from book here, "When Vonnegut Met Kilgore Trout."

Classic:  “If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?”


Vonnegut from late in his life:  "I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”

For Christmas, Kurt wrote a poem for In These Times awhile back, concluding with this:

I wish I could wave a magic wand
this Christmas,
and give every desperately lonesome
and hungry and lost American
man, woman, or child
the love and comfort and support
of an extended family.
Just two people and a babe in the manger,
given a heartless Government,
is no survival scheme. 

On one of his most famous characters, the  philanthropist Eliot Rosewater... "There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."

For Wednesday, a character in Happy Birthday, Wanda June, named Looseleaf Harper wonders what happened while he was lost in the jungle in the 1960s for a few years:  "You know what gets me? How everybody says 'fuck' and 'shit' all the time. I used to be scared shitless if I'd say 'fuck' or 'shit' in public, by accident. Now everybody says 'fuck' and 'shit', 'fuck' and 'shit' all the time. Something very big must have happened while we were out of the country."

For Tuesday, from interview at McSweeny's, 2002:  "The telling of jokes is an art of its own, and it always rises from some emotional threat. The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful."

And for Monday:  "Our government is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor's dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens."

For Sunday, from a 2003 interview:  "The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy."

Friday's pick: "The two most radical ideas, inserted in the midst of conventional human thought, are E=MC2—matter and energy are the same kind of stuff—and 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.'”

For Wednesday, a classic from Cat's Cradle so applicable today:  "The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus:  Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's.   Bokonon's paraphrase was this:  Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.”

The Tuesday Pick, from Bluebeard:   "Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"

For Monday, on his political philosophy: "It’s perfectly ordinary to be a socialist. It’s perfectly normal to be in favor of fire departments. There was a time when I could vote for economic justice, and I can’t anymore. I cast my first vote for a socialist candidate—Norman Thomas, a Christian minister. I used to have three socialist parties to choose from—the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Workers Party, and I forgot what the other one was."

For Saturday, from Slaughterhouse-Five: "You'll pretend you were men instead of babies,  she said, and you'll be portrayed in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.

"So then I understood. It was war that made her so angry. She didn't want her babies killed in wars. And she thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies."

Can't believe I'm just getting around to posting this, from the same 2003 interview (see below), which I use in my book Atomic Cover-up :  "The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki. Not of Hiroshima, which might have had some military significance. But Nagasaki was purely blowing away yellow men, women, and children. I’m glad I’m not a scientist because I’d feel so guilty now."

Thursday's selection, from 2003 interview with The Progressive:  "It’s incumbent on the President to entertain. Clinton did a better job of it—and was forgiven for the scandals, incidentally. Bush is entertaining us with what I call the Republican Super Bowl, which is played by the lower classes using live ammunition."

For Wednesday, from his late Man Without a Country:  "Albert Einstein and Mark Twain gave up on the human race at the end of their lives, even though Twain hadn't even seen the First World War. War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.  Shrapnel was invented by an Englishman of the same name. Don't you wish you could have something named after you?"

Tuesday's pick is one of his most famous lines from Cat's Cradle (he could be talking about, say, cable news today):  "People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say."

For Monday:  "Being a Humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you are dead."


Sunday's pick, from The Sirens of Titan:  "The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart."

For Saturday: "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, ‘The Beatles did.'"

Friday's pick, from Hocus Pocus:  "Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise."

For Thursday, one of his favorite subjects,  from Cold Turkey:  "I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other."  (Note: He would not get his wish.)


For Wednesday, the macho hunter from his play Happy Birthday, Wanda June (which I write about in my book), speaks:  "Don't lecture me on race relations. I don't have a molecule of prejudice. I've been in battle with every kind of man there is. I've been in bed with every kind of woman there is -- from a Laplander to a Tierra del Fuegian. If I'd even been to the South Pole, there'd be a hell of a lot of penguins who looked like me."

For Tuesday, after another U.S. gun massacre, from Slaughter-house Five:   "My father died many years ago now — of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.”

For Monday,  from Vonnegut's Blues:  "If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC."

For Sunday, we get Kurt on evolution from his 2005 appearance on The Daily Show:   "I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That’s why we’ve got giraffes and hippopotami--and the clap."

For Saturday, on guns (from Timequake):  "That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing father or Fats [Waller] or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, 'being alive is a crock of shit.'"

For Friday, from Slapstick:  "I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool."

For Thursday, short and sweet and one of his most famous, from Cat's Cradle:  "Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'"

For Wednesday, from  Cold Turkey: "For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.  'Blessed are the merciful' in a courtroom? 'Blessed are the peacemakers' in the Pentagon? Give me a break!"

For Tuesday, a character from Mother Night responds to question, does he hate America?  He replies: "That would be as silly as loving it.  It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will."

Today: "A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends."

For Friday, from Cold Turkey:  "Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas."

For Thursday, as war threatens, Kurt on the arts vs. the military science, from Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons:  "The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage— and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptability of man in the vastness of the universe. Still— I deny that contemptability, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art."

For today, Kurt on where his ideas came from, with a comparison to my man Ludwig:  "Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.”

For Tuesday, from Mother Night: "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."

A quote for Monday:  "Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?"

Today's offering:  "Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum."

Friday, from an interview:  "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."

A famous quote by Bokonon from  Cat's Cradle for today: "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'   Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."

Our Wednesday quote, from Slaughterhouse-Five:  "The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this:  Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes."

Our Tuesday quote, from Cat's Cradle, as the U.S. promises another missile attack:  "Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns."

Our Monday quote, from his early Sirens of Titan:  "There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."

Our Sunday quote: "The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead."

Another quote comes from one of his late in life columns for In These Times, in 2004:  “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”

From my 1974 interview with him, re: why he had grown so popular. "Well, I'm screamingly funny.  I really am in the books. And I talk about stuff Billy Graham won't talk about, for instance, you know, is it wrong to kill?”

One of his most famous, relating to his character Howard W. Campbell, the American double-agent who too gleefully helped Hitler:  "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

From my 1974 interview with him:  "When you get to be my age, you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with.  You all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school -- class officers, cheerleaders, and all.”

Another Attack on Pussy Riot

The two Pussy Riot women violently attacked again, in a McDonald's in Russia.  One suffered cuts to forehead and maybe a concussion.

Beethoven and 'The Cursed Cellist'

Today's "Composer's Notebook" from American Public Media, and then the quartet (in performance I attended). --Barbara Bedway

Today in 1825, one of Beethoven’s late chamber works, his String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127, received its premiere in Vienna by the Schuppanzigh Quartet. The Quartet had only received the music two weeks earlier, which, in those days, would be plenty of time for experienced musicians to work up a normal string quartet of that day. But Beethoven’s new quartet was harmonically and structurally far from the norm for 1825.

Even Beethoven knew as much, and drafted a humorous “contract” for himself and the four musicians to sign. It read: “Each one is herewith given his part and is bound by oath and pledged on his honor to do his best, to distinguish himself and to vie with the other in excellence. Signed: Schuppanzigh, Weiss, Linke, the grand master’s accursed cellist Holtz, and the last, but only in signing, Beethoven.”

Even so, the premiere was under-rehearsed, and the players seemed visibly unhappy with their difficult assignment. Fortunately, Beethoven was not present, but when he learned of the poor performance, he was furious. He immediately contacted another violinist, Joseph Böhm, whose quartet meticulously rehearsed the new piece under the composer’s watchful eye.

Their performance was better received, and in April of 1825, Böhm took the unusual step of programming the difficult new work TWICE on the same program. As a contemporary review put it, this time, “the misty veil disappeared and Beethoven’s splendid work of art radiated its dazzling glory.”

Today's "Composer's Notebook" from American Public Media,...

Today's "Composer's Notebook" from American Public Media, and part of the quartet. --Barbara Bedway

Today in 1825, one of Beethoven’s late chamber works, his String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127, received its premiere in Vienna by the Schuppanzigh Quartet. The Quartet had only received the music two weeks earlier, which, in those days, would be plenty of time for experienced musicians to work up a normal string quartet of that day. But Beethoven’s new quartet was harmonically and structurally far from the norm for 1825.

Even Beethoven knew as much, and drafted a humorous “contract” for himself and the four musicians to sign. It read: “Each one is herewith given his part and is bound by oath and pledged on his honor to do his best, to distinguish himself and to vie with the other in excellence. Signed: Schuppanzigh, Weiss, Linke, the grand master’s accursed cellist Holtz, and the last, but only in signing, Beethoven.”

Even so, the premiere was under-rehearsed, and the players seemed visibly unhappy with their difficult assignment. Fortunately, Beethoven was not present, but when he learned of the poor performance, he was furious. He immediately contacted another violinist, Joseph Böhm, whose quartet meticulously rehearsed the new piece under the composer’s watchful eye.

Their performance was better received, and in April of 1825, Böhm took the unusual step of programming the difficult new work TWICE on the same program. As a contemporary review put it, this time, “the misty veil disappeared and Beethoven’s splendid work of art radiated its dazzling glory.”

Stamp Out Fox?

Jon Stewart hits Fox coverage of food stamps issue.

Some Feat

Yikes, just out is a thirteen CD boxed set for Little Feat, one of the great '70s bands that continued on despite the death of key writer Lowell George in 1979.  I loved all the '70s albums with Lowell but lost touch thereafter pretty much, though many I respect still dug them.  Here's a Slate appraisal on all this, with picks for their best. 

I like to tell the story of drummer Richie Heyward telling me in 1971 that I had single-handedly kept them on Warner Bros. when they were in danger of getting bouned.  The reason? Their fantastic debut album gotten few reviews at first, until Warners suddenly saw raves in Crawdaddy (where I worked), Changes, Fusion and another national outlet, as I recall. What Warners failed to notice was that the same person had written all those reviews--i.e. yours truly.

My fave Feat (and much better than the version posted by Slate).   Below, runner-up, the Allen Toussaint classic, "On the Way Down."

RT Anchor/Reporter Quits on Air--Now RT Responds--See Updates

Thursday:  Lengthy, and angry, response posted at RT.com by the network's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan.  After hitting U.S. media reaction, it concludes:

I can see very clearly why I continue to work for a channel that stands alone (!) face-to-face with thousands and tens of thousands of Western news outlets, showing everybody the other side of the story, under daily attacks from the media against which it can hardly fight back. It’s my country. There is no other choice for me. But the foreign journalists who work for RT across the globe do have a choice. Some of them might be asking themselves, “Why would I have to defend Russia at the expense of my career, my future, my reputation, why would I tolerate humiliation by my fellow journalists?” Few can say “Because I’m telling the truth, and there’s no one else to tell it.” Some will fail to find the answer and quietly resign. Others will perform their resignation on air in a self-promotional stunt, perhaps securing fantastic career prospects they wouldn’t have dreamt of before.

By the way, CNN now covering the leaked phone call mentioned in the post.

Wednesday:  No, it's not Abby Martin, but still... anchor/reporter Liz Wahl speaks out (see video below), says she can't work for TV network that "whitewashes the actions of Putin."   Tuesday night she had tweeted,  "Just spoke to grandparents who came to US as refugees escaping Soviets during Hungarian revolution. Amazing to hear amid new Cold War fears."  It should be noted that she had to know where the RT funding was coming from all this time.   

UPDATE:  Wahl, interviewed by the Daily Beast, claims she's been "disgusted" by what she's had to report--while trying to stay "objective" she's often been overruled by superiors. “It actually makes me feel sick that I worked there,” Wahl says. “It’s not a sound news organization, not when your agenda is making America look bad.”

UPDATE #2  Wahl on Anderson Cooper show tonight talks more about pressure from management--and today she had part of her interview with Ron Paul cut.  She says as a reporter you need to "seek the truth" but RT "not out for the truth" (though she knew that when she signed on) and merely "Putinist."  Says management makes sure their message "is delivered."  Asked how RT will respond, she says she hasn't seen an "official response" but says RT tweeted that she was out for personal gain.  Note:  the "other" RT anchor who protests, Abby Martin, will be on Piers Morgan show tonight.

UPDATE #3  RT responds to Wahl on Anderson Cooper show, just posted on his site.  Excerpt: "When a journalist disagrees with the editorial position of his or her organization, the usual course of action is to address those grievances with the editor, and, if they cannot be resolved, to quit like a professional. But when someone makes a big  public show of a personal decision, it is nothing more than a self-promotional stunt."   Wahl then comes on Piers Morgan and accuses RT of presenting "Putinist propaganda."  Piers asks the question why she went to work for RT to begin with.  She replies, "That's a very good question." No kidding.  She says she didn't think there would be that much "propaganda" and "pressure." Asked if she thinks Abby Martin should quit, she demures, saying she is allowed to speak out--because her "line" in her show is one they like.

Now Abby Martin on Piers and she says she backs whatever Wahl does but she is not tempted to quit.  Claims she has full "independence"--and accuses all of the TV networks in the U.S. of being equally compliant with U.S. policy.  "Corporate media" in U.S. no different than government-funded network, she claims.  Piers pushes back a bit.  She has a point, to be sure, but apparently did not watch MSNBC in the final years of the Bush reign or Fox News every night of Obama's two terms.  Let's see even a sliver of Putin criticism on RT (before this week).  The better point is how the American networks have gone along with so many U.S. official  lies and nonsense--when, unlike RT, they didn't have to.

Bitcoins, from the Wiklevii to Coinye West

Now that the Winklevii twins of Facebook fame have paid in bitcoin to secure their reservations on Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic (announced on their web site for Winklevoss Capital, where Tyler Winklevoss asserts that bitcoin and Virgin Galactic "are two technologies that meaningfully represent our focus at Winklevoss Capital: the reduction of pain-points and friction in an effort to build a better world" ), you may be wondering if you can really continue to avoid understanding what the hell a bitcoin is. 
Fortunately, the indispensable Consumerist web site has taken on the task of explaining the cryptocurrency in all its mind-numbing complexity, and they even include fun stuff, such as the novelty version, Coinye West, which is sadly now defunct.

The Ars Technica site today reports that Rep. Jared Polis (D- CO ) has written a tongue-in-cheek response to last month's proposal by Sen.  Joe Manchin (D-WVA)  that federal regulators should ban bitcoins before Americans are "left holding the bag on a valueless currency."  Polis asserts in his letter that the use of dollar bills should also be limited, because "dollar bills are present in nearly all major drug busts in the United States and many abroad," and thus also require urgent regulatory attention. A spokesperson for the senator said the satirical letter is meant only to "move the serious debate forward" about bit coins.

Senator Manchin's office had not yet responded to Ars' request for comment. --Barbara Bedway

'Missa' Person Alert

Will heading to Carnegie Hall tomorrow night with B.B. to meet up with the great Robert Jay Lifton (my co-author on two books) with our fourth and his first experience with Beethoven's astounding "Missa Solemnis."  Here's just one part of it--what I like to call, if not the best, the most "intense" seven minutes of music.  And below that: perhaps the most beautiful.