Not much is grabbing me today, though I will offer up a couple of articles that might interest my regular reader(s). The first is by good old Matt and his shouting into a vacuum on the LIBOR scandal. More interesting to me, though, was the majority of the article that focused on the rewriting of history that is allowed when organizations (and people) are allowed to promulgate the lie that they did nothing wrong and simply agreed to a massive (stock holder financed!) fine just to get the lawyers off their backs:
More on LIBOR: Plus, Spitzer takes on Bartiromo in Japanese Monster-Movie Epic
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/more-on-libor-plus-spitzer-takes-on-bartiromo-in-japanese-monster-movie-epic-20120717
The second is another shouter-into-vaccum, Glenn, on his complaints about what passes as journalism now in the US:
Inept stenographers
Journalists’ excuses for their bad behavior — it’s necessary to get quotes — are both fictitious and irrelevant
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/17/inept_stenographers/
Which is worse? Government propaganda that everyone knows is such or government propaganda that is disguised as adversarial journalism? I had a rather impassioned conversation last Saturday with a good friend who gets all her information from the Washington Post and TV, though she does get a couple of channels that give her some less-biased news via Russia, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc. She found it hard to believe (and she is not a simple believer in government, she lived through Nazi Germany) that there was so much journalist-sanction lying going on. I am trying to convince her to join the new century and get web-enabled, but after our conversation she seemed to be considering the ‘ignorance is bliss’ calculus, so I am not sure I can get her to embrace the blogosphere.
Yesterday I commented on this article:
Selling out American democracy
The 2012 election is the perfect time for the wealthy to sway an election
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/16/the_selling_of_american_democracy/
I managed to get in first, as ‘mitakeet’. My post was quite depressed, but I checked back from time to time and it seems my depression is shared by the other posters as well. Quite a sad commentary, eh?
Oh man, Mitakeet. I hope you’re not one of those commentors whose sole goal is to post “First.”
I was quite surprised that I was first. I figured there would be 20 messages before I got around to submitting mine. There weren’t that many comments when I looked earlier today, so for some reason that post didn’t generate much interest.