Measuring Up As Men

By Volaar

“I call on men and boys everywhere to take a stand against the mistreatment of girls and women. It is by standing up for the rights of girls and women that we truly measure up as men.”  — Desmond Tutu, November, 2012

Not three months prior to Tutu’s statement, two teenage boys brutally assaulted, humiliated and traumatized a sixteen year old girl who was inebriated past the point of being able to take care of herself, let alone call for help from others.

To this very day, the victim’s family and the victim continue to receive death threats and threats of bodily harm from the victim’s teenage peers in the Ohio town of Steubenville, population under 19,000.

In Print: The Occupied Wall Street Journal

By Meryl Ann Butler

New Yorkers are saying, “Enough already!” And so are the rest of the 99 percent.

Boasting its second issue, the Occupied Wall Street Journal began publication from a secret location, documenting the occupation and offering practical information on getting involved. According to Anastasia Churkina of RT, NY, 50,000 copies of the first issue of the paper were gone within two days. So were 100,000 of the second issue. The paper does not have advertisers. $75,000 was donated to start it up.

Ex-CIA Robert Steele on Spying, Blogging and the Restoration of Open Society (64 min video)

Keynote address at the 2007 Gnomedex conference by former intelligence officer Robert D. Steele who holds multiple advanced degrees. Though extracted portions of this speech show him encouraging bloggers to step up their work, his main concern is that the intelligence community needs to rely more on open sources of information rather than clandestine sources.

New Assange Interview on Banksters, Cablegate, India

By Times of India

This 20-minute interview of Julian Assange reveals how Swiss banks help criminals hide assets, how public support of Wikileaks protects them from the US, and how Bradley Manning’s plight is kept in the public mind. Of note, Assange describes a recent Obama fundraiser where 12 people each paid $5,000 to attend, and then all stood up together to protest the treatment of Bradley Manning.

Resurrection and the Sociopath

Rand, Hickman and Greenspan: United in Common Purpose

By Volaar

Last year about this time I found myself steeped in a post-graduate rhetorical analysis of the front pages of the website Stormfront.org and two Patriot Movement sites.  The details of contemporary rhetorical analysis go beyond the mere study of words, so I won’t bore you.   But the “a-ha” moment I received at the end of my qualitative analysis is worth mentioning, at some point, in light of all the ballyhoo surrounding the latest remake of Ayn Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged, and Rand’s many “contributions” to the neo-conservative movement of the post-industrial, post-modern United States of America.

Former CIA officer blows lid off Libya fraud live on CNN

This Is What Happens When Establishment Control of the Media Cracks for a Moment

By The American Dream
Prison Planet

Every once in a while, establishment control of the mainstream media cracks for a moment.  In an effort to achieve higher ratings, mainstream news programs will invite guests on that promise to be “interesting”, but then they will say something that is not part of the script and the entire system will go into a state of chaos for a moment. One example of this happened recently when two CNN “infobabes” interviewed former CIA officer Michael Scheuer about the situation on the ground in Libya. They asked Scheuer some questions regarding the role of the CIA in Libya, but the interview rapidly moved in some directions that the “infobabes” were not anticipating.  Instead of sticking to the “Republican” or the “Democrat” script, Scheuer ripped both parties and he detailed many of the reasons why we should have never gone into Libya at all.

5 Ways DHS Violates the Constitution with Website Domain Seizures

By David Makarewicz
Activist Post

Last week, Bryan McCarthy, the 32 year old operator of ChannelSurfing.net, was arrested on charges of criminal copyright infringement.  ChannelSurfing.net was one of the streaming sports sites that had its domain seized by federal authorities shortly before the Super Bowl as part of the “In Our Sites” program, run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Prior to the seizure, McCarthy reportedly made more than $90,000 from advertisements on his site.

This arrest has once again raised questions about the In Our Sites program, in which the Government has seized thousands of domains accused, but not convicted, of copyright infringement, illegal streaming of sporting events, selling black market goods and distributing child pornography.  Critics ranging from bloggers to individual rights advocates to Senators have questioned the constitutionality of these seizures.

Bradley Manning charged with 22 crimes including capital offense ‘Aiding the Enemy’

Faces 22 additional charges, including capitol offense for aiding the enemy

Statements by Manning’s lawyer and by WikiLeaks follows this Wired report. ~Ed.

By Kim Zetter
Wired

The Army has filed 22 new charges against suspected WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, among them a capital offense for which the government said it would not seek the death penalty. The charges, filed Tuesday but disclosed only Wednesday, include aiding the enemy, theft of public property or records, computer fraud, transmitting defense information and wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing it would be accessible to the enemy. The aiding the enemy charge is a capital offense which potentially carries the death penalty.

New Google Algorithm Is Live: News Aggregators Will Be Punished

Eric Blair & Michael Edwards
Activist Post

Just over a month ago, Google announced that they were changing their algorithm in order to weaken the search engine rankings of sites they deem to be “content farmers.”

Whereas most of Google’s algorithm changes are barely noticeable, the current change that they have been working on since last January will affect 12% of U.S. searches.

There has been much debate about what “content farming” is, and Google has done little to offer a clear explanation, simply stating, “low quality” or “shallow” sites would be affected.  This is similar to the vague definition of pornography — you’ll know it when you see it.

Hacked Emails Show US Chamber of Commerce Targeted VelvetRevolution.US, Other Progressive Groups for Smear Campaign

By Brad Friedman
The Brad Blog

It looks like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the Rightwing lobbying firm now allowed to accept hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in secret funding from corporations likely subsidized with your tax dollars — has been caught in the act of creating a $2 million disinformation campaign to attack progressive organizations such as VelvetRevolution.us and its StopTheChamber.com initiative. [Since we believe in disclosure, unlike the Chamber: VR was co-founded by The BRAD BLOG.]

After the disinfo campaign targeted “Anonymous”, the online “hacktivist” organization which had been working to disrupt those who companies who had attacked WikiLeaks (See our December ’10 report: “‘ALL-OUT CYBER WAR’ OVER WIKILEAKS”), “Anonymous” struck back by hacking one of the “intelligence security firms” retained by the Chamber and posting thousands of their emails online.

The Guardian and Telegraph Falsely Incriminate Bradley Manning

By WikiLeaks

The Telegraph this evening ran a story on tomorrow’s Wikileaks book by the Guardian editors David Leigh and Luke Harding – just one of several books in a publishing run by Wikileaks’ media partners.  Among the revelations forthcoming in that volume, we are told, is the rather stale information that Bradley Manning is alleged to be Wikileaks’ anonymous source for Cablegate and the War Log releases.

“The authors, David Leigh and Luke Harding, of The Guardian, name Specialist Bradley Manning, the soldier being held in a US military jail, as the alleged source of the information which was passed on to The Guardian by WikiLeaks.”

The war on WikiLeaks: A John Pilger investigation and interview with Julian Assange

By John Pilger

The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.

In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Julian Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the first world war, or one of the “war on terror” conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a “deliberate set up”, pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and other pillars of American power.

Helen Thomas Joins Falls Church News-Press

Helen Thomas in 2007 at her front row seat in the White House press room. © AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

By ARL.com

Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas has come out of a seven-month retirement to write a column for the Falls Church News-Press.

Spain’s largest newspaper on WikiLeaks, Madrid cables

Why EL PAÍS chose to publish the leaks

By Javier Moreno
El Pais, Dec. 23, 2010

1. The leak and its consequences.

When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange called my cellphone on a Friday afternoon in November, I could barely hear him. The conversation, held amid the usual tumult of Rome’s airport on a weekend, was strangely short. Assange talked slowly, making sure to pronounce each word carefully, his deep, almost baritone voice, reducing itself almost to a whisper at the end of each sentence. A few moments before the conversation, I had noticed how the Italian police seemed particularly interested in the little luggage that I was carrying, and that as the phone had rung, they were examining the cloth that I had used to wipe the screen of my iPad. Were they looking for drugs, or explosives, or both?

Assange, as far as I could tell at that time, was willing to give EL PAÍS access to 250,000 cablegrams sent between the US State Department and its embassies in around 30 countries, garnered as a result of the largest leak of secret documents in history.

A Nobel Peace Prize Winner Torturing Bradley Manning

By Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, the government of the United States is torturing a young man — one of its own soldiers — whom it has incarcerated but not indicted. He has been held in solitary confinement for months on end, subjected to techniques of sleep deprivation taken from the Soviet gulag, denied almost all human contact except from interrogators, constantly harassed by guards to whom he must answer every few minutes — all in an attempt to break his mind, destroy his will, degrade his humanity and force him to “confess” to a broader “conspiracy” against state power.

His name is Bradley Manning. He is 23 years old. The “crime” he is accused of committing is releasing video evidence of an American atrocity committed years ago in Iraq: the murder of Iraqi civilians by helicopter gunships. Under the American system of jurisprudence, of course, he is considered innocent until proven guilty of this heinous ‘crime’ of truth-telling. He has not been tried or convicted of this charge, or any other crime.

The Progressive Mind website shutting down

By Mike Zimmer
The Progressive Mind

Colleagues in arms,

I have published the aggregation site, The Progressive Mind for six years and I need a break. I will stop posting on the site sometime on December 24, 2010.

Regular readers, and visitors, thanks for your patronage.

Regular contributors, thanks for giving me your pieces to publish.

If you are in need of a fix for alternative views on the world, I recommend that you go to COTO Report, at https://coto2.wordpress.com/ and also Food Freedom, at http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/.

There Goes the Internet

By Glen Ford
Black Agenda Radio

With the “compromise” on Internet neutrality, President Obama has betrayed another campaign promise, and this time has no excuse that the Republicans made him do it. The outcome was really never in doubt, since Obama named as his FCC chairman a man who helped make radio and television into a corporate wasteland, under Bill Clinton’s administration.

Yahoo censors SOTT.net E-mail Edition

By Signs of the Times

Starting yesterday, 16 December 2010, Yahoo decided to return all 276 E-mail Editions sent to our subscribers who signed up with a Yahoo e-mail address.

In the past, we would receive returned messages because we are part of Yahoo’s “spam feedback loop”. This means that if someone labeled the E-mail Edition as junk, we would be notified. We would then promptly remove their e-mail address from the mailing list.

In addition, we received other detailed error messages from Yahoo explaining the reason why our E-mail Edition was rejected for a particular address.

This time, we got: “554 Content not allowed [299]”.

World’s Fair Use Day: Jan 13, 2011, Washington D.C.

By Ben Sisto
Seismologik

Notice the air; crisper than yesterday. Luminance enthusiasts adorn dwellings with flickering reds, greens, and whites. The first snowflake falls in perfect time to the Vince Guaraldi Trio, and you know what – Thomas Kinkade paintings are starting to look kind of alright. Ah, it’s that time of year again. Time to start the countdown to World’s Fair Use Day, 2011.

Held at the Washington Post Conference Center in D.C. World’s Fair Use Day is a day-long celebration of fair use & creativity brought to you by the folks Public Knowledge. Registration is free, WFUD is open to the public, the unemployed will be pleased to note convenient timing, 9am to 5pm.

Truths, Lies and WikiLeaks

By Patrick Lagacé
Watching America

Julian Assange has some tricks up his sleeve. What a mouth! The Australian really does fit the part of the role of the mysterious computer genius that came from afar. Imagine if he resembled Raymond Bachand; I am convinced, for reasons difficult to explain, that he wouldn’t be as hated. It’s hard — very hard — to hate the branch manager of Canada Post in Malartic. It is easier to hate the hyper-photogenic DJ…

Assange is enigmatic, blond and pathologically incapable of smiling from behind his tinted glasses. We would imagine him to appear alongside James Bond in the role of…of…

Incidentally, as the hero or the villain?