Suffice it to say that, in all my experience, 43 years, there has been one seat change in our body politic and that I would suggest is the fact is that we no longer have a “free media” in any meaningful sense of the term.

You have to really try, you have to go out of your way, to get the real story – and most Americans are working two jobs or taking care of their kids and they get home at night and they put their feet up and they think that they’re getting news from the likes of Fox News and they’re of course getting anything else but news – they’re getting the kind of thing we used to get on Radio Moscow … they’re getting a steady diet of disinformation.

- Interview with 27-Year CIA Veteran Ray McGovern

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain – or this guy.

A culture that just uses a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter, will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentalities.

- Joel Salatin in Food, Inc.

Interchangeable parts keep things running smoothly down on the farm.

Just finished watching Food, Inc. at the recommendation of TYWKIWDBI and it left me with a few things I hadn’t seen before (it’s well worth watching if you’re hungry for more than run-of-the-mill slaughterhouse footage and McDemagoguery of Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation) which bear repeating for those who aren’t interested in sitting through an hour and a half-long guilt trip:

[via CHRISTOPHER DOMBRES]

• Food Libel Laws – One can be sued or even imprisoned for “disparaging” food items (i.e. “beef” – not necessarily a specific company’s product) in 13 US states. This legislation enables food conglomerates and interest groups to sue when a TV personality like Oprah “slanders” the good name of feedlot beef.
• Food Industry Lobbyists & Government – The Rumsfeld-Searle-Aspartame connection has been mentioned in past diatribes, however, it’s worth noting that Monsanto (which figures heavily into the Food, Inc. picture) went on to purchase Searle and has gone on to purchase … plenty of influence throughout the Clinton, Bush, and Obama cabinets and the FDA.
• Food Cabal Conspiracy – Apparently there is a lot of work being done to gag video footage, pictures, and testimony because some of the horror stories (remember that peanut plant and its stifled, underpaid workforce? What about this canned rat from Con Agra?).

… so if any of that piqued your interest and you’re not presently engorged with the kind of USDA Grade Z circus monkey meat you’ve come to expect from your friendly neighborhood fast food dealer, give the movie a try at YouTube:

* If you answered “yes, I am hungry for change and in fact I would like some now” perhaps it is time to wake up to the fact that the problems of the food industry are hardly unique.

Related: It’s really encouraging that the filmmakers chose to dedicate the last 5 minutes of the film to “things you can do” – but we’re really not going to save the world from ourselves, now, are we?

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

- Stephen Hawking

Would you rather rely upon the police for the protection of your property and your life?

WASHINGTON, June 27 – The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.

- Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone
New York Times – June 28, 2005

“At this time, we are working to verify the source of the video, its veracity, and when or where it was recorded,” a statement from U.S. military headquarters in Iraq said late Monday.

An investigation of the shooting found that the crew of the two Apache helicopters at the scene might have erroneously identified photographer’s cameras as weapons, NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported.

According to U.S. officials, the pilots arrived to find a group of men approaching the area of a battle with what looked to be AK-47s slung over their shoulders and at least one rocket-propelled grenade.

The investigation later concluded that what was thought to be an RPG was really a long-range photography lens; likewise, the camera looked like an AK-47.

- U.S. pilot seen firing on people in Iraq

When all you have is a minigun, everything looks like a target…

Life in a city is inherently chaotic – granted, there are laws which govern how everything behaves and, given enough information, it would be possible to simulate every possible scenario and discern what’s happening from the quanta in an electron which composes a polymer in the plastic seat your ass is parked in to the thoughts of the person sitting next to you on the subway – but survival is generally not of grave concern at a given moment… until it is.

… and when your life depends upon situational awareness, you can count on your five senses (along with that sixth sense of cognitive dissonance) but little else: those entrusted with maintaining control over critical situations will restrict the availability of viable information if that’s as much control as they’ve got.

The person sitting next to you? Probably thinking about dinner or the events of the day or what’ll be on the television… but he or she could be thinking about the thirty-pound bundle of explosives and shrapnel in his or her satchel – and you’d be none the wiser if you were depending upon local law enforcement to clue you in to a terrorist attack.

Announcements informed passengers of delays due to “technical reasons,” avoiding anything more specific.

- Suicide bombers kill 38 in Moscow’s subway at MSNBC
2010-03-28

Containment has failed. Keep them calm. Avoid panic.

“It’s tied in with self-esteem,” says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. “We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels.”

- Why We Lie at Tehran Times
2010-03-09

Preserve the façade of safety. Everything is under control.

Control requires complicit obedience and conditioned responses (the kind which a novel situation would preclude) – some situations must be down-played to prevent stampedes and ensure continuity, even if that means stifling the truth and inviting further casualties: the governing organism which demands freedom in exchange for security must not be exposed for its lies.