I hope you have seen Adam Curtis’ “Happiness Machines“, episode one of the 2002 BBC “The Century of the Self” series.

The arguments that Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss make, and to some extent Frued in his “Civilization and its Discontents“, that humans are far too dangerously irrational and prone to chaotic barbarism to ever participate in a democracy of self governance, is both tautological and false. It is also powerfully self serving. But Eddie Bernays and the National Association of Manufacturers, and now Karl Rove and the Neocons, would certainly make you believe it was gospel.

They are past masters of playing to the emotional aspects of our imperfect rationality. Bernays’ “Freedom Torches” as the name for cigarettes was brilliantly successful in getting women to smoke cigarettes — much to their detriment.

We need to expose their cynical assumption, going back to President Hoover, that citizens can only be, must only be, passive consumers.

There were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, based on the government’s top terrorism center. This suggests that the “War on Terror” is failing. The State Department is taking steps to correct the problem – by discontinuing the report, which is “the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around [...]

Are we on this case? It is more important to stop the “new and improved” Patriot Act than it is working to “protect” Social Security. If the Patriot Act II, and its corallary supporting legislation H.R. 418 sneaks though under the fog of confusion caused by the Social Security distraction, then the fight for Social Security will not matter.

This is an extreme statement of the case, but perhaps extreme conditions require extreme statements. For a less extreme source, please also see Bill Moyer’s essay Welcome to Doomsday.

As Democrats working for all of the people, we should insist that NO American is above the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As Democrats, we must insist that any claims that any person can be placed above the law are such a violation of our democratic principals that they may rightly be considered treasonous. Are we to remain a democracy based on the principal that we are equal before the law and that none are above it? Only, it seems, if the Democrats and we the people fight for it.

The GOP/Bush propaganda machine has been spewing its latest mantra, this time about the supposed “social security crisis.” Laura Tyson in Business Week:
After years of repeated warnings by conservative political thinkers, the word crisis has become the mental frame that shapes the way many Americans think about Social Security’s future. But as a recent Brookings [...]

What ethical standards should apply to bloggers? … The SPJ’s code of ethics is a great starting point. It is now up to all of us to determine where we go with this and how blogging will be perceived in the future.

I strongly recommend Jonathan Raban’s new essay in the New York Review of Books.

The Truth About Terrorism

1.

In his November 3 victory speech, President Bush, sounding the keynote of his second administration, pledged to “fight this war on terror with every resource of our national power.” By saying “this” rather than “the” Bush stressed the palpable, near-at-hand quality of the war whose symbols have grown to surround us in the last three years—the tilted barrels of security cameras, BioWatch pathogen-sniffers, and all the rest of the technology of security and surveillance that Matthew Brzezinski somewhat overexcitedly details in Fortress America. Voters, at least, have been impressed. Responding to the exit pollers’ question “Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?” 32 percent of Bush supporters named “Terrorism” (as against 5 percent of Kerry supporters), 85 percent of Bush supporters said that the country was “safer from terrorism” in 2004 than it was in 2000, and 79 percent said that the war in Iraq “has improved the long-term security of the United States.”

Today, I received an email on one of the many mailing lists I am on entitled:

“I thought it was a joke, but…CNN:Bush arrested in Canada for war crimes”

George Lakoff has written a series of 4 articles for the UC Berkeley News on how the Republicans framed… or was it the American people who were framed… anyway… on how they “carefully crafted a tri-partite frame for George W. Bush’s Thursday acceptance speech.”

For the next week, everyone will be trying to get their message out, many different ways. Some of it will be broadcast on the mainstream commercial media. Other messages will come out on IndyMedia, the blogs, and who knows where else.

Glenn Smith at Drive Democracy posts a few revelations about John E. O’Neill, co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry…