Wednesday, November 30th, 2016
Travis Gettys, - The Raw Story
Stephan: In the late 80s I had lunch with Vladimir Pozner, who at the time was the public face of the Soviet Uni0n explaining on Ted Koppel's Nightline what was going on as Communism and the Soviet Union came to an end. We were at the Writer's Club, and I asked him about press censorship. He leaned towards me and with a knowing smile said, "You don't get it; the Western Press just doesn't get it; not yet anyway. There's censorship in certain areas, sure, but there is censorship in certain areas of American society. That's not the problem." I have to be honest I did not know what he meant. Then he continued, "the problem is self-censorship. Over here it's you might not get that desirable apartment, in the U.S. it would be you won't get access, either professionally or socially. The biggest threat to a free press is self-censorship. Either way the story doesn't get covered, or gets softened." It was a teaching moment. And now we have another factor that is undermining a free press in the United States: Abuse of the legal system by the ultra-rich.
If you have five or ten or more billions, and a reporter seriously pisses you off what's a million dollars spent legally beating that person up, maybe breaking them financially? The effect on a functional fourth estate will be devastating and will inevitably lead to self-censorship -- Do I really need to get into this fight reporters will ask?
W
Credit: Salon
ealthy Americans like Donald Trump have increasingly used the courts to punish their media critics — and the threat they pose to press freedoms will only grow worse with his election.
The president-elect vaguely promised during his campaign to “open up libel laws” to weaken legal safeguards for writers and publishers, but public animosity against the press has already changed the dynamic in those cases, reported Emily Bazelon for the New York Times Magazine.
A jury awarded $140 million in March to former pro wrester Hulk Hogan, who sued the website Gawker over the publication of a sex tape, and one of the jurors said they used the case to make “an example in society and other media organizations.”
The News & Observer lost a libel suit in September filed by a former North Carolina ballistics agent and jurors ordered the newspaper to pay $9 million in damages, although the penalty exceeds the state’s cap of $6 million.
Bazelon points out that Britain’s standard of proof in libel cases is lower than in the U.S., but […]
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Wednesday, November 30th, 2016
Adi Robertson, - The Verge
Stephan: This is a truly alarming report; it may seem like a little thing but it is not. This story is telling us that the assessed judgment of those who preserve the truth is that such a record may no longer be safe in the United States.
The Internet Archive, a digital library nonprofit that preserves billions of webpages for the historical record, is building a backup archive in Canada after the election of Donald Trump. Today, it began collecting donations for the Internet Archive of Canada, intended to create a copy of the archive outside the United States.
“On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change,” writes founder Brewster Kahle. “It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change. For us, it means keeping our cultural materials safe, private and perpetually accessible. It means preparing for a web that may face greater restrictions. It means serving patrons in a world in which government surveillance is not going away; indeed it looks like it will increase.”
“We woke up to a new administration promising radical change.”
The San Francisco-based Internet Archive is comprised of several different preservation efforts, spanning nearly every medium. As of 2012, the entire archive held 10 petabytes of data; for reference, Facebook’s entire photo and video collection totaled 100 petabytes around the same […]
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Wednesday, November 30th, 2016
Stephan: Today as I listened to the team of Deplorables being appointed to the Trump Administration, each one sleazier, more benighted, and more corrupt than the one before. In my lifetime there has never been as unscrupulous a group assembled, and their effect on the fundamental institutions of the United States is going to be tragic and long-lasting. And never forget, sixty two million Americans voted for it. If you voted Republican you are are responsible for what is about to happen. I wouldn't tell your grandchildren by the way because I suspect they will come to curse you for it.
Credit: Mr. Fish / Truthdig
We await the crisis. It could be economic. It could be a terrorist attack within the United States. It could be widespread devastation caused by global warming. It could be nationwide unrest as the death spiral of the American empire intensifies. It could be another defeat in our endless and futile wars. The crisis is coming. And when it arrives it will be seized upon by the corporate state, nominally led by a clueless real estate developer, to impose martial law and formalize the end of American democracy.
When we look back on this sad, pathetic period in American history we will ask the questions all who have slid into despotism ask. Why were we asleep? How did we allow this to happen? Why didn’t we see it coming? Why didn’t we resist?
Why did we allow the corporate state to strip away the rights of poor people of color and force them to live in terror in mini-police states? Why did we build the world’s largest system of […]
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Wednesday, November 30th, 2016
Erin Gloria Ryan, Senior Editor - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Tom Price the proposed new secretary of Health and Human Services, is a true scumbag -- read up on his background; I'm surprised he is not in jail. But one thing seems clear, based on what he has said and is known for, if you are an American woman your health care is under immediate threat.
Republican Representative Tom Price (R-GA) proposed by Donal Trump as the new Secretary of Health and Home Services.
Credit: Reuters
The likely new secretary for health and human services thinks that insurance companies shouldn’t pay for birth control and that the morning-after pill is tantamount to murder.
Now that Donald Trump has nominated Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price as secretary of Health and Human Services, it’s not only time to get your IUD, it’s also time to stock up on birth control pills.
The week before the election, I wrote a half tongue-in-cheek piece about how women can hedge their electoral bets by getting IUDs as soon as possible, just in case Donald Trump won (ha ha, right?). And then he did, and the column went from reading as a joke invoking hand-wringing for intended comedic effect to something that read as serious food for thought for women of reproductive […]
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Tuesday, November 29th, 2016
Stephan A. Schwartz, - Lilipoh Magazine/The 8 Laws of Change
Stephan: This is an extract from my book The 8 Laws of Change published by Lilipoh Magazine. (The link takes you to a .pdf of the entire magazine, begin on page 12)
My friend, Sheila, who was a tough-minded New York City career newspaperwoman turned magazine writer. She prided herself on her cynical view on life and her ability to not be taken in.
One day over lunch she got an assignment from her editor at the magazine she was working for to do a story on Mother Teresa, and she welcomed the opportunity. She saw the piece as an exposé. “I thought she was a fraud, a genius at public relations maybe,” Sheila said. “But I disliked her conservative theology, which I thought demeaned women, and I found her constant involvement with the rich and famous very suspect.”1 She explained to me how she arranged to join Mother Teresa and spend more than a week traveling with her and watching her at one of her hospices.
“My first impression never changed. I disagreed with almost everything she had to say about religion. I found her views about God depressing, and her vision about the place of women in the church almost medieval. At the same time, from the very first moment I was in her presence, I had this overpowering urge to call the magazine and tell them that I wasn’t coming back; […]
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