China Tiangong-1 Launch Animation Set to “America the Beautiful”

Somebody over there in China goofed on this one, setting the background music of the video animation of the Launch to America the Beautiful.

1st collector for China Tiangong-1 Launch Animation Set to “Ameri…
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Rocket’s red glaring error: China sets space launch to America the Beautiful

The lift-off was flawless. The orbit immaculate. But while China‘s leaders were celebrating the triumphant launch of Tiangong-1 space lab on Thursday, viewers of state television footage were treated to a bizarre choice of soundtrack: America the Beautiful.

To mark the launch, the Chinese space agency and China Central Television (CCTV) released aproud animation, set to rousing orchestral strains, of the “Heavenly Palace” thrusting skyward, lofting above the Earth and docking with a Shenzou crew capsule.

The only problem being that the backing music in question is America the Beautiful – more or less an unofficial national anthem of the United States. The Guardian spotted the blunder after picking up the video from the Reuters news agency while covering the launch.

America the Beautiful, which was composed by a New York church organist in 1882, has long been a favourite of US patriots. It has been proposed as the national hymn and a replacement for The Star-Spangled Banner as anthem.

It could hardly be more different from the music associated with the launch of China’s first rocket in 1970. That satellite transmitted the Cultural Revolution anthem, The East is Red, extolling the virtues of the Communist party and Chairman Mao.

The choice of soundtrack for the Tiangong launch raised several questions. Is this the work of an idealist seeking to usher in a new era of transPacific cooperation, a nationalist who wants to colonise American culture as well as outer space, or simply a propaganda gaffe?

A Flood of White Supremacist Political Candidates

After co-opting the right’s racial language and strategy, and having their philosophy of white victimhood adopted by the Tea Party and fully propagandized by think tanks such as the Hoover Institute and AEI, and broadcast 24 x 7 by Faux News…

White supremacists are ready to make another move to the mainstream, just as the Third KKK did in the 1920′s.

One of the impacts of the right’s racial propaganda machine is this – which is summarized from a llstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor survey here.

The issue of , particularly African American influence in the political arena is likely to get even more toxic, considering roughly 1/3 of the 30,000 or so locally elected officials is African-American. This means politically, we should see a rise in the number of Afican American candidates to Federal Positions – and President Obama and guys like Deval Patrick are likely to be just the leading edge of a very big wave. That doesn’ t mean that the majority of elected positions in America will be held by black folks, or even minorities – just that the chances of the Senate remaining an all white bastion, and the next black President may not be as far away as many think.

Which brings us to what I call… “Fear of a Black Planet”.

White Supremacist Stampede

Billy Roper (l), and David Duke

Add to the growing list of candidates considering a bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012 America’s most famous white-power advocate: David Duke.

A former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, member of the Louisiana House of Representatives and Republican executive-committee chairman in his district until 2000, Duke has a significant following online. His videos go viral. This month, he’s launching a tour of 25 states to explore how much support he can garner for a potential presidential bid. He hasn’t considered running for serious office since the early ’90s, when he won nearly 40 percent of the vote in his bid for Louisiana governor. But like many “white civil rights advocates,” as he describes himself to The Daily Beast, 2012 is already shaping up to be a pivotal year.

Former (and current) Neo Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Confederates, and other representatives of the many wings of the “white nationalist” movement are starting to file paperwork and print campaign literature for offices large and small, pointing to rising unemployment, four years with an African-American president, and rampant illegal immigration as part of a growing mound of evidence that white people need to take a stand.

How The Conservative Propaganda Machine Works to Create Mindless Robots – Faux News

Great article over at Truthout on how Faux News manipulates their audience. They list 14 (actually 15) techniques utilized by Faux to manipulate and control the opinions of their most slavish viewers.

The first steps in the making of “Useful Fools” really are -

1. To convince the recruits/fodder that the are party to information no one else has

2. To convince the recruits/fodder they are being persecuted by a large and powerful enemy

3. To convince the recruits/fodder that the “enemy” is morally bankrupt, and thus lies – and you hold the only source of truth. Once this is accomplished, it doesn’t really matter what the facts are (Birthers for instance) – the Useful Fool will hold onto the lie.

4. To convince the recruits/fodder that they share the same group values – even if they didn’t have those values before being brought into the group starting with something no one is going to evince disagreement with, such as “Mom and Apple Pie” and moving from that base to more morally questionable edicts. Thus Hitler’s killing Jews becomes a patriotic act. In he modern context, “Liberals” “Don’t believe in God”, “Kill babies with abortion”, “Want to take your hard earned money”, and “All black people are on welfare”.

5. And lastly to put a “Wall” around the group by defacto declaring those who are fully indoctrinated are “family”.

Worked for Adolph Hitler… And it worked for Jim Jones. It works in the modern conservative “movement”.

So… The Truthout List…

14 Propaganda Techniques Fox “News” Uses to Brainwash Americans

1. Panic Mongering. This goes one step beyond simple fear mongering. With panic mongering, there is never a break from the fear. The idea is to terrify and terrorize the audience during every waking moment. From Muslims to swine flu to recession to homosexuals to immigrants to the rapture itself, the belief over at Fox seems to be that if your fight-or-flight reflexes aren’t activated, you aren’t alive. This of course raises the question: why terrorize your own audience? Because it is the fastest way to bypasses the rational brain. In other words, when people are afraid, they don’t think rationally. And when they can’t think rationally, they’ll believe anything.

2. Character Assassination/Ad Hominem. Fox does not like to waste time debating the idea. Instead, they prefer a quicker route to dispensing with their opponents: go after the person’s credibility, motives, intelligence, character, or, if necessary, sanity. No category of character assassination is off the table and no offense is beneath them. Fox and like-minded media figures also use ad hominem attacks not just against individuals, but entire categories of people in an effort to discredit the ideas of every person who is seen to fall into that category, e.g. “liberals,” “hippies,” “progressives” etc. This form of argument – if it can be called that – leaves no room for genuine debate over ideas, so by definition, it is undemocratic. Not to mention just plain crass.

Why Do Black People Vote for Democrats? A Conservative Mind Freak on Race

This one is a riot! If you have ever talked to a conservative across the WWW, or read a line or two of their Jockey Suited black Proxies…

You’ve heard this story.

This is probably the prototype for conservative propaganda and doublethink – and in the late 80′s and 90′s was popularized by conservative “think” tanks. The beauty of it is, at least from the conservative meisters viewpoint – the more racist a conservative is, the more likely they are to take this as truth. And thus it is effective propaganda as it leverages already existing prejudices and fears.

This is satire – and it’s great satire!

 

The Tea Begins to Crumble in the US…

It has taken a while, but there has been a dramatic change of public opinion about the Tea Party, and it’s sugar daddies – not the least driven by folks experiencing exactly what having these folks in power means.

After successfully buying a movement, and election, and even judges, the Koch brothers juggernaut hit a brick wall. That brick wall is when average Americans actually had to face, and pay for the bigotry and insane policies of the Republican Party.

CPAC...Dancing With Morons and Bigots

The counter-revolution is underway.

Faux News and Tea Bagger favorite pundits are falling in terms of public opinion faster than rocks…

The G.O.P.’s Post-Tucson Traumatic Stress Disorder

…Glenn Beck’s ratings at Fox News continued their steady decline, falling to an all-time low last month. He has lost 39 percent of his viewers in a year and 48 percent of the prime 25-to-54 age demographic. His strenuous recent efforts to portray the Egyptian revolution as an apocalyptic leftist-jihadist conspiracy have inspired more laughs than adherents.

Sarah Palin’s tailspin is also pronounced. It can be seen in polls, certainly: the ABC News-Washington Post survey found that 30 percent of Americans approved of her response to the Tucson massacre and 46 percent did not. (Obama’s numbers in the same poll were 78 percent favorable, 12 percent negative.) But equally telling was the fate of a Palin speech scheduled for May at a so-called Patriots & Warriors Gala in Glendale, Colo.

Tickets to see Palin, announced at $185 on Jan. 16, eight days after Tucson, were slashed to half-price in early February. Then the speech was canceled altogether, with the organizers blaming “safety concerns resulting from an onslaught of negative feedback.” But when The Denver Post sought out the Glendale police chief, he reported there had been no threats or other causes for alarm. The real “negative feedback” may have been anemic ticket sales, particularly if they were to cover Palin’s standard $100,000 fee.

What may at long last be dawning on some Republican grandees is that a provocateur who puts her political adversaries in the cross hairs and then instructs her acolytes to “RELOAD” frightens most voters.

The Death of America’s “Radio Rwanda”.

When Pirate Radio Roamed the Seas

First time I ran into the term “Radio Rwanda” describing the Clearchannel network which inflicts Rush Limbaugh on America’s airwaves through it’s near monopolistic control of broadcast stations, was over at The Field Negro’s spot. I don’t know if Field was the author of that comparison – but however Field came up with it – it is deadly accurate.

Once upon a time, one of the cultural joys of travelling in America was to listen to the local radio stations. They were refections of local culture, which often had playlists and popular songs significantly different from those in other towns and cities. You had “local hits” which were songs, sometimes done by local or regional groups which became popular regionally – and sometimes never caught on nationally.

Since this was waaaaay before the Ipod, lugging a suitcase full of 8 Tracks just wan’t an option – so you tuned the dial and went with the flow. You often discovered new artists, and new musical tastes on AM – and late at night you could sometimes catch a station from a far away location on the old AM radio and listen in for a while to what was hot in a far away city.

Back in the days when the Communists controlled Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there were only two radio stations – both controlled by the State. If you didn’t like what was on one station, you could tune to the other to listen to someone else reading exactly the same script. Not much different from conservative America today, and the propaganda system structured by Republicans in erasing “Fairness” rules and local ownership constructing a modernized copy of the old Soviet system…

But there is hope for the radio wasteland!

Senate Joins House in Passing the Local Community Radio Act!

Today a bill to expand community radio nationwide – the Local Community Radio Act – passed the U.S. Senate, thanks to the bipartisan leadership of Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and John McCain (R-AZ). This follows Friday afternoon’s passage of the bill in the House of Representatives, led by Representatives Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Lee Terry (R-NE). The bill now awaits the President’s signature.

These Congressional champions for community radio joined with the thousands of grassroots advocates and dozens of public interest groups who have fought for ten years to secure this victory for local media. In response to overwhelming grassroots pressure, Congress has given the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) a mandate to license thousands, of new community stations nationwide. This bill marks the first major legislative success for the growing movement for a more democratic media system in the U.S.

Rachel Maddow on Psyops – November 2010 elections

Rachel does get it correct that the MSM is spinning for the Republicans. What she gets wrong is why. This election is about race – not the economy, jobs, or the deficit… It is about fear of a non-white America.  One of the best articles on this phenomenon was in the Village Voice – White America Has Lost It’s Mind…

Laying out why whack job right wing candidates suddenly have a chance, despite the reality that these folks are so far out of the mainstream as to be part of the tinfoil hat crowd.

Watched this same movie during the Bushit’s first illegitimate selection by the 5 thugs in robes. Bushit was their Golden Boy. Boy! That turned out well, now – didn’t it?

The really bad news is that things are so screwed up right now – America really can’t afford the off-the-wall isht the Tea Baggers and whack-job righties are going to bring…

So if it does turn out as so heavily advertised by the MSM…

Welcome to Third World America, complete with Banana Government.

Rachel Maddow on Psyops – November 2010 elections
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Donald Duck Gets Political?

Whoever produced this one did a first class job. I don’t know if they spliced together a lot of clips, or did this one from scratch…

But the sophistication on this one is astounding if done by anything other than a major studio.

Donald Duck vs Glenn Beck!

The New Jim Crow – Media Images of Black Folks

This new book discusses the media portrayal of black folks as a conduit to a continual legacy of racism in America. The imagery is often subtle, and manipulates thinking about race.

Hat Tip - The Grio

Burrell calls the marketing of the myth of Black Inferiority to justify slavery within a democracy “one of the greatest propaganda campaigns of all time.” In BRAINWASHED he shows how the torturous enslavement and indoctrination of a people resulted in the powerful, all-pervasive, mass-media driven brainwashing that impacts African American lives even today. The BI brainwashing campaign may be more subtle than in the past, given that a black First Family occupies the White House, but nonetheless, it exists.

In a volume both instructive and enlightening, Burrell draws on his unique experience of over four decades in the ad industry, where he coined the memorable phrase, “Black people are not dark-skinned white people.” To complement the narrative’s broad historical perspective, the book boasts a riveting 8-page color insert, a dramatic visual history of Black Inferiority propaganda and how blacks “pushed back” against the brainwash. It “reminds us of how far we’ve come and how far we’ve yet to go,” says Burrell.

Ad exec Tom Burrell says America has been ‘brainwashed’ about blacks

Ad executive Tom Burrell has seen first-hand how images can influence consumer thoughts and behaviors.

He founded Burrell Communications Group in 1971 and has worked to promote positive and realistic images of African-Americans ever since.

His new book, Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority, examines how negative images and stereotypes have impacted America’s view of African-Americans.

“If you give people negative images…then they’re going to internalize those images,” Burrell said.

“By portraying it constantly on the screen and on the tube, you take the reality of one and you make it a reality for millions.”

Burrell says he cringes when he watches daytime court tv shows or movies like Precious and The Blind Side, because he says the portrayals of African-Americans are troubling.

“Look at Precious, the casting…all of the misfits, all of the pathological characters are dark-skinned,” Burrell said. “All of the good people, the saviors are at least half-white. If it is not intentional, it is certainly insensitive.”

In Burrell’s book, he outlines how blacks have devalued their own self-worth and how that has negatively impacted their education, health and spending habits.

Burrell says slavery is the historical root of many problems but not the only cause.

“Today, African-Americans have become accomplices to this ‘brainwashing’ of inferiority,” said Burrell who describes the work of filmmaker Tyler Perry as “egregious.” “When a respected, talented black person puts [negative images] out, they automatically gain more acceptability.”

more about “The New Jim Crow – Media Images of Bl…“, posted with vodpod

The Acorn Murders

This is a riot. Glenn Back, desperately needing to bolster ratings to survive the Color of Change Advertiser boycott,  grasps at straws -  getting “outraged” when an ACORN employee tells a fake news crew trying to perpetrate a sting – she doesn’t beat her children…

But she murders her husbands.

Sending Beck into a veritable apoplexy of fake rage on air against the evil ACORN for advising people to kill their spouses…

The problem? The ACORN employee’s husband is alive an well. The employee, recognizing the ridiculousness of the Faux News team…

Decided to play a joke on them.

Faux never back checked the story to make sure it was valid.

Indeed, Faux apparently failed to back check any of the videos for fraud. The amateur video makers are now accused of dubbing in voiceovers to make the material more sinister, and the actions of ACORN employees more perverse specifically to bolster their financial value in selling them to Faux News.

Now – that isn’t saying there may or may not be something “wrong” with ACORN, or the actions of some of it’s employees. It’s not a categorical exoneration…

But it is a categorical indictment of Faux News, and their willingness to manipulate, massage, and fabricate stories which fit their political agenda.

I feel an investigation of ACORN may be in order – at the locations identified as problematic. Since the organization has already been looked at, under a giant microscope for 2 years by Republicans grasping at any infinitesimal act of malfeasance, and – as a government contractor on a much more rigorous basis than say, a Halliburton, or General Dynamics – the chances something is systemically wrong is fairly small.

However, I believe the Justice Department should open a RICO investigation into Faux, where there appears to be substantial evidence of a continuing criminal enterprise.

Faux News and Reverend Wright

Lacking a black boogeyman now that Van Jones has left the Administration, Faux News actually “ambushed” Reverend Jeremiah Wright at the airport -

Attempting to draw some sort of connection between Wright and President Obama’s speech, and the Health Care battle. Said Wright -

“I think the racists in the right wing are upset because the poor people are about to be helped.”

You got that right, Rev. It is, all about racism.

While the funding behind a lot of the demonstrations against Health Care Reform is coming from companies with a vested financial interest in keeping the current overpriced and underperforming system – the sort of vitriol we are seeing coming from the right-wing talking heads in the Media and the ground troops is driven by …

Racism.

In the strangely perverted nether-world occupied by small conservative minds, identifying their racism for what it is…

Is now racist. These words from Martin Luther King -

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Your Brain on Conservatism

This is the death of America…

This is an example of how certain belief sets are propagandized and engineered on an issue, in this case supporting racism -

This is the result of the frequent application of propaganda to misinform, and to form belief sets in the populace in direct opposition to plainly available evidence to the contrary -

This from a longer piece published as Fascist America, Are We There Yet?

From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two are pretty solidly behind us — and the third should be of particular interest to progressives right now.