Zcom_simple

Hello,

Blogs are a familiar feature on the internet - where users post content in an accumulating manner, with comments, and search options, etc. They facilitate expression and exploration, and via attached comments, also debate and synthesis.


Reading and
Navigating Blogs

Our blogs are quite powerful. Each writer can post, as is typically the case. Sustainers who have the option can also post, however. All Blogs appear in the blog system, and sometimes also in content boxes the top page of ZNet - and always via the left menu of the top page - and can be found via searches, etc.

Commenting on blogs follows the blogs, attached at the bottom, and blog comments, like all others, are also visible in many places that show comments including in the forum system. In addition, the entire blog system gathers content for everyone - but one can look at the accumulating content in many ways.

  • For example one can look at one writer's efforts - so one is seeing what is effectively a blog system for that one writer, or Sustainer.
  • One can also look at the content by topic, seeing blogs that are tagged as being about a certain topic - or place, as well. Thus, when doing that, it is a blog system about a topic, or a place, with many contributors.
  • One can look at only writer blogs, or only sustainer blogs, as well.
  • One can look at blogs for particular Groups, too.

All this is easily done using the left menu. Searches allow even more variables and refinements.


Creating Blog Posts

If you are a Sustainer with permission, and are logged in, you will see a link in the left menu for you to post a blog - and you can use that to post one, and then tag it various ways (such as with a topic or place, or a group tag), and once you do, it is in the system with you as the author.

You can also use the console button to the left to post a blog - anytime and from anywhere in the site, as long as you are logged in.

Meanwhile, enjoy the blogs - and, by the way, if you are a Free Member or a Sustainer with a ZSpace page, of course you can put one or more content boxes on it, pulling blog links of any sort you may want to filter for, for example, by you or by your friends or by others - and by topic, about places, for groups, etc.

Blogs

Unworthy Victim: Ray McGovern in the Propaganda Model

By Michael McGehee at Feb 17, 2011


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Can you just imagine how our government and media would be acting if while giving a speech condemning the arrest and brutalization of protesters and stifling of speech by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez or North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Il or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that a protester silently protesting them by standing up, turning their back on them and wearing a shirt that said “[enter noun here] for Peace” was nabbed by police and other officers in civilian clothes, dragged away kicking and screaming only to be found later jailed, beaten, bloody and bruised?

They would have a field day, especially if that official from an enemy state never paused while giving their unctuous speech. That would be the icing on the cake.

But it happened in Washington, DC on February 15, 2011 while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made such a speech and a protester wearing a “Veterans for Peace” shirt was arrested and accosted.

The protester turned out to be none other than Ray McGovern, veteran Army officer, former CIA analyst who was an intelligence briefer for former President Ronald Reagan and who put together the Presidential Daily Briefs for the first President Bush, and now anti-war/pro-justice activist.

A video of the arrest can be seen here. Notice how Clinton never allows the incident that highlights her hypocrisy to interrupt her speech. While she was giving her sermon from the bully pulpit on how other governments need to be more tolerant of dissent—otherwise they "will eventually find themselves boxed in" in their own "dilemma" where they will "have to choose between letting the walls fall or paying the price to keep them standing"—an elderly American dissident is dragged away in plain sight. I guess Washington has made their "choice."

How did our media cover it? I looked at the New York Times, the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and as of today I have found no mention of the incident at all. None. Nada. Zilch. One Washington Post blog was about the speech but the arrest of McGovern was nowhere to be found.

Using the Propaganda Model (Chomsky and Herman) this is predictable. McGovern is an “unworthy victim” of our attention. Down the memory hole!
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