At this point, it's hard to know what's going on in the world of global spin control, but it appears that an emergency smear campaign launched by elite powers has failed to frame Julian Assange, the modern day hero and founder of WikiLeaks. Somewhat surprisingly, Rupert Murdock's Wall St. Journal reported on the evolving fiasco:

"Swedish police said Saturday that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was "no longer wanted" for rape, reversing its position just hours after saying his arrest was being sought."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703461504575443370320437024.html?mod=djemalertEuropenews

The Pursuit of Loneliness is a thundering critique of the unexamined North American lifestyle. It calls to us from the turbulent 60s with a message as relevant today as it was then. Written when the major US foreign war of occupation targeted Vietnam and the major domestic battle was with students, the names have changed but the battle lines are strikingly similar today.

Today there is so much cultural revisionism and retooling of the facts surrounding the clash between the predominating mainstream material culture and the youthful counterculture that one often mutters in disgust at the kind of garish, superficial nonsense being promulgated by the popular media to the effect that the sixties generation was just about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Just fun and games, folks; nothing but fun and games. There is hardly a mention of the very serious, well-thought-through criticisms of materialism, racism, and greed that were so essential to the beginning of the conflict in the sixties. While no one who was there will deny each of these elements (the media's holy trinity of sex, drugs and rock & roll) contributed to the general cultural atmosphere of openness and emotional experimentation and intoxication, it can hardly be truthfully described so simply or in such reductionist terms.

The following is an excerpt from, Blame it on the copula, published in Analytics Magazine, Spring 2009

As we face the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, we cannot help but ask what role mathematics played in this. Over the past 20 years the practice of finance has been revolutionized by the widespread adoption of mathematical models for pricing ever more exotic derivative securities. Mortgage-backed securities, which triggered the financial collapse, were priced using the Gaussian copula model. What would Albert Einstein have to say about all this? I suppose Einstein would remind us that to build a mathematical model, it is necessary to make assumptions. At best, these assumptions are idealizations of reality. The art of model building is to choose assumptions so that the model is unencumbered by less relevant considerations in order to illuminate more important phenomena. A good model provides insight and a guide to action. A good user of a model understands its limitations. We have seen all this play out in the financial markets.

Many decades after 'environmentalists' raised the alarm, the WSJ has discovered that corporations can not be trusted to tell the truth about their environmental crimes.

"Even after BP PLC's broken well under the Gulf of Mexico stops spewing, we might never know how much oil spilled.The extent of earlier spills of comparable magnitude remains disputed, even though they were easier to analyze. Oil companies don't have much incentive to measure spills accurately, and government officials haven't always needed to get a reliable count.

"The BP spill is often contrasted with the 1989 Valdez disaster, above.Exxon knew how much oil its Valdez tanker held when it ran aground 21 years ago. And yet some Alaskan scientists and environmental advocates who have studied the spill say the true amount spreading through Prince William Sound was two or three times the commonly accepted total. 

BraveNewFilms has released a brave new film, called Drill Baby Drill. View it online here.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent.

On May 18, 2010, Newsweek produced an infomercial thinly cloaked as serious news. Among other insults to the intelligence of its viewers, Newsweek includes a very selective reading of history designed to convince the uninformed that Iran=Evil and the United States=Good. Unfortunately, real history is more complex.

Newsweek claims that antagonisms between the United States and Iran began with the 1973 Iran Hostage Crisis, ignoring the far more terrible events beginning in 1953 with the US-sponsored coup against Mossadeq, the elected president of Iran. These crimes of state terrorism resulted in the imposition of the Shah (flown in by the CIA), and the institution of one of the bloodiest dictatorships in history. It is the eventual failure of this policy that brought the internal CIA term, "blowback" into popular usage.

I suppose the immense profit from global imperialist empires makes strange bedfellows.

With an unlikely threesome of puppets openly working together to "help" the people of Haiti, is it any wonder that their first moves were to send in the military, seize the airport, block humanitarian aid, stockpile tents, support corrupt elites, continue to silence Aristide, and eventually deliver some plastic tarps--with great fanfare?