". . . in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them." - Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery
The reported ceremony seems embarrassing to me -- people, obviously corporate hacks, sitting around praising one another with tedious, trite words which everyone knows are tedious and trite. If this is what their careers came to I think they are a curious amalgam of the petty and the tragic. Tragic, because they sold their heritage of consciousness and intelligence for a mess of pottage. Petty, because their accomplishments amounted to so little.
I once read the story of a man who constructed clever bombs which were especially good at killing and maiming civilians -- children, mothers, old folks. He also taught Sunday School. The story was printed in a corporate house organ without a hint of irony. There was a man who was profoundly evil and profoundly tragic. Not just some kind of corporatist fluffer.
Your word "Bomblet", Kristofarian, reminded me after all this time of the on-going disgrace that is represented by the USA when they dropped their loads of bombs, a greater number than in the whole of WWII, on poor countries such as Laos and Cambodia. Still today, people being killed and maimed by bomblets.
This is the kind of story that was covered up by Pentagon 'journalists' in those days, a greater crime in my lifetime I cannot remember
Her comments years ago on Libya was enough for me. A sham, like all the others in that place as they prepare for the next war, using people like Starr to colour the truth to make it digestible.
Well, she fits right in! I mean CNN has no journalistic integrity, and the pentagon doesn't have strong moral values either, so no obstacles in the way of her receiving accolades from her fellow colleagues upon her retirement. CNN is a bad joke, and what is really unfortunate is there are so many American's who tune into their lies. She certainly pedaled our wars and I wonder if somewhere inside she knows she too is responsible for all the deaths in our many middle eastern wars. Although she probably rationalizes her BS so her conscience remains clear, or maybe she didn't start off with much of a conscience to begin with, and that got her by. I would hate to look back on my life and feel in anyway I was a part of the lie that cost so many lives.
I use to listen to them years and years ago, but our middle eastern wars and their coverage made me understand they had no journalistic integrity at all and just got worse through the years..
I think there is always some point in your life, at least for some, when you learn your government lies, and it lies especially when it comes to war. Now I have almost no trust what so ever, not a good feeling. I use to trust the left wing sites online, but after Trump I can't trust most of them either. They just became talking heads for the dems.
Nicely documented. That Brown University study is a great example of what pedestrian journalism ought to look like. Social media and committed alternative publications throw a bright light on the regime hypocrisy, as desperate times call for desperate measures. Honoring this lackey is lame, and clearly an act of desperation.
You will love the military or you will perish? Is this a prison planet? Did I do something bad I cant remember? How can nature be so exquisite and mankind so ugly? Archons?
I can't think of a more shining example of a Joseph Goebbels award recipient than Barbara Starr. She was certainly one of the best. Starr can now join her other female companions, Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton making up the (thankfully retired–or dead) Three Amigas of War, Death and Destruction. Humanity is better served with them gone. Goodbye and good riddance.
This all gets back to the core topic: indoctrination. Americans are raised to believe that they have a government that is on the side of good and righteous. All indisputable evidence contradicts this perception, but a government that can effectively keep that evidence at bay, and simultaneously smother the population with “safe” stories that only reinforce the indoctrination can miraculously yield a nation of suckers.
There is quite a bit of handwringing by the right regarding CRT, and that is because schools are seen by the Imperial Cheerleaders as repositories of trouble and troublemakers. When the Wall St protests were turning up all across the country, hi-tech Homeland Security weaponry was deployed to forcefully end what was largely a peaceful undertaking, well within Constitutional parameters, and when BLM protests were similarly peaceful, they were subjected to neo-Nazi interference, but when neo-Nazis sought to lead a coup to overthrow the government, it was met with little more than a collective yawn. Now, the only real journalism is in the non-commercial media, and the chasm between the lapdogs and the watchdogs is ever widening.
This year is the year that the media made itself so obviously in the pocket of our government and military complex that I had to leave the party I was a part of and protest in every email that I sent them replying to donation requests by complaining about the selling of war using the media. Everything is so transparent now that was explained by Noam Chomsky about the media manufacturing consent.  Why aren't our citizens and especially our representatives in government and the members of the media trained in the constitution and the general traditional critique function of the 4th Estate?
I don't think they give a rat's ass what ordinary Americans think anymore. The corruption in the US government and media is now complete. Totalitarianism now is in the open, like it is in many other countries in the world. The 200 year experiment in democracy is now over. What lies ahead is an American dystopia.
It's really unfair when they call American and UK commentators on Twitter "Russian state media" computer considering all the actual state media scumbags who Tweet while working for mainstream US "state media" who take their directions in part from the government. Stenographers for the government.
Apparently CNN and the military are tone deaf at a time when people are recognizing the shill nature of corporate media colluding with our government. The military did her no favors about how she will be remembered as far as integrity goes by publicly making these comments connecting her to the military as though she had a mission to sway the public towards the military point of view. The military sites praising her in this embarrassing way display an unAmerican, anti-constitutional way of how they relate to the media. 
Had they not made those comments, I might've thought some positive thought about her as she retired. Now I am disgusted.
Our government, military, media, and Congress have all forgotten what journalists are supposed to do and the fact that they are supposed to be independent of corporate or government influence. Sad times.
People keep saying "journalism" is dead, but saying that doesn't get to the depth of the problem.
They lie nonstop about Ukraine.
They don't talk about Yemen.
They act like election theft doesn't exist.
The vax kills people, and was supported by Gates, who believes in population reduction.
They use environmentalism as a club to destroy the livelihood of Dutch farmers.
They use woke capitalism--read Vivek Ramaswamy's books--to destroy language and enforce their sick social agenda.
Their goal is to make you fat, sick, isolated, depressed, and poor. They want you to buy into their fake democracy, fake elections, fake press, fake drugs, and fake save-the-planet. They want to extract as much economic value as possible from you, and then they want you dead.
"Journalist" was never the right word. "Goebbels-level propagandists" is the right phrase.
". . . in America, we have achieved the Orwellian prediction - enslaved, the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them." - Gerry Spence, From Freedom to Slavery
and with all the Freedom
usurious Debt can buy.
Oh what a Country!
.
Thank you Gerry Spense!
and you too denmla.
The reported ceremony seems embarrassing to me -- people, obviously corporate hacks, sitting around praising one another with tedious, trite words which everyone knows are tedious and trite. If this is what their careers came to I think they are a curious amalgam of the petty and the tragic. Tragic, because they sold their heritage of consciousness and intelligence for a mess of pottage. Petty, because their accomplishments amounted to so little.
I once read the story of a man who constructed clever bombs which were especially good at killing and maiming civilians -- children, mothers, old folks. He also taught Sunday School. The story was printed in a corporate house organ without a hint of irony. There was a man who was profoundly evil and profoundly tragic. Not just some kind of corporatist fluffer.
disgusting
tho not Surprising
perhaps they'll name
a cruise missle after her
or a bunker-bustin' A-bomb
tho best might be a cluster bomb
with her likeness on every Bomblet.
.
selling War is
the Devil's Busi-
ness and the Busi-
ness, Buster, is BOOMIN'.
GREAT Essay, Caitlin.
thank you!
Your word "Bomblet", Kristofarian, reminded me after all this time of the on-going disgrace that is represented by the USA when they dropped their loads of bombs, a greater number than in the whole of WWII, on poor countries such as Laos and Cambodia. Still today, people being killed and maimed by bomblets.
This is the kind of story that was covered up by Pentagon 'journalists' in those days, a greater crime in my lifetime I cannot remember
much like cluster bomblets
lie in wait for the Unsuspecting
frequently Children, Monsantan's
Forever Chemicals're there for Gen-
erations to weave their Horror Tales
of Birth Defects, Sterile topsoil & god
only knows what. excellent comment.
It's laughable what Clinton era deregulation enacted did to an already completely compromised media. It's all state media now and transparently so.
Stenographers are
Always invited back and
Troublemakers blacklisted
.
our once-Vaunted
Fourth Estate had a Sale
& it sold itself down The River.
An honorable retirement for an actual journalist would be if they were forced to flee to a non-extradition country....
Her comments years ago on Libya was enough for me. A sham, like all the others in that place as they prepare for the next war, using people like Starr to colour the truth to make it digestible.
It isn't and never will be.
Well, she fits right in! I mean CNN has no journalistic integrity, and the pentagon doesn't have strong moral values either, so no obstacles in the way of her receiving accolades from her fellow colleagues upon her retirement. CNN is a bad joke, and what is really unfortunate is there are so many American's who tune into their lies. She certainly pedaled our wars and I wonder if somewhere inside she knows she too is responsible for all the deaths in our many middle eastern wars. Although she probably rationalizes her BS so her conscience remains clear, or maybe she didn't start off with much of a conscience to begin with, and that got her by. I would hate to look back on my life and feel in anyway I was a part of the lie that cost so many lives.
I've been calling CNN "the Pentagon Channel" for decades. Sigh.
I use to listen to them years and years ago, but our middle eastern wars and their coverage made me understand they had no journalistic integrity at all and just got worse through the years..
I got hip to their presstitution watching their coverage of Desert Storm in the early 90s.
I think there is always some point in your life, at least for some, when you learn your government lies, and it lies especially when it comes to war. Now I have almost no trust what so ever, not a good feeling. I use to trust the left wing sites online, but after Trump I can't trust most of them either. They just became talking heads for the dems.
She “served” the Pentagon, bringing them closer to the American people through 20 years….20 years of observing and asking NO hard questions about:
- Irresponsible nuclear escalation
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/12/19/scott-ritter-a-lexicon-for-disaster/
- Pummelling of defenceless peasants
https://www.salon.com/2022/01/11/the-us-drops-an-average-of-46-bombs-a-day-why-should-the-world-see-us-as-a-force-for-peace/
- Crimes against humanity
https://www.justiceinitiative.org/publications/death-drone
- Subsidies to war profiteers
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
- Grotesque waste & corruption
https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/12/12/the-pentagon-fails-another-audit-gets-858-billion-anyway/
Thank you for your service Barbara - without dedicated journalists like you, it would be impossible for the American people to understand that 2+2=5 !
Nicely documented. That Brown University study is a great example of what pedestrian journalism ought to look like. Social media and committed alternative publications throw a bright light on the regime hypocrisy, as desperate times call for desperate measures. Honoring this lackey is lame, and clearly an act of desperation.
You will love the military or you will perish? Is this a prison planet? Did I do something bad I cant remember? How can nature be so exquisite and mankind so ugly? Archons?
Archons? Only heretics know.
Sickening fraudsters.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/11/michael-hastings-on-a-mission-149437
She was called a “ spokesperson for the Pentagon”.
I can't think of a more shining example of a Joseph Goebbels award recipient than Barbara Starr. She was certainly one of the best. Starr can now join her other female companions, Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton making up the (thankfully retired–or dead) Three Amigas of War, Death and Destruction. Humanity is better served with them gone. Goodbye and good riddance.
This all gets back to the core topic: indoctrination. Americans are raised to believe that they have a government that is on the side of good and righteous. All indisputable evidence contradicts this perception, but a government that can effectively keep that evidence at bay, and simultaneously smother the population with “safe” stories that only reinforce the indoctrination can miraculously yield a nation of suckers.
There is quite a bit of handwringing by the right regarding CRT, and that is because schools are seen by the Imperial Cheerleaders as repositories of trouble and troublemakers. When the Wall St protests were turning up all across the country, hi-tech Homeland Security weaponry was deployed to forcefully end what was largely a peaceful undertaking, well within Constitutional parameters, and when BLM protests were similarly peaceful, they were subjected to neo-Nazi interference, but when neo-Nazis sought to lead a coup to overthrow the government, it was met with little more than a collective yawn. Now, the only real journalism is in the non-commercial media, and the chasm between the lapdogs and the watchdogs is ever widening.
This year is the year that the media made itself so obviously in the pocket of our government and military complex that I had to leave the party I was a part of and protest in every email that I sent them replying to donation requests by complaining about the selling of war using the media. Everything is so transparent now that was explained by Noam Chomsky about the media manufacturing consent.  Why aren't our citizens and especially our representatives in government and the members of the media trained in the constitution and the general traditional critique function of the 4th Estate?
I don't think they give a rat's ass what ordinary Americans think anymore. The corruption in the US government and media is now complete. Totalitarianism now is in the open, like it is in many other countries in the world. The 200 year experiment in democracy is now over. What lies ahead is an American dystopia.
This madness has to have an end. Let’s hope it’s quick. Ground zero right here
CNN - PRAVDA. Central National News. CNNUSA. DEEP STATE MOUTHPIECE.
It's really unfair when they call American and UK commentators on Twitter "Russian state media" computer considering all the actual state media scumbags who Tweet while working for mainstream US "state media" who take their directions in part from the government. Stenographers for the government.
Elon could sure have a lot of fun by using some new labels, like "Corporate hack", "Incorrigible warmonger," or “Imperial propagandist”.
Apparently CNN and the military are tone deaf at a time when people are recognizing the shill nature of corporate media colluding with our government. The military did her no favors about how she will be remembered as far as integrity goes by publicly making these comments connecting her to the military as though she had a mission to sway the public towards the military point of view. The military sites praising her in this embarrassing way display an unAmerican, anti-constitutional way of how they relate to the media. 
Had they not made those comments, I might've thought some positive thought about her as she retired. Now I am disgusted.
Our government, military, media, and Congress have all forgotten what journalists are supposed to do and the fact that they are supposed to be independent of corporate or government influence. Sad times.
People keep saying "journalism" is dead, but saying that doesn't get to the depth of the problem.
They lie nonstop about Ukraine.
They don't talk about Yemen.
They act like election theft doesn't exist.
The vax kills people, and was supported by Gates, who believes in population reduction.
They use environmentalism as a club to destroy the livelihood of Dutch farmers.
They use woke capitalism--read Vivek Ramaswamy's books--to destroy language and enforce their sick social agenda.
Their goal is to make you fat, sick, isolated, depressed, and poor. They want you to buy into their fake democracy, fake elections, fake press, fake drugs, and fake save-the-planet. They want to extract as much economic value as possible from you, and then they want you dead.
"Journalist" was never the right word. "Goebbels-level propagandists" is the right phrase.
We need to wake up.