Grad Night and Intolerance (video)

Pat Macpherson, Crystal Quintero, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; Matt Bai (news.yahoo)

"Die-in" San Francisco protest (IM)

America's college students are back and resting at home this week, which is a good thing, because during the long months away they seem to have gone completely out of their minds.

 

Last weekend, The New York Times' Jennifer Medina reported on the latest bizarre demand on campus: "trigger warnings" to let students know if the text [book] they're about to study will expose them to some version of misogyny or homophobia, so they aren't unexpectedly [re-]traumatized by visions of things that can never be unseen -- like, say, every novel written by a white man before 1960 [Hey, by the way, I'm a privileged white male, but never mind that].

The Harvard Commencement Speech

PC on overdrive: Ali G. (Sacha Baron Cohen aka Borat) gives commencement speech at America's most prestigious university in 2004.

That followed the public [sham]ings of several commencement speakers whose invitations had to be rescinded, including such evildoers as [Bush Era war criminal] former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the International Monetary Fund's [bankster] Christine Lagarde, and [insider] Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

All of this has provoked a torrent of eloquent condemnation from pundits and academics, who worry that our elite universities, in the words of an editorial published in Monday’s Washington Post, are being "impoverished by intolerance."

One of Obama's alleged alma maters, Oxy

[This] is a reasonable concern, except that it misses the point. It's not the students' fault that they expect to laze around in a world of ideological comfort. It's totally ours.

 

There's nothing new about the basic tension between speech and sensitivity on campus. When I was at Tufts in the late '80s, at the height of what we called political correctness [PC], we argued fiercely about whether the military belonged on campus [ROTC] or whether certain faculty members were denied tenure because of their politics. But, by and large, we were primed to have the debate, not chill it. More

How we rule the world: Confessions of an Economic Hitman (John Perkins, Y Audiobooks)

Is USAID the new CIA? Another Twitter (video)

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly (ANALYSIS); Amy Goodman, Peter Kornbluh, Juan Gonzalez, Nermeen Shaikh (DemocracyNow.org)

USAID, the new CIA?

How America (under its secret-government as the US Military-Industrial Complex) runs the world: By co-creating Facebook, Google, Twitter -- and/or coopting them after someone else creates them -- CIA agents and operatives (as well as the FBI, black-budget Pentagon, DARPA, DHS, the Secret Service, and of course the NSA) foment and agitate for civil war, "revolution," and liberation. 

They're doing what to my America?!

But the goal is not actual freedom and democracy for people in the US or elsewhere, it is to topple uncooperative governments without overtly sending in soldiers. Secret operatives do a quieter, and therefore better, job by avoiding all the sticky accusations of "imperialism," "war crimes," and "illegal intervention."

The CIA learned its lessons well in Vietnam, the Philippines, Egypt (Arab Spring), Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Central America, Kosovo, Grenada, Cambodia, Laos, Tibet/China... It's been all over the world.

McCutcheon means 1% now rules US legally

It rules the world by subterfuge and deceit, raking in billions in drug dealing, market manipulations, and international banking. Ask the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman for the details of how we loan money to nations (Hello, Ukraine!) through the World Bank and IMF then send in jackals to call the shots making those nations very friendly to the West. What choice will they have when we assassinate their leaders who are for the people and prop up new politicians corrupt enough to do whatever America asks of them?

Senator: Billionaires now "buy elections"

Now we clearly see that USAID, following the playbook, created a Twitter for Cuba. A hummingbird whispers via mobile phones and cell networks, and a government comes down with flash mobs, "Occupy" style events, protests, demonstrations, disruptions, Anarchist Bible (written by the CIA) vandalism, general hooliganism and drug use (brought in by the fine Company folks who work with the authorities who will arresting the buyers and sellers but never the distributors)...

AP reports a complex and intricate strategy devised by the U.S. gov't to artificially foment political dissent in Cuba and spur a "democratic" uprising -- rigged by the CIA -- using a fake social media platform. It's the Latin Twitter ZunZumeo (vator.tv)

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ZunZuneo reveals how US gov't spies in US

DemocracyNow.org

NSA, Twitter, DARPA, Facebook, FBI, Google

"U.S. Secretly Created 'Cuban Twitter' to Stir Unrest" is the name of an explosive new article by the Associated Press detailing how the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) created a fake Twitter program to undermine the Cuban government.

 

The CIA has many guises and operatives

[As Americans, we have the real Twitter spying on us and undermining actual dissent while seeming to stir up all sorts of trouble by facilitating peer-to-peer conversations that are thoroughly documented and used for later investigations and to set people up.]

The communications network was called "ZunZuneo" -- slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet. It was reportedly built with secret shell companies financed through [CIA-controlled] foreign banks. According to the AP, the United States [the MIC] planned to use the platform to spread political content that might trigger a Cuban Spring.

Havana, D.C., Pretoria, South Africa

Or it might, as one USAID document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society." Democracy Now! speaks to Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. He recently wrote an article in Foreign Policy called "Our Man in Havana: Was USAID Planning to Overthrow Castro?"

Cambodia: "A River Changes Course" (film)

Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; Kalyanee Mam; Film Festivals and Indie Films; LA Times

Theravada monks in front of Angkor, once the world's largest religious monument

Legacy of the CIA and Khmer Rouge

Twice a year in Theravada Buddhist Cambodia, the Tonle Sap river changes course, while the metaphorical river of life flows in a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth, creation and destruction. Working in an intimate and cinema vérité style, filmmaker Kalyanee Mam (director of photography for the Oscar-winning documentary "Inside Job") spent two years in her native homeland following three young Cambodians struggling to overcome the crushing effects of deforestation, overfishing, and overwhelming debt. A breathtaking and unprecedented journey from the remote, mountainous jungles and floating cities of the Cambodian countryside to the bustling garment factories of its modern capital Phnom Penh, "A River Changes Course" traces a remarkable and devastatingly beautiful story of a country torn between the rural present and an ominous industrial future.

• Travel guide: Introducing Cambodia (Lonely Planet)
• Khmer Studies Forum screening of documentary 

Amazing discovery in Cambodia!

"River" reveals a Cambodia in crisis

Susan King (latimes.com, Oct. 10, 2013)

Filmmaker Kalyanee Mam grew up with an unbridled passion for her native Cambodia. Though she was just a toddler when she and her family fled the country in 1979 and settled in Stockton (California), her parents would tell Mam and her siblings about the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, tempered with stories of the country's rich culture, history, and beauty. "I always had this strong sense I wanted to return to my homeland and to understand..." More

(TheLipTV) Kalyanee Mam talks about her documentary MORE