These days, you don't just buy an iPod; that purchase is a gateway into a tech-savvy life that is cool, cutting edge and effortlessly stylish.

Everything from video games to sneakers and gum is sold this way, using media which follows kids everywhere -- on cellphones, on the Internet, on the backs of their friends' clothing and in the lyrics of the songs they love.

And many of the sponsors Oprah does business with are the prime cultivators of these messages.

So much in our culture tells young people they should lust after the latest product by Apple, Verizon, Jimmy Choo or Martha Stewart.

And Oprah, whose fetishizing of celebrity and high-end consumer goods is legend, has fed that compulsive consumerism as much as anyone in modern media.   more »

Bush's announcement last night that he is going to pour more troops into Iraq was the last throw of the dice in a misconceived enterprise that has dragged his country, this country and the Middle East into a nightmare.

The package includes 17,500 more combat troops for Baghdad and 4,000 more marines for Anbar province, the cockpit of the Sunni insurgency. Over $1bn will be spent in economic aid. In return the Iraqis are to promise to crackdown on insurgents, regardless of sect or religion.

In opting for a troop surge, Mr Bush has ignored the message of the mid-term elections, the Iraq Study Group, Congress, his own top generals and most world opinion. US generals have difficulty enough maintaining current levels of combat-ready troops and are not convinced that more troops will make any difference.

Rather than listen to them, Mr Bush has turned to the right, to those who argue that honour and the America's national interests require fighting on. One senses that "honour" is the more important of the two.   more »

Since the day of the assassination till this very moment, and on a daily basis - Arab people took to the streets, in demonstrations, in feigned funeral processions, in letters, in articles...denouncing the true murderers.

USA, Israel, GB, and the covert hand of Iran. The Four Hyenas as Gabriele Zamparini aptly calls them.

Only yesterday, hundreds of Morroccans went on a demonstration, organized by Trade Unions, Lawyers ... They were carrying an enormous white sheet.

On it were printed the pictures of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Mao, Mahatma Ghandi... and none other but Saddam Hussein.   more »

The surge strategy depends on the Iraqi police and military eventually taking over from the US forces. This in turn assumes that Iraq's army and police are somehow exempt from the country's sectarian and ethnic divisions and can therefore be neutral guarantors of public safety.

But, of course, Iraq's security forces are as polarized as the country itself, with the important distinction that the police and army have weapons and are trained to use them.

The Shiite police include the death squads while the Sunni police are insurgent sympathizers or the insurgents themselves.

The army is not quite as bad but still with most battalions are more loyal to their religious or ethnic leaders than to a civilian chain of command that is itself mostly sectarian.   more »

Our primary usefulness to those in power is to buy products, pay taxes, vote for specific candidates and send our young into service.

For most everything else, they want us docile and complacent. In order for us to do this however, there must be motivation, otherwise why would we want to do someone else's bidding?

The solution for this is something called Bernaysian manipulation and it works like a charm.

This deliberate control of the masses is meant to achieve all of their ends, including the seemingly impossible task of convincing the middle class that laws should cater to the upper class.   more »

It’s deja-vu all over again.

In Somalia, in a unilateral move destined to further destabilise the lawless nation, a hi-tech U.S. gunship has slaughtered “terror suspects” and civilians alike as ousted members of the Somalia Islamic Courts Union – whose six months of strict Islamist rule had largely stopped the preceding 15 years of violence and chaos common under feuding warlords – flee invading Ethiopian forces.

With U.S. sanction, the Ethiopian putsch was ostensibly done to stave off the collapse of the weak but internationally recognised Somali “Government” bunkered in its lone stronghold in the west of that unhappy country.

At least one child – a four-year-old boy - was killed in the U.S gunship strike. An aircraft carrier has joined three other US warships off the Somali coast.

Last year, the United States covertly supported warlords – the same thugs responsible for the Blackhawk Down debacle - fighting the Islamist movement. Prepare for overt support, in typical, hypocritical U.S. fashion.    more »