There's a new double "0" in Hollywood, and it's not James Bond

It's the dress size of stick-thin celebrities whose hollowed-out cheeks, bony chests and protruding pelvic bones have dominated the coverage of star-obsessed tabloids.

Nicole Richie, Kate Bosworth, Victoria Beckham, Ellen Pompeo and Keira Knightley are part of a rail-thin rotation of stars who have been accused of eating disorders in celebrity magazines.

The starlets have denied having any disorders. But how thin is too thin?   more »

In an age when a MySpace page or a YouTube video can give extraordinary exposure to ordinary people, a young generation now believes fame to be one of the most desirable of traits.

"Kids see fame as a cure all for problems," says Jake Halpern, author of the new book "Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America's Favorite Addiction." "Fame is an attractive fix-it."

Focusing on all things celebrity is also a form of release for many people. Ken Baker, West Coast executive editor for "US Weekly" magazine, looks back to Sept. 11 as a pivotal point, the dawn of a supposed new age of sincerity.

"[Readers] didn't go away from escaping. They embraced escaping," says Mr. Baker. "I'm not a sociologist, I'm a celebrity journalist. I don't know its cause and effect. I don't know if you can tie it to 9/11, but that's when our business took off."   more »

She remains a divisive figure, and polls suggest that more than 40 per cent of Americans will not vote for her under any circumstances.

It is not that she would be the first woman elected president - the same polls show that Americans have little against that novelty.

There is something about her, people say: an excessively calculated way of doing things that has you wondering about her true convictions.

Why, for instance, did she last year back the ridiculous proposal to ban flag-burning by law - if not to pander to the centre and the right?   more »

America is the only nation in the West that kills it’s own people through the use of the death penalty.

America is an international pariah, a true maverick, refusing to work with the rest of the world in order to resolve problems confronting humanity and has a long and varied history of aligning itself with a rather vicious assortment of dictators, tyrants, and despots willing to do our bidding at the expense of their own people.

As such, is increasingly beginning to resemble the fascist movements of Adolph Hitler in his nascent 1930’s attempt to take over the world.

Perhaps the greatest propaganda surrounds the fundamental ideology of our culture. We are led to believe that capitalism, an economic system in which it is assumed that self-interest (exclusive concern for one’s own family and personal welfare) is an undeniable good, that greed can (and perhaps should) be tolerated.   more »

>The slogan “never again”, as used in relation to the Nazi genocides during the Second World War, and those which have succeeded, seems empty when we consider the ethnic cleansing carried out in Palestine after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and after the Israeli occupation of the remains of historical Palestine beginning in June 1967.

How can the “Western democracies” continue to participate in the genocidal punishment of a population while proclaiming the purest of intentions?

One of the reasons is the power of Zionist propaganda over those who lack alternative information and the political fear and hypocrisy that it can inspire in those who understand what is happening.

Of the modern means of communication and the formation of consciousness, the cinema is pre-eminent and, in the case of the Zionist state of Israel, one film in particular has been remarkably influential.   more »

f one looks at the historical record, in times of severe social upheaval almost without exception, societies respond in remarkably similar ways, most often by resorting to apocalyptic vision.

These are most often accompanied if not actually delivered by messiahs of one kind or another, who offer salvation if and only if, we accept the word.

The alternative is presented as being too horrible to contemplate and/or an afterlife consisting of essentially more of the same.


Today’s world is no exception, depressing I know but the failure of the socialism to offer a viable alternative to the ongoing capitalist disaster has left many millions of people not only vulnerable to the offerings of all kinds of ‘solutions’.   more »