Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Ritchie, Kate Moss, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse and other beautiful young celebrity women have become prime-time poster girls for the fast life.

The brutal dehumanization, generated by drunken excesses and promiscuity, is redefined as high-tension energy and overwrought exhaustion.

The cure is an escape into a hospital or upscale rehabilitation retreat. That pit stop is then recalibrated by media spin artists as an experience of reflection, remorse and religious epiphany, which only re-whets the appetite and recharges the batteries so that the penitent can emerge, reborn, to do it all over again.

Hyped publicity and excessive amounts of money cushion the "bottom" hit by the media's glamour girls, and consequently, the depth of their actual addiction illness is trivialized along with the larger problem of female addiction in this country.

The tortured, glorified and over-dramatized celebrity victims live in a world apart from thousands -- maybe millions; no one knows exactly -- of ordinary, demoralized, cast-off women who struggle, from one day to the next, trying to recover their lives from drug and alcohol abuse.   more »

Such attempts by those in the media to attribute their own shameful behavior to the supposed demands of a coarsened, celebrity-obsessed audience—and they far overestimate the audience’s interest in Simpson’s latest legal battles—conveniently ignores their own role in cultivating and directing such attitudes toward celebrity culture.

To be sure, the media’s coverage of scandals such as the Simpson arrest, the drinking habits of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, or the amount of time Paris Hilton was required to spend in jail serves a definite purpose.

It channels all the audience’s pent up anger and frustration onto a harmless target, in this case Simpson, whose fate, whether he is convicted or not, will have no impact whatsoever on the viewers’ lives.

And so in a time when Washington is busy laying the groundwork for possible attacks against Iran, when a report by Britain’s polling agency ORB (Opinion Research Business) estimates that 1.2 million violent deaths have occurred in Iraq during the US occupation.

When the US is facing a crisis in the housing market with alarming numbers of foreclosures, the top story on all the major news networks is the alleged botched robbery of some autographed footballs by a washed-up athlete.   more »

Nearly six decades after its creation

– six decades of ruthless military, territorial,

demographic and economic gains

– Israel is still working to destroy its neighborhood,

out of insecurity and to remove

the last pockets of resistance to its hegemony

After defeating nearly all its Arab adversaries,

after successfully urging the US to occupy Iraq,

after devastating Lebanon in a new war

in the summer of 2006, Israel is once again

urging the America to unleash its war machine

against Iran, and to use nuclear strikes

if necessary to destroy its nuclear sites

   more »

Keywords: hate, palestine, violence, israel, zionism, occupation

Let's be clear here. The government intervened to make money for banks, or more precisely to print and distribute money to banks.

The grateful banks were told that their interest cost to get this new government-issue money would henceforth be much cheaper. The government hopes that the banks, flush with this cheap new money, will lend it and so revive the credit system.

If they do, that might prevent the financial crisis from becoming a general economic crisis.

The government -- led by anti-government free-market ideologues -- is trying to rescue capitalism from financial free markets that have spun out of control and threaten the whole economy.   more »

The fundamentalist worldview can never be sated.

It's true. No matter how clamped down we as a culture become, no matter how much misinterpreted Biblical dogma we're forced to swallow.

No matter how many insidious laws are passed limiting behaviors and restricting independent thought and repressing sexuality and banning dildos in Texas, it will never be enough.

And why? Because the fundamentalist mind-set is not so much a firm and rational set of beliefs based on thoughtful interpretation of strict Biblical screed as it is, well, a paranoid wallowing in fear.

Fear of the Other, fear of change, of progress, of the new and different and young and the sexual and the truly spiritual.   more »