Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
This is how it works: The increasingly decadent and profit-driven book publishing business, which is "more concerned with the sensational than the sensible" publishes Dinesh D'Souza's new book. (Quote is from Alan Wolfe's review in the January 21, 2007, New York Times Book Review.) The book provides conclusive evidence, not only that D'Souza is an ignoramus — although earlier evidence was already quite persuasive - but also that the Hoover Institution hires hacks, provided they are conservative extremists.
Yet, notwithstanding numerous scathing reviews - for example, Professor Wolfe writes that D'Souza is "a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace." — newspaper editors and TV talk show hosts from around the country pimp for the book, as though they were paid advertisers. Alexander Solzhenitsyn called such people "smatterers" (although he was referring to the debased intelligentsia that pimped for the Soviet state).
French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, explained the phenomenon in his book On Television: "Editorial staff spend a good deal of time talking about other newspapers, particularly about 'what they did and we didn't do.'" Thus, "if X talks about a book in Liberation, Y will have to talk about it in Le Monde or Le Nouvel Observateur even if he considers it worthless or unimportant." [p.24] As Bourdieu observes: "this sort of game of mirrors reflecting one another produces a formidable effect of mental closure." [Ibid] In the United States, the most severe form of "mental closure" occurs when the crap from the right-wing echo chamber, including right-wing book publishers, is uncritically propagated by the so-called "liberal" news media.
Thus, on January 18, 2007, the Los Angeles Times pimped for D'Souza by publishing his Op-Ed, "How The Left Led Us Into 9/11." (See my article about it). By publishing such infantile crap, the editors at the LA Times validated Bourdieu's observation that journalists are "dangerous…since they're not always very educated." Thus, they are prone to "describe as extraordinary something that is totally banal, simply because they don't know any better." [Ibid, p. 43]
Many of you have written about the IKEA furniture commercial. Although IKEA is not a nationally known company, they are growing, with stores in most major U.S. cities. IKEA is a Sweden-based retail furniture company and they are trying to force their liberal worldview on Americans through television.
Their latest U.S.-aired commercial features a homosexual male couple and young female child on the floor, resting up against each other, as they lean on the front of their couch. The voiceover poses the question: “Why shouldn’t sofas come in flavors, just like families?”
This is just one of many pro-homosexual ads IKEA airs around the world.
Please let IKEA know that the promotion of homosexual couples as a “family” is offensive and undermines American values.
The only people who identify Hillary Clinton as part of the “left” are the wingnuts on right-wing talk radio and Fox News. By their standards, Clinton and all Democrats save Joe Lieberman are closet left-wing revolutionaries just waiting for the chance to nationalize industries and make peace with America’s adversaries.
Hillary Clinton: The Woman Who Would Be President
She's in, but can she win? That is the question after Hillary Clinton's announcement yesterday that she is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.
A Hillary victory and a two-term presidency would mean that Bushes and Clintons had ruled the US for 28 straight years; do Americans want that kind of dynastic politics, verging on monarchy? [1]
During the campaign for the 2008 Presidency of the American Psychological Association the candidates were asked a series of questions, based on the most frequent submissions from members. One of these questions concerned APA policy toward psychologist participation in coercive interrogations. The question was:
Do you think APA should have an explicit policy, including sanctions, against members enabling/participating in/advising about the coercive interrogation of prisoners/enemy combatants?
The good news is that all five candidates tried to appear be against participation in coercive interrogations. This suggests that all these candidates assumed that the APA membership is clearly against psychologist participation in coercive interrogations.
UPDATE 1-22-2007 5:00PM EDT:
Stephen Ragusea sent the following to me:
I did not try to “subtly” change the
topic. In an imperfect transcript, I may be seen as responding as best as
possible during a late night conference call. I don’t think that psychologists
should be involved in either torture or interrogation and all my written
statements for years have been both consistent and clear. And furthermore,
what I said that night is: “Psychology should have nothing to do with torture.
We should be seen as the antithesis, the antonym to it, not in anyway
synonymous with the concept of torture.” I think that is a very strong, clear
position. I’m appalled that my response is being distorted in this manner. If
Stephen Soldz needed clarification of my position, I wish he would have asked
for it rather than defaming my name. Sometimes social responsibility and
personal responsibility go hand in hand.
If there’s any way you can post this response, I’d appreciate it.
I’m glad to hear that I was wrong and that he doesn’t “think that psychologists should be involved in either torture or interrogation.” As my comments indicates, being against “torture” isn'’t enough. I’m glad that Dr. Ragusea is against participations in interrogations. This was not clear from his comments. I apologize for the misunderstanding on my part.
It's been a repetitive phenomenon of these last years — when fears about disaster (or further disaster, or even the farthest reaches of disaster) in Iraq rise, so does the specter of Vietnam. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between the two situations, Vietnam has been the shadow war we're still fighting. The Bush administration began its 2003 invasion by planning a non-Vietnam War scenario right down to not having "body counts," those grim, ridiculed death chants of that long-past era. His administration, as the President put it before the November mid-term elections, wasn't going to be a "body-count team." But the Vietnam experience has proven nothing short of irresistible in a crisis. Within the last month, after Bush himself bemoaned the lack of a body count in the vicinity, the body count slipped back into the news as a way to measure success in Iraq.
And that was only the beginning. With the recent plummeting of presidential approval ratings and the dismal polling reactions to Bush's "new way forward" in Iraq, the Vietnam scenario is experiencing something like a renaissance. Sometimes, these days, it seems as if top administration officials are simply spending their time preparing mock-Vietnam material for Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. The recent "surge" plan, for instance, brought that essential Vietnam vocabulary word, "escalation," back into currency. (It was on Democratic lips all last week.) Even worse, the President's plan was the kind of "incremental escalation" that military commanders coming out of Vietnam had sworn would never, ever be used again.
In any case, when Republican Senator (and surge opponent) Chuck Hagel questioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the E-word last week, she denied it was an appropriate moniker. Here's what she suggested instead. "I would call it, Senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad." (And, of course, Stewart promptly pounced…)
But that, too, was only the beginning. Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, called the President's plan "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, just appointed senior military commander in Iraq in charge of the Baghdad "surge," turned out to have written a doctoral thesis, much publicized last week, entitled "The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study of Military Influence and the Use of Force in the Post-Vietnam Era." ("Don't commit American troops, Mr. President unless… You have established clear-cut, attainable military objectives for American military forces… [and] you provide the military commander sufficient forces and the freedom necessary to accomplish his mission swiftly...")
Writings
This is how it works: The increasingly decadent and profit-driven book publishing business, which is "more concerned with the sensational than the sensible" publishes Dinesh D'Souza's new book. (Quote is from Alan Wolfe's review in the January 21, 2007, New York Times Book Review.) The book provides conclusive evidence, not only that D'Souza is an ignoramus — although earlier evidence was already quite persuasive - but also that the Hoover Institution hires hacks, provided they are conservative extremists. 
Rev. Don Wildmon and his grotesquely misnamed American “Family” Association are once again attempting to 
by Edward Strong
It's been a repetitive phenomenon of these last years — when fears about disaster (or further disaster, or even the farthest reaches of disaster) in Iraq rise, so does the specter of Vietnam. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between the two situations, Vietnam has been the shadow war we're still fighting. The Bush administration began its 2003 invasion by planning a non-Vietnam War scenario right down to 
