Site Updates & Notes
Tuesday, 10. November 2009
I want to thank all of you who have kindly donated to this project, registered to become a member of our irate club, and shared your comments and views. This project solely depends on your support; thank you.
ITUNE & Podcast Interviews
We are still working on reformatting and moving the iTUNE subscription function from the old site. I’ll have the new interviews added to the old site, so that you can retrieve and listen to them until we finalize the move and complete testing and troubleshooting.
Random Hold on Certain Comments
From what I see a few comments are being filtered and put on hold by Wordpress, even though they don’t raise any flags such as listing too many links or going over the length limit. I am trying to determine why this is happening, and meanwhile, I am checking the blocked comments several times a day, and will lift the ‘hold’ manually. Please be patient while I find a solution, and don’t take it personally.
Adding New & Needed Functions
We are working on adding a ‘direct reply’ option for each comment. Once that’s done we can reply to each comment directly instead of this tedious way of @ XYZ …Believe me it is bugging me too!
I am also planning to set up ‘author accounts’ for our contributing authors and reporters. This way at the bottom of each piece you’ll see the name of the author instead of this generic impersonal ‘Admin.’
…
Again, thank you for being understanding and patient while we are adding and improving site functions and troubleshooting problems. I wish I had a full-time, or even a part-time, webmaster to run to with these requests and problems, but I don’t. Those of you who know me are aware of my qualifications when it comes to technology; for those of you who are not, put the adjective ‘challenged’ next to my name in relation to anything related to technology 
Add to that limited resources and time, until we have sufficient funding to operate and expand, and you’ll understand the need for a bit of patience and a bit of forgiveness.
Sibel Edmonds
contextofnocontext Says:
Ms. Edmonds,
Thanks again for the hard work. Two quick things I was made aware of today, just in case you missed them:
- More National Security Letter News: http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/09/taking_liberties/entry5595506.shtml?tag=mncol;txt
- Two separate articles referencing the same Richard Hofstadter essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” One was a dismissal of the general outrage and distrust of the American public towards any ‘program’ offered to them by the Government written by the Establishment Court Philosopher Paul Krugman (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09krugman.html). The other was written by some blogger/author named Arthur Goldwag who, like Mr. Krugman, seems to place anything he deems outside his immediate sphere of influence as belonging to a fringe group. An irate minority of loons, racists and obsessives, of course. It can be found here: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/09/911-truth-and-the-pa.html
The dual reference to that essay and the fascistic pragmatism these particular pimps are preaching made me wonder if they happened to look at the published date of that particular essay (November 1964) and if they made a, clearly unrelated, connection to August 1964 and the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. To the masses of people who rose up in protest against the situation that followed, who lost complete faith in the veracity of their elected officials…who saw in the Pentagon Papers a conspiracy amongst the MIC and the moneyed elite to pursue objectives that had nothing to do with the well-being of the American public. But I’m probably reaching. I guess that Hofstadter essay’s just part of the collective unconscious right now. Floating through the minds of the intelligentsia.
Kingfisher Says:
The Goldwag article is great. Hofstadter nailed the dynamic for the ages when he wrote Paranoid Style, though he was wrong about Barry Goldwater. It has manifested itself on both left and right in our country. Goldwag is dead on about the self importance and closed systems of the truthers.
ZicaTanka Says:
Regarding Goldwag:
Ah, the rhetoric of a marginalizer. How can we imagine being part of the mentally normal without marginalizing anyone who points out a problem with the official story of a major focal point in American History. If you have any trouble, just create lists of normal looking people and groups next to obviously evil looking ones. And put the word evidence in quotes a lot.
I think it’s purely relative psycho-babble myself. The closed systems are the ones, like those of the establishment behind the scenes of so much of what we talk about here, that produce paranoia inducing literature such as this.
T Says:
Hi Sibel,
Don’t worry about building the site. The important thing is that it’s there (vs. the MSM who’s never there
).
What’s your rule on using clips from your podcasts (for non-profit use to help the site)?
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.
NeoNoetic Says:
Sibel, have you looked at all the options under the “Settings/Discussion” administration page of the blog to see if something there might be causing the holds?
Sibel Edmonds Says:
@T: ‘What’s your rule on using clips from your podcasts (for non-profit use to help the site)?’ Of course you/they can use it, as long as BF Post is cited with a link.
@NeoNoetic: Yes we have. The only few rules in place have to do with: comments only by registered users, no more than 2 links, and not too lengthy comments (those that tend to go on for pages!). That’s about it.
Jade Says:
Sibel – Have you read the latest piece from the Nation about Afghanistan? It compliments the long piece that you wrote recently nicely by bringing in Wardak and some uncomfortable details about how the Taliban is being funded.
It’s here. Cheers.
Jade Says:
Wow, I jumped the gun by posting that link while being only 5 paragraphs into reading the Nation article, myself. It’s almost as if the author grabbed the key players in your blog, Sibel, and just spun out a different tale of corruption and chaos. Talk about a brutal article. I don’t see how the President, the military, or anyone else can justify us escalating in Afghanistan or keeping this charade going. We are literally “nation building” by shifting the wealth of US taxpayers to the warlords and favored businessmen over there. Meanwhile, back at home, we’ve seen the largest transfer of wealth upwards in our history and seem hellbent on creating a permanent class of debt slaves. Our troops deserve better than this, we deserve better, and so do the Afghans. I doubt that any of that blood money over in Afghanistan is trickling down to the starving, displaced masses.
Greg Bacon Says:
How else does one expect Wall Street banks to rake in over 50 billion a year on the Afghan opium trade if we don’t escalate the number of troops which will also be used to keep a heavy military presence around those rich Caspian Basin oil and natural gas fields and to surround Israel’s ‘existential’ enemy, Iran, with American targets?
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.
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