In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.” Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.” In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. John Pilger ☀
My Top 25 Podcasts (2009) ☀
Back in 2007, soon after the genesis of this humble online adobe, I composed a Top 10 Podcast post.
Here in 2009, it’s mushroomed to a 25 count list. Mainly because I struggled with which ones to leave out of the top 10 list and cordon off into an “honorable mentions” bracket. So, in haste, decided to dump my whole iTunes podcast subscription suite (almost, there’s actually a few more that I don’t have listed here). The ones occupying the bottom of the list are either relatively new entries or shows that pile up but are infrequently played.
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This American Life — fellow family members and friends are puzzled about my adulation on what I believe to be the greatest radio show ever… …I find the program to be fascinating and riveting, even on matters I am faintly interested in… …and it’s high quality, professionally produced fare too, a delight for the auditory organs.
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Bill Moyers Journal — there is just not any other program like this on television right now, providing a forum for knowledgeable subject matter experts in long form (at least for the medium it is created for) interviews… …sort of the un-Larry King of talk shows. Moyers can meander into excessive preachy mode, but again, the guests and the questions that are not asked on all those other shows make this show.
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This Week in Tech — Leo Laporte’s podcast universe’s flagship product… …of recent, quality has started to suffer as I believe (a) Leo has too many irons in the fire, (b) is increasingly coming across a spoiled tech debutante far detached from typical tech users and (c) needs to shuffle some of the panelists off. This ranking is mainly reflective of past years and Leo’s pioneering in this realm.
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Thom Hartmann Show — Probably the talk show host that comes closest to mirroring my political views. Which makes me wonder if his program would rate so high if I did not. As a radio host, he’s full of flaws: (a) still hasn’t mastered inflection and speaking into the microphone, though he’s conducted a radio show for many years now and (b) his intro segments where he “duels” with libertarian thinkers, neoconservatives and paleoconservatives are too short, and worse, he’s often “bested” in debate, especially when engaging with a crafty righty like Frank Luntz. I keep wishing he’s eschew the whole token 10 minute “debate an opponent” affair and instead, slot an hour where he could invite a full panel — one additional person for his “side”, who’s much more knowledgeable in the subject up for discussion, and two in opposition, along with time in the second half hour for callers to get a crack at the panelists.
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Media Matters with Bob McChesney — Professor McChesney’s program is one of the few places where I can listen to Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Mark Weisbrot, John Pilger, etc.… …all the voices shunned on mainstream outlets.
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Three Moves Ahead — I don’t even own a Windows machine anymore so most of the banter on strategy computer games flies past me but I do harbor an affection for strategy games (card, board, or electronic) and the host and panelists do talk about the greatest turn based strategy game ever. One of the frequent panelists, Bruce Geryk, was the author of the Dominions 3 manual.
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MacBreak Weekly — by next year, this show may not even be on this list. Outside of the annual MacWorld and Mac developer conferences, the panelists struggle for subjects, and the conversation descends into silliness. And the way they use their Macs may be congruent with those adorning money hats, it’s just not that practical for me.
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Woodland Hills Church - Sermon messages from Pastor Greg Boyd, author of The Myth of a Christian America and The Myth of a Christian Religion.
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The Media Squat with Douglas Rushkoff — Media pontificator and modern day McLuhan wannabe Douglas Rushkoff ventures into radioland.
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Real Time with Bill Maher — I think Bill Maher is a detestable fellow. But he’s funny.
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Antiwar Radio — The program’s web page title still lists longtime Phoenix radio jock Charles Goyette as a host, but I think it’s a strictly Scott Horton (not to be confused with this Scott Horton) run enterprise now.
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Democracy Now — Amy Goodman’s enterprise delivers news from a leftist point of view.
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FLOSS Weekly — A podcast featuring interviews with interesting figures from the world of free and/or open source software. Hosted by Randal Schwartz and sometimes Leo Laporte.
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KunstlerCast — James Howard Kunstler’s acerbic rants are better delivered in written form. In audio, his blustering frequently comes across as “get off my lawn you infantile baggy pant wearin’, tatoo stamped sluggo”.
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Behind the News with Doug Henwood — Economics commentary and interviews, hosted by Left Business Observer publisher Doug Henwood. I enjoy listening to Henwood, though he seems awfully jaded, often firing many more darts at those on the left, who at first take, would seem to be more sympathetic to his worldview. Or maybe we can just award him with +1 in objectivity.
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Brain Science Podcast with Dr. Ginger Campbell — Dr. Campbell explores discoveries in the world of neuroscience. Fascinating, but there is a major annoyance (have not listened recently, so it may have been remedied since my last podcast consumption) in that the commercial advertisement inclusions are at a decibel level exponentially greater than the content in the rest of the program.
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EconTalk — Professor Russ Roberts discusses economics with a right/libertarian Hayekian bent.
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Le Show — the voice of the Simpsons Mr. Burns and Waylon Smithers (along with a slew of other characters) has his very own NPR comedy show. It’s a hit or miss affair, and Shearer isn’t bashful about letting his politics seep into the comedic material. Still, some funny bit gems to be discovered here.
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Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show — Actor Kevin Pollak has jumped into the podcast game, and from my brief listening experience to date, he’s got an engaging show. Interesting, lengthy (his podcast clocks in at over 2+ hours, though that includes his intro bits) interviews with directors, actors and celebrities like Kevin Smith and Felicia Day. And listeners get a chance to play the Larry King game.
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Glenn Greenwald Radio — is a professionally produced quality affair, but the schedule is just so sporadic.
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Rebooting the News — Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on rebooting journalism in the age of the interwebs.
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Berkman Center for Internet and Society — I love the subject matter and the speakers, but the audio quality is extremely poor. It sounds like somebody is recording from a Sports Illustrated sneaker phone in the back of a conference hall.
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Trinity Mennonite Church — Sermon messages by local Glendale, AZ pastor Shane Hipps, author of Flickering Pixels.
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Truth Seekers — Fellow Valley native and friend Dani Cutler.
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NPR Fresh Air — Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Gross’s interviews, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, are “a remarkable blend of empathy, warmth, genuine curiosity, and sharp intelligence”.
Some additional ramblings on podcasts:
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Podcasts should be posted promptly. No later than the following day. For most podcasts, waiting more than a few days top publish — why bother wasting disk space and bandwidth for a show that’s gone stale already. Sure, there are some podcasts for which there is a timeless quality to. But most, especially those that deal with tech related subjects, need to be published posthaste. Which is why Leo Laporte’s syndicated “The Tech Guy” podcast is not on this here list.
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Even with limited funds, it’s really not a herculean effort to produce a quality audio podcast. A decent mike, a stable broadband connection, and freeware software is all that is required. There’s really no excuse for substandard audio in 2009.
What are your favorite podcasts?
But for most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the internet for all its subversiveness has still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we’re getting still either its this singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call is a contrived silence, a censorship by a mission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars. All of this, it seams to me, has come together in the presidency of Barack Obama who is almost a creation of this media world. He promised some things, although most of them were more for us, and has delivered virtually the opposite. He started his own war in Pakistan. We see the events in Iran and Honduras in quiet subtlety, but very directly influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media. It is a time when I think, where either we are going to begin to understand how the media really works, or we’re going to let that opportunity pass. Its almost a historic opportunity the we understand that the perception of our world is utterly distorted, most of the time through what are seen as credible sources of information. John Pilger ☀
Israeli human rights groups have documented the routine torture of Palestinians by Shin Bet agents with “beatings, painful binding, back bending, body stretching and prolonged sleep deprivation”. Amnesty has long reported the widespread use of torture by Israel, whose victims emerge as mere shadows of their former selves. Some never return. Israel is high in an international league table for its murder of journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, who receive barely a fraction of the kind of coverage given to the BBC’s Alan Johnston. John Pilger ☀
Travelling with Robert Kennedy in 1968 was eye-opening for me. To audiences of the poor, Kennedy would present himself as a saviour. The words “change” and “hope” were used relentlessly and cynically. For audiences of fearful whites, he would use racist codes, such as “law and order”. With those opposed to the invasion of Vietnam, he would attack “putting American boys in the line of fire”, but never say when he would withdraw them. That year (after Kennedy was assassinated), Richard Nixon used a version of the same, malleable speech to win the presidency. Thereafter, it was used successfully by Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. Carter promised a foreign policy based on “human rights” – and practised the very opposite. Reagan’s “freedom agenda” was a bloodbath in central America. Clinton “solemnly pledged” universal health care and tore down the last safety net of the Depression. John Pilger ☀
What struck me, living and working in the United States, was that presidential campaigns were a parody, entertaining and often grotesque. They are a ritual danse macabre of flags, balloons and bullshit, designed to camouflage a venal system based on money power, human division and a culture of permanent war. John Pilger ☀
In my view, the greatest distraction is the hypocrisy of those political figures in the democratic West, who claim to support the Burmese liberation struggle. Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice come to mind. “The United States,” said Rice, “is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place in Burma.” What she is less keen to keep a focus on is that the huge American company, Chevron, on whose board of directors she sat, is part of a consortium with the junta and the French company, Total, that operates in Burma’s offshore oil fields. The gas from these fields is exported through a pipeline that was built with forced labor and whose construction involved Halliburton, of which Vice President Cheney was Chief Executive. John Pilger ☀
What Kissinger and Nixon began, Pol Pot completed. Had the United States and China allowed it, Cambodia’s suffering could have stopped when the Vietnamese finally responded to years of Khmer Rouge attacks across their border and liberated the country in January 1979. But almost immediately the United States began secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Direct contact was made between the Reagan White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr. Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., made a clandestine visit to Pol Pot’s operational base inside Cambodia in November 1980. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Reagan. Within a year some fifty C.l.A. and other intelligence agents were running Washington’s secret war against Cambodia from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok and along the Thai-Cambodian border. The aim was to appease China, the great Soviet foe and Pol Pot’s most enduring backer, and to rehabilitate and use the Khmer Rouge to bring pressure on the source of recent U. S. humiliation in the region: the Vietnamese. Cambodia was now America’s “last battle of the Vietnam War,” as one U.S. official put it, “so that we can achieve a better result. John Pilger ☀
Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water’s edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who “clashed” with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.
John Pilger
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I’ve made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first was Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. It describes the American bombing that provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had started, Pol Pot completed—CIA files alone leave no doubt of that. I offered Year Zero to PBS and took it to Washington. The PBS executives who saw it were shocked. They whispered among themselves. They asked me to wait outside. One of them finally emerged and said, “John, we admire your film. But we are disturbed that it says the United States prepared the way for Pol Pot.” I said, “Do you dispute the evidence?” I had quoted a number of CIA documents. “Oh, no,” he replied. “But we’ve decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator.” Now the term “journalist adjudicator” might have been invented by George Orwell. In fact they managed to find one of only three journalists who had been invited to Cambodia by Pol Pot. And of course he turned his thumbs down on the film, and I never heard from PBS again. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries and became one of the most watched documentaries in the world. It was never shown in the United States. John Pilger ☀
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