Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Congratulations to Participant Productions on reviving the spirit of conscience and meaning in filmmaking with two recent releases: Good Night, And Good Luck and North Country. Thanks to the wall of right wing noise, the past few years have seen a mighty counter surge of intelligent, truth seeking documentaries and fact-based motion pictures, such as The Corporation, The Fog of War, and of course the work of Michael Moore.

Good Night, and Good Luck covers Edward R. Murrow’s confrontations with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Government sponsored investigations and accusations of Communist activities, a Red scare witch hunt that inspired Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. Incredibly, to those of us who truly believed the American psyche had evolved above and beyond those dark days, we now have the likes of Ann Coulter and right wing robot mouths reviving the glories of McCarthy’s delusional deeds. Has she no shame?

Participant Productions was founded in 2004 by eBay philanthropist Jeff Skoll. It is heartening to see capital success put to good use this way. Don’t let the bastards get you down. Keep on fighting the good fight.

P.S. You should definitely support these films by going out and seeing them!

Karl Rove, aka Humpty Dumpty, has fallen off the wall, landed on Lewis Libby. Dick Cheney and the Republican Party can’t put the mess back together again. This is The Great Unraveling. This is Worse Than Watergate, and has only been a matter of time for the Democrats to decide they’ve had enough stalling, secrecy, cronyism, diversion, and avoidance of the truth… and so too it seems more and more American people are seriously up in arms.

An article at The Nation compares the White House pre-war intelligence fraud to the Enron investor fraud.

Happy Halloween! This Tom Delay guy really is scary! Hot Tub Tom!

With the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the unraveling of the tangled web is happening fast. Those of us who smelled a rat a long time ago are having fun with the inevitable implosion of the Right Wing Nuthouse, so I thought I’d join in.

If you are catching up on how we got into this war in Iraq, expect to see a lot more attention on it.

I’m glad it’s over! Especially the Houston games. The post-season baseball games TV broadcast from Houston were oddly distracting with the ever present snowball white hair of Bulldog Barbara Bush constantly behind home plate. I have to give her credit for sitting through game 3 like a vigilant animated George Washington painting for 11 or 12 innings, the longest world series game in history, 5 hours and 41 minutes. Now I know where her son W gets his stubborn tenacity.

I know that I am not alone in this obvious observation because other bloggers are venting also:

Barbara Bush’s shining white mane continues to infiltrate my HIGH-DEF

I am pulling for them not only because half my family is from Chicago, but because George H.W. and Barbara “Let Them Eat Cake” Bush are seated behind home plate at the former Enron Park (now Minute Maid Park, because who doesn’t like orange juice?), both clad in Astros jackets. Last night (game 3) Babs was accompanied by Neil Bush of Silverado S&L scandal fame.

As the Chicago Sun-Times Mark Brown noted, Mrs. Bush’s seat was so close to home plate “you can see her head during every pitch of every at-bat.”

Some interesting buzz in the news today about Google reaching into eBay, craigslist and classified advertising territory with their search technology. Here is the screenshot of Google Base.

That’s the hazy future, but for now I’m bummed that I was not invited to Google’s Zeitgeist forum. This is the kind of smart brainstorming contact high cluster f*ck that temporarily raises my IQ to rare sub-genius levels. Dear Google, please invite me next time. I promise I will not blog about it. Thank you.

Here at Media Spin we are compulsive collectors of media. Digital archiving started over 20 years ago, and recently we uncovered a huge stash of rare old gems. There are many unusual finds, such as the above cover of an early girly mag test run by a struggling Hugh Hefner.

Here’s a good one. How cool would it be to have a job making up good intelligence, news stories and “strategic communications” for the U.S. Government to feed the unwary public? That’s what The Rendon Group does, and you can too! They’ve helped sell us rubes on the last couple of Gulf Wars and that’s only the beginning.

Hers’ a stunning find… Martha Stewart’s lesser known sister, Celeste. Her dedication to office work kept her out of the kitchen and out of Martha’s way. There are many more of these that still are being sorted out. Sorry, still no early Oprah photos.

It is with great anticipation and delight that I look forward to meeting the author of a book I am reading, The Reluctant Shaman by Kay Cordell Whitaker. She is currently on a tour, promoting her new book Sacred Link, and is scheduled to be at East West Bookstore in Mountain View on October 28th and Black Oak Books in Berkeley on Sunday, October 30. Kay’s full schedule is at her web site, A World In Balance.

My first introduction to writings on shamanism were the Carlos Castaneda booksdescibing his travels into the Mexican desert and apprenticeship under the mysterious Yaqui Indian teacher, don Juan Mateus. Unlike Castaneda’s experience, Whitaker’s Peruvian teachers, Chea and Domano Hetaka, introduced themselves and taught her on her home turf in Santa Cruz, California. Whitaker’s writing is far more accessible than Castaneda’s including practical homework lessons given to her in logical steps by her teachers. Castaneda gave much attention to building personal power in order to escape the bounds of the ordinary world of reality. The Hetekas express a greater mission through their teachings: by finding your own song, you contribute to awakening society in order to bring about global healing. Spiritual joys experienced along the way just happen to be a plus.

From Kay’s web site, A World In Balance…

This work is my Path. This is what
I came here to do, to participate in helping
the world, my community, my people. To do that,
I had to first find out about me, help me, heal me,
learn who and what I am, and how I connect
to the whole world. Once I was able to do that,
I had the tools to help someone else.

As the Hetakas have often said to me, it is for each person to objectively reexamine deep inside themselves, their beliefs, their values, and their world, to find THEIR OWN TRUTH – whatever that may be.