Here's what happens when you don't play by the rules of the media... even if you're right.

Ashleigh Banfield was smart, attractive, (important on television for women unfortunately) and a real journalist. But she disappeared from the face of the earth for months. MSNBC had kept her a tape closet for the remaining period of her contract (they didn't want to fire her in case she took her talent elsewhere.) And this is because just as she was rising in her career, Ashleigh Banfield gave the following speech:

Ashleigh Banfield Landon Lecture
Kansas State University
Manhattan, Kansas
April 24, 2003



...I suppose you watch enough television to know that the big TV show is over and that the war is now over essentially -- the major combat operations are over anyway, according to the Pentagon and defense officials -- but there is so much that is left behind. And I'm not just talking about the most important thing, which is, of course, the leadership of a Middle Eastern country that could possibly become an enormous foothold for American and foreign interests. But also what Americans find themselves deciding upon when it comes to news, and when it comes to coverage, and when it comes to war, and when it comes to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate any longer.

I think we all were very excited about the beginnings of this conflict in terms of what we could see for the first time on television. The embedded process, which I'll get into a little bit more in a few moments, was something that we've never experienced before, neither as reporters nor as viewers. The kinds of pictures that we were able to see from the front lines in real time on a video phone, and sometimes by a real satellite link-up, was something we'd never seen before and were witness to for the first time.

And there are all sorts of good things that come from that, and there are all sorts of terrible things that come from that. The good things are the obvious. This is one more perspective that we all got when it comes to warfare, how it's fought and how tough these soldiers are, what the conditions are like and what it really looks like when they're firing those M-16s rapidly across a river, or across a bridge, or into a building.

[...]

So for that element alone it was a wonderful new arm of access that journalists got to warfare. Perhaps not that new, because we all knew what it looked like at Vietnam and what a disaster that was for the government, but this did put us in a very, very close line of sight to the unfolding disasters.

That said, what didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.

I can't tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you've got to be on both sides. You've got to be a unilateral, someone who's able to cover from outside of both front lines, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to cover a war, which is the way most of us covered Afghanistan. There were no front lines, they were all over the place. They were caves, they were mountains, they were cobbled, they were everything. But we really don't know from this latest adventure from the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should never do it again. The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.

That just seems to be a trend of late, and l am worried that it may be a reflection of what the news was and how the news coverage was coming across. This was a success, it was a charge it took only three weeks. We did wonderful things and we freed the Iraqi people, many of them by the way, who are quite thankless about this. There's got to be a reason for that. And the reason for it is because we don't have a very good image right now overseas, and a lot of Americans aren't quite sure why, given the fact that we sacrificed over a hundred soldiers to give them freedom.

[...]

All they know is that we're crusaders. All they know is that we're imperialists. All they know is that we want their oil. They don't know otherwise. And I'll tell you, a lot of the people I spoke with in Afghanistan had never heard of the Twin Towers and most of them couldn't recognize a picture of George Bush.

[...]

That will be a very interesting story to follow in the coming weeks and months, as to how this vacuum is filled and how we go about presenting a democracy to these people when -- if we give them democracy they probably will ask us to get out, which is exactly what many of them want.

[...]

As a journalist I'm often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for going on television and saying, "Here's what the leaders of Hezbullah are telling me and here's what the Lebanese are telling me and here's what the Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here's what they have to say about the Golan Heights." Like it or lump it, don't shoot the messenger, but invariably the messenger gets shot.

We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al -Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they're prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that's not all, as a porn star. And that's not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.

How can you discuss, how can you solve anything when attacks from a mere radio flak is what America hears on a regular basis, let alone at the government level? I mean, if this kind of attitude is prevailing, forget discussion, forget diplomacy, diplomacy is becoming a bad word.

[..]

When I said the war was over I kind of mean that in the sense that cards are being pulled from this famous deck now of the 55 most wanted, and they're sort of falling out of the deck as quickly as the numbers are falling off the rating chart for the cable news stations. We have plummeted into the basement in the last week. We went from millions of viewers to just a few hundred thousand in the course of a couple of days.

Did our broadcasting change? Did we get boring? Did we all a sudden lose our flair? Did we start using language that people didn't want to hear? No, I think you've just had enough. I think you've seen the story, you've' seen how it ended, it ended pretty well in most American's view; it's time to move on.

What's the next big story? Is it Laci Peterson? Because Laci Peterson got a whole lot more minutes' worth of coverage on the cable news channels in the last week than we'd have ever expected just a few days after a regime fell, like Saddam Hussein.

I don't want to suggest for a minute that we are shallow people, we Americans. At times we are, but I do think that the phenomenon of our attention deficit disorder when it comes to watching television news and watching stories and then just being finished with them, I think it might come from the saturation that you have nowadays. You cannot walk by an airport monitor, you can't walk by most televisions in offices these days, in the public, without it being on a cable news channel. And if you're not in front of a TV you're probably in front of your monitor, where there is Internet news available as well.

You have had more minutes of news on the Iraq war in just the three-week campaign than you likely ever got in the years and years of network news coverage of Vietnam. You were forced to wait for it till six o'clock every night and the likelihood that you got more than about eight minutes of coverage in that half hour show, you probably didn't get a whole lot more than that, and it was about two weeks old, some of that footage, having been shipped back. Now it's real time and it is blanketed to the extent that we could see this one arm of the advance, but not where the bullets landed.

But I think the saturation point is reached faster because you just get so much so fast, so absolutely in real time that it is time to move on. And that makes our job very difficult, because we tend to leave behind these vacuums that are left uncovered. When was the last time you saw a story about Afghanistan? It's only been a year, you know. Only since the major combat ended, you were still in Operation Anaconda in not much more than 11 or 12 months ago, and here we are not touching Afghanistan at all on cable news.

There was just a memorandum that came through saying we're closing the Kabul bureau. The Kabul bureau has only been staffed by one person for the last several months, Maria Fasal, she's Afghan and she wanted to be there, otherwise I don't think anyone would have taken that assignment. There's just been no allotment of TV minutes for Afghanistan.

And I am very concerned that the same thing is about to happen with Iraq, because we're going to have another Gary Condit, and we're going to have another Chandra Levy and we're going to have another Jon Benet, and we're going to have another Elizabeth Smart, and here we are in Laci Peterson, and these stories will dominate. They're easy to cover, they're cheap, they're fast, you don't have to send somebody overseas, you don't have to put them up in a hotel that's expensive overseas, and you don't have to set up satellite time overseas. Very cheap to cover domestic news. Domestic news is music news to directors' ears.

But is that what you need to know? Don't you need to know what our personality is overseas and what the ramifications of these campaigns are? Because we went to Iraq, according to the President, to make sure that we were going to be safe from weapons of mass destruction, that no one would attack us. Well, did everything all of a sudden change? The terror alert went down. All of a sudden everything seems to be better, but I can tell you from living over there, it's not.

[...]

There was a reporter in the New York Times a couple days ago at the Pentagon. It was a report on the ground in Iraq that the Americans were going to have four bases that they would continue to use possibly on a permanent basis inside Iraq, kind of in a star formation, the north, the south, Baghdad and out west. Nobody was able to actually say what these bases would be used for, whether it was forward operations, whether it was simple access, but it did speak volumes to the Arab world who said, "You see, we told you the Americans were coming for their imperialistic need. They needed a foothold, they needed to control something in central and west Asia to make sure that we all next door come into line."

And these reports about Syria, well, they may have been breezed over fairly quickly here, but they are ringing loud still over there. Syria's next. And then Lebanon. And look out lran.

So whether we think it's plausible or whether the government even has any designs like that, the Arabs all think it's happening and they think it's for religious purposes for the most part.

[...]


I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I'm very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people's opinions. It was very sanitized.

It had a very brief respite from the sanitation when Terry Lloyd was killed, the ITN, and when David Bloom was killed and when Michael Kelley was killed. We all sort of sat back for a moment and realized, "God, this is ugly. This is hitting us at home now. This is hitting the noncombatants." But that went away quickly too.

This TV show that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there's nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.

War is ugly and it's dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It's a dangerous thing to propagate.

[...]

There is another whole phenomenon that's come about from this war. Many talk about it as the Fox effect, the Fox news effect. I know everyone of you has watched it. It's not a dirty little secret. A lot of people describe Fox as having streamers and banners coming out of the television as you're watching it cover a war. But the Fox effect is very concerning to me.

I'm a journalist and I like to be able to tell the story as I see it, and I hate it when someone tells me I'm one-sided. It's the worst I can hear. Fox has taken so many viewers away from CNN and MSNBC because of their agenda and because of their targeting the market of cable news viewership, that I'm afraid there's not a really big place in cable for news. Cable is for entertainment, as it's turning out, but not news.

I'm hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.

Well, all of this has to do with what you've seen on Fox and its successes. So I do urge you to be very discerning as you continue to watch the development of cable news, and it is changing like lightning. Be very discerning because it behooves you like it never did before to watch with a grain of salt and to choose responsibly, and to demand what you should know.

That's it. I know that there's probably a couple questions. No one's allowed to ask about my hair color, okay? I'm kidding, if you want to ask you can. It's a pretty boring story. But I just wanted to say thank you, and let's all pray and hope in any way that you pray or hope for peace and for democracy around the world, and for more rain this summer in Manhattan. Thank you all.

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The Birds and The Bees

Besides the endangered whales and dying rain forests and everything else in nature falling apart, one of the things that breaks my heart the most is that honey is becoming more and more artificial--it is becoming increasingly difficult to find honey that isn't fake or impure, because this state is so low on bees.

It's those darn immigrant bees. Takin' all the good flowers. Infiltrating the culture of pure honey!* I was telling this to Rahat and he expressed the idea quite characteristically.

*This is satire.

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the signs

of Judgment Day:

(If it's in bold, I think it's already happened.)

• The disappearance of knowledge and the appearance of ignorance (Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Majah, & Ahmad)
• Books/writing will be widespread and (religious) knowledge will be low (Ahmad)
• Adultery and fornication will be prevalent (The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that this has never happened without new diseases befalling the people, which their ancestors had not known.) (Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Majah, & Al-Haythami)
• When fornication becomes widespread among your leaders (The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that this will happen when the people stop forbidding evil) (Ibn Majah)
• Adultery and fornication will be performed in the open
• The consumption of intoxicants will be widespread (Bukhari & Muslim)
• Women will outnumber men......eventually 50:1 (Bukhari, Muslim, & Ahmad)
• Killing, killing, killing (Bukhari, Muslim, Ibn Majah, & Ahmad)
• The nations of the earth will gather against the Muslims like hungry people going to sit down to a table full of food. This will occur when the Muslims are large in number, but "like the foam of the sea."
• People will beat others with whips like the tails of oxen (Muslim) ?The Slave Trade
• The children will be filled with rage (at-Tabarani, al-Hakim)
• Children will be foul (at-Tabarani, al-Hakim)
• Women will conspire (at-Tabarani, al-Hakim)
• Rain will be acidic or burning (at-Tabarani, al-Hakim)
• Children of fornication will become widespread or prevalent (at-Tabarani, al-Hakim)
• When a trust becomes a means of making a profit (at-Tirmidhi, Al-Haythami)
• Gains will be shared out only among the rich, with no benefit to the poor (at-Tirmidhi)
• Paying zakat becomes a burden and miserliness becomes widespread; charity is given reluctantly (at-Tirmidhi & Al-Haythami)
• Miserliness will be thrown into the hearts of people (Bukhari)
• Episodes of sudden death will become widespread (Ahmad)
• There will be people who will be brethren in public but enemies in secret (He was asked how that would come about and replied, "Because they will have ulterior motives in their mutual dealings and at the same time will fear one another.") (at-Tirmidhi)
• When a man obeys his wife and disobeys his mother; and treats his friend kindly while shunning his father (at-Tirmidhi)
• When voices are raised in the mosques (at-Tirmidhi)
• People will walk in the marketplace with their thighs exposed
• Great distances will be traversed in short spans of time
• The people of Iraq will recieve no food and no money due to oppression by the Romans (Europeans) (Muslim)
• People will hop between the clouds and the earth
• A tribulation will enter everyone's home (Ahmad)
• The leader of a people will be the worst of them (at-Tirmidhi)
• Leaders of people will be oppressors (Al-Haythami)
• People will treat a man with respect out of fear for some evil he might do (at-Tirmidhi)
• Men will begin to wear silk (at-Tirmidhi)
• Female singers and musical instruments will become popular (at-Tirmidhi)
• When singers become common (Al-Haythami)
• People will dance late into the night
• When the last ones of the Ummah begin to curse the first ones (at-Tirmidhi)
• People will claim to follow the Qur'an but will reject hadith & sunnah (Abu Dawood)
• People will believe in the stars (Al-Haythami)
• People will reject al-Qadr (the Divine Decree of Destiny) (Al-Haythami)
• Time will pass rapidly (Bukhari, Muslim, & Ahmad)
• Good deeds will decrease (Bukhari)
• Smog will appear over cities because of the evil that they are doing
• People will be carrying on with their trade, but their will only be a few trustworthy persons
• Wealth will increase so much so that if a man were given 10,000, he would not be content with it (Ahmad & Bukhari)
• A man will pass by a grave and wish that he was in their place (Bukhari)
• Earthquakes will increase (Bukhari & Muslim)
• There will be attempts to make the deserts green
• The appearance of false messengers (30 dajjals) (Bukhari)
• Women will be naked in spite of being dressed, these women will be led astray & will lead others astray (Muslim)
• The conquest of Constantinople by the Muslims (Ahmad)
• The conquest of India by the Muslims, just prior to the return of Jesus, son of Mary (peace be upon both of them)(Ahmad, an-Nisa'i, at-Tabarani, al-Hakim)
• When people begin to compete with others in the construction of taller buildings (Bukhari)
• There will be a special greeting for the people of distinction (Ahmad)
• The Euphrates will disclose a treasure (The Prophet, peace be upon him, said that whoever is present should not take anything from it) (Bukhari & Muslim)
• Two large groups, adhering to the same religious teaching will fight each other with large numbers of casualties (Bukhari & Muslim)
• Wild animals will be able to talk to humans (Ahmad)
• A man will leave his home and his thigh or hip will tell him what is happening back at his home (Ahmad)
• Years of deceit in which the truthful person will not be believed and the liar will be believed (Ahmad)
• Bearing false witness will become widespread (Al-Haythami & Ahmad)
• When men lie with men and women lie with women (Al-Haythami)
• Trade will become so widespread that a woman will be forced to help her husband in business (Ahmad)
• A woman will enter the workforce out of love for this world (Ahmad)
• Arrogance will increase in the earth (at-Tabarani, al-Hakim)
• Family ties will be cut (Ahmad)
• There will be many women of child-bearing age who will no longer give birth.
• There will be an abundance of food, much of which has no blessing in it.
• People will refuse when offered food.
• Men will begin to look like women and women will begin to look like men


• Masih ad-Dajjal (The AntiChrist)
• The Mahdi
• The appearance of Masih al-Isa (Jesus Christ), the son of Mary (peace be upon him)
• Ya’juj and M’juj (Gog and Magog)
• The destruction of the Ka’bah and the recovery of its treasure
• Emergence of the Beast
• The smoke
• Three major landslides (one in the East, one in the West, and one on the Arabian peninsula)
• The wind will take the souls of the believers
• The rising of the sun from the west
• The fire will drive the people to their final gathering place
• Three blasts of the trumpet (fear & terror, death, resurrection)


So I know I haven't been posting as much but I'll get back to it soon! Just have to get past midterms...

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Stop this. Now.

This article was written two years ago, but I came across it recently. I'm going to post it here, because I have no words for this. I'm astonished, pained, and outraged. And I feel sick.

--beginning of article--

Crush Videos: Animal Torture and Murder as a Fetish
May 22, 2007 by Laura Brady

The word crush has many definitions. It can mean to hug, embrace, overwhelm, suppress. It also means infatuation and love. Yet the opposite of love is hate, and of good is evil. In this case crush is meant in the killing sense, to squeeze out of shape, to grind or pound to small bits. Crush videos are film for fetishists who can only achieve sexual gratification by seeing a woman in high heels torture and dominate an animal and finally kill it by viciously crushing it. It is an obscenity that has been around for many years but with the internet it is almost impossible to stop the proliferation and publication of these videos.

There are many fetishes. A fetish is "an object whose real or fantasized presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification." Some people have foot fetishes, shoe fetishes, hair fetishes; the list is fairly endless. It is something that usually begins when a person enters into adolescence, comes into contact with a certain object, and is sexually aroused at the same time. They associate their sexual arousal with that object and the obsession grows stronger over time. This is not necessarily a harmful association until it leads to hurting others. It shouldn't matter to the rest of the world that John Doe gets turned on by buying pretty shoes to masturbate over at home. It's when he is aroused by a woman wearing these shoes while she tortures and crushes animals with them that it crosses the line from odd to immoral and illegal.

These crush fetishists have fantasies that they are actually the ones being crushed. It's a combination of a foot/high heel/dominatrix/giantess fantasy fetish. They watch the woman, filmed only from the legs down, walk around the animal, dominating it first by perhaps tying it down or pinning it with her heels. She then proceeds to torture it for as long as possible by slashing it with her heels, breaking its bones by stomping on arms and legs, stubbing out cigarettes on the animal's body, and other horrendous acts. She completes the video by crushing the defenseless creature either beneath her stiletto, or between her buttocks or breasts.

The fetishists usually begin their animal abuse stage of their behavior in small increments. They typically start by watching videos of small insects being tortured and crushed, such as caterpillars, spiders, etc. While most people wouldn't blink an eye at crushing a bug this act is all about the intention. The intent in killing the insects is malicious and for personal, sexual gratification. After a while this is not enough and they must move on to bigger game, so to speak. Their next victims are frogs, rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small animals. Of course this is followed up by crushing kittens, puppies, cats, dogs, and any other animals they can get away with obtaining for their torturous and horrendous videos.

This kind of abuse puts a black face on humanity. Some might argue that there are too many hideous things that are perpetrated in this world, such as murder, rape, child abuse and other crimes against humanity, and that we have enough to worry about trying to hold back that tide of evil. These animals suffer fear, confusion, and horrible pain at the hands of these vile people. The ones who watch and obtain sexual gratification are just as culpable because they drive the demand. We should never turn our backs to any kind of torture, murder, and abuse.

It is difficult to hunt down the people who make and produce these videos because they hide their faces and names. There are many sites on the internet geared just towards this sort of sick pornography and it can be hard, if not impossible, to remove them. If you come across a site that appears to have crush videos, or hear anything about them, click on the provided links to report them to the proper people in authority. Evil should never be overlooked, no matter who is the victim.

--end of article--

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Eid Mubarak

Eid Mubarak.

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Undercover Investigation at Hy-Line Hatchery

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Ramadan Mubarak

Do not intend to eat, or you are not fasting. Do not intend to view sin, or your eyes are not fasting. Do not intend to speak sin, or your mouth is not fasting. Do not intend to hear sin, or your ears are not fasting. Do not intend to touch sin, or your hands are not fasting. Do not intend to commit sin, or your soul will not fast.

The masjid began Taraweeh prayer. Out of bed at 4:00 AM to eat and be clean before the sunrise in preparation for the first day, and every day, of the month long yearly cleansing. What we overindulged in throughout the year was taken from us. The television wasn't felt as a loss to me as much as to my brothers. From me my mother promptly collected the radio. She would take the Internet if she could.

This is the month in that which Hell would cease to burn, and those tormented within it will be temporary relieved until the fasting is over. The devil is chained away. Rewards for prayers and good deeds are multiplied. Everything from eating to anger is to be controlled.

I start college in 2 days.

The signs

of God

are everywhere.

Regardless of time.

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