Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

The blog division of Melançon Enterprises has joined a million blogs for peace and should probably find somewhere permanent to display this strange icon:

For the record, the blog division is strongly against any additional war against Iran, Afghanistan, any country in Africa, or any other country in the world where the government has not organized an army and attacked first.

My point, actually, is that headline should speak for itself.

A week or so ago I read about a poll of United States residents' opinion of – and grasp of facts regarding – the U.S. war on Iraq.

News (Opinion?) Flash: "77% of Americans find the level of civilian deaths in Iraq unacceptable."

This is a U.S. public that (according to the same poll) thinks the number of Iraqis killed is oh, just under 10,000 people– not, say, more than 600,000 mostly noncombatants.

George Lakoff tries to save humanity with clear language: The Words None Dare Say: Nuclear War.

Jake and I have identified the precise analogy for what's going on among the leaders of this planet:

A whole bunch of people on a raft fighting over whose raft it is with a big wave coming.

And Dick Cheney drilling for oil through the bottom of the raft.

Ted Rall's Cancers of the Future cartoon supposes that all those little electronic gadgets beaming waves at us (including wireless internet and self-flushing urinals) cause cancer.

Cell phones probably do.

I'm scared he's right. Talk about preventable disease. At least we in the wealthy world would suffer the effects of our own poor planning and extravagance for a change.

Sixty years after Taft-Hartley helped destroy the momentum of the labor movement, the newly Democratic Congress is on the verge of passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow unionization of a workplace if a majority of workers signed a card indicating their desire for a union.

Why now?

I coined another phrase today: imperial suicide party.

Over at NewStandard News' blog on shoddy journalism in the attempted run-up to a war against Iran.

And just the day before I coined the phrase free software is worth paying for. (Unlike, say, these coiny phrases.)

With the misleading headline "University costs may not be blocking poor youth: StatsCan," the CBC this Thursday played the well-worn media role of trying to discredit anyone calling for action.

This single-source story came after students protested for lower tuition. It is this context, and its presentation, that are most troubling. Personally, I agree that poverty and inequality themselves are the larger problems, and that they will not be overcome by lowering university costs. Because of the barriers to entry of required tests and an educational system that puts more effort into separating students than educating everyone at the highest level possible, the University of Massachusetts tends to be a subsidy for middle-class kids paid by the taxes of lower-income state residents. (This is also due to state taxes being relatively regressive.)

Just listened to The Rolling Stone's "Sweet Neo Con" again.

I love how the Dixie Chicks apologize for Texas' letting Bush loose on the world, and there is a sustained media campaign against them. Here, the Rolling Stones have a whole bloody song deconstructing Cheney and Bush's war on Iraq, and the media ignored that little fact. The purpose is the same: eliminate critique of power and suppress protest against the war on Iraq, but the Stones are just too big to take on. They don't get much radio time anymore anyway, they just sell a million records and sell out every show anyway.

Turns out the Dixie Chicks were also too tough for Clear Channel and the right-wing media echo chamber, always aided willingly by the establishment media, but I find the difference in approach revealing. It's not an emotional or ideological response, "how dare they criticize the President." It is a pragmatic (for the powerful) response: the best approach to minimize dissenting opinion.