15 thoughts on “Memory Hole”

  1. I haven’t been to the new location, but the old Newseum had lots of neat stuff in it, among them, a few sections of the Berlin Wall. Kind of like Jersey barrier but a lot taller, covered in graffiti.

  2. Well, compared to all of the other examples, Duranty is more than a little significant in the history of news reporting.

  3. I’m something of a student of intellectual history and leftists are particularly bad about going completely amnesic about their failures. In their minds, modern history is just one long story of leftists going from success-to-success and being proven right over and over again. To the extent they “fail” it is only by not being able to drag the rest of society far enough to the left at any juncture in history.

    My favorite example is FDR’s National Recovery Administration. It was a system of sweeping wage and price controls and de facto nationalization. Many of its architects wrote glowingly of the Soviet Union and even suggested we should adopt a Five-year plan like the Soviets or a Four-Year Plan like Nazi Germany With 80 years hindsight and experience we know the NRA would have been economically disastrous and politically dangerous. The Supreme court destroyed the NRA and the Republicans managed to walk back many of the other “reforms.” The policies put into place were nothing but a pale shadow of what FDR originally intended.

    Yet modern leftists will tell you that FDR saved the country from the Great Depression with his great ideas. And the idea that massive government intervention saved the country is an article of faith among them.

    It’s now wonder that leftists are so utterly convinced they have the answer to every problem. Their hagiographic history of their political subculture tells them that they are right, that they’ve always been right and that everyone who has every questioned them has been proved wrong.

    If you want to see a “deer in the headlights” expression, ask a leftists to explain why so many American leftists thought turning Cambodia over to the Khmer Rouge was a good idea. Ask them to explain why leftists of the era so badly misjudged the Khmer Rouge or how they convinced themselves that those psychos were largely harmless. It’s an interesting study because the same mechanisms of delusion that caused them to see the Khmer Rouge as the good guys is the same cognitive distortion that causes them to see various Palestinian autocrats as the good guys compared to the liberal-democratic Israel.

  4. When the fancy building goes up is often when the institution is declining. This expensive museum is a mausoleum.

  5. This is only the beginning as we see the inauguration of the Ministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.

    The new Financial Reforms pushed through by the regime [term used deliberately in reference to a specific concept in economics] grants the Federal Trade Commission the power to regulate the internet and communications, including the “news” industry.

    The Federal Trade Commission has released a “staff discussion draft” of policy recommendations to “save” journalism.

    http://tinyurl.com/29cd4pn

    The goal, from the draft, is to preserve and protect the monopoly of the dead tree media and the Main Stream Media broadcast networks. Among the proposals:

    * Expanding copyright law and restricting the fair comment doctrine.

    * Granting anti-trust exemptions to the conventional media.

    * Granting tax exemptions to the conventional media.

    * Government subsidies for approved news organizations that include; increased funding for government public broadcasting, establishing a government organization to pay reporters, tax credits for employing journalists, government funding for local news operations, and giving news organizations postal subsidies.

    * A doctrine of “proprietary facts”, to give news organizations the equivalent of copyright ownership of the facts of events, which would prevent anyone from “fact-checking” assertions of the government funded media.

    Not to worry. It is all to be paid for by a new tax. Dubbed the “iPad tax” it is a 5% surcharge on all consumer electronics, the use of the broadcast spectrum, and advertising [I assume that government advertising is exempt].

    I would guess that the next architectural incarnation of the Newseum is going to be inspired by the backgrounds in some of Leni Reifenstahl’s productions.

    “Mr. Zenger, Mr. John Peter Zenger. Please pick up the White Courtesy Phone under the ‘Sedition Act of 1798/Sedition Act of 1918’ sign.”

    Subotai Bahadur

  6. Try “Eason Jordan.” Or “Jayson Blair.” Or “Janet Cooke.”

    For that matter, try “Rush Limbaugh.” You get some crap about Mark Shields.

    Try “Pajamas.” You get more crap about Wonkette.

    There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia in Pravda.

  7. I apologise for a second posting, but I just found something that stunned me into silence [ I promise you, that is a hard thing to do ], followed by profanities in English, German, and Mandarin Chinese. And yes it fits both the Memory Hole thread, and my previous posting about the new, improved, Government-regulated media.

    I’m sure that you know who Helen Thomas is. The Senior White House correspondent and all but official spokesperson for the administration.

    Here is a link to a video of an interview with her at the White House, during a celebration of Jewish Heritage Month. [I rather suspect that Obama declined to appear.]

    I chose this particular blog [Yid with Lid] carrying this video, because he gives more context, and also knows the Rabbi speaking to her. It is all over the net at mainstream conservative blogs.

    http://tinyurl.com/2amox7n

    Helen Thomas has actually stated on the record that the IDF are as bad as the Nazis, that Israel is occupying and oppressing Palestine, and that the Jews in Israel should go back to their real homes in Germany and Poland..

    Orthodoc above mentioned PRAVDA and Izvestia. I think perhaps that we might have to add Der Angriff, Völkischer Beobachter, and Der Stürmer.

    If she has a career by the end of next week, you can make a reasonable working assumption that such opinion is considered mainstream by both the regime and the MSM in this brave new world.

    Subotai Bahadur

  8. SB: on the contrary, I think Allah is right: let her stay; firing her will only get her a chance to become “oppressed by Jewish media cabal” martyr. No, let her open her ugly yaphole and tell us more of the same – and we’ll look not at her, but at those around, in WH and elsewhere, nodding their heads.

    Then the real scope of Jew hatred might be realistically accessed, out in the open.

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