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Managing your stress can improve your memory. We all know chronic stress is bad for our heart, our weight, and our mood, but how about our memory? Interestingly, acute stress can help you focus and remember things more vividly. Chronic stress, on the other hand, reduces your ability to focus and can specifically damage cells in the brain effecting short term memory. Did you know that the emotional and physical responses you have to stress are set in motion by a series of chemical releases and reactions? If it's been a really, really tough week at work or home and you can't remember where you put your car keys, it may be that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol are interfering with your memory. Stress frequently is the result of a hectic schedule. So hectic, in fact, that we tend to forget things.

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If you feel stressed out and forgetful, relieve your brain's overload during times of chaos and tension. When your concentration wanes, it's up to you to rein it in and regain control.

There are a few ways you can improve the function of your mind during duress. The first option is to exercise. The movement helps your brain generate new cells that are linked with the improvement of memory.

Don't isolate yourself, make sure you socialize with friends and family. People who are highly stressed are often isolated, working alone and over-burdened by their tasks. Socializing, gives your brain a workout because it's adjusting to a new environment and situations.

If you have a long commute, you might consider listening to an audio CD with a narration like a fiction or non-fiction book. Some people like to listen to these as they work out, or when relaxing at home.

And break up other routines that you have, such as how you get home from work, or which restaurant the family dines at one night. If you're used to buying your lunch at the office cafeteria, brown-bag it instead and sit outside under a tree to enhance your senses and give your memory powers a much-needed boost.

Stress Management can improve your memory. Stress doesn't have to cause your memory to deteriorate. As long as you give your mind a workout the same way you would your body, you'll have a healthy memory that allows you to remember the important things during times of stress and anxiety. Healthy Mind, Healthy Body, Healthy Life.
Would you like more stress relief techniques that get results? Learn how to dramatically improve your stress relief results by claiming your FREE 5 Part customized home study course at =>http://www.keytostressfreeliving.com
From Linda Hampton RN, MSN A Wellness and Stress Management Coach
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MPEG-1 with its subset called "constrained parameter bit stream", or the performance of the CPB is widely used. This performance is stored in the CD-ROM Red Book audio standard compliance requirements, the same number of video and audio data and design. This means that a 74 minutes of CD-ROM, you can save a full 74 minutes of video and audio. This standard is known as the White Paper or video CD (VCD). At 44.1kHz sampling rate conditions, the video data rate is set at 1.15Mb / s, audio data rate of 224Kb / s; video size is locked to 352x240 30fps NTSC and 352x280 25fpsPAL (also known as the CIF).

This standard is working well, but only the "standard" television performance of a quarter, and often caused controversy in the television public, but at that time was this is still an amazing technological achievements. About 1.5Mbit / s (125Kbytes / s) bit rate, the existing cable modem can easily transfer MPEG-1CPB flow, but for wireless cellular networks, to reliably do this there is still a long way to go. In addition, MPEG-1 network transmission and the lack of correct re-synchronization errors. MPEG-2 has this functionality, but to the actual implementation of the technology to catch up with the time, MPEG-4 and other streaming format has been displayed in front of people.

MPEG-2 has a higher data transfer rates, which range from 6 to 10Mbit / s. Bit rate 6Mbit / s and 9Mbit / s between the MPEG-2 (720x480 resolution) is ideal for DVD, it has also been selected to do the work; however, that under the bit rate, network traffic should more difficult, but the picture quality can be achieved watching television standards. MPEG-2 also has the packet, fault tolerance and correction, fast forward, rewind and other functions required for broadcasting. Then the MPEG-2 is also suitable for wireless / mobile streaming video equipment? Network channel must be 1MB / s data transfer rate to ensure reliable MPEG-2 video transmission, playback, and can be watched. Therefore, people have been exploring the best of the video stream format. MPEG-4 is the answer.

Why the answer is in the MPEG-4?

Requirements: high compression ratio, high video quality and powerful system layer; MPEG-4 wireless mobile video devices can provide satisfactory performance. (Note: This does not refer to MPEG-3, MPEG-2 directly from the rising to the MPEG-4; often mistaken for the MP3 is MPEG-3 audio is actually MPEG-1 Audio Layer III).

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MPEG-4 format 1MBit / s bit rate can achieve the quality of MPEG-2720x480 resolution. If the video reduced to MPEG-1CPB, can be 350KBit / s data rate and reasonable can receive video. Further minimize the ratio may be 100KB / s data rate. Of course, due to the decline in the quality of video is not worth reading. We believe that the resolution of 352x240 or common interchange format (CIF, CommonInterchangeFormat) is the minimum acceptable video clarity. QCIF very interesting and in some network channel is essential. Table 1 lists the common terms of video resolution.

We would not consider the video resolution of the problem, first to see if suitable for wireless transmission using MPEG-4 video streams. To answer this question, we have two ways to study the MPEG-4?? Video compression capabilities and system layer. Existing mobile phone use general packet radio service (GPRS) standard 2.5G technology, the network data transfer rate can reach close to 112kbps. This rate is not fast, not too reliable, and see where you use. 3G network data transfer rate close to 2Mbps, which is a big improvement. Although 2.5Gw/GPRS can support a number of video streams, but until the advent of 3G, mobile phone anytime, anywhere using only universal up to watch the video stream. Of course, the wider the data pipeline, the higher video quality.

We now take a closer look at some data, in order to include them in the article. Most of the broadband network data rate is the number of bits used to represent every few seconds. Since each byte has 8 bits, so we put it more simply expressed as the number of bytes per second or bps divided by 8. So, 2.5Gw/GPRS is 14,000 bytes per second speed of the channel (14kBps. Note: capital B that byte). Accordingly, 3G is the rate 250kBps channel. 1X CD-ROM drive under the speed of transferring data 150kBps. As the 3G bandwidth for the 250kBps, in theory, will be MPEG-1CPB video, audio streams directly to the 3G receiver should be no problem. Of course, we may be only 60% of channels to the video service, but this effect can be a very good video. Since it's compression is much better than MPEG-1, then we can use 3G technology is the effect of what DVD format. On the MPEG-4, the answer was yes.

MPEG-1 data rate required per second 600kBps (4.8Mbps) channel, to achieve full D1 video resolution. This obviously requires less bandwidth 3G budget. DVD (currently using MPEG-2 video compression) constant speed of 6Mbps per second compression. Therefore, in order to experience the video content using the 3G technology, compression technology is not needed is not MPEG-1 MPEG-2. Now we still do not know the implementation of the first generation of 3G technology can make DVD video experience possible; but if possible, that MPEG-4 compression technology and the related can give us a direction. Then the current 3G technology enables the ultimate video performance to what kind of state do, we think that will be CIF. As mentioned above, 30 frames of the CIF image quality is quite clear, was designated as the current video benchmark. So, if the channel transmission rate of 2Mbps, which CPBVCD they adapt to this channel, why not directly use the MPEG-1 do? The reason is simple, in the same bit rate, MPEG-4 compression efficiency is that it's 3 times, and under certain conditions will be more efficient. This means that the transmission rate of 300-400kbps to 1.2Mbps MPEG-4 stream and under the MPEG-1 CPB CI has the same picture quality.

Fujitsu MPEG-4 chip has been added to the mobile media processor (MMP) of the new product line. Fujitsu energy-efficient MPEG-4 core to 2Mbps per second bit rate and speed per second for the CIF 30fps encoding or decoding (see Figure 5), compared to the standard frame rate to 15fps in QCIF for video calling. MPEG-4 core has two noteworthy features. First, the movement of vector technology with adaptive motion estimation computation circuit monitoring system of traditional sports 1 / 20. Second,
I am China Product writer, reports some information about acoustic ceiling , calcium silicate.
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Thoughts on the Documentary "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" For those of you who may have never heard of Professor Chomsky, the New York Times has called him arguably the greatest intellectual alive.' And this is ironic because the New York Times, the paper of record' i.e. they set the standard for all the rest of the newspapers in America, & according to the conservatives, it is the bastion of the liberal media, is a lapdog to the powers that be, in Chomsky's opinion. By the way, this is a good place for me to confess that though I tried to capture Chomsky's words verbatim from the film, sometimes I failed and so occasionally I will paraphrase his words but I have tried to be true to the spirit of his words. I will note whenever possible, my paraphrasing of his exact words. For example, he didn't say the powers that be' in reference to the New York Times above. Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the documentary, I want to also inform you that "Noam Chomsky is one of the ten most-quoted writers of all time. The Chicago Tribune has called Professor Chomsky the most cited living author,' adding that among intellectual luminaries of all eras, he ranks eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud." (Chomsky For Beginners, by David Cogswell, pg. 1) Moreover, on that list of the ten most-quoted writers of all time is Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, & Socrates. Chomsky in my opinion is a one-man revolution and if you are new to the world of liberal, progressive, & radical thought, you couldn't pick a better place to start than with Chomsky. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that if you read no one other than Chomsky and did a thorough study of his prolific writings, books, lectures, interviews, videos, & audio tapes, you would acquire an education equivalent to a Ph.D. and you would be a very enlightened individual. Chomsky would probably disagree with such flattery and that's one of the things that especially endears him to me i.e. he is a very humble man. Okay, let's get down to the brass tacks of this piece of mine. The term the manufacture of consent' was coined by Walter Lippmann in 1922. Chomsky states, "Walter Lippmann coined the term the manufacture of consent' and he basically said that the common interests are above the heads of the public and that a separate, specialized class, would have to manage or regulate society. And this is the opposite of our common understanding of democracy." Since Lippmann's term is the title of this film and of Chomsky's book, I am going to give you some background on Lippmann along with some pertinent quotes from him. I hope this will help to shed some light on the significance of this pernicious concept the manufacture of consent.' It's absolutely mind-boggling that Lippmann is held up as some sort of champion of the free press' and liberalism' and after you read the following, you will see why I feel this way. "Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a political philosopher and journalist whose writings constitute a sustained and close commentary on American public affairs for a period of nearly six decades. He brought to the discussion and analysis of current social and political problems a degree of learning unprecedented in American journalism. Throughout his career he retained an independent, critical stance on foreign and domestic issues and combined a rigorous commitment to democratic principles with a deep sense of the pragmatic limitations of real political situations. He is certainly among the most thoughtful and cultured newspapermen of all times The main focus of Lippmann's thinking in the 1920's was on the relation of knowledge to public opinion in mass society.Lippmann became doubtful whether citizens could be adequately and objectively informed of the knowledge required for self-government, conceived along Jeffersonian lines.An Enquiry into the Principles of the Good Society advanced the principle of disinterestedness on the part of statesmen as a cure to the excesses of majority rule and as an antidote to the dangers of elitism." (Alan Waters in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, St. James Press, 1987) And now Lippmann's words: "That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on the rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premiseIt has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach." (Public Opinion, by Walter Lippmann, Free Press, 1965; first published in 1922, page 158) And more from Lippmann: "The lesson is, I think, a fairly clear one. In the absence of institutions and education by which the environment is so successfully reported that the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality. This class is irresponsible, for it acts upon information that is not common property, in situations that the public at large does not conceive, and it can be held to account only on the accomplished fact." (Public Opinion, page 195) Boy! Talk about fancy, double-talk. Lippmann sounds more like a lawyer than a journalist. And fortunately we have someone as brilliant as Chomsky to decipher this gobbley-gook. I could see Chomsky's basic assertion that Lippmann was saying in a nutshell that the public is too ignorant to understand the larger issues affecting society. And one thing that jumped out at me in the last quote from Lippmann was this class is irresponsible.' He was clearly referring to this specialized class' who he felt were the only ones fit to run our society. But it seems to me that he revealed his true convictions in this sentence i.e. this superior class' is above the law and above the peons of our society which means the vast majority of us who aren't multi-millionaires. Of course when you first think of the word irresponsible,' you probably think of an irresponsible teenager or an adult who doesn't pay his bills or hold down a job. Well, check out this definition from Webster's; irresponsible (not answerable to higher authority ) Freudian slip? Or perhaps the unvarnished truth? And how apropos because as I believe Chomsky shows us in this documentary, what we call a democracy here in America is all but gone and we are sliding towards a variation of a fascist or totalitarian state---my description. I am going to come back to more quotes from Lippmann later on because I don't want to belabor the point here. The next person Chomsky mentions in the film is Reinhold Niebuhr. Chomsky summed up Niebuhr thus; "the average man follows faith not reason because of his stupidity and therefore society needs to be run by cool, reasoning men. He was a big influence on the policy makers of the 1960's. Now, I'm not sure to be honest with you if the next two phrases were Niebuhr's but they are in the same paragraph of my notes from the film. And they are Necessary Illusions' & "Emotionally Potent Oversimplifications." I wrote that these are needed to herd the sheep, in the margins of my notes. And the film showed an example of the S.D.I. (Strategic Defense Initiative i.e. Star Wars) program that Reagan launched with simplistic animations of a protective umbrella' over the U.S. and satellites that could shoot down incoming missiles. And these necessary illusions & emotionally potent oversimplifications' definitely contribute to the dumbing-down of the American public. The hypocrisy is phenomenal in that as Lippmann and Niebuhr charge the public with being too stupid to participate in the democratic process and at the same time, contribute to keeping the public ignorant. In other words, they're blaming the victims. And speaking of ignorant, once again if it hadn't been for Chomsky's insight, I would've gone on thinking Niebuhr was a champion of the oppressed. I believe I even have a book or two of his in my garage somewhere? I wanted to refresh my memory regarding Niebuhr so I went to my Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia and here is a bit of what it has to say about him. "Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892-1971) American theologian.he took an active interest in labor problems, Niebuhr joined the faculty at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he taught from 1928 to 1960. Allied with the socialist movement in the 1930s, Niebuhr dealt with questions of political morality and with the failure of Christianity to confront social problemsthe moral irresponsibility of those who fail to come to grips with the problem of power. Following World War II, Niebuhr's earlier radicalism was replaced by what he called conservative realism'; but, in Christian Realism and Political Problems (1953), he maintained that the church was actively sanctioning social ills by refusing to confront them. He persistently emphasized the reality of sin and its bearing on the tragedy of man and saw the modern world as one to which power and technocracy have brought confusion and meaninglessness.Always invigorating, usually controversial, Niebuhr was one of the most influential thinkers of his day." As a matter of fact, somewhere in the back of my mind, I seem to recall that Niebuhr was a big influence on President Kennedy? And since nothing is so damning as a person's own words, here are some of Niebuhr's words: "God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." (The Serenity Prayer, 1943) I knew there was always something that I didn't like about that prayer.' It's used at AA meetings and in the context of this essay & Niebuhr's insults regarding public stupidity, I interpret it to mean, just accept your lot in life e.g. being screwed by the status quo. "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 1944) Then why did you promote the undermining of democracy by saying people are too stupid to participate in democracy and as a theologian you preached the virtues of faith' and then have the audacity to turn around and say the public is too stupid and believes more in faith than in reason? "Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility." (Faith and History, 1949) And you consider yourself an exemplar of responsibility when you promote faith over reason and then blame people for being too ignorant to participate in the democratic process? "Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love." (The Irony of American History, 1952) I'd say the hypocrisy of American history rather than the irony. But then it is sort of ironic that Niebuhr chastises the public for follows faith not reason when as in this quotation he says we must be saved by faith.' I can see how the public policy makers loved him because by praising the virtues of faith in public, you make it that much easier to manipulate the public and cloud the issues affecting their lives with such necessary illusions' as hope and faith. And with emotionally potent oversimplifications,' you continue to keep the public distracted and off-balance e.g. George Bush the Lesser's "you're either with us or you're against us," and "I'm going to lead the country to understanding the value of life---the preciousness of life. Life for the living and life for the unborn." (THIS WEEK, ABC, January 23, 2000) Next in the film, Chomsky says "indoctrination is the essence of a democratic state. In a totalitarian state it doesn't much matter what people think because you have a bludgeon over their heads. But, in a democracy you need to control what people think. People may become so curious and arrogant that they don't submit to a civil rule." I am reminded of that glorious period of the 1960's when people---mostly university students & hippies---were definitely not civil' and how wonderful a feeling it was! We rejected the crass materialism of the day and which has returned today, stronger than ever. We fought for civil rights, women's rights, the protection of our environment, & against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Chomsky also protested in the 1960's and risked going to prison for many years. Chomsky goes on to say "the standard way to control people's thoughts was in the more honest days called propaganda. There are various ways to either marginalize the general public or reduce them to apathy. And the role of the mass media is to mobilize public support for the special interests." Of course the major special interests which he is referring to are the banking, financial, and corporate interests. And our current occupation of Iraq clearly serves the interests of the corporate oil industry and the financial & banking interests because as I have learned, the dollar was devaluating significantly around the world. Saddam's real threat to America as some scholars have said was because he threatened to start selling Iraq's oil using the Euro dollar instead of the American dollar and that would've possibly plunged the U.S. into hyper-inflation. And so, as soon as we conquered' Iraq, our leaders' immediately switched the oil currency of Iraq back to the U.S. dollar. What's more, as Chomsky points out, "investment, production, & distribution decisions are made by and are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of corporations and they are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government & they're the ones who own the media." Indeed! And don't think this just pertains to the oil industry, it applies to every major industry you can think of. Have you ever heard of the revolving door' between government and the corporate sector? I could give you a long list of examples but the most glaring one currently is Dick Cheney and his flagrant conflict of interest because he worked for Halliburton before he became vice-president and he now financially benefits to the tune of millions from that relationship because Halliburton was given the sweetheart deal of a no-bid contract for the majority of the rebuilding' of Iraq---should more accurately be called the raping of Iraq & the enrichment of the greedy hogs of corporate American oil. George Schultz and Bechtel, another major war profiteer from Iraq's destruction. James Baker and the Carlyle Group of which King George the First is a member and which benefits not only from Iraq's misery but also benefited handsomely from the devastation of 9/11 and Baker has the balls to legally represent the Saudi Royal family against the surviving family members of 9/11 who are suing the Saudis. Don't forget that 15 of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11th were Saudis and that Osama is Saudi and the Bush bastards are not only friends of the bin Laden family but whisked them out of the U.S. immediately after that terrible day when all other flights around the country were grounded. Coincidence? Yeah, right! Yep, I'd say Chomsky is right on the money and I'm also reminded of President Eisenhower's warning regarding the military-industrial complex except today as Chomsky has shown us, it's also the media serving these cold-blooded robber baron class. Recall that Chomsky has called the New York Times their lapdog. And also bear in mind the recent scandal of Judy Miller, who almost single-handedly led us to war in Iraq because she relied on Chalabi, that suspected double-agent for Iran, embezzler on the run from Syria, and hated Iraqi exile whom the Iraqis would never accept as their leader---though the Bush cabal tried to install him. Judy Miller was a star reporter for the New York Times, remember that bastion of the liberal media according to the rabid right-wingers, and she went to jail not to protect a whistle-blower protecting the public's interest but rather to protect a White House whistle-blower who publicly revealed the identity of an undercover CIA agent who happened to be the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Why? Because Ambassador Wilson actually believed that the truth should be spoken and refused to rubber stamp Bush & Cheney's phony pack of lies which they spun to suck us into the Iraq invasion and quagmire. In addition, Chomsky goes on to say that "within the economic system by law and in principle, they [the concentrated network of corporations] dominate. They control our resources. The need to satisfy their economic interests places very serious constraints on the political and ideological system. There are two targets for U.S. propaganda; 1)the political class who are relatively well-educated, make up about 20% of the public, & play some part in the decision making as managers or cultural managers e.g. teachers, writers, and so on. Their consent is crucial and they have to be deeply indoctrinated. 2) the other 80% of the public whose main function is to follow orders, not to think, and not pay attention to anything. And they're the ones who usually pay the cost." As soon as Chomsky mentioned the cultural managers' such as teachers, I immediately thought of my wife. She sincerely believes she's doing good and she's very dedicated to her work as an educator. And we've been arguing for years about our educational system. I tried my best to convince her that we should home-school our son but she's been too-well indoctrinated with the critics of home-schooling's mantra of socialization.' It's been a very painful and frustrating experience to have to sit by and watch my own son be destroyed by our public educational system. And my wife, just as blind as the majority of teachers, laments how he has turned out i.e. self-centered, materialistic, angry, lacking in compassion or empathy for the downtrodden, cussing too much, etc. When we get into heated arguments I hurl at her well, you wanted him to be socialized and he's indeed just like the majority of the angry youth.' I shouldn't be surprised at this sad state of affairs even in my own family because I have been a lone voice of dissent from the common wisdom ever since I started educating myself in my twenties. I have been mocked, ridiculed, intimidated, etc. by strangers, my own relatives, friends, etc. for so long that it feels natural to me now. Because I read people like Chomsky and most people read the t.v. guide, the Reader's Digest, or the National Enquirer, and other such quality' material. And because they have never heard of the great thinkers words or seen them on their televisions, I must be a nutcase in their minds and they smugly put me down and call me a loser, a quitter, a failure, etc. Yes indeed, I have paid and continue to pay a very high price for daring to challenge the myths and propaganda we have been raised on. And the dearest price has been the loss of my son's respect. He won't even read an essay I wrote for him trying to warn him of the manipulations of the military propaganda in an effort to save his life. So far he doesn't have any desire to join the military but I also fear that they will be forced to reinstate the draft due to the chicken-hawks in the White House and their designs on world conquest for their corporate cronies bank accounts. Because you probably believe like I did when I was in high school and still ignorant of the lies & manipulations of these masters of the universe and their diabolical schemes, you might still think that it is only evil empires' like the former Soviet Union and Communist China who use propaganda on their citizens? Well fortunately, scholars like Chomsky show us that our government' is equally guilty of manipulating us with its own propaganda. I mean, Jesus Christ! Isn't it as clear as the nose on your face that this junta occupying the oval office have blatantly lied us into invading & occupying Iraq? Let me remind you of the constantly shifting sands of deceit they used to sucker us into this war.' By the way, some war,' after ten years of sanctions and bombing, and after daddy invaded Iraq in 1990 and had its infrastructure almost totally destroyed so that it's children & elderly have died because they have no power, no medicine, no clean water, lack food, etc. and over 500,000 Iraqi children have died because of it, and our weapons inspectors made sure there weren't any weapons of mass destruction so our mighty military could be sure that it wouldn't be able to put up hardly any resistance whatsoever, we attack? This is nothing to be proud of and in fact quite the opposite. It's something all decent people are deeply ashamed of. Our conquest of Iraq and the bragging of that little Bantam rooster who couldn't even serve out his military duty in the safe and stateside, Texas Air National Guard that daddy got him into, is like me boasting of having beat up a kindergarten student. To demonstrate how propaganda works U.S. style, Chomsky provides us with a propaganda model' in this brilliant documentary. Chomsky like any who dare to critique the powers that be, is often labeled a conspiracy theorist' but as he states, no, what he does is institutional analysis.' The intellectually lazy and dishonest try to dupe us and to marginalize those who reveal their dirty tricks with terms like conspiracy nut, anti-American, etc. Without reservation though, I challenge you or any who would like to argue against my opinions or my quotes from Chomsky to prove me wrong. And I am not ashamed one bit to clearly state that I'm riding on Chomsky's coattails. This is a man who as I said at the beginning & to rephrase, an intellectual giant and the rest of us are mental midgets in comparison. And Chomsky religiously lists his sources, so any of you would be intellectual assassins put up or shut up! Prove him or me wrong if you dare and you must cite your sources or else you're just a coward like that bushwhacker in the executive office who hides and shoots people in the back. To illustrate his propaganda model,' Chomsky starts off with saying that there are filters which are used in the propaganda assault (my word). "The elite media set the agenda. Some of the most prominent among them are the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major television stations such as ABC, NBC, & CBS, etc. They set the general framework and the local media around the country more or less adapt to their structure. The elite media set the agenda in all sorts of ways e.g. by the selection of the topics to be discussed; by the distribution of concerns to be covered; by the emphasis they place on topics; by the framing of issues (I strongly recommend reading George Lakoff on the critical importance of framing of the issues'); by their filtering of the information they provide us with; by the bounding of debate (the limits as to what can be discussed); they determine, select, shape, control, & restrict what news items or stories we see, hear, or read in order to serve the interests of the dominant elite groups." Again my friend, I added some of the details of the factors or items Chomsky listed in hopes of making it a little more explicit or clear to whomever may read this essay. Furthermore, Chomsky goes on to argue that the New York Times is the most important paper in the U.S. and arguably the entire world and it creates history. Because the New York Times again is the paper of record' and publishes only the news that's fit to print,' which it proudly displays on every copy. It creates history in the sense that it is the paper which people go to when they want to know what happened in the past." I want to inject here that when I heard this, I was immediately reminded of that nightmare world George Orwell described in his classic 1984. In case you're not familiar with it, it's a horrific portrait of a future society in which one of the primary ways of controlling the public is done by a government department called the Ministry of Truth. Those who work in this department, including the protagonist of the novel, Winston, spend their days rewriting history. They delete inconvenient facts from past editions of the official government news and insert new facts' which fit the current claims of the government. And the spooky & relevant quote from Orwell's book is "Those who control the past, control the present. And those who control the present, control the future." Can you see the power and the significance of this quote? In brief, those who control the media of a country, control what the people think and believe and its an easy matter after you have this kind of control, to get the public to do just about anything you want e.g. go to war against an imaginary enemy (Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc.); give up their rights (the Patriot Act); resign themselves to being permanently unemployed or underemployed (Globalization); etc. etc. etc. And the New York Times clearly has the power to shape the past because its editors decide which stories to print, how to shape them, etc. as Chomsky delineated above. And they maintain a storehouse of all their past stories. Researchers, scholars, government and business leaders go to the New York Times if they want to find something out about a past event. In fact, I just pulled a book off my bookshelves titled The New York Times Guide To Reference Materials: The Indispensable Handbook, Updated and Expanded, For Anyone Who Needs to Know How and Where to Look Up Almost Anything by Mona McCormick. Pretty arrogant wouldn't you say? Sounds like they're so full of themselves that they actually believe their own hype. In any case, Chomsky goes on to point out that "it's important to have an impression of a liberal bias in the press so as to make people think there's a counterbalance and not dare to think of going beyond the so-called liberal left which the New York Times is suppose to represent. And because of the pseudo-far Left that the Times is suppose to represent, nobody goes further to the Left because they'd be written off as nutcases from outer space because they have gone beyond what is acceptable in terms of debate and critique of our society and its institutions. I added on considerably to Chomsky's words but its close to Chomsky's intent I believe. For instance, in order to prevent the real truth seekers from getting too close, the elite media restrict the debate and therefore the presuppositions of the liberal media' are sacrosanct. In other words, if the New York Times, that bastion of the liberal media' is indeed liberal, adversarial, and all those bad things, how can I go beyond it? They're already so extreme in their opposition to power that to go beyond it would be to take off from the planet i.e. to leave rationality, reasonability, & reality behind. (my description) The media thus say in Chomsky's words "Thus far and no further!" Equally important to remember is the fact that "the major media are large corporations sometimes integrated with even larger corporations e.g. General Electric, Westinghouse, etc." And a very important side-note here from me is recall that Ronald Reagan, that champion of the conservative cockroaches and who started the war on the poor and the environment with the Reagan Revolution, spent twenty years as a spokesman for G.E. before he got into politics. And in those 20 years he toured the G.E. plants around the country giving the same speech i.e. the Commies are Coming! And G.E. is this country's largest producer of nuclear energy amongst other lovely things. I forget if they're in the weapons industry but I heard recently that Lockheed-Martin is the largest weapons manufacturer. In brief, megalithic corporations like G.E. have a total lock on us i.e. they produce the weapons of mass destruction that threaten our very survival, they sell these weapons even to our enemies,' they poison our environment, they are funded by our tax dollars, they downsize us by moving overseas, they take away our pensions, and just about every labor law is gutted, and by owning the elite media' they keep it all hidden from the average American who watches their news and believes it as objective fact. I know this is all terribly depressing but you can either bury your head in the sand and hope it will all go away or that I'm just a paranoid nutcase or you can stand up on your hind legs and like in that classic movie Network from the late 60s or early 70s in which the central character, a television anchorman, told his audience in an apparent nervous breakdown on air, "go to your windows, open them up and shout, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Obviously, I am kidding in a sense but I do believe we must get mad and we must inform ourselves as Chomsky himself counsels people who come to him for some magical answer. He tells them again and again, I can't tell you what's right. And he tells them that he could be wrong. He basically says that we have to do our own work and it's tough but there's no easy way. Next Chomsky touches on how advertising fits into the manufacturing of consent and this would be a good spot for me to go back and share with you a bit on Edward Bernays whom some have called the grandfather of the Public Relations industry in America, I believe? I am bringing him up because I believe that public relations and advertising are closely intertwined and responsible for a large part of our manipulation by the power elite! I am going to quote a lengthy portion on the subject of public relations from a book I have dissected and am using in my own book. And while I am using this book, I believe the author, John Taylor Gatto, may have a hidden agenda in support of Christian fundamentalists which I utterly detest. Nonetheless, Gatto is useful and does provide some great information and occasionally some brilliant insights. "Four hundred years after Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his treatise on scientific deceit, Edward L. Bernays began to practice the scientific art of public deception, trading heavily on his uncle Sigmund Freud's notoriety. A decade earlier, Ivy Lee's publicity savvy had rescued the Rockefellers from their Ludlow Massacre disgrace. Public Relations as political science was off and running on the fast track. Bernays was only a solitary word magician at the time, of course, but he was in an ideal position to capitalize quickly upon his rhetorical talent and to set his stamp on the new science's future. In 1928, Bernays published two books in quick succession which planted his flag in the dream terrain of the unconscious.' The first, Crystallizing Public Opinion, the second, Propaganda. Adolf Hitler is said to have displayed both on a table in his office under a poster-sized picture of Henry Ford. The new world was blazing a trail into an even newer world than it imagined. Both of Bernays' books argued that language could be used successfully to create new realities. Psychological science was so advanced, he claimed, it could substitute synthetic reality for natural reality, as urban society had successfully replaced our natural connection to birds, trees, and flowers with a substitute connection to billboards, cars, and bright lights. Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda had much to say to the newly minted administrative classes burgeoning all over American schools and colleges. In Propaganda, Bernays redefined democratic society, in the interests of the mass-production economy. I've selected three short excerpts from Bernay's classic which enriched him with corporate work in the seven decades of life he had left---he died in 1995 at the age of 105---after its publication. The first assertion of Propaganda was that common people had to be regimented and governed from behind the scenes. Here are Bernays' actual words: The need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the Technical means have been invented and developed by which public opinion May be regimented. The next important contention was that the critical pollution of language necessary to make this work was already in use: We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, Largely by men we have never heard of. We are dominated by a relatively small Number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of The masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public. Finally, Bernays attempts to provide a moral' justification for proceeding as he suggests: The conscious manipulation of organized habits and opinions of the masses is an Important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen Mechanism constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in This country. This attitude of manipulation as an important component of democratic' management entered the urban factory-school classroom in a big way at a time when psychology was taking over from academics as the tool of choice in America's German-inspired teacher-training institutions." (The Underground History of American Education, pgs. 354-55, John Taylor Gatto) And from the same website where I got the Walter Lippmann quotes: THE ENGINEERING APPROACH This phrase quite simply means the use of an engineering approach---that is, action based only on thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs. Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval, and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public's consent to a program or goalThe engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process the freedom to persuade and suggest. The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly, the freedoms which make the engineering of consent possible, are among the most cherished guarantees of the Constitution of the United States Today it is impossible to overestimate the importance of engineering consent; it affects almost every aspect of our daily lives. When used for social purposes, it is among our most valuable contributions to the efficient functioning of modern societyThe responsible leader, to accomplish social objectives, must therefore be constantly aware of the possibilities of subversion. He must apply his energies to mastering the operational know-how of consent engineering, and to out-maneuvering his opponents in the public interest. From The Engineering of Consent, by Edward Bernays, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1947, pages 114-115 See also: pages 16-17 Well, I don't know about you my friend but I feel like a rat in a lab experiment after learning this? And I am absolutely stupefied that both Bernays and Lippmann could call this manipulation of the public democratic?' That is some twisted & perverse logic more closely resembling Alice in Wonderland than scientific or rational thought. Something occurred to me as I was typing the date of the last quote from Bernays quote and that is that 1947 was also the year that marked the beginning of the National Security State i.e. Allen Foster Dulles wrote the National Security Act and we began the Cold War with Russia. Food for thought? Think about it in terms of the manufacture of consent. I'm not sure if it was Allen Dulles or his brother, John Foster Dulles in regards to writing the National Security Act? At this point in the film, Chomsky states that "what keeps the media functioning is advertising, not their readers (in fact, the newspapers devote something like 40% of the paper to advertising). What comes out is a picture of the world that satisfies the needs of the corporations and conglomerates. They exclude, marginalize, or eliminate dissenting voices just like any institution because dissenting opinions are self-destructive to institutions." I would add though that dissenting opinions are in fact healthy for an institution, organization, government because if you surround yourself with nothing but yes-men, you are missing out on some opinions that can sometimes make the difference between failure and success. Chomsky continues "In a democracy, before we go to war, the media's obligation is to provide background and offer peaceful resolutions or alternatives by presenting differing points of view in a public debate. This didn't happen in the Gulf War, 99% of the media just went along with President Bush. And every time Bush said there'd be no negotiations, there'd be a hundred editorials the next day lauding him for going the last mile in diplomacy. Bush said aggressors can't be rewarded but he invaded Panama and was head of the CIA during the East Timor genocide and the media applauded. The media kept us from knowing we didn't have to go to war and that means we went to war very much in the tradition of a totalitarian state. Equally important is the fact that the U.S. has vetoed almost every UN resolution against aggressor states (Gee! I wonder why? Could it be because the majority of those aggressive invasions have been committed by the U.S. & our number one ally, Israel?) "The purpose of the real mass media i.e. not the elite media, which is aimed at the top 20% of the relatively well-educated', but the media aimed at Joe six-pack, is to dull people's brains. The main thing for the 80% of the public is to divert them, to get them to watch the National Football League. And to worry about the motherless child with six heads, astrology, fundamentalists stuff, etc. (The National Enquirer, the largest selling paper in America') In brief, the true purpose of the mass media for the lower classes is to get them away from things that matter. It's important to reduce their capacity to think. Sports is another crucial example of the indoctrination system because it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. To keep them from worrying about things that matter to their lives, that they might have some ideas of how to do something about. High-school students are urged to root for their team even though they don't know them and they mean nothing to them. This is a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind the leader i.e. training in irrational jingoism."(note the often used sports metaphors in business and government e.g. the CEO or the president & etc. are often referred to as the coach or the quarterback and we're the team. And also note the similar tactic used in ancient Rome with the Bread & Circus routine rituals of gladiators in The Coliseum used to distract the citizens from the political acts of the Emperor and the Senators e.g. taxing the hell out of the citizens, etc.) "Pol Pot, Cambodia's bloody dictator and engineer of the Killing Fields which decimated somewhere around 750,000 of his own citizens, was covered in great and gloriously gory detail in our media but at the same time, the U.S. support of Indochina's genocide against East Timor had no or barely any coverage or mention in the media. East Timor was our ally because they had oil and they were next to a very deep section of the ocean perfect for U.S. submarines to pass through in that region of the world. Indonesia invaded East Timor, the former Portuguese colony, because they were much more powerful and therefore could, and because they didn't want a small, independent country which was very egalitarian and treated its citizens fairly, to serve as an example and possibly inspire other countries in the region. President Ford & Killer Kissinger' visited Jakarta, Indonesia and asked them to delay their invasion until after they had left because it would be embarrassing in terms of world opinion (remember, the U.S. is supposedly the beacon on the hill i.e. the bright, shining example of all that's good in the world). Less than twelve hours later, Indonesia invaded East Timor (December 7, 1975) and simply slaughtered East Timor's citizens without stop for three weeks. The UN called for resolutions, sanctions, etc. but the U.S. was clearly not going to allow anything to interfere with Indochina's campaign of genocide. And that great democratic leader, Daniel Patrick Moynihan proudly led the way in blocking the UN sanctions for our State Department. The U.S. supplied 90% of the weapons and right after the invasion, the shipment of arms was stepped up. This went on for years and Indochina's military slowly starved the people of East Timor to death. When some who had been hiding in the jungle would come out under a white flag of surrender, they would be murdered---men and children. The women were taken to Delhi to service' the military of Indochina i.e. raped repeatedly!" "In 1978 when Indochina was running out of weapons and ammunition, the Carter administration increased sales to them as well as England and every other nation that could profit from munitions sales (remember that Carter is supposedly the champion of Human Rights & also note that weapons and drugs are the two largest businesses in the world). As the genocide reached its peak in 1978, the coverage in the U.S. media and in Canada's media dropped to zero. Before this, there was some coverage but always from the point of view of the State Dept. and the Indonesian army, never from the people of East Timor and this was exactly at the time of Pol Pot's genocidal campaign in Cambodia. And there was great protest and moral outrage in the press regarding Cambodia. The level of atrocities was comparable relatively but it was considerably higher in East Timor. From 1970 to 1975 there was also an atrocity for which the U.S. was responsible i.e. the bombing of Cambodia. CIA estimates were that our bombings killed somewhere around 600,000 Cambodians and the aftermath of our bombings killed approximately another million innocent civilians . The U.S. bombings of Cambodia played a significant role in building up peasant support for Pol Pot's Khymer Rouge who implemented the genocide against their own people. And within a couple of weeks of the takeover by the Khymer Rouge, the New York Times was accusing them of genocide but mentioned nothing about the five years of bombings by the U.S. And from then on it was a drumbeat, a chorus of genocide by our mass media. Time, The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, etc. etc. etc. all jumped on the bandwagon decrying Pol Pot but not a word about East Timor. Our media lied outrageously about Cambodia, vastly exaggerated the numbers of dead e.g. anywhere from 1 to 4 million, doctored pictures, never provided any evidence nor was it required, claimed that Pol Pot bragged about killing over 2 million, etc. The lies would've made Stalin cringe. The difference between the genocide in East Timor and Cambodia was that East Timor's killers weren't Communists!" "Whenever the U.S. media did cover East Timor, it was a systematic, consistent whitewash of U.S. complicity. Indonesia killed a third of the people of East Timor and put them in concentration camps. Women were forced to use birth control and whenever any dared to protest, they were massacred. (Amy Goodman of America's best alternative news media program Democracy Now!, was there & was severely beaten) The slaughter in East Timor exemplifies that the U.S. media isn't merely subservient to corporate power but are complicit in genocide. The reason atrocities like this can go on is because nobody knew about them. If we did, we could protest and pressure them to stop. American people would be horrified if they knew of the blood that's dripping from their hands because they allow themselves to be manipulated and deluded by the media. The courage of those in the Third World who continue to struggle and fight for freedom is awe-inspiring and they rely on the assistance from dissidents in the First World. Freedom and Democracy are prerequisites for survival." (Chomsky is often charged with being a Conspiracy Theorist but he's doing the complete opposite i.e. an institutional analysis) "The charge of being a conspiracy theorist's effect is to discourage institutional analysis. Chomsky is marginalized in U.S. media because he primarily criticizes the U.S. but in other countries he's given a lot of access to their major media because he's not so much of a threat to them. And here's the paradox, the freer a society is, the more necessary it is to induce fear (Note how effectively and how consistently Bush has used the tool of fear since Sept. 11th to manipulate public opinion e.g. to invade Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11). "And Chomsky's freedom to speak in other countries like Belgium, Holland, Canada, etc. is partly because their opinions don't matter i.e. the U.S. is the world's sole superpower! The U.S. is ideologically narrower than most other countries. The structure of the U.S. media is to pretty much eliminate critical discussion. FAIR's (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) analysis of ABC's Nightline revealed that of 1,530 guests: 92% were White, 89% were Male, & 80% were Professionals, Government Officials, or Corporate Representatives. Defenders of television like Jeff Greenfield of Nightline, say that people like Chomsky don't work on t.v. because he's not concise enough i.e. able to provide sound-bites of a sentence or two between commercials. The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts. You don't need any evidence e.g. Khomeni is nuts!, Quadafi is a murderer!, etc. Everybody just nods in agreement. They just spew the standard regurgitations of conventional pieties. On the other hand, if you say something like the biggest international terrorism operations that are known, are run out of Washington D.C.' or what happened in the 1980s was that the U.S. government was driven underground' (Iran Contra Scandal), or the U.S. is invading South Vietnam' or if the Nuremburg Principles were applied, then every post-war U.S. president would've been hanged,' or the best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt,' or the Bible is the most genocidal book in our total canon,' or education is a system of imposed ignorance,' or there's no more morality in world affairs fundamentally than there was in the time of Genghis Khan, there's just different factors to be concerned with,' people will demand that you give evidence. And a lot of evidence if you make such statements that startle them and which they've never heard before. But you can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision. That's the genius of this structural constraint. In fact, if they'd let the dissenters on more often, they'd sound like they're from outer space and that would serve the propagandists much better." In another case, "The number of guests in sixteen years of the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour was over 10,500 & the number of interviews with Chomsky on this program was 1. He was given 11 minutes & 52 seconds to speak. Chomsky was asked why if everything is so bad here in regards to the U.S. media, he lives here? Because it's my country, it's the freest country in the world, and there's more possibility for change here than anywhere else. And comparatively speaking, the U.S. is the country where the State is the most restrictive. The U.S. is a scandal in point of view of its wealth, it's resources, its lack of enemies, etc. The U.S. should have a level of health, welfare, and so on that's on an order of magnitude that's beyond anybody else in the world and we don't! The U.S. is last among twenty eight industrialized societies in terms of infant mortality. " Furthermore, "there's virtually no correlation between the internal freedom of a society and its external behavior e.g. ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy & its citizens were amongst the freest peoples of the time yet it was an imperialist power that invaded other nations. " To return to the subject of the media, "the only way to make the media or corporations more democratic is to get rid of them. If you have concentrated power, you can slightly affect it by protest but you can't really affect the structural power of the corporation unless you're ready for a social revolution. It's not to say one shouldn't keep on trying. There are internal contradictions in institutions such as in the media i.e. the media's support of the powers that be & on the other hand, the striving for journalistic integrity on the part of some journalists. For instance, Sarah McClendon who was an independent journalist who tore into Presidents at press briefings for over 40 years. Most reporters simply internalize the values of their corporate bosses and then regard themselves as acting freely. Self-censorship vs. formal censorship! The ways things change are because lots of people are working all the time in their communities, or wherever they happen to be and they're building up the base for popular movements e.g. the end of slavery, democratic movements, Civil Rights in the 1960s, etc. History books give a very false notion of this i.e. there are a couple of leaders like George Washington, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, etc. who caused the changes to come about & this is not to say that these leaders aren't important. But it's all those who we never hear of or know the names of, who are building up the pressures against the social wrongs until a point is reached i.e. Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat, and that spark ignites a wildfire. (my description of the phenomenon) "When you have active activists, then people like me (Chomsky) can appear and we can appear to be prominent but that's only because somebody else is doing the work! His giving hundreds of lectures, spending 20 hours a week writing letters, writing books & etc. isn't directed towards politicians, intellectuals, etc., it's directed toward what are called ordinary people. (earlier in the film it was revealed that Chomsky comes from a blue-collar background & has always championed the working class) And what he expects from them is exactly what they are i.e. to try to understand the world and act according to their decent impulses. And that they should try to improve the world and many people are willing to do that but they have to understand that in these things, I feel what I'm trying to do is help people to develop courses of intellectual self-defense! (I believe this to be the central message of Chomsky?) It means you have to develop an independent mind and work on it! That's extremely hard to do alone. The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube. (note the age-old military strategy of divide & conquer,' food for thought?) What's more, "it's hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances, some people can but it's very rare. The way to do it is through organization. It makes sense to try and look at what the institutions are trying to do and then try to combat that. They want to isolate us and we're trying to bring people together. (I am writing a book in which I'm analyzing the educational institutions, the media, the corporations, anti-intellectualism, & fundamentalists) The right answers are what you decide are the right answers. I can't point you to particular media for the right answers. I could be wrong about everything I'm saying. But that's something for you to figure out. There isn't any reason why you should pay attention to what I think is right. I'm not God. The alternative media is what's keeping people together. For example, Z Magazine has a staff of two, and no resources but because of the incredible amount of effort on their part, it's a national magazine. Or South End Press, a small collective (six people) but they put out a lot of good books. The information is out there but it's for somebody who's a fanatic and will spend the time and energy comparing today's lies and yesterday's leaks and etc. to find out or discover. The 1960s didn't change the way our institutions function but it has led to very significant cultural changes and they expanded in the 70s, 80s, & 90s. Changes or things that seemed outrageous in the 1960s are now taken for granted e.g. the feminist movement, the ecological movements, Third World Solidarity movements, etc. were student movements in the 60s and now they're mainstream America. And even though more people realize the government and the media don't reflect their views, they go outside the mainstream to inform themselves and to participate and be heard. And most don't bother to even participate by voting or writing mainstream media, etc. Somehow people don't see how profoundly contemptuous of democracy it is for them to hold these stage-managed elections where PR people determine what will come out of the politicians' mouths and etc. The point is you're going to have to work and that's why the propaganda system is so successful because very few people are going to have the time, energy, or commitment to carry out the constant battle that's required to get outside the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, Dan Rather, or somebody like that. The easy thing to do is when you come home from work, it's been a long day, you're probably tired so you turn on the t.v. and watch the news and say it's probably right. You read the newspaper and the Sports section and that's the basic way the indoctrination system works. Sure the other stuff is there but you're going to have to work to find it. Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. And the driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain! It's accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation. It's long been understood that a society that's based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as its possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and the world is an infinite garbage can." I have to interrupt Chomsky here because what he's saying hits home for me in such a personal and deeply felt way. As I said earlier about my family, friends, & even my own son not understanding or respecting what I have been doing for most of my adult life. And Chomsky is right on the mark when he said that most people are too tired after a day's work and simply switch on the boob-tube for their news.' I have heard this excuse a million times from people I was trying to get through to on the importance of reading serious books about what's going on. And I still think it's bullshit that people can't even take twenty minutes a day to read something challenging. They can spend eight hours in front of the t.v. but always claim they don't have any energy for the crucial stuff affecting all our lives? I read recently that back around the turn of the century, factory workers in the woolen mills would hire people to read to them while they were working because they wanted to be informed and they'd read serious stuff. Why were they intellectually curious and why are people today so intellectually lazy? Chomsky is so right also in that we have become so obsessed with material things. Consider the popular bumper sticker He who dies with the most toys, wins!' I have had people say things to me like you always talk about your education but what good has it done for you?' or so what are you going to do with a degree in philosophy, sit on the beach and meditate?' And my friends both in L.A. where I mostly grew up and my friends up here in Portland, Oregon where I have lived since 1992, can't understand why I'm not interested in Sports. They are obsessed with it and watch it ad nauseam, but won't read a book or even an article I plead with them to read, if their lives depended on it. It's very depressing and again is why I often feel like a stranger in a strange land to steal the title of Robert Heinlein's book. And because of the general apathy, indifference, & ignorance of most of the Americans I know, I love to leave whenever I can and Europe is my favorite destination. My experiences in Europe have usually been very intellectually stimulating to say nothing of the thrill of seeing places that I had just read about in school or in books. I don't mean to sound like a braggart but I am proud to say that I have been to Europe eight times so far and I'm always plotting my next escape to return there. Yes, the almighty dollar reigns supreme in this land of consumers not citizens. And I worry that we won't wake from our zombie-like slumber until it's too late and we have become a police-state totally. I just hope that I'm in Europe or somewhere else when they lock the doors for good? Finally, Chomsky is indeed correct in his assessment of why this state of ignorance can go on. Most Americans have swallowed completely and without any reflection whatsoever that we are the righteous, God-chosen people destined to rule the world and we do nothing but good in the world. And because of their blindness to the long and sordid history of our government, business leaders, & military, they can't connect the most obvious dots which are staring us in the face today e.g. we're losing jobs by the millions, we're losing our pensions, our health insurance, we're being forced to accept ever decreasing wages, our environment is being poisoned, we're led into war after war by deceitful politicians and media talking heads, we live in the most violent society on earth, etc. etc. etc. I just don't know what it's going to take to wake up the slumbering giant of America's people? In addition, Chomsky adds that "at this stage of history, either one of two things is possible; either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity, sympathy, and concern for others or alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy favorable to the special interests it serves. But conditions of survival, let alone justice require social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, that means the global community. (tragically I fear that we won't appreciate how precious Democracy and Freedom are until we've lost them, if only we would talk to those who have lived under dictators maybe we could wake up?) The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must. Namely to impose necessary illusions' to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and to remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is whether Democracy and Freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, Democracy and Freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival! (I am reminded of a quote by H.G. Wells that I often tell people about when arguing about our species continued existence i.e. "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." How true!) At this point, an interviewer, David Barsamian (he's well worth checking out), asks Chomsky: You deal with the genocide in East Timor, the murders in El Salvador, on and on, it's pretty horrific stuff, what keeps you going? What keeps you from getting burnt out?' Chomsky: "It's mainly a matter of being able to look yourself in the mirror I think?" He was then asked if he'd ever thought of running for president and he smiled and chuckled slightly and replied "if I ever ran for president, the first thing I'd do is tell people not to vote for me." This is where the film ends but I want to add a couple more points which I discovered in the special features section of the DVD. To illustrate the power of the mass media and its tragic consequences when its power is used in service to the military/industrial complex, recall the mostly hidden lesson of Vietnam. "Because we're not a totalitarian state (yet!), we don't have a fixed propaganda line but the presuppositions of the liberal media' i.e. the limits of our debates, are the propaganda line here in the U.S. e.g. Vietnam---the presupposition was that we began with blundering efforts to do good. (and hardly no one, even on the Left, questioned this supposition) Chomsky then goes on to point out that terms like anti-American' are absurd and is the type of accusation that would be only made in a totalitarian state. States like Russia would make such charges and it was considered a terrible crime. It was and is used to intimidate people and to prevent them from committing the heresy of honesty' and applying the same standards of morality to ourselves that we do to other nations. In conclusion, Chomsky states that the most dangerous propaganda systems of the 20th century have grown out of the most democratic states i.e. England & the U.S. The first Public Relations institut

I was born in Oregon but grew up in L.A. I've done a fair amount of traveling and started by hitch-hiking up & down the West Coast several times and across the U.S. I've been to Europe several times. Earned a B.A. in English Lit from Cal State Long Beach. Been an avid reader all my life. Write mostly political essays and working on a major project (2,000 pgs. complete so far). Love stimulating conversations and listening to oldies but goodies, Motown, jazz, etc. Divorced and have a son who recently got married. Work as an assistant in Special Education.
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The digital revolution has transformed the way we receive information and indulge in entertainment. We no longer have to listen to the radio, watch TV, go to the movies, or pick up books at our local bookstore. Instead, we can get virtually of the information and entertainment we need with a few clicks of our mouse.

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Because the technology to create digital videos, e-books, and audio products is widely available, you have a greater choice than ever before. Indeed, you can find excellent sources of information and entertainment that mainstream publishers might overlook. Moreover, many sources of entertainment and informational products allow you to sample the wares before you buy, by enabling you to listen to a portion of the audio or read a few pages of the ebooks.

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How does one keep calm when parenting? After 15 years of counseling, I have found that no matter what parenting strategies are applied, keeping emotionally balanced is key to family mental health. Anger management, for example, provides parents the calm that they need to make better parenting choices and avoid creating family crises. Angry outbursts can rupture family relationships that matter most. A parents influence over his child is only as good as their relationship. So although some emotional crises can be repaired, why repair them when they can be avoided. Emotional change only occurs through a conscious effort focused on the way we think and the way we behave.

To help gain control of your anger, follow these ten steps:

Take responsibility for your actions. Feelings do not justify behavior. For example, anger does not automatically equal yelling. Sadness does not necessarily equal withdrawal. Our feelings should not dictate behavior. Next time you feel angry, stressed or depressed, choose a less invasive behavior. Be aware of the ways in which you instantaneously react to your child. Over a lifetime, you have created patterns that dictate the ways in which you respond to certain situations. In order to change them, you need to become aware of those patterns. There are many visual reminders you can use to awaken yourself when you are falling into old patterns like wearing a special ring or putting stickers around your house. Awareness leads to the ability to change. Stop before you act. We move at the speed of light! Our thoughts, feelings and behaviors are automatic. The stop technique is a great tool that can put a halt to negative responses. Literally saying stop interrupts your pattern of behavior and gives you time to think and do something differently. Do this repeatedly and form a new pattern! Replace negative thinking and behavior with something new. Instead of attacking when angry, try sitting down and breathing calmly. Instead of running when frightened, try standing your ground. Over time, the negative responses will decrease as you create new patterns. Take a deep breath! Yes, its true. Breathing brings oxygen to the brain, which, in turn, tells the body its safe. Deep, slow breathing mimics the bodys resting state. As you control your breathing, you bring calm to yourself. By taking 10 deep breaths when upset, you can think more clearly. Stay in the present. Whether you lament the past or worry about the future, learning to cope in the here and now is essential. Worries about the past or the future can derail parents from dealing with their children. We can really only control the present. It deserves our best energy. Speak for yourself. Remember that the I feel statement is more than counselor speak! It keeps YOU in control. Blaming others for your feelings by saying, You make me feel angry, is like handing them your emotional reins. Get perspective on situations over which you have little control. Weigh the intensity of your feelings against your power in a situation. In parenting, for example, we might feel irritated over our childrens grades. Our irritation may be high but our power over the situation may be low. The disparity is a misuse of emotional energy. Evaluating your power to bring about change can help prioritize action and eliminate some concerns. Ask for help. Managing your emotions isnt easy. Sometimes parents need individual help. Hiring a family therapist is an excellent way to receive assistance designed just for you. Whether it is a one-time consultation or ongoing counseling, the pay-off can be big. Reach out for resources. If you have a parenting book by your bedside, an audio-class on your MP3 or CD player, and a top 10 list stuck to your refrigerator, then change is close at hand!

Copyright 2008 Parent Education Group - Reprints Accepted - Two links must be active in the bio.

Laura Doerflinger, MS, a licensed mental health counselor, is the Executive Director of the Parent Education Group at http://www.familyauthority.com/ and the author of the audio book, Emotionally Balanced Parenting.
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For those of you who may have never heard of Professor Chomsky, the New York Times has called him arguably the greatest intellectual alive.' And this is ironic because the New York Times, the paper of record' i.e. they set the standard for all the rest of the newspapers in America, & according to the conservatives, it is the bastion of the liberal media, is a lapdog to the powers that be, in Chomsky's opinion. By the way, this is a good place for me to confess that though I tried to capture Chomsky's words verbatim from the film, sometimes I failed and so occasionally I will paraphrase his words but I have tried to be true to the spirit of his words. I will note whenever possible, my paraphrasing of his exact words. For example, he didn't say the powers that be' in reference to the New York Times above. Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the documentary, I want to also inform you that "Noam Chomsky is one of the ten most-quoted writers of all time. The Chicago Tribune has called Professor Chomsky the most cited living author,' adding that among intellectual luminaries of all eras, he ranks eighth, just behind Plato and Sigmund Freud." (Chomsky For Beginners, by David Cogswell, pg. 1) Moreover, on that list of the ten most-quoted writers of all time is Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, & Socrates. Chomsky in my opinion is a one-man revolution and if you are new to the world of liberal, progressive, & radical thought, you couldn't pick a better place to start than with Chomsky. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that if you read no one other than Chomsky and did a thorough study of his prolific writings, books, lectures, interviews, videos, & audio tapes, you would acquire an education equivalent to a Ph.D. and you would be a very enlightened individual. Chomsky would probably disagree with such flattery and that's one of the things that especially endears him to me i.e. he is a very humble man. Okay, let's get down to the brass tacks of this piece of mine.

The term the manufacture of consent' was coined by Walter Lippmann in 1922. Chomsky states, "Walter Lippmann coined the term the manufacture of consent' and he basically said that the common interests are above the heads of the public and that a separate, specialized class, would have to manage or regulate society. And this is the opposite of our common understanding of democracy." Since Lippmann's term is the title of this film and of Chomsky's book, I am going to give you some background on Lippmann along with some pertinent quotes from him. I hope this will help to shed some light on the significance of this pernicious concept the manufacture of consent.' It's absolutely mind-boggling that Lippmann is held up as some sort of champion of the free press' and liberalism' and after you read the following, you will see why I feel this way.

"Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a political philosopher and journalist whose writings constitute a sustained and close commentary on American public affairs for a period of nearly six decades. He brought to the discussion and analysis of current social and political problems a degree of learning unprecedented in American journalism. Throughout his career he retained an independent, critical stance on foreign and domestic issues and combined a rigorous commitment to democratic principles with a deep sense of the pragmatic limitations of real political situations. He is certainly among the most thoughtful and cultured newspapermen of all times

The main focus of Lippmann's thinking in the 1920's was on the relation of knowledge to public opinion in mass society.Lippmann became doubtful whether citizens could be adequately and objectively informed of the knowledge required for self-government, conceived along Jeffersonian lines.An Enquiry into the Principles of the Good Society advanced the principle of disinterestedness on the part of statesmen as a cure to the excesses of majority rule and as an antidote to the dangers of elitism." (Alan Waters in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century, St. James Press, 1987)

And now Lippmann's words:

"That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on the rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premiseIt has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach." (Public Opinion, by Walter Lippmann, Free Press, 1965; first published in 1922, page 158)

And more from Lippmann:

"The lesson is, I think, a fairly clear one. In the absence of institutions and education by which the environment is so successfully reported that the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality. This class is irresponsible, for it acts upon information that is not common property, in situations that the public at large does not conceive, and it can be held to account only on the accomplished fact." (Public Opinion, page 195)

Boy! Talk about fancy, double-talk. Lippmann sounds more like a lawyer than a journalist. And fortunately we have someone as brilliant as Chomsky to decipher this gobbley-gook. I could see Chomsky's basic assertion that Lippmann was saying in a nutshell that the public is too ignorant to understand the larger issues affecting society. And one thing that jumped out at me in the last quote from Lippmann was this class is irresponsible.' He was clearly referring to this specialized class' who he felt were the only ones fit to run our society. But it seems to me that he revealed his true convictions in this sentence i.e. this superior class' is above the law and above the peons of our society which means the vast majority of us who aren't multi-millionaires. Of course when you first think of the word irresponsible,' you probably think of an irresponsible teenager or an adult who doesn't pay his bills or hold down a job. Well, check out this definition from Webster's; irresponsible (not answerable to higher authority) Freudian slip? Or perhaps the unvarnished truth? And how apropos because as I believe Chomsky shows us in this documentary, what we call a democracy here in America is all but gone and we are sliding towards a variation of a fascist or totalitarian state---my description. I am going to come back to more quotes from Lippmann later on because I don't want to belabor the point here. The next person Chomsky mentions in the film is Reinhold Niebuhr.

Chomsky summed up Niebuhr thus; "the average man follows faith not reason because of his stupidity and therefore society needs to be run by cool, reasoning men. He was a big influence on the policy makers of the 1960's. Now, I'm not sure to be honest with you if the next two phrases were Niebuhr's but they are in the same paragraph of my notes from the film. And they are Necessary Illusions' & "Emotionally Potent Oversimplifications." I wrote that these are needed to herd the sheep, in the margins of my notes. And the film showed an example of the S.D.I. (Strategic Defense Initiative i.e. Star Wars) program that Reagan launched with simplistic animations of a protective umbrella' over the U.S. and satellites that could shoot down incoming missiles. And these necessary illusions & emotionally potent oversimplifications' definitely contribute to the dumbing-down of the American public. The hypocrisy is phenomenal in that as Lippmann and Niebuhr charge the public with being too stupid to participate in the democratic process and at the same time, contribute to keeping the public ignorant. In other words, they're blaming the victims. And speaking of ignorant, once again if it hadn't been for Chomsky's insight, I would've gone on thinking Niebuhr was a champion of the oppressed. I believe I even have a book or two of his in my garage somewhere? I wanted to refresh my memory regarding Niebuhr so I went to my Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia and here is a bit of what it has to say about him.

"Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892-1971) American theologian.he took an active interest in labor problems, Niebuhr joined the faculty at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he taught from 1928 to 1960. Allied with the socialist movement in the 1930s, Niebuhr dealt with questions of political morality and with the failure of Christianity to confront social problemsthe moral irresponsibility of those who fail to come to grips with the problem of power. Following World War II, Niebuhr's earlier radicalism was replaced by what he called conservative realism'; but, in Christian Realism and Political Problems (1953), he maintained that the church was actively sanctioning social ills by refusing to confront them. He persistently emphasized the reality of sin and its bearing on the tragedy of man and saw the modern world as one to which power and technocracy have brought confusion and meaninglessness.Always invigorating, usually controversial, Niebuhr was one of the most influential thinkers of his day."

As a matter of fact, somewhere in the back of my mind, I seem to recall that Niebuhr was a big influence on President Kennedy? And since nothing is so damning as a person's own words, here are some of Niebuhr's words:

"God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." (The Serenity Prayer, 1943) I knew there was always something that I didn't like about that prayer.' It's used at AA meetings and in the context of this essay & Niebuhr's insults regarding public stupidity, I interpret it to mean, just accept your lot in life e.g. being screwed by the status quo.

"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." (The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 1944) Then why did you promote the undermining of democracy by saying people are too stupid to participate in democracy and as a theologian you preached the virtues of faith' and then have the audacity to turn around and say the public is too stupid and believes more in faith than in reason?

"Life has no meaning except in terms of responsibility." (Faith and History, 1949) And you consider yourself an exemplar of responsibility when you promote faith over reason and then blame people for being too ignorant to participate in the democratic process?

"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love." (The Irony of American History, 1952) I'd say the hypocrisy of American history rather than the irony. But then it is sort of ironic that Niebuhr chastises the public for follows faith not reason when as in this quotation he says we must be saved by faith.' I can see how the public policy makers loved him because by praising the virtues of faith in public, you make it that much easier to manipulate the public and cloud the issues affecting their lives with such necessary illusions' as hope and faith. And with emotionally potent oversimplifications,' you continue to keep the public distracted and off-balance e.g. George Bush the Lesser's "you're either with us or you're against us," and "I'm going to lead the country to understanding the value of life---the preciousness of life. Life for the living and life for the unborn." (THIS WEEK, ABC, January 23, 2000)

Next in the film, Chomsky says "indoctrination is the essence of a democratic state. In a totalitarian state it doesn't much matter what people think because you have a bludgeon over their heads. But, in a democracy you need to control what people think. People may become so curious and arrogant that they don't submit to a civil rule." I am reminded of that glorious period of the 1960's when people---mostly university students & hippies---were definitely not civil' and how wonderful a feeling it was! We rejected the crass materialism of the day and which has returned today, stronger than ever. We fought for civil rights, women's rights, the protection of our environment, & against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. Chomsky also protested in the 1960's and risked going to prison for many years. Chomsky goes on to say "the standard way to control people's thoughts was in the more honest days called propaganda. There are various ways to either marginalize the general public or reduce them to apathy. And the role of the mass media is to mobilize public support for the special interests." Of course the major special interests which he is referring to are the banking, financial, and corporate interests. And our current occupation of Iraq clearly serves the interests of the corporate oil industry and the financial & banking interests because as I have learned, the dollar was devaluating significantly around the world. Saddam's real threat to America as some scholars have said was because he threatened to start selling Iraq's oil using the Euro dollar instead of the American dollar and that would've possibly plunged the U.S. into hyper-inflation. And so, as soon as we conquered' Iraq, our leaders' immediately switched the oil currency of Iraq back to the U.S. dollar.

What's more, as Chomsky points out, "investment, production, & distribution decisions are made by and are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of corporations and they are also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government & they're the ones who own the media." Indeed! And don't think this just pertains to the oil industry, it applies to every major industry you can think of. Have you ever heard of the revolving door' between government and the corporate sector? I could give you a long list of examples but the most glaring one currently is Dick Cheney and his flagrant conflict of interest because he worked for Halliburton before he became vice-president and he now financially benefits to the tune of millions from that relationship because Halliburton was given the sweetheart deal of a no-bid contract for the majority of the rebuilding' of Iraq---should more accurately be called the raping of Iraq & the enrichment of the greedy hogs of corporate American oil. George Schultz and Bechtel, another major war profiteer from Iraq's destruction. James Baker and the Carlyle Group of which King George the First is a member and which benefits not only from Iraq's misery but also benefited handsomely from the devastation of 9/11 and Baker has the balls to legally represent the Saudi Royal family against the surviving family members of 9/11 who are suing the Saudis. Don't forget that 15 of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11th were Saudis and that Osama is Saudi and the Bush bastards are not only friends of the bin Laden family but whisked them out of the U.S. immediately after that terrible day when all other flights around the country were grounded. Coincidence? Yeah, right! Yep, I'd say Chomsky is right on the money and I'm also reminded of President Eisenhower's warning regarding the military-industrial complex except today as Chomsky has shown us, it's also the media serving these cold-blooded robber baron class. Recall that Chomsky has called the New York Times their lapdog. And also bear in mind the recent scandal of Judy Miller, who almost single-handedly led us to war in Iraq because she relied on Chalabi, that suspected double-agent for Iran, embezzler on the run from Syria, and hated Iraqi exile whom the Iraqis would never accept as their leader---though the Bush cabal tried to install him. Judy Miller was a star reporter for the New York Times, remember that bastion of the liberal media according to the rabid right-wingers, and she went to jail not to protect a whistle-blower protecting the public's interest but rather to protect a White House whistle-blower who publicly revealed the identity of an undercover CIA agent who happened to be the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Why? Because Ambassador Wilson actually believed that the truth should be spoken and refused to rubber stamp Bush & Cheney's phony pack of lies which they spun to suck us into the Iraq invasion and quagmire.

In addition, Chomsky goes on to say that "within the economic system by law and in principle, they [the concentrated network of corporations] dominate. They control our resources. The need to satisfy their economic interests places very serious constraints on the political and ideological system. There are two targets for U.S. propaganda; 1)the political class who are relatively well-educated, make up about 20% of the public, & play some part in the decision making as managers or cultural managers e.g. teachers, writers, and so on. Their consent is crucial and they have to be deeply indoctrinated. 2) the other 80% of the public whose main function is to follow orders, not to think, and not pay attention to anything. And they're the ones who usually pay the cost." As soon as Chomsky mentioned the cultural managers' such as teachers, I immediately thought of my wife. She sincerely believes she's doing good and she's very dedicated to her work as an educator. And we've been arguing for years about our educational system. I tried my best to convince her that we should home-school our son but she's been too-well indoctrinated with the critics of home-schooling's mantra of socialization.' It's been a very painful and frustrating experience to have to sit by and watch my own son be destroyed by our public educational system. And my wife, just as blind as the majority of teachers, laments how he has turned out i.e. self-centered, materialistic, angry, lacking in compassion or empathy for the downtrodden, cussing too much, etc. When we get into heated arguments I hurl at her well, you wanted him to be socialized and he's indeed just like the majority of the angry youth.' I shouldn't be surprised at this sad state of affairs even in my own family because I have been a lone voice of dissent from the common wisdom ever since I started educating myself in my twenties. I have been mocked, ridiculed, intimidated, etc. by strangers, my own relatives, friends, etc. for so long that it feels natural to me now. Because I read people like Chomsky and most people read the t.v. guide, the Reader's Digest, or the National Enquirer, and other such quality' material. And because they have never heard of the great thinkers words or seen them on their televisions, I must be a nutcase in their minds and they smugly put me down and call me a loser, a quitter, a failure, etc. Yes indeed, I have paid and continue to pay a very high price for daring to challenge the myths and propaganda we have been raised on. And the dearest price has been the loss of my son's respect. He won't even read an essay I wrote for him trying to warn him of the manipulations of the military propaganda in an effort to save his life. So far he doesn't have any desire to join the military but I also fear that they will be forced to reinstate the draft due to the chicken-hawks in the White House and their designs on world conquest for their corporate cronies bank accounts.

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Because you probably believe like I did when I was in high school and still ignorant of the lies & manipulations of these masters of the universe and their diabolical schemes, you might still think that it is only evil empires' like the former Soviet Union and Communist China who use propaganda on their citizens? Well fortunately, scholars like Chomsky show us that our government' is equally guilty of manipulating us with its own propaganda. I mean, Jesus Christ! Isn't it as clear as the nose on your face that this junta occupying the oval office have blatantly lied us into invading & occupying Iraq? Let me remind you of the constantly shifting sands of deceit they used to sucker us into this war.' By the way, some war,' after ten years of sanctions and bombing, and after daddy invaded Iraq in 1990 and had its infrastructure almost totally destroyed so that it's children & elderly have died because they have no power, no medicine, no clean water, lack food, etc. and over 500,000 Iraqi children have died because of it, and our weapons inspectors made sure there weren't any weapons of mass destruction so our mighty military could be sure that it wouldn't be able to put up hardly any resistance whatsoever, we attack? This is nothing to be proud of and in fact quite the opposite. It's something all decent people are deeply ashamed of. Our conquest of Iraq and the bragging of that little Bantam rooster who couldn't even serve out his military duty in the safe and stateside, Texas Air National Guard that daddy got him into, is like me boasting of having beat up a kindergarten student.

To demonstrate how propaganda works U.S. style, Chomsky provides us with a propaganda model' in this brilliant documentary. Chomsky like any who dare to critique the powers that be, is often labeled a conspiracy theorist' but as he states, no, what he does is institutional analysis.' The intellectually lazy and dishonest try to dupe us and to marginalize those who reveal their dirty tricks with terms like conspiracy nut, anti-American, etc. Without reservation though, I challenge you or any who would like to argue against my opinions or my quotes from Chomsky to prove me wrong. And I am not ashamed one bit to clearly state that I'm riding on Chomsky's coattails. This is a man who as I said at the beginning & to rephrase, an intellectual giant and the rest of us are mental midgets in comparison. And Chomsky religiously lists his sources, so any of you would be intellectual assassins put up or shut up! Prove him or me wrong if you dare and you must cite your sources or else you're just a coward like that bushwhacker in the executive office who hides and shoots people in the back. To illustrate his propaganda model,' Chomsky starts off with saying that there are filters which are used in the propaganda assault (my word).

"The elite media set the agenda. Some of the most prominent among them are the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major television stations such as ABC, NBC, & CBS, etc. They set the general framework and the local media around the country more or less adapt to their structure. The elite media set the agenda in all sorts of ways e.g. by the selection of the topics to be discussed; by the distribution of concerns to be covered; by the emphasis they place on topics; by the framing of issues (I strongly recommend reading George Lakoff on the critical importance of framing of the issues'); by their filtering of the information they provide us with; by the bounding of debate (the limits as to what can be discussed); they determine, select, shape, control, & restrict what news items or stories we see, hear, or read in order to serve the interests of the dominant elite groups." Again my friend, I added some of the details of the factors or items Chomsky listed in hopes of making it a little more explicit or clear to whomever may read this essay.

Furthermore, Chomsky goes on to argue that the New York Times is the most important paper in the U.S. and arguably the entire world and it creates history. Because the New York Times again is the paper of record' and publishes only the news that's fit to print,' which it proudly displays on every copy. It creates history in the sense that it is the paper which people go to when they want to know what happened in the past." I want to inject here that when I heard this, I was immediately reminded of that nightmare world George Orwell described in his classic 1984. In case you're not familiar with it, it's a horrific portrait of a future society in which one of the primary ways of controlling the public is done by a government department called the Ministry of Truth. Those who work in this department, including the protagonist of the novel, Winston, spend their days rewriting history. They delete inconvenient facts from past editions of the official government news and insert new facts' which fit the current claims of the government. And the spooky & relevant quote from Orwell's book is "Those who control the past, control the present. And those who control the present, control the future." Can you see the power and the significance of this quote? In brief, those who control the media of a country, control what the people think and believe and its an easy matter after you have this kind of control, to get the public to do just about anything you want e.g. go to war against an imaginary enemy (Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc.); give up their rights (the Patriot Act); resign themselves to being permanently unemployed or underemployed (Globalization); etc. etc. etc. And the New York Times clearly has the power to shape the past because its editors decide which stories to print, how to shape them, etc. as Chomsky delineated above. And they maintain a storehouse of all their past stories. Researchers, scholars, government and business leaders go to the New York Times if they want to find something out about a past event. In fact, I just pulled a book off my bookshelves titled The New York Times Guide To Reference Materials: The Indispensable Handbook, Updated and Expanded, For Anyone Who Needs to Know How and Where to Look Up Almost Anything by Mona McCormick. Pretty arrogant wouldn't you say? Sounds like they're so full of themselves that they actually believe their own hype.

In any case, Chomsky goes on to point out that "it's important to have an impression of a liberal bias in the press so as to make people think there's a counterbalance and not dare to think of going beyond the so-called liberal left which the New York Times is suppose to represent. And because of the pseudo-far Left that the Times is suppose to represent, nobody goes further to the Left because they'd be written off as nutcases from outer space because they have gone beyond what is acceptable in terms of debate and critique of our society and its institutions. I added on considerably to Chomsky's words but its close to Chomsky's intent I believe. For instance, in order to prevent the real truth seekers from getting too close, the elite media restrict the debate and therefore the presuppositions of the liberal media' are sacrosanct. In other words, if the New York Times, that bastion of the liberal media' is indeed liberal, adversarial, and all those bad things, how can I go beyond it? They're already so extreme in their opposition to power that to go beyond it would be to take off from the planet i.e. to leave rationality, reasonability, & reality behind. (my description) The media thus say in Chomsky's words "Thus far and no further!"

Equally important to remember is the fact that "the major media are large corporations sometimes integrated with even larger corporations e.g. General Electric, Westinghouse, etc." And a very important side-note here from me is recall that Ronald Reagan, that champion of the conservative cockroaches and who started the war on the poor and the environment with the Reagan Revolution, spent twenty years as a spokesman for G.E. before he got into politics. And in those 20 years he toured the G.E. plants around the country giving the same speech i.e. the Commies are Coming! And G.E. is this country's largest producer of nuclear energy amongst other lovely things. I forget if they're in the weapons industry but I heard recently that Lockheed-Martin is the largest weapons manufacturer. In brief, megalithic corporations like G.E. have a total lock on us i.e. they produce the weapons of mass destruction that threaten our very survival, they sell these weapons even to our enemies,' they poison our environment, they are funded by our tax dollars, they downsize us by moving overseas, they take away our pensions, and just about every labor law is gutted, and by owning the elite media' they keep it all hidden from the average American who watches their news and believes it as objective fact.

I know this is all terribly depressing but you can either bury your head in the sand and hope it will all go away or that I'm just a paranoid nutcase or you can stand up on your hind legs and like in that classic movie Network from the late 60s or early 70s in which the central character, a television anchorman, told his audience in an apparent nervous breakdown on air, "go to your windows, open them up and shout, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Obviously, I am kidding in a sense but I do believe we must get mad and we must inform ourselves as Chomsky himself counsels people who come to him for some magical answer. He tells them again and again, I can't tell you what's right. And he tells them that he could be wrong. He basically says that we have to do our own work and it's tough but there's no easy way. Next Chomsky touches on how advertising fits into the manufacturing of consent and this would be a good spot for me to go back and share with you a bit on Edward Bernays whom some have called the grandfather of the Public Relations industry in America, I believe? I am bringing him up because I believe that public relations and advertising are closely intertwined and responsible for a large part of our manipulation by the power elite! I am going to quote a lengthy portion on the subject of public relations from a book I have dissected and am using in my own book. And while I am using this book, I believe the author, John Taylor Gatto, may have a hidden agenda in support of Christian fundamentalists which I utterly detest. Nonetheless, Gatto is useful and does provide some great information and occasionally some brilliant insights.

"Four hundred years after Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his treatise on scientific deceit, Edward L. Bernays began to practice the scientific art of public deception, trading heavily on his uncle Sigmund Freud's notoriety. A decade earlier, Ivy Lee's publicity savvy had rescued the Rockefellers from their Ludlow Massacre disgrace. Public Relations as political science was off and running on the fast track.

Bernays was only a solitary word magician at the time, of course, but he was in an ideal position to capitalize quickly upon his rhetorical talent and to set his stamp on the new science's future. In 1928, Bernays published two books in quick succession which planted his flag in the dream terrain of the unconscious.' The first, Crystallizing Public Opinion, the second, Propaganda. Adolf Hitler is said to have displayed both on a table in his office under a poster-sized picture of Henry Ford. The new world was blazing a trail into an even newer world than it imagined.

Both of Bernays' books argued that language could be used successfully to create new realities. Psychological science was so advanced, he claimed, it could substitute synthetic reality for natural reality, as urban society had successfully replaced our natural connection to birds, trees, and flowers with a substitute connection to billboards, cars, and bright lights.

Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda had much to say to the newly minted administrative classes burgeoning all over American schools and colleges. In Propaganda, Bernays redefined democratic society, in the interests of the mass-production economy. I've selected three short excerpts from Bernay's classic which enriched him with corporate work in the seven decades of life he had left---he died in 1995 at the age of 105---after its publication.

The first assertion of Propaganda was that common people had to be regimented and governed from behind the scenes. Here are Bernays' actual words:

The need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the

Technical means have been invented and developed by which public opinion

May be regimented.

The next important contention was that the critical pollution of language necessary to make this work was already in use:

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested,

Largely by men we have never heard of. We are dominated by a relatively small

Number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of

The masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public.

Finally, Bernays attempts to provide a moral' justification for proceeding as he suggests:

The conscious manipulation of organized habits and opinions of the masses is an

Important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen

Mechanism constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in

This country.

This attitude of manipulation as an important component of democratic' management entered the urban factory-school classroom in a big way at a time when psychology was taking over from academics as the tool of choice in America's German-inspired teacher-training institutions." (The Underground History of American Education, pgs. 354-55, John Taylor Gatto)

And from the same website where I got the Walter Lippmann quotes:

THE ENGINEERING APPROACH

This phrase quite simply means the use of an engineering approach---that is, action based only on thorough knowledge of the situation and on the application of scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs. Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval, and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public's consent to a program or goalThe engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process the freedom to persuade and suggest. The freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly, the freedoms which make the engineering of consent possible, are among the most cherished guarantees of the Constitution of the United States

Today it is impossible to overestimate the importance of engineering consent; it affects almost every aspect of our daily lives. When used for social purposes, it is among our most valuable contributions to the efficient functioning of modern societyThe responsible leader, to accomplish social objectives, must therefore be constantly aware of the possibilities of subversion. He must apply his energies to mastering the operational know-how of consent engineering, and to out-maneuvering his opponents in the public interest.

From The Engineering of Consent, by Edward Bernays, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 1947, pages 114-115 See also: pages 16-17

Well, I don't know about you my friend but I feel like a rat in a lab experiment after learning this? And I am absolutely stupefied that both Bernays and Lippmann could call this manipulation of the public democratic?' That is some twisted & perverse logic more closely resembling Alice in Wonderland than scientific or rational thought. Something occurred to me as I was typing the date of the last quote from Bernays quote and that is that 1947 was also the year that marked the beginning of the National Security State i.e. Allen Foster Dulles wrote the National Security Act and we began the Cold War with Russia. Food for thought? Think about it in terms of the manufacture of consent. I'm not sure if it was Allen Dulles or his brother, John Foster Dulles in regards to writing the National Security Act? At this point in the film, Chomsky states that "what keeps the media functioning is advertising, not their readers (in fact, the newspapers devote something like 40% of the paper to advertising). What comes out is a picture of the world that satisfies the needs of the corporations and conglomerates. They exclude, marginalize, or eliminate dissenting voices just like any institution because dissenting opinions are self-destructive to institutions." I would add though that dissenting opinions are in fact healthy for an institution, organization, government because if you surround yourself with nothing but yes-men, you are missing out on some opinions that can sometimes make the difference between failure and success.

Chomsky continues "In a democracy, before we go to war, the media's obligation is to provide background and offer peaceful resolutions or alternatives by presenting differing points of view in a public debate. This didn't happen in the Gulf War, 99% of the media just went along with President Bush. And every time Bush said there'd be no negotiations, there'd be a hundred editorials the next day lauding him for going the last mile in diplomacy. Bush said aggressors can't be rewarded but he invaded Panama and was head of the CIA during the East Timor genocide and the media applauded. The media kept us from knowing we didn't have to go to war and that means we went to war very much in the tradition of a totalitarian state. Equally important is the fact that the U.S. has vetoed almost every UN resolution against aggressor states (Gee! I wonder why? Could it be because the majority of those aggressive invasions have been committed by the U.S. & our number one ally, Israel?)

"The purpose of the real mass media i.e. not the elite media, which is aimed at the top 20% of the relatively well-educated', but the media aimed at Joe six-pack, is to dull people's brains. The main thing for the 80% of the public is to divert them, to get them to watch the National Football League. And to worry about the motherless child with six heads, astrology, fundamentalists stuff, etc. (The National Enquirer, the largest selling paper in America') In brief, the true purpose of the mass media for the lower classes is to get them away from things that matter. It's important to reduce their capacity to think. Sports is another crucial example of the indoctrination system because it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. To keep them from worrying about things that matter to their lives, that they might have some ideas of how to do something about. High-school students are urged to root for their team even though they don't know them and they mean nothing to them. This is a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind the leader i.e. training in irrational jingoism."(note the often used sports metaphors in business and government e.g. the CEO or the president & etc. are often referred to as the coach or the quarterback and we're the team. And also note the similar tactic used in ancient Rome with the Bread & Circus routine rituals of gladiators in The Coliseum used to distract the citizens from the political acts of the Emperor and the Senators e.g. taxing the hell out of the citizens, etc.)

"Pol Pot, Cambodia's bloody dictator and engineer of the Killing Fields which decimated somewhere around 750,000 of his own citizens, was covered in great and gloriously gory detail in our media but at the same time, the U.S. support of Indochina's genocide against East Timor had no or barely any coverage or mention in the media. East Timor was our ally because they had oil and they were next to a very deep section of the ocean perfect for U.S. submarines to pass through in that region of the world. Indonesia invaded East Timor, the former Portuguese colony, because they were much more powerful and therefore could, and because they didn't want a small, independent country which was very egalitarian and treated its citizens fairly, to serve as an example and possibly inspire other countries in the region. President Ford & Killer Kissinger' visited Jakarta, Indonesia and asked them to delay their invasion until after they had left because it would be embarrassing in terms of world opinion (remember, the U.S. is supposedly the beacon on the hill i.e. the bright, shining example of all that's good in the world). Less than twelve hours later, Indonesia invaded East Timor (December 7, 1975) and simply slaughtered East Timor's citizens without stop for three weeks. The UN called for resolutions, sanctions, etc. but the U.S. was clearly not going to allow anything to interfere with Indochina's campaign of genocide. And that great democratic leader, Daniel Patrick Moynihan proudly led the way in blocking the UN sanctions for our State Department. The U.S. supplied 90% of the weapons and right after the invasion, the shipment of arms was stepped up. This went on for years and Indochina's military slowly starved the people of East Timor to death. When some who had been hiding in the jungle would come out under a white flag of surrender, they would be murdered---men and children. The women were taken to Delhi to service' the military of Indochina i.e. raped repeatedly!"

"In 1978 when Indochina was running out of weapons and ammunition, the Carter administration increased sales to them as well as England and every other nation that could profit from munitions sales (remember that Carter is supposedly the champion of Human Rights & also note that weapons and drugs are the two largest businesses in the world). As the genocide reached its peak in 1978, the coverage in the U.S. media and in Canada's media dropped to zero. Before this, there was some coverage but always from the point of view of the State Dept. and the Indonesian army, never from the people of East Timor and this was exactly at the time of Pol Pot's genocidal campaign in Cambodia. And there was great protest and moral outrage in the press regarding Cambodia. The level of atrocities was comparable relatively but it was considerably higher in East Timor. From 1970 to 1975 there was also an atrocity for which the U.S. was responsible i.e. the bombing of Cambodia. CIA estimates were that our bombings killed somewhere around 600,000 Cambodians and the aftermath of our bombings killed approximately another million innocent civilians . The U.S. bombings of Cambodia played a significant role in building up peasant support for Pol Pot's Khymer Rouge who implemented the genocide against their own people. And within a couple of weeks of the takeover by the Khymer Rouge, the New York Times was accusing them of genocide but mentioned nothing about the five years of bombings by the U.S. And from then on it was a drumbeat, a chorus of genocide by our mass media. Time, The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, etc. etc. etc. all jumped on the bandwagon decrying Pol Pot but not a word about East Timor. Our media lied outrageously about Cambodia, vastly exaggerated the numbers of dead e.g. anywhere from 1 to 4 million, doctored pictures, never provided any evidence nor was it required, claimed that Pol Pot bragged about killing over 2 million, etc. The lies would've made Stalin cringe. The difference between the genocide in East Timor and Cambodia was that East Timor's killers weren't Communists!"

"Whenever the U.S. media did cover East Timor, it was a systematic, consistent whitewash of U.S. complicity. Indonesia killed a third of the people of East Timor and put them in concentration camps. Women were forced to use birth control and whenever any dared to protest, they were massacred. (Amy Goodman of America's best alternative news media program Democracy Now!, was there & was severely beaten) The slaughter in East Timor exemplifies that the U.S. media isn't merely subservient to corporate power but are complicit in genocide. The reason atrocities like this can go on is because nobody knew about them. If we did, we could protest and pressure them to stop. American people would be horrified if they knew of the blood that's dripping from their hands because they allow themselves to be manipulated and deluded by the media. The courage of those in the Third World who continue to struggle and fight for freedom is awe-inspiring and they rely on the assistance from dissidents in the First World. Freedom and Democracy are prerequisites for survival." (Chomsky is often charged with being a Conspiracy Theorist but he's doing the complete opposite i.e. an institutional analysis) "The charge of being a conspiracy theorist's effect is to discourage institutional analysis. Chomsky is marginalized in U.S. media because he primarily criticizes the U.S. but in other countries he's given a lot of access to their major media because he's not so much of a threat to them. And here's the paradox, the freer a society is, the more necessary it is to induce fear (Note how effectively and how consistently Bush has used the tool of fear since Sept. 11th to manipulate public opinion e.g. to invade Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11).

"And Chomsky's freedom to speak in other countries like Belgium, Holland, Canada, etc. is partly because their opinions don't matter i.e. the U.S. is the world's sole superpower! The U.S. is ideologically narrower than most other countries. The structure of the U.S. media is to pretty much eliminate critical discussion. FAIR's (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) analysis of ABC's Nightline revealed that of 1,530 guests: 92% were White, 89% were Male, & 80% were Professionals, Government Officials, or Corporate Representatives. Defenders of television like Jeff Greenfield of Nightline, say that people like Chomsky don't work on t.v. because he's not concise enough i.e. able to provide sound-bites of a sentence or two between commercials. The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts. You don't need any evidence e.g. Khomeni is nuts!, Quadafi is a murderer!, etc. Everybody just nods in agreement. They just spew the standard regurgitations of conventional pieties. On the other hand, if you say something like the biggest international terrorism operations that are known, are run out of Washington D.C.' or what happened in the 1980s was that the U.S. government was driven underground' (Iran Contra Scandal), or the U.S. is invading South Vietnam' or if the Nuremburg Principles were applied, then every post-war U.S. president would've been hanged,' or the best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt,' or the Bible is the most genocidal book in our total canon,' or education is a system of imposed ignorance,' or there's no more morality in world affairs fundamentally than there was in the time of Genghis Khan, there's just different factors to be concerned with,' people will demand that you give evidence. And a lot of evidence if you make such statements that startle them and which they've never heard before. But you can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision. That's the genius of this structural constraint. In fact, if they'd let the dissenters on more often, they'd sound like they're from outer space and that would serve the propagandists much better."

In another case, "The number of guests in sixteen years of the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour was over 10,500 & the number of interviews with Chomsky on this program was 1. He was given 11 minutes & 52 seconds to speak. Chomsky was asked why if everything is so bad here in regards to the U.S. media, he lives here? Because it's my country, it's the freest country in the world, and there's more possibility for change here than anywhere else. And comparatively speaking, the U.S. is the country where the State is the most restrictive. The U.S. is a scandal in point of view of its wealth, it's resources, its lack of enemies, etc. The U.S. should have a level of health, welfare, and so on that's on an order of magnitude that's beyond anybody else in the world and we don't! The U.S. is last among twenty eight industrialized societies in terms of infant mortality. "

Furthermore, "there's virtually no correlation between the internal freedom of a society and its external behavior e.g. ancient Greece, the birthplace of democracy & its citizens were amongst the freest peoples of the time yet it was an imperialist power that invaded other nations. "

To return to the subject of the media, "the only way to make the media or corporations more democratic is to get rid of them. If you have concentrated power, you can slightly affect it by protest but you can't really affect the structural power of the corporation unless you're ready for a social revolution. It's not to say one shouldn't keep on trying. There are internal contradictions in institutions such as in the media i.e. the media's support of the powers that be & on the other hand, the striving for journalistic integrity on the part of some journalists. For instance, Sarah McClendon who was an independent journalist who tore into Presidents at press briefings for over 40 years. Most reporters simply internalize the values of their corporate bosses and then regard themselves as acting freely. Self-censorship vs. formal censorship! The ways things change are because lots of people are working all the time in their communities, or wherever they happen to be and they're building up the base for popular movements e.g. the end of slavery, democratic movements, Civil Rights in the 1960s, etc. History books give a very false notion of this i.e. there are a couple of leaders like George Washington, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, etc. who caused the changes to come about & this is not to say that these leaders aren't important. But it's all those who we never hear of or know the names of, who are building up the pressures against the social wrongs until a point is reached i.e. Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat, and that spark ignites a wildfire. (my description of the phenomenon) "When you have active activists, then people like me (Chomsky) can appear and we can appear to be prominent but that's only because somebody else is doing the work! His giving hundreds of lectures, spending 20 hours a week writing letters, writing books & etc. isn't directed towards politicians, intellectuals, etc., it's directed toward what are called ordinary people. (earlier in the film it was revealed that Chomsky comes from a blue-collar background & has always championed the working class) And what he expects from them is exactly what they are i.e. to try to understand the world and act according to their decent impulses. And that they should try to improve the world and many people are willing to do that but they have to understand that in these things, I feel what I'm trying to do is help people to develop courses of intellectual self-defense! (I believe this to be the central message of Chomsky?) It means you have to develop an independent mind and work on it! That's extremely hard to do alone. The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube. (note the age-old military strategy of divide & conquer,' food for thought?)

What's more, "it's hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances, some people can but it's very rare. The way to do it is through organization. It makes sense to try and look at what the institutions are trying to do and then try to combat that. They want to isolate us and we're trying to bring people together. (I am writing a book in which I'm analyzing the educational institutions, the media, the corporations, anti-intellectualism, & fundamentalists) The right answers are what you decide are the right answers. I can't point you to particular media for the right answers. I could be wrong about everything I'm saying. But that's something for you to figure out. There isn't any reason why you should pay attention to what I think is right. I'm not God. The alternative media is what's keeping people together. For example, Z Magazine has a staff of two, and no resources but because of the incredible amount of effort on their part, it's a national magazine. Or South End Press, a small collective (six people) but they put out a lot of good books. The information is out there but it's for somebody who's a fanatic and will spend the time and energy comparing today's lies and yesterday's leaks and etc. to find out or discover.

The 1960s didn't change the way our institutions function but it has led to very significant cultural changes and they expanded in the 70s, 80s, & 90s. Changes or things that seemed outrageous in the 1960s are now taken for granted e.g. the feminist movement, the ecological movements, Third World Solidarity movements, etc. were student movements in the 60s and now they're mainstream America. And even though more people realize the government and the media don't reflect their views, they go outside the mainstream to inform themselves and to participate and be heard. And most don't bother to even participate by voting or writing mainstream media, etc. Somehow people don't see how profoundly contemptuous of democracy it is for them to hold these stage-managed elections where PR people determine what will come out of the politicians' mouths and etc.

The point is you're going to have to work and that's why the propaganda system is so successful because very few people are going to have the time, energy, or commitment to carry out the constant battle that's required to get outside the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, Dan Rather, or somebody like that. The easy thing to do is when you come home from work, it's been a long day, you're probably tired so you turn on the t.v. and watch the news and say it's probably right. You read the newspaper and the Sports section and that's the basic way the indoctrination system works. Sure the other stuff is there but you're going to have to work to find it. Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. And the driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain! It's accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation. It's long been understood that a society that's based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as its possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and the world is an infinite garbage can."

I have to interrupt Chomsky here because what he's saying hits home for me in such a personal and deeply felt way. As I said earlier about my family, friends, & even my own son not understanding or respecting what I have been doing for most of my adult life. And Chomsky is right on the mark when he said that most people are too tired after a day's work and simply switch on the boob-tube for their news.' I have heard this excuse a million times from people I was trying to get through to on the importance of reading serious books about what's going on. And I still think it's bullshit that people can't even take twenty minutes a day to read something challenging. They can spend eight hours in front of the t.v. but always claim they don't have any energy for the crucial stuff affecting all our lives? I read recently that back around the turn of the century, factory workers in the woolen mills would hire people to read to them while they were working because they wanted to be informed and they'd read serious stuff. Why were they intellectually curious and why are people today so intellectually lazy? Chomsky is so right also in that we have become so obsessed with material things. Consider the popular bumper sticker He who dies with the most toys, wins!' I have had people say things to me like you always talk about your education but what good has it done for you?' or so what are you going to do with a degree in philosophy, sit on the beach and meditate?' And my friends both in L.A. where I mostly grew up and my friends up here in Portland, Oregon where I have lived since 1992, can't understand why I'm not interested in Sports. They are obsessed with it and watch it ad nauseam, but won't read a book or even an article I plead with them to read, if their lives depended on it. It's very depressing and again is why I often feel like a stranger in a strange land to steal the title of Robert Heinlein's book. And because of the general apathy, indifference, & ignorance of most of the Americans I know, I love to leave whenever I can and Europe is my favorite destination. My experiences in Europe have usually been very intellectually stimulating to say nothing of the thrill of seeing places that I had just read about in school or in books. I don't mean to sound like a braggart but I am proud to say that I have been to Europe eight times so far and I'm always plotting my next escape to return there. Yes, the almighty dollar reigns supreme in this land of consumers not citizens. And I worry that we won't wake from our zombie-like slumber until it's too late and we have become a police-state totally. I just hope that I'm in Europe or somewhere else when they lock the doors for good? Finally, Chomsky is indeed correct in his assessment of why this state of ignorance can go on. Most Americans have swallowed completely and without any reflection whatsoever that we are the righteous, God-chosen people destined to rule the world and we do nothing but good in the world. And because of their blindness to the long and sordid history of our government, business leaders, & military, they can't connect the most obvious dots which are staring us in the face today e.g. we're losing jobs by the millions, we're losing our pensions, our health insurance, we're being forced to accept ever decreasing wages, our environment is being poisoned, we're led into war after war by deceitful politicians and media talking heads, we live in the most violent society on earth, etc. etc. etc. I just don't know what it's going to take to wake up the slumbering giant of America's people?

In addition, Chomsky adds that "at this stage of history, either one of two things is possible; either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity, sympathy, and concern for others or alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy favorable to the special interests it serves. But conditions of survival, let alone justice require social planning in the interests of the community as a whole, that means the global community. (tragically I fear that we won't appreciate how precious Democracy and Freedom are until we've lost them, if only we would talk to those who have lived under dictators maybe we could wake up?) The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must. Namely to impose necessary illusions' to manipulate and deceive the stupid majority and to remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is whether Democracy and Freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided.

In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, Democracy and Freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival! (I am reminded of a quote by H.G. Wells that I often tell people about when arguing about our species continued existence i.e. "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." How true!) At this point, an interviewer, David Barsamian (he's well worth checking out), asks Chomsky: You deal with the genocide in East Timor, the murders in El Salvador, on and on, it's pretty horrific stuff, what keeps you going? What keeps you from getting burnt out?' Chomsky: "It's mainly a matter of being able to look yourself in the mirror I think?" He was then asked if he'd ever thought of running for president and he smiled and chuckled slightly and replied "if I ever ran for president, the first thing I'd do is tell people not to vote for me." This is where the film ends but I want to add a couple more points which I discovered in the special features section of the DVD.

To illustrate the power of the mass media and its tragic consequences when its power is used in service to the military/industrial complex, recall the mostly hidden lesson of Vietnam. "Because we're not a totalitarian state (yet!), we don't have a fixed propaganda line but the presuppositions of the liberal media' i.e. the limits of our debates, are the propaganda line here in

I was born in Oregon but grew up in L.A. I've done a fair amount of traveling and started by hitch-hiking up & down the West Coast several times and across the U.S. I've been to Europe several times. Earned a B.A. in English Lit from Cal State Long Beach. Been an avid reader all my life. Write mostly political essays and working on a major project (2,000 pgs. complete so far). Love stimulating conversations and listening to oldies but goodies, Motown, jazz, etc. Divorced and have a son who recently got married. Work as an assistant in Special Education.
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Events management is the term given to the service carried out by event management companies. They will plan, prepare and execute events, conference, ceremonies, parties or anything other event you require. Anyone who has organised a party before will know how very stressful it can be and how much there is to think about. There are always hundreds of individual tasks to carry out and last minute projects that need doing. If you hire the assistance or an events management company however,r they will take care of everything for you. If you planning a conference or party or some other corporate event, let the professionals take care of it for you. That leaves you time to continue with other important tasks and ensure you can sit back and enjoy the event on the day itself.

Events management begins with a thorough planning stage. During the initial stages it will be necessary to sit down with the professional events management team and discuss goals and objectives. At this stage budget for the event must be discussed. Keeping to a budget is very important as costs can otherwise spiral out of control. The events management team will be experts at handling the financial side of an event however and will be able to ensure the budget is adhered too and costs do not escalate. If the event is to be themed then this will be discussed at this point too. If you want to maintain a close eye on preparations then you should make this clear from the start. State that all decisions must be made by you. If you are happy to take a back seat however then the events management team can make the decisions on your behalf.

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Once the main strategy has been agreed upon the professional team can get to work. There is so much involved in preparing for an event. The major tasks involve things such as booking a venue and organising catering. Session materials may also be required and car parking and transport arranged. If invitations are to be sent then this should be one of the first projects tackled. Sometimes events need online registration so the events management company need to create a website with an online registration capability.

Smaller tasks involve creating name badges, hiring audio visual equipment, making sure special diets are catered for and in some cases organising insurance. If delegates are to be staying over then accommodation and additional facilities may need to be organised. Publicity and promotion of the event may also be necessary. With so much involved it is easy to become completely overwhelmed. That is why leaving event management to professionals is often the best approach.

On the day itself there are always last minute decisions needed and small problems to deal with. The events management company can be on hand to take care of these last small details. Whether it is assisting the speakers with final arrangements to handing out name badges, it is essential to have a event management team available to help on the day in question. Aside from the organisation of the event itself, another important role of the event management team can be recording and monitoring it. This can include filming the speeches or sessions, monitoring numbers and recording a wealth of other statistics.

The tasks carried out by an events managementteam will vary from event to event. Sometimes only a very small amount of assistance is required, or the event itself is very small and doesn't involve too much organisation. Other times the event will be extremely complex, perhaps lasting several days and including overnight accommodation. Whatever you need, let event companieshelp and you will find yourself feeling a lot calmer. Fromlive conference av hireto booking venues and arranging catering, you can delegate it to the professionals.

Sarah Shore writes articles for Piranha Audi- Visual, one of the leading event companies in the UK. Piranha offer customers a variety of events managementservices, including session workshop management, financial event management and speaker management. Live conference av hireis one of the main services on offer, and almost encompasses all of the previous services. Equipment hireis also available including the use of stages, amplifiers and PC laptops and Apple Macbooks.
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The invention of the MP3 player, with MP4 player and iPod following it, has revolutionized the music industry. These lightweight, reasonably priced, portable music gadgets are almost everywhere you look. Earlier they used to be the obsession of the geeks, nerds and the electronic enthusiasts but today these players are a must have consumer electronic item for almost everyone whether it is the stay at house mom, working business executive, fitness freak joggers, teenagers or even the bored granddad.

MP3 player has personalized music like never before. The MP3 craze has reached its peak with people wanting more and more features in their players. What they want is to download their complete collection of music in their player. You can download and store more than thousands of songs inexpensively into your device and listen to it whenever you want; whether at office or at home or tolerating a boring lecture or even struggling past a heavy traffic jam. A music player seems to be in every hand nowadays. These are wireless, portable, wonders of music and entertainment that can store, systematize and play music on demand.

The three main types of digital audio players are MP3 CD Players that can play both data CDs and audio CDs with MP3 format files, Flash-based Players that are solid state devices with internal media or memory cards type external media and Digital Jukeboxes like the apple iPod and Creative Zen which can read digital audio files from a hard drive. These types of players are the most advanced in technology and have high memory ranging from 1.5 GigaByte to 100 GigaByte.

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There is a myth regarding MP3 and MP4 player as Mp4 being a successor of Mp3 player, but these two are different things. Fundamentally, Mp3 is a specific category of audio format while Mp4 is actually a container format. But an Mp4 player can also play Mp3 files besides MP4 format files with complete clarity just like the original player.

The iPod was introduced by Apple Inc. and was launched in October 2001. The varieties of iPod available today include video fifth generation iPod, the small iPod nano and the display free iPod shuffle. You can use Apple`s iTunes software to transfer music of your choice to the devices. An iPod supports and plays MP3, AAC, AIFF, Protected AAC, WAV and some other audio file formats. The Apple iPod also has some additional features like displaying text files, viewing contacts and synchronizing it with the host computer, gaming facilities like the Brick, solitaire, Parachute and Music Quiz. A lot of accessories have been made for the iPod such as sound recorders, wired remote control, FM radio tuners, and cables for enabling TV connections.

iPods have often been criticized due to their short life-span, delicate hard drives.There are also some health risks associated with frequent use of these players which can lead to loss in audio capacity and can also lead to absent mindedness.

All of these music players are portable and use either a semi-permanent rechargeable battery or conventional batteries that can be disposed or recharged. Some MP3 / MP4 players also have additional features like playing FM stations, games, microphone for voice recording, address storage book and etc.

The MP3 player have created a huge mass hysteria amongst some age groups leading to many companies joining the bandwagon to design and market different types of MP3, MP4 players and iPods. It has also given rise to an entirely new industry of downloading sites. This heavy competition has forced companies to find new and innovative use of these players like incorporating features like camera, mobile and etc.

This article is under GNU FDL license and can be distributed without any previous authorization from the author. However the author's name and all the URLs (links) mentioned in the article and biography must be kept.
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The day has come when the world and the people in it are just too busy to read anything. Think about it, with the invention and release of MP3 players, people on the go simply do not take the time to read books, articles, or anything for that matter. What they do instead is listen to them. That is right; they can download audio files right from the internet and listen to them while they are on the go.

Private label rights audio can help you tap into that market of people quickly and easily. The world in general is a busy place; it is time that your business starts catering to the busy professionals as well.

Private Label Rights Audio The Key to the Future

PLR audio files can be found in many forms and types. The most popular audio files are MP3's. However, they may be found in midi, wav, or other types of audio files. The key is to find out just what your customers want. For the most part, it will likely be MP3's they are wanting, which are very easy to find.

So, what types of PLR audios are available? There are many different forms of audio available that you can begin offering your customers:

Audio Novels Again, society is entirely too busy now days to take a few hours to read a book. Therefore, people are turning to the ability to listen as they go. With audio novels, they can listen to an entire book while they travel to and from work, exercise, cook, eat, or any other activity really.

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Audio Self-Help Books Self-help books are extremely popular. People are always looking for ways to improve their lives, abilities, and self-help books are the way to go. Again, the benefits are that they can listen to the book while they are doing almost any activity.

Audio Tutorials Not everyone has the patience or ability to learn a new skill by reading an article, a tutorial, or a book. Why not offer your customers an easier method of learning.

Audio Lectures and Speaking Engagement Do not worry about transcripts, offer your customers an easier way to listen and learn from speakers.

There is so much more available in the area of private label rights audio, such as music, courses, and the like. It is important that you tap into exactly what your customers need and want.

PLR Audio How To Profit

The best thing about audio is that they can be downloaded right to any computer and used in a variety of ways. For example, a customer could listen to it right on their computer, burn it onto a disk for use in a CD player, or even transfer it directly to their personal MP3 player, listening to it while they are on the go.

The key to earning a profit with private label rights audio is to make sure it is of the highest quality and is of good content. With PLR audio, you are given the rights to edit, brand, and resell as you see fit. However, it is important to keep in mind that while you do have these rights, so do other people as well. You may have duplicated content. Therefore, you will have to work that much harder to get customers to choose you over another company.

You want to brand the PLR audio with your own business information, logos, and links. You can provide the audio files for direct downloads or include them with another product. For example, many people are offering e-Books for sale, but they also include an audio file of the same e-Book to provide more benefits to their customers, as well as make an additional profit.

Happy Listening For You And Your Customers!

Marcus Haug
See for yourself - some of the most unique and varied PLRs Products

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Special Vault of PLRs Products - Not Just PLR articles!

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Copyright 2007 Marcus Haug - All Rights Reserved You may distribute this article freely but nothing may be changed
and author and copyright must remain intact.
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Oracle 1Z0-238 EBS R12: Install, Patch and Maintain Applications covers the following exam objectives:

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When you learn new languages, you break barriers. One of the languages that offers such an immense scope is French because it is spoken not only in France but in many other countries also. French is a sweet language, as sweet as the girls who speak French. Learning French is also quite easy. Of course, you have books that teach how to speak French. You can learn how to speak the language to a certain extent by using the books. You can also use a dictionary that guides you in pronunciation to a limited extent. But only if you listen more and more how the language is spoken, you will be able to learn speaking French.

You have a myriad number of CDs and MP3s available in the market with contents of French teaching courses. They are very useful and you can learn the language faster by using them. But Internet is a great source from which you can download many online French lessons. There are interactive courses also in which you can keep getting clarifications for your doubts in pronunciation or meanings or even in sentence structuring. These interactive online courses are a great learning source for your efforts to speak French.

Learning from online courses has a lot of benefits. You can learn them anywhere you wish, at your convenient time and at your convenient pace. You can get the lessons repeated several times till you are satisfied with the progress you make. But you should choose the right online course because there are so many available. If you choose the wrong one, that may result in frustration and you may quit learning the language. You can take the guidance of those who used such software to learn French.

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You should practice using the words you learned as often as possible. If you know a few girls who speak French, that will add spice to your learning because you can converse with them and you will enjoy when they giggle at your committing an error during the course of your speaking. You can request them to correct you whenever you commit mistakes in pronunciation or in sentence formation. Thus you can have fun while you learn French. You can search for free French lessons online and you'll find many audio lessons.

As in many languages, you can also buy software for learning French. But you should select the most useful software. Again you can take the help of experts for choosing the right software.

If you want to accelerate learning of French, you should listen to audio lessons as frequently as possible. There are several audio CDs and audio software available. But you should ensure to buy CDs and audio software that contain lessons conducted by French people themselves so that you can also replicate their pronunciation. Of course, initially your accent may not be perfect and will have the influence of your language. But by practicing for several hours daily, you can perfect the accent also. You can not expect to learn French overnight or within weeks.

Of course, you can engage the services of a French teacher to learn the language but you have to spend a lot for that. Instead you can rely on these audio CDs and software that may not be expensive even if you buy them. It does not make economic sense to engage an expensive French teacher at such exorbitant costs. Modern language teaching systems have improved to a great extent and these CDs and software or Internet lessons are updated as and when such improvements take place and you can rely on them fully.

Once you learn the language to a satisfactory level, you can have more fun with girls who speak French or you can also visit France, the most bewilderingly surprising country of the world.

Are you ready to Speak French ? Visit http://www.SpeakLanguagesFast.com today and sign up for a "Free 6 Day Course"!
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If you like reading books constantly, but if you travel a lot, a bag full of your favorite books can be uncomfortable, especially if you have many luggages. This is where a book reader electronic device comes handy. Book reader electronic is small, portable, wireless and with plenty of storage space for uploading a large numeric of books.

A book reader electronic device can carry up to one hundred books depending on the device memory, and the size of the books. However, you can always update, and buy a book reader electronic device with numerous features, and not only for reading books.

Take a little of your time and do some researches. You can apply for a color five inch LCD display, with up to four giga byte of memory, digital book reader electronic device.

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Some eBooks readers have a nice, intelligent feature called c-Paper electronic screen, which can turn your book reader electronic device in an actual book, due to the paper like effect induced. You can also read your favorite books vertically or horizontally, and in a sunny day you don't have to be worried, because the effect of direct sun rays on your screen might make it unreadable, because it won't.

You may now think why you need a color display for your book reader electronic device. A four giga byte, color screen eBook reader, among other features has the capability of reading different file formats, such as mp3, avi, wma, and that means you can listen to your favorite music or watch a movie as well.

Book reader electronic slim design, and the small size, yet a generous display, makes a book reader electronic device to fit any pocket, purse or any type of handbags. It is equipped with a Lithium battery that lasts up to 28 hours of audio tracking time, and a generous 6-7 hours of video playback.

A book reader electronic device will always make you enjoy your outdoor or travel time, and save you a lot of money and space making suitable for any occasion you might want to read a great good book.

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Do you have depression, anxiety or marriage problems but don't want counseling because it is too embarrassing or medication because it has side effects? Or, maybe you are in counseling, but want to speed-up the results.

Wondering if something other than medication, psychotherapy or counseling might help you? After all, once in psychotherapy and counseling, you will have to confront unpleasant facts, such as subconscious motivations and desires.

Why might you need to use a self-help tool rather than signing up with a counselor or other doctor? This article reveals the answers.

First, confronting your unconscious may be frightening because there may be much that you would just not want to become aware of. You might be worried that you might feel excessive anxiety.

After all, if you became conscious of any unflattering drives and motivations, you might not feel very good about yourself. Much of our anxiety and depression has its genesis in our family of origin and childhood.

Because of childhood trials we experience lots of negative experiences that are often traumatizing. We also have to confront the destructive impact that our childhood defense mechanisms have had on us.

Defense mechanisms are emotional techniques that we use in childhood to relieve our anxiety. These include projection, displacement, rationalization etc. which are often useful in childhood but can be devastating in adulthood.

Later, in adulthood, they become dysfunctional and cause painful levels of depression and anxiety. As children, these methods reduced our anxiety, sufficiently enough so that we could effectively manage our feelings.

By continuing to use these defense mechanisms in our adult years, we begin to experience painful emotional problems. Professional psychotherapy is designed to bring these defenses to awareness so that we can live a higher quality life.

However, not everyone benefits from counseling and psychotherapy. What personal attributes does one need to benefit from counseling?

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The ability to reflect and discuss issues mindfully and analytically is crucial as is the possession of sufficient financial resources to support the process. You must be able to trust your counselor and be enthusiastic and optimistic about the counseling outcome.

Unfortunately, some people are skeptical about the counseling process, have had poor results in the past or want to try something else before starting it. Most people are fearful of the side effects of medication and others do not have enough money to participate in private counseling.

What is a person to do? Fortunately, new self-help programs called Self-Therapy Kits (STKs) are now available and are guaranteed to provide fast results. It's like having your own therapist at your disposal 24/7, without going through the anxiety or inconvenience of having to talk with a stranger.

STKs are new-generation digital programs proven to work and are ideal for those who are sophisticated and at home in the digital age! After all, taking medication has the potential for serious side effects and counseling can get very expensive, so many astute people are now using STKs.

They are compact, cutting-edge and are now getting easier to find; by using the internet, you can easily locate them. Just search for "self-help" "self-improvement," "anxiety, depression self-help," self-therapy" etc.

These new-generation STKs can virtually eliminate your anxiety, depression and extreme anger-without the dangerous side-effects of medications! STKs are compact self-help digital therapists that provide powerful psychological help.

They work particularly well for astute new-generation people that are part of this wondrous new digital age. STKs may contain any or all of the following: CDs, DVDs, MP3s, e-books, workbooks, audios, videos etc.

You can use them in the privacy of your home and you set the pace. You are in absolute control of the process.

It's like having your own therapist available to you 24/7 without having to talk with someone you don't know or feel comfortable with. STKs provide cutting-edge information, amazing guided imagery, revealing behavior profiles and easy monitoring of your progress to eliminate your symptoms-once and for all.

There are no dangerous meds or doctor hassles to suffer through. Also, if you're presently in counseling or psychotherapy, using STKs at the same time could dramatically shorten the time required for your symptoms to disappear. As a matter of fact, using an STK while engaging in treatment could super-charge the speed of your recovery many times over!

After browsing a selection of these tested programs, be sure to study their brochures and make sure that any SKTs you may pick are unconditionally guaranteed in a way that, if necessary, could be accessed through an easy, fast process.

SKTs are a bargain, proven and easy to use!

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Steps to make your book accessible on the Kindle, Ipad By Apple, Nook Reader, and Sony Readers! We will transform your manuscript files from Pdf, Indesign, Quark, MS Word, Pages etc. - in to epub and .mobi E-book formats (the file types used by most devices).

What exactly is epub?

EPUB (short for electronic publication; additionally capitalized as ePub, ePUB, EPub, or epub, with "EPUB" preferred by the vendor) is a free and open ebook standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Documents have the extension .epub. in some ways epub is to electronic books exactly what mp3 is to audio . . . It's the standard within the electronic digital publishing world and is recognised by most electronic book reading gadgets.

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The Mobipocket ebook formatting is based on the Open e book standard using XHTML and might include JavaScript and frames. It also sustains naturelle SQL queries to be used with embedded databases. .Mobi is the best file variety for the Amazon Kindle.

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Precisely why Convert My Book into E book Formats?

The marketplace for book readers keeps growing at an outstanding rate. By 2015 it's forecasted that there will be almost 330 million gadgets being used, and by 2020 that quantity is expected to be up to 2 Billion! When you add Mobile phones to that quantity the total may be up to 4 billion.

90% of the publishing industry's revenue comes from print.... however by 2015 that figure is forecasted to lower with a bigger portion of book revenues originating from digital products (electronic books). By 2020 there's supposed to be a 52% fall in the usage of paper.

With these extraordinary increases in e book readers you cant afford to not have an e-book! The way audience are deciding upon to read is changing, please don't lose out on the digital revolution.

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NOT LONG! We will get your publication transformed into e-book formats and to you for review in just a couple of days -- Ordinarily within five days or fewer.

Can I Maintain My Books Formatting?

Most of your publications original formatting can be maintained. Photographs, graphs, charts along with other formatting can all be handled by ebook files. Nevertheless usually there are some files that are not necessarily favorable to good ebook conversion. Magazines and intensely illustrated kid's books tend to be not suited to ebook conversion.
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Introduction

While the learning and use of English Language was compulsory for Nigerians because of their colonization by the British colonial government, the teaching and learning of French was not significant to Nigerians. The French government was not encouraged by the British because of their economic interest in Nigeria. French is actually rivaled by English as the international language of trade, diplomacy and science.

In Africa for instance, Equatorial Guinea in 1997 declared French as their official language along with Spanish. The small islands of Cape Verde and Sao tome and Principe are also members of La Francophonie and as a result, French is getting more widely spoken there as well. Nigeria shares its borders with francophone speaking countries namely: Chad, Republic of Benin and Cameroun. No wonder in 1996, the late General Sanni Abacha, the former head of state of Nigeria in Ouagadougou declared the new status of French as the nations second official language. French as a modern language is spoken, written and used like other modern languages of the world. Therefore for Nigerians to interact effectively with francophone countries locally or internationally, they should be able not only speak the language fluently but also be able to attend international seminars and conferences without much problem. According to Adekunle (1976), the language policy of every country should make provisions for the following areas of communication: Internal communication, international scientific or technical communication. French is one of the international languages most widely used in commerce, scientific and technological research, administration, education, literature etc. With the knowledge of French, Nigerians and Francophone countries will be able to work together in areas of science and technology. This however cannot be achieved if French teachers are not employed or if those employed are not encouraged to teach the language.

Statement of the problem

There is a growing concern about the attitude of Nigerians towards the study of French in our schools. A good number of them are not sufficiently informed about the usefulness of French in our educational system or its importance as an international language. They feel that people should not waste their time studying it. This feeling has often misled some secondary school teachers so much so that they fail to:

(a) Include the subject in the school time-table.

(b) Allow French graduates teach French. Rather preferring them to teach

other subjects.

(c) Assign enough number of periods to the teaching of French.

(d) Provide adequate teaching/learning materials for the teaching of French.

Purpose of the study

Much has been said about the need for French in Nigeria and also the teaching and learning of French in Nigerian educational institutions. That is to say that the importance of French in Nigeria cannot be over-emphasized. The purpose of this study therefore is to:

(a) Find out if French is being taught in secondary schools in Makurdi Local

Government Area of Benue State

(b) Find out if French graduates teach French.

(c) Determine if there are enough teaching/learning materials.

Research Question

The study was to provide answers to the following research questions:-

(1) Is French language taught in your school?

(2) Are there enough French teachers in your school?

(3) Do French graduates teach other subjects other than French?

(4) Are there adequate teaching/learning materials?

(5) Do French teachers attend seminars and workshops?

Significance of the study

The need for French in our secondary schools cannot be over-emphasized. Nigerias geographical, economic, diplomatic as well as her educational and research needs makes it imperative for her to give adequate attention and priority to the learning of French. In view of the above it is hoped that this research will throe more light on the importance of French language to our society. It is also hoped that the study will inform education managers on the importance of engaging French graduates fully in teaching French in our secondary schools.

The importance of teaching French in Nigeria

French is one of the worlds greatest languages which is rivaled only by English as the language of international society and diplomacy, a position it has now lost to English. Katzner (1975), records that French is the mother tongue of about 75million people, with millions more familiar with it in some degrees as a second language.

The planning and implementation of a national language on the adoption of French as the nations second official language is of utmost importance. The status of languages forms an important part in language policy in francophone countries. According to Moruwawon (2004), The republic of Cameroon was made up of two former colonies; French and English speaking. The republic consists of eastern Cameroon who were predominantly French while the western Cameroon were English speaking. At present, French and English are today being used as official languages but French is dominating. Bimbo Fisayo an educationist speaking to the Daily Champion African News (2005), stressed the importance of speaking and understanding a second international language, especially the French language. From the above accounts so far given, the real need for French in Nigeria according to Emordi(1986), is Nigerias geographical, economic and diplomatic as well as her educational research, makes it imperative for her to give adequate attention to the teaching and learning of the French language. It could be said that the first attempt at the Franco- Nigerian co-operation started from the teaching of French in Nigerian secondary schools. For many years the, the efforts at establishing sound basis for the teaching of French in Nigeria and the provision of facilities in French universities for the one year abroad training of students of French in Nigerian Universities remained the hallmark of Franco-Nigerian co-operation. According to Ojo (1997), French would better prepare the Nigerian child who is planning to move into the future with self assurance, hope and sense of belonging. He wil discover that even in the Nigeria of tomorrow, French will serve as a linguistic visa that would open better professional prospects for him.

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Like with the teaching of most foreign languages, teaching French in Nigerian secondary schools is not problem-free. Some of these problems are highlighted by Emordi (1986), who complains that there are lack of qualified teachers and teaching materials for effective teaching of the language. Emordi recommends the teaching of only the oral aspect of French.. Asobele (2004), states that for French to succeed in Nigeria, French must be taught as a language of culture. It is therefore of great importance for parents and guardians to allow their children and wards to learn the language as it would open wider doors of opportunities to them. It therefore behooves all of us to speak more than one language. If we can speak an international language like French, definitely we will have certain immeasurable concessions. It will expose us to several meetings and seminars outside the shores of this country.

Methodology

The method used is the survey method. It is descriptive research based on the information gathered through the questionnaire. The population sampled where thirteen (13) secondary schools which were randomly selected in Makurdi Local Government Area of Benue State where we had French graduates. Thirty-five French Language graduates teaching various other subjects were the respondents to the questionnaire that was administered. Ten principals of secondary schools were also interviewed. Frequency and percentage were used to analyze the data.

Findings and discussions

The study was designed to investigate the extent to which French graduates of secondary schools in Makurdi Local Government Area of Benue State are under-utilized. The presentation, analysis and interpretation are based on research questions formulated for this study.

Research Question One

Is French taught in your school?

Out of the thirteen school used for this research, French is taught in only six of these schools. 46% of the schools visited indicated that French was taught in their schools while the remaining 54% of the schools did not have French in their school time tables. The six schools that offer French only teach it at their JSS level. From the above analysis one can infer that French is not included in most schools time-table. This is very sad indeed as none of these schools offer it at their SSS level. From the above analysis one could therefore infer that French is not included in the time-tables of most schools.

Research Question Two

Are there enough French teachers in your school?

There are thirty-five French graduates in the thirteen schools visited. This figure shows that there are enough French graduates in these schools. Every year, hundreds of French graduates are turned out into the work market. One then wonders why principals of schools will not include this subject in their time-tables. Ministries of education in each states have to re-educate themselves on the importance and usefulness of French as a subject in secondary schools.

Research Question Three

Are French graduates made to teach other subjects rather than French?

In the schools visited there are thirty-five French graduates. Of the 35 of them, only ten of them which make up 28.6% teach French in their respective schools while the remaining twenty-five which make up 71.4% of the respondents are forced to teach other subjects rather than French..88% of these teachers agree that they regret not teaching French. While the rest which make up 12% of these teachers do not regret their not teaching French.. Reasons given for their not regretting include lack of encouragement by their principals in terms of equipment textbooks and other teaching materials to aid in the teaching/learning of French. The disadvantage in this unfortunate circumstances is that these French graduates lose interest and cannot pursue the course at a postgraduate level. Dusai (1995), in a survey found out that most graduates of French language especially from the colleges of education tends to pursue the alternate subject combination in the university to the detriment of the French language.

Research Question Four

Are there adequate teaching /learning materials in schools?

In the schools where French language is taught, 94% of the respondents agree that there are no adequate teaching/learning materials. The teachers complain that there are no text- books in their libraries. Even in schools where they have very few books, the books are not utilized by the students. None of the schools visited have audio-visual aids. This lack of text-books and equipment hinders effective teaching and learning of the French language which in turn hinders motivation of the teachers.

Research Question Five

Do French teachers attend seminars and workshops

Out of the 35 respondents, 29 of them which represent 82.9% have never attended any seminars or workshops. Only 17.1% of them have attended seminars. They sponsored themselves to attend these seminars. It would be encouraging for educational managers to organize lectures, symposia and seminars to enable French teachers to update their knowledge.

Conclusion and Recommendations

This study was designed to investigate the under-utilization of French graduates in French subject in secondary schools in Makurdi Local Government Area of Benue State. The study revealed that lack of knowledge of the importance of French language by educational managers, lack of incentives and motivation of French graduates, inadequate teaching/learning materials, absence of text-books which hinders effective teaching/learning of French and adversely kills student and teachers interest in the French subject are some of the causes of the under-utilization of French graduates in our secondary schools. It was also revealed that because principals fail to include the subjects in their time table, most French graduates posted to the different secondary schools are forced to teach English language, Literature and other arts subjects other than French. This negative attitude has therefore limited the scope whereby students could expand on their choice of future career. Limitations brought about by this kind of constraints affect the expansion of the educational horizon of Nigerians in the francophone speaking states of the world.

To alleviate some of the aforementioned problems that have caused the under-utilization of French graduates in Makurdi Local Government Area of Benue State, Educational managers need to be educated on the need for French in Nigeria in general. Apart from the geographical location of Nigeria which is surrounded by French speaking countries, Nigeria is a member of the African Union (A.U.), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and very many important world organizations where French is used as one of the principal official languages. Nigeria also tends to gain economically and commercially by encouraging the teaching/learning of French. Still on the importance of French, Kwofie (1984), has this to say: The national and international relevance in of French is further emphasized by the adoption of the language by non-French-speaking countries of the world It is therefore necessary to make Nigerians realize the importance of French in our country. The fact that we see a lot of highly placed Nigerians rushing to study French in the different offices of Alliance de Francaise in the country shows that the need for this language exists. Government should therefore take adequate steps to motivate the teacher and the learner so that a lot of progress could be achieved and we will be in a position to reap the full benefits of improved teaching of French.

References

Adekunle, M.A., (1976), National Language Policy and Planning: The Nigerian Situation in West African Journal of Modern Languages, No. 1, January Pp23-29

Asobele, S.J. (2004), Prolegomena to a legislation of official languages acts in Nigeria with particular reference to French Language in Francophone Heritage in Africa.

Daily Champion African News Feb. 16, 2005

Ibanga E.E. (1995), Limportance de la langue franaise au Nigeria Unpublished PGDE Project, Benue State University, Makurdi.

Emordi, F.I. (1986), Report on the French programme inspection of the Bendel State University Primary and Secondary Schools Ekpoma.

Katzner,K.(1975), The Languages of the world. London, Routledge and Kequan Paul.

Moruwawon, B.S.(2004), Prospects of the adoption of French as a second official language in Nigeria. A journal published in the faculty of education, University of Ado-Ekiti, Ondo State.

Ojo, A. (1997), French Language and Nigeria, The Guardian Monday 5.

Ebi is an Assistant Registrar in the Nasarawa State University, Keffi. She holds a B.A.ed in french and an M.ed in Educational Management. Her Ph.D degree in Educational Admin and Planning is in view
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Author is an eminent and experienced Content Writer in Travel & Tourism related topics. he has written several articles on India Tour Packages, wildlife tours and Char Dham etc. Currently, he is rendering service for Go Heritage India Journeys
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The compromise is often between raw functionality with legion choices, and one thing that's easy to line up and use.

In essence, advanced users that need a NAS with a protracted list of options (email server, web server, quite one internal drive for redundancy) can ought to look elsewhere. this can be an easy device that enables users to instantly have networked file house for storing content, backups and sharing that content (video/audio/images) with computers and different devices that support DLNA (such because the Xbox 360 and PS3) or sharing through iTunes.

The only interface provided on the box is ethernet. there's no USB ports for expanding storage. If your network is configured for DHCP the device are immediately on the market.

Everything is managed through an online interface; putting in the bundled software takes a number of the guesswork out of finding the device itself.

The included assistance is.....only moderately useful. There are parts that seem like they were merely not finished. as an example, choosing "WD Quickview", followed by "learning center", and eventually choosing the "More Things to Do" menu provides a page with no links telling you to sit down with chapter eight, etc., which might be useful as a result of the text on this page is not very useful in the least. Furthermore, there's no thanks to navigate back except by choosing the rear button within the internet browser. the brand at the highest of the page is not a link to home. These are those very little things that a decent internet designer would have noticed.

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The documentation included is sparse on how do do easy things like sharing media through it's in-built DLNA server. Western Digital is using Twonky Media as it's DLNA server software that's embedded within the Western Digital MyBook Live. it's been around for a jiffy, and is obtainable as a separate software product for a spread of platforms. it's reliable, and also the device itself initiates video playback streams to my Xbox 360 fairly quickly. it absolutely was additionally ready to stream to my iPhone over my native wifi network using using the free DLNA consumer MLPlayer Lite. once more -- the documentation isn't complete on a way to build use of this capability. At the top of the day, you drag all of your media into one mounted volume (WD2K) and it simply works.

But very the items i'm talking concerning are those very little further things. it's an easy, non-obtrusive device that's fairly speedy over an {area|a neighborhood} area network. it's ideal for home use. it's designed with a purposefully restricted variety of choices, that are only enough to create is helpful for several folks, while not creating it burdensome to use.

See Western Digital My Book Live 2 TB Home Network Attached Storage Drive

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Aside from having a good story and a good iPad children's book app developer, you'll need some interactive elements in order to self publish and get your children's book approved as an app. If not, you'll be told to publish your book as an iBook. Besides, the iPad can do so much more for your children's book than just plain text and pictures. With that in mind, there are some key elements that you'll need to work on in order to give your iPad children's book developer a clearer idea of how you want your iPad children's book app to appear and function.

The steps outlined below will provide a solid foundation for you to work with an iPad children's book app developer to complete your app. You should be able to do quite a bit of the work on your own using a graphics program such as PhotoShop, PhotoPaint, etc. , a text file editor such as Wordpad or MS Word, and a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel.

For each file you create for your iPad children's book app, it's important to begin with, and stick with, a good file naming structure. For example, if your app is called "MyApp", and you have an image of a rabbit on page 3, then you'll want to name that file something like "MyApp_rabbit_1_page3_xxyyzz.png" , where xxyyzz is month/day/year. This becomes even more important when you have many images, or many revisions of images to work with. Otherwise it's very difficult for everyone involved to be sure they're working with the correct image.

1) Create a text file containing the text for your story, broken down into sections for each individual page of your app. This can also a good place to add notes for each page to help your iPad children's book developer during development. You can choose to add your notes to this text file, or a better method is to create a separate Excel spreadsheet that details each page in your iPad children's book app.

2) Create a rough storyboard for each page in your iPad children's book app. These pages would include the startup splash screen, title page, index page, help page, story pages, etc. Each page should be a rough pencil sketch of the background art, characters, objects, and text. The purpose is to get a rough idea of how everything is going to fit on the page, and how the pages will flow together. The background images should be 1024x768 pixels in size, PNG format, enough to fill the iPad screen.

3) Once you have your first storyboard pages completed, identify elements, characters, etc. that you'd like to be interactive or animated. These items will need to be drawn as separate images later to be able to animate them. For example, you may want to be able to touch a ball and have it bounce across the screen. To do this, the ball needs to be drawn as a separate image with a transparent background so your iPad children's book app developer can animate the ball. The typical file format for these images are PNG, and the size should generally be the size that you need on the iPad screen ( relative to the 1024x768 background image ). Sometimes you may want items created in a larger scale, if you for example want to be able to make the item larger when touching it, etc. Having your iPad children's book app developer working with you at this stage is ideal, as they can help you identify the best ways to animate and interact with your iPad children's book app.

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4) Once you've worked out all the items you'd like to interact with or animate, now it's time to complete the color background images for each page in your iPad children's book app. This will also help you to choose the color and placement of text, characters, and other elements that you'll use in your iPad children's book app.

5) Now that your background images are ready, it's time to work on the characters and other items in your iPad children's book app. These items are placed on the iPad screen in layers. So think of your background image as layer 1, and then your other items are added in layers on top of that layer. For example, for a character to sit on a chair and have both animated, the chair and character would need to be separate images. The background image is placed on layer 1, the chair on layer 2, and the character on layer 3. That way the character is in the foreground, and the chair is behind it. You can use as many layers as you need.

6) Now that you have color background images, text, characters and items created, it's time to place this all together into a new set of storyboard pages similar to those in step 2.

7) Once your color storyboards are ready, it's time to start thinking about sounds. You may want background music, narration, and sound effects for certain items in your iPad children's book app. Audio files can increase the size of your app significantly, so it's best to keep sound effects to a few seconds or less, and keep background music to short loops to save space. The typical file format for your audio files would be either mp3 , caf, or wav.

Now it's time to start working on the icons for your iPad children's book app. It's important to think of your icons as one of the first things people see about your app. It's a first impression, and also tells people something about your app. It's also important to think of how your icon will look in the different sizes requried. For example , your main icon as seen on iTunes is 512x512 pixels, and the icon seen on the iPad main screen is 114x114 pixels. These 2 icons need to be the same image, but different scales. There are other sizes required, but these are primary icon sizes that you should consider in this first pass. Typically you only need to give your iPad children's book app developer the 512x512 pixel icon image and they will create all of the other icons from that image.

9) Now that most of the foundation details for your iPad children's book app are ready, it's time to sign up as an Apple iOS developer. To do this, go to the Apple developer website ( http://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/ ) and sign up as an iOS Developer. The current fee is $99 per year, and that fee is for as many apps as you want to self publish. Once you've completed the sign up process, contracts, and banking information, you'll be ready to register your first app for submission. Even though your app may not be ready for submission, you can still register the name for your app which can hold the name for you for 90 days.

To prepare your iPad children's book app for submission, you'll also need to write a description for your app for iTunes, and use the 512x512 icon and some of the color storyboard images as temporary screenshots. It's also a good idea to have a basic website setup to promote your children's book app for iPad, as well as a support email address where customers can reach support.

For what I call stage 1 of app discovery, for your app description, focus on the first 3 sentences as viewed on an iPad, and first 2 sentences as viewed on iTunes via a PC. These both work out to be the first 214 characters and are the text that people see before they click on anything further.

Also think carefully about your app description keywords. These are added in a separate line when you prepare to submit your app, and are used for App Store SEO to drive customers to see your app in the App Store. A good test is to use an iPhone and iPad device and search for your keywords in iTunes and see what apps come up.

10) Once you've completed all of the steps above, if you haven't already, it's time to bring in your iPad children's book app developer to review and work on helping you build and guide you through the rest of the process of how to self publish your children's book app for iPad.

Hope this helps !

by Wayne Boyle
Motile Media Inc.
iPad Children's Book Developer
http://motilemedia.com
Wayne Boyle Motile Media Inc. iPad Children's Book Developer http://motilemedia.com
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Teaching English Grammar through Communicative Language Teaching Approach (CLTA) in the Context of Bangladesh.

Abstract

Communicative Language Teaching Approach is the most discussed of all language teaching-learning approaches in the last few decades. Many approaches are introduced, but these are rethought again and again whether a fusion is possible with CLTA. Any language without grammar can bring us back to the atavistic world of mere sounds and body language. This study aims at defining why and how grammar fits in CLTA in the perspective of Bangladesh.

Keywords

World Englishes, Grammar Translation Method (GT Method), Audio Lingual Method (ALM), Communicative Language Teaching Approach (CLTA), Language Competency.

Background of the Study

Communicative Language Teaching Approach is the most talked approach in last few decades. Many approaches are introduced, but these are rethought again and again whether a fusion is possible with CLTA. A language without grammar can bring the modern people to the atavistic world of mere sounds and body language (sarwar, 2011). For this reason, why and how grammar fits in CLTA is a concern of this study. Though Grammar as a method of language teaching-learning has been followed since the Greek and Latin period (B.Kachru, 2006, World Englishes), yet its definition is vast and dynamic. Depending on one's theoretical orientation, different linguists define grammar differently according to their own way. Geoffrey Leech et al (1982) consider grammar as an important component that relates phonology and semantics, or sound and meaning. Hudson (1992) opines that grammar embraces any kind of information about words since there are no boundaries around grammar. Grammar as consisting of morphology and syntax was believed by Huddleston (1988). Cobbett (1984) defines grammar as constituting rules and principles that help a person to make use of words or manipulate and combine. H.W. Fowler(1983) states grammar as the branch that deals with a language's inflexions, with its phonetic system, and with the arrangements of words in sentences, George Snell (1649) thinks that Grammarians through grammar are getting language to a fixed and immutable state', James Barclay (1743) emphasizes on grammar claiming that writing will be improved with rules concerning the justness of expressionthe force and harmony of certain phrases, the proper meaning of words, their connection one with another, and the necessary skill of placing them all in regular order (p-660). Rutheford (1987) defines grammar as "a necessary component of any language teaching programme" (p.9), and thus, he further says that it plays an important role in language teaching. However, the focus on grammar in language teaching was challenged with the emergence of teaching methodologies based on different learning theories and in the context of socio-economic infrastructure of a country. Such a challenge influenced not only the content and the curriculum in language teaching of the particular context, but also the implication for teaching grammar. Undergraduate education of Bangladesh is no exception in this regard. So, a fresh and revised look at the role of grammar was necessary causing linguists and language educators to rethink the status and strategy of grammar in language teaching and learning. Thus, a constant debate is led among language educators and linguists regarding the nature and type of grammar instruction aiming at how second languages should be taught or learned.

The Problem to be addressed

In spite of a recent soaring interest in teacher's belief in the systems of mainstream education studies, the beliefs of ESL teachers about grammar and the influence of such beliefs on their intentions, decisions and action in classroom practices remain relatively unexplored. The present study would seek to fill the knowledge gap left by insufficient researches in this area. More precisely, this study would investigate teachers and learners belief of grammar teaching and examine the congruence and incongruence of their beliefs with the classroom practices in undergraduate English in the context of Bangladesh. It would also examine the contextual existing and feasible factors that support and impede in materializing with a view to establishing the beliefs into practices, and the accommodative strategies teachers would adopt when coping with contextual constraints as undergraduate education is the most crucial junction in the context of Bangladeshi education system.

Considering various second language teaching methods, teaching grammar through Communicative Language Teaching Approach is the most talked. Though it may be assumed that the role played by the Grammar and the role of communicative language Teaching are the two opposite poles, but actually these comments are only misconceptions. Fusion of these two terms is needed for the better performances and from utilitarian point of view. Fusion of Grammar and CLT is to be rethought from Bangladeshi perspective in line with present world context.

Teaching grammar in the undergraduate level through appropriate language teaching approach in Bangladeshi perspective is to be re-considered as the students/learners learn grammar every year till their Higher Secondary level and read English as a compulsory subject in undergraduate syllabus of Bangladeshi Universities, they learn almost the same grammatical items every year, still they cannot use it properly and go for some commercial language canters to practice communications. If the grammar is taught with Communicative Language Teaching approaches (CLTA), they could straightly go to national and international job markets to prove their competency. Now to find out the possible ways to teach grammar through CLTA are to be defined in such a way that the language teachers can forget their traditional role of active instructor and educator, instead the students role have to be emphasized keeping in mind the classroom size in Bangladesh, teachers quality, salary, resource constraints, economic and infra-structural conditions, possibility of teachers training from appropriate CLT concept, tendency of changing syllabuses by the policy makers, learners age, interest, motivations, needs etc. in Bangladesh. Major role can be played by the Teachers of Bangladesh if they can come out from the traditional concept of teaching grammar as an instructor and become a Facilitator, a suitable role for Communicative Language Teaching Approach. Teachers can work in partnership with students and thus can help them in raising their language competency. Learning grammar, which has been an unpleasant and phoebia for the students since the teaching-learning English language has been started in Bangladesh. Van Ek (1975) stresses on A teacher who is a facilitator tends to be more student-centered and less dominant in the classroom than in other approaches. The facilitator may also take the role of mentor or coach rather than director'. The British Council (Campaign in Asian countries) identifies the need of functional syllabus based on communicative acts such as making introductions, making requests, expressing opinions, requesting information, refusing, apologizing, giving advice, persuading' which is often used in communicative language teaching. As teaching-learning of grammar to ESL/EFL learners is beyond question, and as it is to be done in an attractive and acceptable way remembering economical and infra-structural condition of Bangladesh as well as the class size, belief of teachers-students relationship, average facilities provided by Bangladeshi government and the educational institutions. The remarks of Finocchiaro and Brumfit (1983) regarding the CLT syllabus can be remembered and rethought.

a. Meaning (function) is emphasized

b. Contextualization is important

c. Language learning is learning to communicate

d. Language is created through repeated trials and errors

e. Fluency is primary whereas accuracy is secondary.

Wu (1998) suggests that structural activities in textbooks need to be supplemented by communicative activities. Accordingly, five activities are suggested (as in the PhD research A Communicative Approach to Teaching Grammar: Theory and Practice' by Siaw-Fong Chung, 2005): games, natural contexts, activities that balance skills, personalization, and adjustment of teacher role.

In Bangladesh, what are being followed is obsessed with previous and traditional structural method. In line with the contents, the way of teaching should also be reconsidered. Teacher's active inclusion and involvement in students learning activities and passive role in giving instructions can accelerate in creating the CLT teaching-learning environment. The traditional concept of teacher-student relationship should be changed from learner's early stage. A tension free friendly relationship is essential and a pre-condition for creating CLT approaches in Bangladesh. Learners involvement in the classroom depends on the removal of their psychological phoebia came from shyness or from other sources. Implementing more learner's activities such as educative puzzles, games and sports, quizzes, brain works, pair revision, scheduled open discussion etc can help in making a CLT environment. The learners should be given the importance on achieving fluency at first, and then accuracy will come automatically if selective grammar items are taught in their learning progress. A teacher may try to enhance the multidimensional intelligence such as : linguistic intelligence, logical and mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence, musical intelligence, bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence, and naturalist intelligence', Gardner (1999). These can be enticed and aroused by selective texts in their syllabus and some active roles played by the teachers to activate student's active role. Halliday (1992) ascribes the means to perform the CLT approach through some functions as proponent instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative and representational. In Bangladesh, all prevalent facilities of developed countries may not be available. So, the measures to be in taken in implementing CLTA in Bangladesh may differ. The role of teachers in Bangladesh, especially in rural areas are to be trained to come out from their cocoons of traditional methods to cope with CLTA. Games of Bangladeshi taste and type in English can be innovated for creating and igniting initial interest. Song with language background can be practised. Long or mini dialogues can be used where the essence of motivation will be prominent. Peer revisions, works and discussions along with groups can be utilised carefully with the mastery of teacher's role. Evaluation can be made at first by the students by their pair work and then by teachers. Teachers must try to increase the analytical strength at first and then can proceed the process of evaluating among them by them. As a facilitator, a teacher can be trained by experts how to achieve it. Oral communication activities can be encouraged from controlled and guided to freer communication and environment. Questions and answers can be encouraged from the learners own experience. Teachers may play their role as Needs Analyst', A Counsellor' or A Group Manager' or A Classroom Manager'. Teachers should not wait for the formal teaching rather can start from the beginning so that learners can be psychologically prepared for the fluency and performance first and then accuracy and perfection. Learners should be always reminded that communicative competenceis the first priority;' language competence' will come after that.

In CLT approach, student's role is usually active. In Bangladeshi perspective, Syllabuses of different public universities, and in all undergraduate levels (General education, Technical Education, Madrassa Education ) the variations of syllabuses might be one of the vital reasons for not reforming syllabuses on the basis of meeting the demand of the practical world. All the texts included in the existing syllabuses may not reflect the aim of the communicative syllabus. Though no relevant research has been done for identifying the actual condition lying in the texts, it can be assumed that most of the grammar activities in the text books of the stated level still feature the traditional set pattern rather conforming to the principles of the communicative syllabus. Though some parts of the textbooks attempt to integrate the communicative elements, most exercises are mainly structural with the inclusion of grammar-rule explanation that shows the affinity of the earlier Grammar-Translation Method. Grammar items should be chosen keeping the view in the mind that it must reflect the concept of CLTA so that the teaching-learning process can be proved useful in the present context.

Objectives of the Study:

Diverse language teaching methods have been applied from time to time in undergraduate education in Bangladesh. Many critics assume that Grammar Translation Method could not continue to hold its popularity as It requires few specialized skills on the part of the teachers. Tests of grammar rules and of translations are easy to construct and can be objectively scored. Many standardized tests of foreign languages still do not attempt to tap into communicative abilities, so, students have little motivation to go beyond grammar analogies, translations, and rote exercises' Brown (1994:53). After that, direct method became popular as a method of teaching English language especially in the first two decades of twentieth century. Grammar was taught inductively but it could not sustain as it was a method meant for short-term and quick success based on some set things. Audio lingual method appeared in a context for short-term use during world war. It based on some drilling of set things and continued to become popular in the middle of twtienth century till 1960's. Situational language teaching became popular in parallel with Audio lingual method and grammar rules were basically taught by oral practices. As the theory focused on achieving accuracy through oral practices and mistakes were discouraged, this method soon gave a question of sustaining among the linguists. Communicative Language Teaching Approach (CLTA) appears as a challenge as it differs from the other methods in many respects. According to Hymes (as cited in Larseen-Freeman, 2000), communicative competence is "knowing when and how to say what to whom"(p-121). According to David Nunan the communicative approach to language teaching is a cluster of language teaching techniques and methodologies, it is not a single methodology.

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Dissatisfaction caused by situational approach and structuralism, Communicative Language Teaching was appeared in 1970's and supported by Council of Europe and linguists of United States of America particularly from California. However, in the 1970s, particularly in California, a new type of pedagogy arose and started becoming popular in response to the greatly increased number of ESL learners, who outnumbered native English speakers in some school districts. Many of these learners knew grammar rules but could not use the target language communicatively, and others urgently needed immediate survival competency in English. The related humanist approaches were also developed in the late 1970s and 1980s as communicative activities designed to give learners positive feelings toward the instructional process so that language acquisition was facilitated.' (Lawrence Eribaum Associates, NJ, 2002). The focus came on the point of the learners that they knew the grammar rules but could not use them in the target language. This gave a new thought of urgency of the Communicative Language Teaching Approach. Yalden (1987:61) focuses on CLT, as a summary on the essence, It is based on the notion of the learners as communicators, naturally endowed with the ability to learn languages. It seeks to provide learners with the target language system. It is assumed that learners will have to prepare to use the target language (orally and in written form) in many predictable and unpredictable acts of communication which arise both in classroom interaction and in real-world situations, whether concurrent with language training or subsequent to it'.

After introducing CLT in many countries, many English textbooks were designed attempting to accommodate the expectations of the communicative syllabus. When grammar teaching is concerned, CLT focuses on "communicative proficiency rather than mere mastery of structures" (Richards and Rogers, 1986:64). Communicative language teaching (CLT) refers to both processes and goals in classroom learning' (Savignon, 2002). The central theoretical concept in communicative language teaching is communicative competence,'' a term introduced into discussions of language use and second or foreign language learning in the early 1970s (Habermas 1970; Hymes 1971; Jakobovits 1970; Savignon 1971). Competence is defined in terms of the expression, interpretation, and negotiation of meaning and looks to both psycholinguistic and sociocultural perspectives in second language acquisition (SLA) research to account for its development (Savignon 1972, 1997). Identification of learners' communicative needs provides a basis for curriculum design (Van Ek 1975). So, curriculum design is very important in Communicative Language Teaching Approach.

Some critics say that there seem a conflict between Communicative Language teaching and Grammar because of their ultimate goal in terms of results such as fluency and accuracy. But the remarks in favour of the contradictions between Grammar and Communicative Approach are irrelevant and the search for the proper way to teach grammar through Communicative Language Teaching now has become a prime concern in many countries. It is believed that the more thoroughly a learner masters the grammatical system of the language, the more effectively he or she can use this language for communication' (Sayeedur Rahman, 2005). The aim of learning English is to be able to communicate in the official and business world in changed perspective of the world. Since it is not needed as a language under compulsion in Bangladesh from anthropologist and ethnographic point of view, the main target is for communication which can convert our population as resource and manpower in the world economic market. Hence, among the most used language skills are Listening and speaking both in and outside the classroom. Speaking is an interactive process of constructing Meaning' that involves producing, receiving and processing information (Florez, 1999; Brown, 1994), Kumaravadivelu (1999). So, the time has come to reconsider the selection and use of grammar terms in the changed needs of Bangladesh. The research is very important because it demonstrates discourse bridges, the relationship between language structure and the immediate or the recent social context where it will be used. Here, classroom is a Mini society'-an exercise centre of predictable and unpredictable situations with its own activities and rules. Pennington (2002) hints of "action grammar" in which grammar of language should meet the need of real use: "it must be interactive in nature and relative to specific discourse communicates and their communicative practices" (Fall 2005 Issues in EFL Vol.3 No.2 187). So, students usually should produce sounds, gestures, writing for each other using basic grammatical structures for purposeful actions.

Penny Ur, in her interview with The British Council in Chennai, London, Delhi and Israel, suggests some factors that can be useful for CLTA. These are considered as TacitMyths of CLTA. According to her, Some amount of explicit teaching was necessary to correct, explain and raise awareness about grammar usage. Students may talk and listen but unless explicitly taught grammar, they may not speak correctly.' She added that solution lies in reaching a balance between communicative grammar and theoretical grammar. Instead of fill-in-the-blank type exercises, students needed creative exercises to encourage original thinking'. She also adds Fluency and accuracy are two factors which determine the success of the students in the future'. She further says Students should not be asked to learn lists of words' and Memorizing chunks of language such as How do you do? And its proper response, idioms, phrases, proverbs and the rest, equips students with a readymade vocabulary of grammatical combinations that could be adapted to suit different situations.' About grammar, she continues Grammar is an arbitrary system, so the more we talk the better it is because that's the only way non-native speakers can pick up language and grammar'

In terms of language teaching methodology, the communicative approach provides the learners with an opportunity to use language for communication purposes without focusing on accuracy' (Bygate, 2001). The aims of the communicative approach are (a) to make communicative competence the goal of language teaching and (b) develop procedures for the teaching of the four language skills that acknowledge the interdependence of language and communication' (Richards and Rodgers, 1986: 66). Regarding Communicative Language Teaching, Howatt (1984) suggests the possible mix of Grammar and Structure with Communicative Language Teaching Approach. According to him, ...attempts to integrate such activities into a wider program of language teaching. advances the claim that language is acquired through communication, so that it is not merely a question of activating an existing but inert knowledge of the language, but of stimulating the development of the language system itself'. So, mix of Grammar and Communicative Language Teaching Approach can be considered a fruitful method for the desired level.

In fact, the linguists and the researchers felt that the students are not learning enough realistic English language. Despite knowing the rules of English grammar, they could not communicate well in social environment using proper social language with expressions. English seems to be confined in bookish knowledge; learners are not getting the benefits of English for communication in their real life. The language competency seems to be absent. The aim of teaching- learning English is not achieved the desired goal.

As Steven Pinker explains Chomsky's Language theory, he classifies the language competency through four parts of competency level. These also reflect the importance of teaching grammar for achieving language competency. He clarifies these as following:

1. Grammatical competence is how well a person has learned that features and rules of the language. This includes vocabulary, pronunciation, and sentence formation. The main question is: How well does a person understand English grammar?

2. Sociolinguistic competence is how well a person speaks and is understood in various social contexts. This depends on factors such as status of those speaking to each other, the purpose of the interaction, and the expectations of the interaction. The main question is: how socially acceptable is the person's use of English in different settings?

3. Discourse competence is how well a person can combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve different types (genres) of speaking or writing. The main question is: How well does one properly combine all the languages elements to speak or write in English?

4. Strategic competence is how well the person uses both verbal forms and non-verbal communication to compensate for lack of knowledge in the other three competencies.

The existing condition of the stated level is to be analyzed through scientific method. If any actual CLT is being practiced, that is to be identified and would be analyzed for further studies to mark its' actual version, adaptability, from utilitarian point of view. Howatt (1984) classified CLT into strong' and weak' versions. Communicative features are the vital concern of the strong version on the other side; the weak version promotes the integration of structural practice into the communicative elements. If the former could be described as learning to use' English, the latter entails using English to learn it'. Howatt (1984: 279). This research can include the feasibility of introducing the view that both structural and communicative elements can have a major role to play in EFL and ESL teaching in the Asian setting especially in Bangladesh. One of the most probable reasons of this feasible implementation is that may be the traditions and norms of practicing the structural syllabuses in Bangladesh for last three decades can not be changed radically, rather can play a role of active agent or a catalyst. Another reason may be communicative proficiency will become easier to achieve only when one has grasped the necessary knowledge of language (such as grammar). For societies whose first (and second) language is not English, there is still a need for structural practices so that the foundation of linguistic knowledge can be built up before further' (William Littlewood, English Centre, University of Hong Kong, 2006). So, presence of grammar in CLTA is indispensible because the notion that grammar and communication are incompatible opposites is based on serious misconceptions about the nature of language and language use' (William Littlewood, 2006), and The notion that an individual can develop anything other than a rudimentary communication ability without an extensive mastery of the grammatical system is absurd (David Wilkins in the journal Applied Linguistics, 1981). So, it is necessary to find out possible and effective bridge between grammar and CLTA, which is the prime concern of the present research. The more elaborately a learner masters the grammar of a language, the more effectively he or she can use the targeted language for communication. This position was strongly established by David Wilkins, whose work in the 1970s provided one of the major impetuses to the communicative approach i.e. The notion that an individual can develop anything other than a rudimentary communication ability without an extensive mastery of the grammatical system is absurd ( Applied Linguistics, 1981).

Some research works have already been done regarding the communicative approach of teaching grammar in some Asian countries specially in China {a survey carried out by Maley (1986:104)}, in Taiwan {Siaw-Fong Chung (2005:33-50)}, in Nepal {Koirala, Sanjel et al (NELTA Vol. 10, 2005 )}, in Malaysia ( Siti Rohani Bt Md. Zain, PhD Thesis, 2007), in India {Annika Hohenthal(1998)}. These researches do not reflect the environment of Bangladesh, because the position of English Language in Bangladesh is not same like these countries. Even with the most nearest neighbouring country India. In a small country like Bangladesh, the scope of using other language instead English was very limited from emotional and utilitarian point of view. India is a vast country having a huge variation of language difference, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore these types of developing countries have to depend on their tourism and resources and people from different countries have migrated over there. Naturally, as a part of their integration and political unity, English has been chosen emphatically. So, the scenario is quite different in Bangladesh. But the things are changing with the emphasis given by the government emphasizing on a new era of using skilled manpower as well as exploring the scope of multinational jobs. Now time has come to re-consider English language teaching approach in Bangladesh, because undergraduate syllabuses do not reflect the Communicative Language Teaching Approach rather these still reflect the structural approach. The rise of so many local and foreign English skills training centers are indications of that. If the policy makers would give attention, FM method, Saifurs, Mentors etc. could not promote the language courses as the replacement to the undergraduate English courses of universities. English is needed in Bangladesh not solely for internal use, rather mostly for international use. Bangladesh, as an underdeveloped and overpopulated country of the third world can make her human resources useful in the world perspective, where she is still facing a hard competition and sometimes lagging behind in terms of knowing useful communicative English. The recent government policies can accelerate the Bangladeshi linguists' endeavours in innovating a right approach in the right moment. The approaches to be implemented in Bangladesh should be based on local conditions considering the practical factors.

Significance of the Study

Bangladeshi students are learning English from utilitarian point of view, rather than integrative motivation' (Asian EFL Journal, June, 2005). So, it is necessary to find out the appropriate approach for Bangladeshi students. It involves to analyze the feasible texts and techniques befitting Bangladeshi socio-economic perspectives because An approach is a set of co-relative assumptions dealing with the nature of language teaching and learningit describes the subject matter to be taughtwhere method is an overall plan' (Richards & Rogers, p-14-30, 2002)

The history of English teaching in Bangladesh is rather less smooth in comparison to that with neighboring countries as it had to face some problems. Before the independence of Bangladesh, status of English language was tagged with the crucial policy taken by the authority who tried to impose their mother tongue as national language of Bangladesh. So, the attention of the Bangladeshi educational policy makers was to stay with Bangla language, perhaps, they didn't find the ample scope to improve the English or could not go for researches as the concentration was from emotional point of view. After liberation in 1971, the scenario started changing. After the freedom war of 1971, Bangladeshi curriculum in undergraduate levels were mostly based on English as Urdu was hated, and Bangla text books were not prepared in a large scale. So, the importance was given on Grammar-Translation method as the policy makers were influenced and pre-occupied by structural methods. The syllabuses of secondary, higher secondary and undergraduate levels were influenced purely based on by the extracts or texts from English literature and language ruled by grammar. World trend of CLT was almost absent in that time. The emotional implement of The Bangla Procholon Ain-1987' was a shock to the progress of English. It actually restricted the use of English in any type of official communication and correspondences and thus English was ignored from the socio-cultural domain. The policy makers were influenced by the BPA act, 1987 because it influenced as background to the policy decisions and the current status of English' (Banu & Sussex, 2001). The necessity of learning English language was felt tremendously and so, in the year 1989, English was introduced as a compulsory subject in colleges and universities covering the Higher Secondary and Undergraduate syllabuses. The necessity and urge of improving English was felt much more than ever. The syllabuses were mostly based on structural type followed by Grammar-translation method and after that Situational method. The new era of English flourished in the beginning of twenty-first century, i.e. after 2001, because of changes taken place in the policies of teaching English in neighboring and in many other countries. The growth of the jobs in the private sectors and in multinational companies created the demand of the persons who know effective English practically needed for communication across the national borders. Hence, the emergence of the Communicative Language Teaching Approaches in Asian countries has given a new thought of rethinking on the policy to be implemented because the graduated people could not use English effectively. It is felt in Bangladesh lately, but it was felt earlier in many countries since many of these learners knew grammar rules but could not use the target language communicatively, and others urgently needed immediate survival competency in English.'(Rogers, 2002). Emotional attachment, socio-economic conditions, post liberation war unstable conditions, restlessness in mind-setup regarding political issues hindered the way of improving educational sector in Bangladesh as well as English also.

Thus the concept of teaching English grammar seems to have been provided with the idea of the failure of the cited methods to teach English grammar effectively in Bangladesh. For this reason, this study emphasizes how teaching grammar through communicative language teaching approach (CLTA) is functioning in the context of Bangladesh.

Research Questions:

This paper seeks to understand teaching grammar through communicative language teaching approach (CLTA) in the context of Bangladesh. Despite many teaching approaches of English language, CLTA seems, at present, an appreciable method very often discussed among the academics and is heard as a popular language teaching approach in the globe. Actually students in Bangladesh from class 01 to class 12 have English courses on their syllabus but unfortunately most of them are remaining below the competent level with a very few exceptions. At the same time, even many university graduates cannot reach at least the communicative level of speaking and writing English language using correct grammar. In such a situation this paper attempts to address the possible problems causing the barriers for learning English grammar in Bangladesh with the following questions.

a) Is teaching English Grammar important for the students at the undergraduate level?

b) Are Grammar-Translation methods, Audio lingual method, Berlitz Method (Direct Method) and so on not effective to teach English grammar?

c) Does the undergraduate syllabus have sufficient elements to satisfy the present need in the field of communication?

d) Are the students capable enough to learn grammar clearly for communicative perspective?

e) Do the teachers have sufficient knowledge and adaptability to accept teaching grammar through CLTA? What role is being played by the teacher, a facilitator or a dictator?

f) Is the policy of Bangladesh suitable to nourish the technique of teaching grammar through Communicative Language Teaching Approach?

g) Are the socio-economic and infra-structural condition impediments for this approach?

Research Methodology:

Multiple methods would be used in the investigation including interviews, classroom observations, journal writings and analysis of lesson plans. Data would be analyzed and categorized for common themes and patterns in the undergraduate level of English teaching including various sectors under Public Universities, National University and Madrassa level. The central theme of the analysis would highlight the interactive relationship between beliefs, knowledge and instructional contexts in teachers' personal framework of teaching grammar and learners' inherent belief in the practical context.

The primary & secondary data would be sought on the basis of practical experience. Basically the secondary data will be considered as per the set standard of the Native & Non-Native English experts. The method may include Questionnaire with closed and open type among controlled group after data are being selected randomly. For a smooth study, questionnaire would be distributed among teachers and learners. Likart scale may be used in setting methodology. The Questionnaire would consist of demographic information and their statement. Obviously, it will be made clear to the respondents before their answer in a scientific way. There will be followed a standard version of questionnaire for perfect data collection. The whole data analysis will be furnished through SPSS version 18.0

Conclusion:

The history of English Language in Bangladesh is not new. Though, Bangladesh had been a colony of The Great Britain as were India and Pakistan, and again a part of Pakistan, the scenario of English is quite different here. The role of English in Bangladesh is purely functional as English is used as an international link language. Unlike India, English is not used as an interpersonal and inter-institutional communication and there is seemingly no possibility of English becoming the lingua franca in Bangladesh' ((Asian EFL Journal, June, 2005). Since the socio-economic conditions are different than India and Pakistan, the need of English is important for the international perspective than national need. In Bangladesh, the role of grammar in teaching-learning English at undergraduate level is to be redefined so that, the learners can get the befitting knowledge in the new era of e-world of national and international job market and at the same time, the prestige and standard of English education at the stated level would be renovated and up-dated.

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Alam M. Sarwar is an English faculty at the Universiti Malaysia Sabah and working at Centre for Promotion of Knowledge and Language Learning, Labuan International Campus. Previously, he had been teaching English in universities in Bangladesh and in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since 1996. He possesses an M.A. in English and is currently pursuing a PhD in Linguistics in Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. He has written some books on English Grammar, Writing Skills and on Literature for the undergraduate and graduate English students. E-mail: Sarwar@ums.edu.my
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