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Le Monde Diplomatique has many international editions, including in english

Le Monde Diplomatique has many international editions, including in english

French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique (also known as the "diplo"). International editions are available, including english edition.

I have a few unusual news sources that tend to complete or contradict the stories given by main stream medias: the two most important are le Monde Diplomatique, which now even have an english edition. arretsurimages.net, which is only in french.

It is worth pointing that I pay for that information. None of these two sources are free for the reader and paid by advertising. I am convinced this is a key point for an independent point of view.

Doing that gets the Daily show a lot of viewers, I would think that doing the same thing in a more rigorous journalistic environment would get you a lot of eyeballs.

This is exactly what I do not understand about online journalism. At the moment, newspapers seem to be in a race to the bottom, with each trying to publish the same sort of crap before everyone else; mostly rehashed press-releases, all the while complaining that nobody wants to pay for their news online.

Maybe I am part of a small target group. But, dear newspaper publishers: Please give me a website that
1. pays talented journalists a decent salary to go out and investigate complex stories, actually reveal novel information, and then come back and write lucid, enlightening stories.
2. does not show any ads, thereby making itself independent from corporations for revenue, turning the readers into the sole customers.
3. has a calm, clean layout, accessible from both the desktop and mobile devices, hassle free. Oh, and please actually fill my damn screen with text and images, instead of using 20% of its width to show 50-line articles broken into 5 pages, filling the rest with horrible flash ads.

I am willing to pay, say, 200$ a year for a subscription to this site (I currently pay a similar amount for print subscriptions to a weekly and a monthly paper). It doesn't have to have hourly updates, all I want is something to read for an hour in bed every evening. I don't understand why such a website doesn't exist yet. I know, ads are an important part of traditional publishing, but web publishing is cheaper (printing presses and paper boys are more expensive than servers and bandwidth), and there are great economies of scale: The first publisher to establish a high-quality online news service will be able to attract readers from the entire English-speaking world.

Seriously, I don't get it. Why is everyone still trying to make money with ads?

Huh? We aren't talking about military retaliation.

Now we are...

Why would you bring that up?

Because it's about time. Enough about the bullying. Sometimes you do need to pull a Columbine on bullies. And God, have we seen bullying by the US during the last 10 years! Enough already, please leave us alone!

Christ, nuclear power or not France is an ally!

However, why France still wants to be an ally of a Nation which doesn't respect the civil liberties of its own citizens is beyond me. During the cold war, it may have made sense, but no longer now. Ironically, during most of the cold war (since 1966), France was not a member of NATO, and it is only very recently that they decided to join again

Personally, I hope they do stand up to us, just like Germany did regarding Iraq. "No, this is a bad idea!" That's all they have to do.

Indeed. No need to spell everything out explicitly. US diplomats should be intelligent enough to understand that when France says that it is a bad idea, that indeed, then it is indeed a bad idea. Indeed, France has much more convincing arguments here than Germany.

However, $12K out-of-pocket is still better than losing 30% of my paycheck to Obamacare I wonder where you got that 30% figure from? Here (Paris, France) Social Security is actually 15% of my paycheck, the other 15% going for retirement and unemployment benefits. It seems to me that you would have much to gain with such a system, which mutualizes costs. I suppose this inflated estimate of the cost of Social Security is the type of FUD that is spread by people who stand to lose a lot of money if they stop collecting insurance premiums. Yet health care in the US costs 14% of GNP, compared to 11% in Europe(*), where everybody has access to medical care, which is far from being the case in the US. (* : http://www.amis.monde-diplomatique.fr/article1040.html)

Moral media isn't dead. You just have to look harder for it.

Now that the Sept 11th jingoism has died down and it's starting to be a non-terminal offence to express discontent versus the powers that be, you're starting to see the creepings of independent thought show up even in CNN. Up here in Canada, CTV's been doing it for a while. But even then there's a huge under-reporting of stories that would knock the comfort zone of the average person.

The basic problem is this -- any media outlet is a slave to the mandate of its publisher. This isn't really new, it's as old as newspapers themselves (it used to be that if you wanted to be a politician it was a shrewd move to found your own newspaper). So, if you've got nothing but biased media out there, the only way to really inform yourself is to (a) check up on all the biases and try to develop your own conclusions from them, and (b) realize that there's no substitute for actually being at the scene of the event, or at the very least talking to someone who is.

People who critique the media as having a bias often make the mistake of trying to sound like it's forced upon them, when really, you can choose to go out and find different information from a different source. Some options include:

ZNet

The Guardian

The Independent

Le Monde Diplomatique (English version here)

Tom Tommorow

It also helps in times of conflict to go to the media outlets or websites of your political enemies to see what they're saying. It's amazing how they often take as gospel a premise that is completely different from your own. It's also amazing how often the exact same coercive techniques are used by both sides. Makes you wonder if there are average citizens over there are pissed off at their media as much as some of us are at ours.

By the way, I know I went off on a bit of a tangent, but if you click on any of the links above you'll see minimal coverage of the Elizabeth Smart case. There might be a story in there at some point to tell everyone how it all turns out, but nothing like the usual CNN sensationalism. The point is, if you don't like your media, don't go back to it -- go elsewhere. It's not like we have battered wife syndrome or something.

(or maybe we do???)

"Mais Chomsky commit une erreur, la seule dans cette affaire. Il donna son texte à un ami d'alors, Serge Thion, en lui permettant de l'utiliser à sa guise. Or Thion le fit paraître, comme avis , au début du mémoire publié pour défendre Faurisson. Chomsky n'a cessé de rappeler qu'il n'avait jamais eu l'intention de voir publier son texte à cet endroit et qu'il chercha, mais trop tard, à l'empêcher (5). "
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2001/04/BRICMONT/ 15109

Apparently, Chomsky gave the French translation rights of his work to Serge Thion to publish as he pleased.
Chomsky denies that he ever intended his work to be published with Faurrisson's and he further claims that he tried to stop it when he found out about it.
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2001/04/BRICMONT/ 15109 (the article is in French)

So there you have it. I don't know if Chomsky is lying, but his story sounds entirely plausible to me.
Stephan

Given that there is actually a row about how to define unemployment we may be arguing past each other. You might find this article interesting in how it questions both the way that both the UK and other countries (Netherlands) have messed around with calculating how many people are unemployed. It also makes a few points about the US situation.

I am assuming that just like their foam gun and wheel shooting equipment that this thing will also come out looking bad. According to the article they are going to shoot this thing from up to 750 meters? From that distance the energy is going to be distributed over the entire body of the victim... err target. That means it will damage eye's, the skin around your ears, and if you are a card carrying member of the Y-chromosone club your going to get your testes roasted.

Think about that last one for a minute there, boys.

The more I listen to this stuff the more skeptical I become. This whole project seems more like an excuse to just dump money on a few companies and academics.

For more info check out this and this and maybe this.

You've answered your own question. You did well in life because you got a good start: your parents were well-educated and supportive. If they had been illiterate, I doubt that you would have fared as well. Poverty breeds poverty.

There are about one million Americans who work full-time, but are still homeless. Moreover, there 1.2 billion people in the world who live on less than $1 a day. I find this unacceptable. Since I earn far more than most, I think it's right that I should give a large portion of my income to help those who are less well-off.

For more about global poverty, see this.

For the causes of poverty, see this.

Then read this or this or this to find out more about what can be done.
--

The NATO media lead us to believe (at the time) that the Rambouillet Treaty had been rejected by the Serbs, and that this showed that all reasonable diplomatic avenues had been explored. Thus the only avenue left was military force. But if you read the treaty you find that the treaty terms call for the annexation of Serbia (not just Kosovo) by NATO. (Look at Appendix B, from about Appendix B (8) onwards). this annexation would be of land, air, with full access to electromagnetic spectrum.... Oh, read it for yourself, it only takes 5 mins. We're talking about a treaty that asked Serbia to accept a NATO occupation force in *Serbia* - not just Kosovo (as it is now). You could call it a peacekeeping force, but if I were a Serb, I would see it as an occupation force. What nation would accept a treaty like that? Wasn't it at least forseeable (inevitable?) that Serbia would reject a treaty such as this? If so, what was the motivation of NATO in presenting the treaty as the final possible offer that diplomacy could offer? I was keeping a close eye on the media at the time, mostly in Britain and the US, but found no mention of these treaty terms. BTW - I have confirmed this document against other sources. Doesn't this raise some rather disturbing questions?

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ELECTRONIC PEASANTS

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE: [Amazon's]founder Jeff Bezos owns over $4 billion. The work of Amazon employees is less lucrative and a great deal less creative. Several hundred, many young, unmarried and well educated, work at the Seattle premises in gigantic landscaped offices split into tiny, shared cubicles. With their head-sets plugged in and their eyes glued to the screen they handle millions of e-mail orders a year.

Some managers at Amazon refer to them as "electronic peasants", for when they are on-line with a customer they are not supposed to show off their literary skills. The focus in these modern times is on output: 12 e-mails an hour and the sack for anyone who drops below seven and a half. On the phone any conversation exceeding four minutes, in a voice that according to a former employee "is supposed to be loud enough for the customer to hear and quiet enough to keep from distracting cubical mates," earns the guilty party a warning.

"It's like Communist China under Mao," explains one of the new economy's production-line workers, "you're constantly being pushed to help the collective. If you fail to do this, you're going against your family. But if this is a family, it belongs on the Jerry Springer show." Such ingratitude in a company that is constantly organizing events for its workers - or devotees. Last September, for instance, there was a "Midnight madness" keyboard marathon, humorously announced by an e-mail entitled "You can sleep when you're dead". This irresistible game involved coming to work at night to cope with as many outstanding cyber-orders as possible. The winner received a princely $100 prize.

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE

**********

I don't buy from Amazon. Tim O'Reilly means well, but there's nothing in his conversation that makes me believe that Bezos is a man with whom I wish to do business. He's just another sweatshop owner. He's made a pile of dough and he means to share as little of it as possible with him employees. In the "brick and mortar" world, he'd be an eligible target for the protests currently being staged on campuses around the country.

mp