You can now post on the forum as a Guest
Posted in: Uncategorized | Comments (5)
We at Free Media Productions are impressed by our broad audience of viewers. We realize that forums are dominated by a small group of people who are used to using them. We understand that it can be difficult for a “forum virgin” to start posting. Signing up with an email (that has to be real) and a password can be intimidating.
To ease your intimidation, we are allowing guests to post and perform searches. You will not have the full privileges of membership, such as the ability to edit your profile. In order to have the ability to edit your profile, you must become a member. In order to send private messages and view who is online, you must become a trusted member.
But to make things easier for our virgin audience – the numerous people who google us and find us but never post – we have enabled you to post as a guest.
Free Media Productions Staff @ December 12, 2009
Today’s Headlines
Posted in: Propaganda & Information | Comments (0)
From the FMP News Room:
09.03.2010 – NATO warmongers preparing for Kandahar offensive
09.03.2010 – President Chavez denounces Clinton as, ‘blond Condoleezza’
09.03.2010 – DPRK puts armed forces on high-alert
09.03.2010 – Another British occupation soldier killed in Afghanistan
09.03.2010 – Protesters denounce EU import of goods from Jewish settlements
09.03.2010 – US official: Washington economically bankrupt
FMP News @ August 1, 2008
A radio Show Bashing Stumble Inn
Posted in: Cross-Bloging | Comments (0)
I’ve been invited a few times to go on stumble inn radio on blogtalkradio.
Should I accept…no fuck that, I think I’ll do what Eazy-E did to Dr. Dre, and turn around bash them with my own radio program! I was only faking like I was going to do it. Lord Satan / Racial Awareness and I are already planning the details out. We have an account there anyways. That way the traffic comes here, not there.
Metal Gear @ March 9, 2010
Tribe of Ice – It isn’t me!
Posted in: Cross-Bloging | Comments (0)
The link
I know there are a lot of coincidences. I know it links to a Vlad the Impaler blog, and Vlad Tepes had a last name that I enjoy studying and I’ve praised the man. I know it links to Dienekes and I like Dienekes. I know it links to a few other people I link to. I know it talks about “race realism.”
It’s not me though. I know it’s hard to believe but it’s a coincidence!
Metal Gear @ March 7, 2010
Unlike Islamic Fundamentalist Countries, Israel is honoring the Red Army
Posted in: Activism, Marxist-Leninism, Religion | Comments (1)
The link
Just to play Devil’s advocate, as many of our “Communists” think that Islamic Fundamentalism is inherently more compatible with Marxism than Zionism, it should be pointed out that the Taliban and Iranian regime curse the Red Army whereas Israel praises it. Now you can say the material conditions make ideology unimportant, but it is still ironic.
It should be noted that the SECULAR Ba’athists were pro-USSR in their original conception, whereas the counterpart regime in Afghanistan was not. And that regime was a fundamentalist regime, but not the Taliban.
Israel will erect a memorial commemorating the Red Army’s crucial role in the victory over the Nazis, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told Russian Prime Minster Vladimir Putin at a photo opportunity before their meeting Tuesday.
Netanyahu said the gesture, which he intends to move forward, is in honor of the 65th anniversary of the victory over the Nazis later this year. This move comes amid growing concern in Russia that their role and sacrifice in the victory over Nazism is increasingly being underplayed.
Putin, saying that it was forbidden to forget the Nazi victims and that the Jews and the people of the former Soviet Union suffered more than anyone else at the hands of the Nazis, said he was currently in discussion with Moscow’s chief rabbi about the possibility of establishing a Holocaust museum in Moscow.
Netanyahu said he hoped the memorial would be erected before Putin’s next visit to Israel, expected with the year, and that at the same time the Russian prime minister could also take part in the ceremony in which Russia would formally take over control of the Sergei courtyard in central Jerusalem.
After saying that Israel and Russia would increase cooperation in a number of spheres, including technology, security and agriculture, Putin joked that he hoped the agricultural cooperation would add funds to Israel’s Agriculture Ministry so that it could quickly move out of its offices in the Sergei courtyard.
Metal Gear @ March 6, 2010
Housekeeping
Posted in: Uncategorized | Comments (4)
First of all, I went through the Editorials and converted redundant threads into Comments and got rid of some posts that were posted as jokes but now may incorrectly be seen as serious.
In addition here are some stats for unique viewers of free media productions :
The date is listed, followed by unique monthly visitors, by total visitors, by pages, by hits, by bandwidth, then the length of each month (the first month started mid month).
Jun 2009 1918 3955 45536 104652 1.23 GB (20 day time period)
Jul 2009 2236 5153 45877 108254 1.83 GB (31 day time period)
Aug 2009 2448 5860 39203 100889 1.83 GB (31 day time period)
Sep 2009 3049 8199 49428 111716 1.92 GB (30 day time period)
Oct 2009 3196 8212 38400 89962 1.66 GB (31 day time period)
Nov 2009 3992 10128 66877 158462 3.00 GB (30 day time period)
Dec 2009 4375 10595 76268 177501 2.13 GB (31 day time period)
Jan 2010 4441 10791 57813 129035 1.85 GB (31 day time period)
Feb 2010 4781 11154 67142 162148 1.88 GB (28 day time period)
Metal Gear @ March 4, 2010
Army is hiring contractors; “Not enough” Combat Majors!
Posted in: Anti-Imperialism, Wars | Comments (0)
The link
It appears the current material conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan are very unpopular, as even with the recession and horrible job market, “not enough” people want to join the military to fight a strategically flawed war in Afghanistan and an ideologically flawed war in Iraq. So the army is now hiring “for profit” contractors to “fill the void,” thus validating claims of a military industrial complex. We continue to be weary of veterans who brag about their service while simultaneously pretending they are political dissidents.
WASHINGTON — The Army’s ability to train its forces is “increasingly at risk” because of the nation’s protracted commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan, the general in charge of training has told the Army’s chief of staff.
In a Feb. 16 memo to Gen. George W. Casey, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the commander of the Army Training and Doctrine Command, says that the Army has lost thousands of uniformed trainers because of troop demands in Iraq and Afghanistan, has had to put junior officers in charge of some key training functions and has delayed initial instruction for nearly 500 pilots because it doesn’t have enough trainers.
Only 30 percent of the instructors at Army training schools are in the military, Dempsey says, with the Army increasingly dependent on outside contractors.
“We are behind in integrating lessons learned, developing training and updating doctrine,” Dempsey wrote in the memo, a copy of which McClatchy obtained. “We are undermanned in our efforts to design the future Army.”
Dempsey’s warning occurs as the Obama administration presses ahead with plans to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan by 30,000 and has committed a growing number of military trainers to doubling the size of the Afghan security forces. Since Dempsey took command of TRADOC in December 2008, the command has sent 889 troops, contractors and civilians to Iraq and 675 to Afghanistan.
Casey, who’s frequently warned that the long-term commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan have strained the Army, said in an interview this week that Dempsey’s memo didn’t surprise him.
He said, however, that the military didn’t have enough soldiers to commit more troops to training, and that relief would come from two developments: the continued withdrawal from Iraq and the planned expansion of the Army by 65,000 soldiers by the end of 2011.
Dempsey’s memo “is his way of getting it on my radar,” Casey said.
Titled “Erosion of TRADOC’s Core Competencies and Functions,” the memo contains a litany of how keeping a large troop presence in two war zones while committing to train foreign troops has hurt the military’s training efforts.
There are 96,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 78,000 in Afghanistan.
Dempsey wrote that since September 2001, the number of soldiers assigned to training and other planning responsibilities has declined by 7,300, while the number of civilian employees has declined by 4,500. To fill the gap, Dempsey says, his command has hired 9,000 outside contractors.
He complains that the result is a “de-greening” of training, meaning less reliance on Army personnel. For example, he wrote, outside contractors are teaching 68 percent of the courses at the Army’s Intelligence School.
Dempsey says the manpower shortage has affected ROTC training programs, particularly at universities that provide large numbers of junior officers to the Army. He says that the officer-to-student ratios at five of the nation’s six largest ROTC programs, including The Citadel in South Carolina and Texas A&M University, now exceed 1 to 45 and that in some cases the ratio is 1 to 76.
A shortage of captains and majors with combat experience is particularly troubling, he says.
“Their experience level is of extreme importance to our command because it gives them the field-tested knowledge and credibility to teach, coach and mentor the officers following behind them,” Dempsey wrote.
He wrote that 18 first lieutenants were filling company command positions in basic combat training units — positions usually reserved for higher-ranking officers — and that the command has had to turn to noncommissioned officers in some of those units to fill operations positions usually reserved for commissioned officers.
Metal Gear @ March 4, 2010
Evangelicals, Catholics and internationalism
Posted in: Religion | Comments (1)
The link
I find this to be interesting that Christianity is a driving force behind international altruism, good or bad. It is just interesting. The shift in the activity of evangelicals is interesting.
It is interesting that nuns are handing out condoms. How about just realizing that people who cannot control themselves are not human beings?
For most of the last century, save-the-worlders were primarily Democrats and liberals. In contrast, many Republicans and religious conservatives denounced government aid programs, with Senator Jesse Helms calling them “money down a rat hole.”
Over the last decade, however, that divide has dissolved, in ways that many Americans haven’t noticed or appreciated. Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.
A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?
It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.
World Vision now has 40,000 staff members in nearly 100 countries. That’s more staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the worldwide operations of the United States Agency for International Development — combined.
A growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion. The head of World Vision in the United States, Richard Stearns, begins his fascinating book, “The Hole in Our Gospel,” with an account of a visit a decade ago to Uganda, where he met a 13-year-old AIDS orphan who was raising his younger brothers by himself.
“What sickened me most was this question: where was the Church?” he writes. “Where were the followers of Jesus Christ in the midst of perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time? Surely the Church should have been caring for these ‘orphans and widows in their distress.’ (James 1:27). Shouldn’t the pulpits across America have flamed with exhortations to rush to the front lines of compassion?
“How have we missed it so tragically, when even rock stars and Hollywood actors seem to understand?”
Mr. Stearns argues that evangelicals were often so focused on sexual morality and a personal relationship with God that they ignored the needy. He writes laceratingly about “a Church that had the wealth to build great sanctuaries but lacked the will to build schools, hospitals, and clinics.”
In one striking passage, Mr. Stearns quotes the prophet Ezekiel as saying that the great sin of the people of Sodom wasn’t so much that they were promiscuous or gay as that they were “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” (Ezekiel 16:49.)
Hmm. Imagine if sodomy laws could be used to punish the stingy, unconcerned rich!
The American view of evangelicals is still shaped by preening television blowhards and hypocrites who seem obsessed with gays and fetuses. One study cited in the book found that even among churchgoers ages 16 to 29, the descriptions most associated with Christianity were “antihomosexual,” “judgmental,” “too involved in politics,” and “hypocritical.”
Some conservative Christians reinforced the worst view of themselves by inspiring Ugandan homophobes who backed a bill that would punish gays with life imprisonment or execution. Ditto for the Vatican, whose hostility to condoms contributes to the AIDS epidemic. But there’s more to the picture: I’ve also seen many Catholic nuns and priests heroically caring for AIDS patients — even quietly handing out condoms.
One of the most inspiring figures I’ve met while covering Congo’s brutal civil war is a determined Polish nun in the terrifying hinterland, feeding orphans, standing up to drunken soldiers and comforting survivors — all in a war zone. I came back and decided: I want to grow up and become a Polish nun.
Some Americans assume that religious groups offer aid to entice converts. That’s incorrect. Today, groups like World Vision ban the use of aid to lure anyone into a religious conversation.
Some liberals are pushing to end the longtime practice (it’s a myth that this started with President George W. Bush) of channeling American aid through faith-based organizations. That change would be a catastrophe. In Haiti, more than half of food distributions go through religious groups like World Vision that have indispensable networks on the ground. We mustn’t make Haitians the casualties in our cultural wars.
A root problem is a liberal snobbishness toward faith-based organizations. Those doing the sneering typically give away far less money than evangelicals. They’re also less likely to spend vacations volunteering at, say, a school or a clinic in Rwanda.
If secular liberals can give up some of their snootiness, and if evangelicals can retire some of their sanctimony, then we all might succeed together in making greater progress against common enemies of humanity, like illiteracy, human trafficking and maternal mortality.
Metal Gear @ March 3, 2010
The Free Market is the American Religion
Posted in: Consumerism, Global Economic Meltdown, Neo-liberalism, Religion, Third Position | Comments (0)
The link
The reason America never fixes its problems is that it believes they will auto-correct. This article is the ideological foundation of authoritarianism. If you prefer to smear it, I guess you could call it “emergency dictatorship,” “capitalism in decay” or “fascism.” It is the idea that freedom and liberty “don’t work,” but the logical conclusion is that authority is needed to patch society. It is not really stressing class conflict or the need for the complete elimination of private property, and thus not really addressing the issue from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint but a corrective authoritarian standpoint.
It requires a religious belief in capitalism in order to keep trying to succeed against all odds, because otherwise it is easier to give up. After all, to succeed requires many failed attempts and/or a special networking connection, especially in this global economic meltdown. I can attest to the fact that most hardcore entrepreneurs truly believe these values.
WASHINGTON — The most popular religion in America isn’t Christianity, as most of us have been taught to believe. The most cherished belief system celebrates the principles of unfettered capitalism.
That misplaced faith in free markets was on display in this past Thursday’s health care summit, when — between sound bites and talking points — Republicans argued that “choice and competition” would largely resolve the country’s health care problems. That belief — that the arbitrary, confusing and consumer-unfriendly policies and practices that we euphemistically call a health care “system” can be transformed by relying on free market principles — is confounding.
Except for beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Affairs system — all government-run insurance programs — those of us who have insurance are utterly reliant on the private market. That’s what got us into the mess we’re in.
The health care market simply doesn’t operate like the market for cars or computers or flat-screen TVs. Sony and Samsung make their profits by selling as many of their products as they can. Health insurance companies make their profits by selling as many of their products as they can and then trying very hard not to actually deliver them.
Try to imagine that you’re awaiting delivery of your brand-new 50-inch TV, for which you’ve already made a hefty down payment. But the company calls to tell you that you violated some obscure clause in your contract, so they’re not going to bring it! In the health insurance world, it’s called “rescission.” Insurers decide they won’t honor the contract because of some alleged violation by the policy-holder.
They do that to keep their fat profit margins. Health care giant Wellpoint has proposed substantial rate increases in the individual market (policies for individuals who don’t have employer-based insurance), not just in California but in several other states. In congressional testimony last week, WellPoint president Angela Braly said the company had to raise premiums because of soaring health care costs. But Wellpoint hardly seems to be hurting; it reported a profit last year of $4.7 billion.
California’s Wellpoint subsidiary, Anthem Blue Cross, is not only proposing stunning rate hikes. The state’s insurance commissioner has announced that the company has also repeatedly violated state law by failing to pay medical claims on time and by misrepresenting policy provisions to consumers, according to the Los Angeles Times.
So, it seems, the company tells you that a policy offers broad coverage when they’re trying to get you to buy insurance. But when you need the coverage, you find out that the policy doesn’t offer broad coverage, after all. That helps explain why so many people, even with health insurance, go bankrupt after a costly illness.
Without stricter government oversight and regulation — which is the essence of the health care reform proposed by President Obama — health care costs will continue to soar while consumers get less and less. Obama’s proposals don’t represent a “government takeover,” as critics contend. The vast majority of Americans would still get their insurance in the private marketplace. But insurers would have to live by a different set of rules.
Vice President Joe Biden said it best at the summit: If Republicans agree that insurance reform is necessary, that health insurance companies should be prohibited from turning away consumers because of pre-existing conditions, that they should be prevented from enforcing lifetime caps on benefits, then the GOP must see the need for strict government regulation. You don’t get those changes in the “free market.”
And, unlike the choice of buying a computer or a car, you’d don’t really get to walk away from health insurance. If you do, you take your life into your hands. Having health insurance increases your chances of longevity.
Once upon a time, political leaders realized that all Americans needed access to electricity, and they stepped in to ensure that all households got that small miracle at reasonable rates — something that the “free market” could not provide. Americans need a similar intervention in health care now.
Metal Gear @ March 1, 2010
Autistic Posters Accuse Other Posters of Being Autistic
Posted in: Activism | Comments (6)
Some of the internet personalities you meet are pathetic. They set up their own false micro-realities, in which the world can be explained in a certain way, and then flip out when someone shakes their foundations. This is autism and I expose the autism. The same people accuse me of autism. No I am the ground shaker and you are the collapsing house!
I have no use for being stuck in the 1940’s or 1800’s and I view people as negative when their mind thinks backwards. My mind only thinks sideways and forwards! If you can’t handle that, then fuck you.
Metal Gear @ February 28, 2010