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"Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." -Frederick Douglass

The New York Times this morning has a particularly lush installment of one of the American media's most favored, reliable, and self-affirming rituals -- it's time to mock and pity Those Crazy, Primitive, Irrational, Propagandized Muslims and their Wild Conspiracy Theories, which their reckless media and extremists maliciously disseminate in order to generate unfair and unfounded hostility toward the U.S.:

Ten years ago, when we first focused national attention on the dangers of the US media cartel, the situation was already grim, although in retrospect it may seem better than it really was. In the spring of 1996 Fox News was only a conspiracy (which broke a few months later). CNN belonged to Turner Broadcasting, which hadn't yet been gobbled by Time Warner (although it would be just a few months later); Viacom had not yet bought CBS News (although it would in 1999, before they later parted ways); and, as the Telecommunications Act had been passed only months earlier, local radio had not yet largely disappeared from the United States (although it was obviously vanishing). One could still somewhat plausibly assert, as many did, that warnings of a major civic crisis were unfounded, overblown or premature, as there was little evidence of widespread corporate censorship, and so we were a long way from the sort of journalistic meltdown that The Nation had predicted.

Seit sich die Welt durch die Vogelgrippe bedroht sieht, klingeln bei der Erfinderfirma des Gegenmittels Tamiflu die Kassen. Zu den Gewinnern geh�rt auch US-Verteidigungsminister Donald Rumsfeld.

Die urplötzlich nach "den Muslimen", "dem Terrorismus", "Kinderpornografie", "Piraten", Cyber-Angriffen von "Geisternetzen" aus China nun aus dem Hut gezogene "Angst vor dem viralen Supergau" (1) durch die "Schweinegrippe" muss nachdenklich stimmen.