By Hiram Lee - 25 May 2013

Musician Ray Manzarek, a founding member of renowned rock band The Doors, died May 20 in Rosenheim, Germany, where he had traveled for treatment of bile duct cancer. Manzarek’s inspired and versatile keyboard playing was central to The Doors’ music and in later years the always-spirited musician would serve as a kind of keeper of the band’s legacy.

Predators must have knowledge about their prey if they are going to be successful hunters. It is clear that we have been studied and our weaknesses have been exploited in an effort to exhaust us economically, physically and spiritually. Renowned researcher, Alan Watt goes so far as to state that the perpetrators responsible for this ultimately want to destroy any sense of individuality in us whatsoever.

By David Walsh - WSWS

The visit to America in mid-May by Prince Harry of Wales, third in line of succession to the British throne, coinciding with the release of a new film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), brings into focus a number of issues.

By David Walsh - WSWS

New information has emerged exposing the level of collaboration between the CIA and the makers of the pro-torture Zero Dark Thirty, screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow. In fact, the reports reveal that the US intelligence agency vetted the film script and insisted on significant changes that Boal subsequently carried out.

By DAVE MARSH - May 08, 2013

Bono may be the personification of all that’s evil about contemporary celebrity culture and all that’s worse than bankrupt about liberal capitalism (and liberal capitalists) but there’s also a real person in there, and he’s spent most of a lifetime making himself what history must surely judge...as a fool.

By Dave Zirin - April 25, 2013

Why did Newark’s only movie theater, co-owned by Shaquille O’Neal, just pull a scheduled showing of a documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal? No one is talking, but this is a story that stinks worse than the Jersey swamps...When O’Neal purchased the theater, he held a press conference...and pointedly thanked “the Newark Police Department” which “helped raise” him. The future Hall of Famer has long held court about his dreams of becoming a police officer. He has been sworn in as a “reserve police officer” in both Miami and Los Angeles.

By Morrissey - April 9, 2013

...[S]he destroyed the British manufacturing industry, she hated the miners, she hated the arts, she hated the Irish Freedom Fighters and allowed them to die, she hated the English poor and did nothing at all to help them...She gave the order to blow up The Belgrano even though it was outside of the Malvinas Exclusion Zone...When the young Argentinean boys aboard The Belgrano had suffered a most appalling and unjust death, Thatcher gave the thumbs-up sign for the British press.

By John Pilger - March 14, 2013

Today's "message" of grotesque inequality, social injustice and war is the propaganda of liberal democracies. By any measure of human behavior, this is extremism. When Hugo Chavez challenged it, he was abused in bad faith; and his successor will be subverted by the same zealots of the American Enterprise Institute, Harvard's Kennedy School and the "human rights" organizations that have appropriated American liberalism and underpin its propaganda.

She's connected to America's rich and powerful. Months before Washington's 2003 Iraq war, she promoted it on air. She had no business doing so. American society reflects consumption and competition. Oprah's solutions represent it. So does her background.

By Gar Lipow - March 05, 2013

The 2012 Canadian science fiction series Continuum...is a warning sign. It represents, possibly without intent, an escalation in the way media drums up support for increased police power, and repression of civil liberties and dissent...At first glance, this series is a mix of a standard science fiction trope with a police procedural.

By DAVID YEARSLEY - Counterpunch Weekend Edition

Barely having recovered from the Super Storms of musical fakery and propaganda that were the Presidential Inauguration and the Super Bowl, the latest State ritual — the Oscars — sent all whose brains were still attached to their ears scampering for higher ground against the surging flood-waters of propaganda and poison.

By David Walsh - WSWS

The 2013 Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles Sunday night was painful to watch. It was one of those public events that diminishes virtually everyone involved, including the more or less “innocent bystanders”...All in all...a pathetic and tawdry showing...Official Hollywood liberalism, to judge by Sunday’s ceremony and related events, is bombastic mediocrity in alliance with the military-intelligence apparatus.

Hollywood's complicity with Washington is longstanding. Movie moguls are duplicitous. The only thing they like like better than good films are good deals. Washington's requests are prioritized. Scripts feature pro-Western propaganda.

By John Pilger - January 30, 2013

A full-scale invasion of Africa is under way. The United States is deploying troops in 35 African countries...The invasion has almost nothing to do with “Islamism”, and almost everything to do with the acquisition of resources, notably minerals, and an accelerating rivalry with China...As in the cold war, a division of labour requires that western journalism and popular culture provide the cover of a holy war against a “menacing arc” of Islamic extremism, no different from the bogus “red menace” of a worldwide communist conspiracy.

By DAVE CLENNON - Counterpunch

Michael Moore sure can make up a lot of dialogue for scenes he thinks happened off screen, in Zero Dark Thirty...He freely invents quotes for President Obama, writing words no one else has ever quoted Obama as saying...Were you writing fiction, Mike, or were you basing your script “on first hand accounts of actual events.” (The claim of Bigelow and Mark Boal in Zero.) In any case, your made-up dialogue belongs on Saturday Night Live, not in a serious defense of Bigelow and Boal.