http://mcauleysworld.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/jobless-rate-bolts-to-high-not-seen-since-clinton-administration-unemployment-14-year-high-of-65-percent/

Right in the center of the page. 11.3%

One old time journalist, Bill Mazer, just left a New York radio station after working for them for a decade and having been a journalist since the 1930’s. All because Fox News bought the station. It was the last “independent” network in the New York City area until Fox bought them out from the owner, who sold air time to anyone who wanted to do a program from any number of angles. Anything from a political program done by gays in gay interests to far right wing gun nuts got access to the air under the previous ownership.

Christ Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He served for eight years as the Middle East bureau chief of The New York Times, where he shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism, for coverage of terrorism. Hedges also received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.

n 2009 the Los Angeles Press Club honored the original columns that Hedges writes for Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year and granting him the Best Online Column award for his Truthdig essay “Party to Murder,” about the December 2008-January 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza.

Hedges is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the best-selling “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Hedges, who holds a B.A. in English literature from Colgate University and a master of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School, is fluent in Arabic and also speaks French, Spanish, Greek and Latin.

If those are the sort of credentials that you suggest make the Truthdig article suspect, you rather fit the people being described BY the article to a T.

America, land of the free, home of the illiterate.

Alan Stock is the morning host on the Las Vegas station KXNT 840 AM. Alan is a typically entertaining, well-spoken, conservative host who is usually right in line when it comes to separating the hyperbole from the pragmatic regarding political discussion…until he gets to the subject of education.

Sadly, on that topic he marches lockstep with almost every other conservative host in the country. For some reason not one of these people has ever explained why they refuse to differentiate the teachers’ union and its aims from the working teacher. In this column I will discuss why Alan and his compatriots are embarrassingly and tragically wrong in their opinion, and why this opinion is rapidly ruining this country’s future.

“All public school teachers are commie-leftists!”

This is the typical rejoinder from conservative talk hosts when pushed into a corner where anything other than private or home-school education is concerned. The problem with this is most of them have never been in a classroom since they left high school. Information about public school comes to them from what they read in Talkers Magazine and from what they hear on the assorted GOP funded talk shows. This is not what would be considered an in-depth investigation of the problem.

As a member of Nevada’s State Government I sat on the committee on education. After the session I acquired a teaching license and entered the classroom as a substitute teacher. A substitute is able to sample a variety of classrooms and schools. In this way I learned firsthand what actually went on in the schools, what the teaching staff did and felt about a variety of issues and how the students did and didn’t learn. I did this by not just sitting in classes but by talking to the teachers away from the Administration, talking to the Deans and Principles and teaching classes. The reality within this country’s schools is so far removed from what talk radio dispenses that the word “fiction” is beyond inadequate as a description. In all honesty, I cannot use the word “lie” because hosts like Alan Stock, Rush Limbaugh, Hannity and others really believe the tripe they are dishing out. Others like Glen Beck have a good handle on it but the lie has become so ingrained into the party that it is almost considered dogma.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/15748

And these articles are based on several new books on the topic of illiteracy in America. And of course also on the ABC News story on illiteracy done on February 25, 2009 called “Living in the Shadows: Illiteracy in America
Millions Live With a Crippling Secret That Affects Their Everyday Lives”

Truthdig is in fact, a rather reliable source of information. Usually sourced back to other articles. Something uncommon in the world of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

The author of the article, Chris Hedges is the former Middle Eastern bureau chief for the New York Times, is a senior fellow of The Nation Institute. An author of a huge number of books “Several with Christopher Hitchens) He is also a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, so I will trust his article reprinted in “Truth Dig” a lot more than anything that comes out of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, or Bull O’Really! He has a Masters of Divinity from Harvard, and is a regular writer for Harpers, Foreign Affairs and The New York Review of Books. Also is a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities, as well as a former Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University.

That impeccable enough credentials for me. No Republican candidate for office even comes close. The last Republican with anything like that education was William F. Buckley.

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year….

…Political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest. They only need to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. The most essential skill in political theater and the consumer culture is artifice. Those who are best at artifice succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of artifice fail. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we do not seek or want honesty. We ask to be indulged and entertained by clichés, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both…

…The ability to magnify these simple and childish lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives these lies the aura of an uncontested truth. We are repeatedly fed words or phrases like yes we can, maverick, change, pro-life, hope or war on terror. It feels good not to think…

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate

Can Sufi Islam counter the Taleban?

You see it all the time. A big recent aspect of it is the anti-Muslim rhetoric that fuels much right wing argument for the use of force, rather than diplomacy, when in fact most Muslims are rather no violent, peaceful rural villagers who are like most people. They want enough to eat, a roof over their heads, and to avoid trouble. Even that Pakistani article is not very reflective of the majority of Pakistani Muslims who mostly belong to a rather extremely peaceful branch of Islam. Most follow various Sufi mystics who preach a very non violent, contemplative form of Islam, which was rather discriminated against for a long time in the Muslim world The worship of Islam in Pakistan surrounds the various tombs and shrines of Sufi saints in that region. Benazir Bhutto’s family was closely related to one of these, and this is largely why a woman became Prime Minister in one of the world’s largest Islamic countries. This version of Islam is far older and far more widespread than the very recent Taliban school of Islam in Pakistan. The Taliban extremists are the new kids on the block in Pakistani Islam. This is MORE of what every day Islam is like in Pakistan:

It’s one o’clock in the morning and the night is pounding with hypnotic rhythms, the air thick with the smoke of incense, laced with dope.

I’m squeezed into a corner of the upper courtyard at the shrine of Baba Shah Jamal in Lahore, famous for its Thursday night drumming sessions.

It’s packed with young men, smoking, swaying to the music, and working themselves into a state of ecstasy.

This isn’t how most Westerners imagine Pakistan, which has a reputation as a hotspot for Islamist extremism.
Devotional singing

But this popular form of Sufi Islam is far more widespread than the Taleban’s version. It’s a potent brew of mysticism…

…’Love and harmony’

“Islam came to this part of the world through Sufism,” says Ayeda Naqvi, a teacher of Islamic mysticism who’s taking part in the chanting.

“It was Sufis who came and spread the religious message of love and harmony and beauty, there were no swords, it was very different from the sharp edged Islam of the Middle East.

“And you can’t separate it from our culture, it’s in our music, it’s in our folklore, it’s in our architecture. We are a Sufi country, and yet there’s a struggle in Pakistan right now for the soul of Islam.”…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7896943.stm

The large regular Sufi worship sessions more resemble Woodstock than a radical, violent religious movement. About the only thing that is winning converts to the Taliban in Pakistan has been the attack on Afghanistan and the cross border raids and missile attacks on Pakistan. More often than not, the Taliban will hold their meetings close to where these peaceful, ecstatic, Sufi weddings or religious celebrations are going in so that “collateral damage” will take out the followers of the Sufi sects that the Taliban is extremely opposed to.

No India would love to have the green light.