today brings sad tidings from our dear friend at the Times--The Week in Review. This article, with its slightly mocking tone, tut-tuts that Americans DO in the main believe in Heaven, but that it is a place much like earth, oh dear. John Edwards, lying fake psychic asshole, as opposed, of course, to John Edwards, seemingly decent but ultimately doomed politician, is named as a phenomena that supports the views in the article, without any question about his alleged and obviously fake "abilities". I guess no one at the TImes watches "South Park", which had a takedown of Edwards this season so brilliant it was painful. Including was a scene of Stan saying, directly to the camera "John Edwards, you are a fake and a fraud, and if what i'm saying isn't true, then you should sue me." Genius, one of the funniest eps they've ever done, but i digress.

Anyhoo, this article talks about American belief in Heaven (82%! Hire three more Peter Steinfels!!!!), and how we like our Heaven all soft and squishy. Michael Novak, some kind of "academic", is unhappy that there is no more fire/brimstone, like the old days. This is where i start to scratch my head. Fine, i started the moment i saw the headline, this is where i draw blood and kill lice. This guy is a fucking PHD with an expertise in Heaven? Heaven forfend, has he perhaps been there? Seen it firsthand? Has he read works by others who have been there? Seen it firsthand? Or, more likely, has he read a bunch of other people's completely random guesses, and then created "expertise" out of gobeldygook. I mean, could i become a PhD in Arcturus 7 Alpha Prime life forms? I have as much knowledge about those aliens (greenish, small, thin, shiny thing at end of finger) as he does about heaven. SHit, there are whole books devoted to this stuff!

fucking pathetic. the whole article mindlessly accepts the assumptions of the religious folk, without even realizing it is doing so. it manages to patronize those who believe this crap, while pissing off those who don't.

robert

hey everybody--look at that---a blog from the man himself!

well, back to my crap...

Thomas Powers is an erudite man, one who constructs sentences with near-surgical precision. I'm not so much like that. i will break down his extraordinary article in the NY Review of books as follows:

a) a specific case was made to go to war, with specific claims that are verifiable
b) none of those claims have been verified. zero. zilch. nada.

a comment i left on abortion at the right christians blog:

so...boring...so...obvious...

a) all agree that the "born" are individuals with enumerated rights, regardless of religion. though those rights change from society to society, again all agree that the "right to life" (e.g. the right NOT to be killed by other members of the society) is primary.
b) some people, the GREAT majority of whom are driven by their religious convictions, believe that a fetus has those same rights that any individual has in society. But many others, in fact a plurality if not a super-majority, disagree with this viewpoint. So, unlike a) what we have here is a point of major dispute. does a) apply? some say yes, some say no, but in such numbers do some say no that those that say yes, pretty much everywhere in the civilized world, have to live with the will of the majority.
c) there are 5.7 billion people on earth, of whom only 2 or less billion are in fact Christian. Of those billion plus Christians, not all agree that fetuses have the rights of an individual in a society. yet
d) those who are both Christian AND believe in the rights of the fetus as an individual believe further that their belief system, esp. on this point, must supercede the beliefs of the other 4 or so billion people on this earth, both in the micro (their society) sense, and in the macro (the rest of the world who does not share their religious belief) sense.

e) now read carefully here, because this is the key point--IF YOU THINK THAT YOUR MINORITY BELIEF SYSTEM IN A GOD THAT KILLS HIS SON FOR YOUR SINS MUST BE FOLLOWED BY ALL UNDER ANY AND ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, YOU ARE INSANE.

f) To understand this is to understand why many people HATE religion and (even worse) religiosity. just to be clear--I promise, forever, not to make your daughter have an abortion. I really do. Until i hear from Christians that they promise NOT to prevent my daughter from having a safe and healthy abortion, should she so choose, i will reserve the right to find Christians, as far as cults go, to be the most dangerous and hateful of them all.

obviously, there is a fundamental and inherent insanity in a belief system that is self-reflexively and necessarily omnipotent, and one that 4 billion people don't have any time for. So...boring...to...have...to...point...this..out...



peace,

r

Don't read if you haven't seen the Matrix yet:


here is the movie i thought/wished to see:

neo discovers it's all a trick--zion is a construct, the machine world is a construct, it's all part of one unitary supercomputer. the architect is the only "representative" of the outside world, and he tells neo/the oracle that none of it is real, that in fact, there is no "real" for neo/the humans as they have been led to believe. and that either a) neo can go and tell everyone this, destroying whatever hope they have, or b) neo reaches into THE ARCHITECT and we smash cut to some hermetic white room at JPL or something, and all of the sudden they have finally created "true" AI, or maybe c) Neo is told by The Architect, "look, do whatever the fuck you want, you have know gained total control over the Matrix, remake it in "your" image.

If I were writing the copy for the Times part I:

Somewhere, buried in the business section, is a little innocuous article about Dennis Miller being hired to do a primetime show on CNBC. No mention is made of his politics, nor of those of CNBCs various hosts.

I might have written it thusly:

"CNBC, whose hosts run the gamut from middle of the road (Keith Olbermann) to hard right Wall Street (Kudlow and Cramer), have added another conservative pundit to their line-up. Dennis Miller, who has introduced President Bush and Ahnuld in recent weeks, is slated to begin his new show in the spring. Miller has come to be known for his acerbic attacks on Democrats, particularly President Clinton, along with other Democrats. Miller's transformation from Libertarian to conservative began in 199..."

same info, all true, acknowledges the reality of CNBC. is perfectly "objective" by any measure. but nope, not a word about any of that in the Times' article. SCLM indeed.

David Brooks is doing that damn thing that seems to be epidemic these days--Chris Rock said it best when he exclaimed to Ann Coulter "you just make shit up!". At the end of an up-and-down seeming attack on the GOP (though he manages to posit that only McCain, Gramm and Novak are heroes in this case of Boeing "leaseback"--what, no Dems on that list, what a shock) Brooks pines for the days of Gingrich, when the Republicans were young and angry. The question (and it's damn near metaphysical) is simple: is Brooks aware of the facts, of Gingrich's district regularly being ranked in the top three pork receivers while he was speaker? Or that Reps spread it around EVEN MORE THICKLY than Dems? Or that Red States get more than they give? I figure he does know this (sorry about reading your mind David, but one becomes cynical about your ilk these days)--Gingrich was a legendary feather-bedder, and i'm sure David has been to one or more lectures at some Gingrichian Institute of Funny Walks down there in Georgia...

Brooks has had a chance to be an important voice of conservative reason on the Times Op-Ed, an antidote to the insanity of Safire (who makes really dangerous shit up), the wishy-washy yucky neo-liberalism of Kristof, the...someone help me out with how to sum up Friedman, someone? Fat chance. Just another guy who would rather score a point than have one.

Why I hate hockey, a sport I used to love more than any other to watch.

The first in a series of very occasional sports posts...

2-1 final scores are great in soccer, but hockey's scoring dearth is depressing. the game has been ruined by
a) steroids, which in turn have led to players who are TOO FUCKING BIG. If i want to watch football, i will. I'm sick of every player looking like a linebacker, with hands that match the profile. 6'6" 245 is NOT hockey size.
b) rink size. they are too small. in part, this has to do with a, cuz bigger players take up more room on the ice, obviously. but still, a bigger euro style rink would make for more scoring and skating. course, you would have to get rid of some seats (and premium seats!) so fat fucking chance.
c) goalie equipment. too much too big. every year they say they are making stuff smaller, but come on--goalies should look the way JD did in 1979.
d) bad rule changes. the NHL made several changes to slow down the Oilers in the 80s (couldn't have too many stanley cup games in CAnada now could we?). some of those rules were idiotic--what the hell is wrong with a two line pass? of course, no one can get around to changing the rules back to when hockey was...exciting.
e) a diminished talent pool, though in fact a) is the root of this. i'm sure there are plenty of 5'11" guys languishing in lower divisions or in europe...
f) coaches who are afraid of their own shadows. Anyone with knowledge of Italian Serie A soccer from the 70s knows that catenaccio grew out of coaches worried about getting fired, so thus, play for the 0-0 and you are better off. hockey is thick with coaches who play not to lose, and that leads up to..
g) the trap. the worst thing in hockey, other than a).

fuck it, i can't watch it any more, and it really does make me sad. farbeit from Bettman et. al. to learn from baseball--what energized baseball more than any in modern history? why, it was a home run race between mcgwire and sosa, probably juiced up with the tightest wound baseball since 1930.

my two cents.

Seymour Hersh, in his (as usually is the case) excellent article in The New Yorker says this:

"The government of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, President Bush’s closest ally, was also brought in. As Blair later told a British government inquiry, he and Bush had talked by telephone that summer about the need “to disclose what we knew or as much as we could of what we knew.” Blair loyally took the lead: on September 24th, the British government issued a dossier dramatizing the W.M.D. threat posed by Iraq. In a foreword, Blair proclaimed that “the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam . . . continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.” The dossier noted that intelligence—based, again, largely on the sismi report—showed that Iraq had “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” A subsequent parliamentary inquiry determined that the published statement had been significantly toned down after the C.I.A. warned its British counterpart not to include the claim in the dossier, and in the final version Niger was not named, nor was sismi [ITalian intelligence]. "

Bob Somersby over at the (nearly always) excellent Daily Howler harped for weeks on this particular aspect of the NIger scandal--that Bush's "sixteen words" were NOT in fact a reference to NIger, because Bush repeated Blair's claims that "Sadaam has sought nuclear materials in Africa (emphasis mine)" as opposed to specifically saying Niger, and thus all reporting on Bush's words that didn't clarify this was misleading, lazy, or possibly worse. I think this is important because this is the first time the press, EVEREVEREVER, got around to actually dealing with Bush's raging mendacity, taking a meme from the blogworld and making it mainstream (as always, Paul Krugman gets honorable exception...). But in truth, as one reads the above, it seems clear (and to me has forever seemed clear) that the Niger claim WAS the Africa claim--that is, there was no other evidence to which Blair or anyone else could refer. NOw, ex post facto, vague and hopeful bits of spin were thrown out there by Cheney and others about some third country in AFrica, but none was ever named, no evidence was ever offered--e.g. just more bullshit. So, it seems clear that it was in fact reasonable to assume that Niger=Africa for the sake of this argument, and that sometimes, even my heroes like Somersby can have feet of clay.

Parsing the Times part MDMCXVIII:

So on the cover, we get a story that Bush is saying that THE PHILLIFUCKINGPINES are our template for Iraq. The times reporter in classic "while some claim the earth is round, others believe it is flat" mode gently points out around para 32 that it took 50 or so years for us to leave them to their good graces after our splendid little war. And in para 31 that the precipitating incident, REMEMBER THE MAINE, was bogus.

what they don't mention is that after 50 years, we ended up with Ferdinand Marcos, and the lovely and talented Imelda, fascists who raped and pillaged their own country to the tune of a billion or so dollars. Oh, and if you think this is old news, there was a military coup attempt 3 months ago too. Great fucking template, moron-in-chief. I wish i knew how to curse someone in Tagalog.

Michael Newdow is my hero. Someone should give this guy a fucking medal. He is smart and well spoken, and he doesn't believe in supremedeitythatlivesintheskyandknowseverything. support him here.

This was written, maybe, by Norman Rush and you should click there and buy his new book. Even if he didn't send me this. Like i think, maybe, he did.

US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."

Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.

"They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.

The destruction of the fruit trees took place in the second half of last month but, like much which happens in rural Iraq, word of what occurred has only slowly filtered out. The destruction of crops took place along a kilometre-long stretch of road just after it passes over a bridge.

Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic English for compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: "Tens of poor families depend completely on earning their life on these orchards and now they became very poor and have nothing and waiting for hunger and death."

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."

Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth."

read it here

Comment: Every now and then we hear reports of "friendly fire" or other "accidents." They're not, and they're not "mistakes" or "bad judgment" by some troops or other, either. If I throw a match onto a mattress soaked with kerosene and it lights up, we don't call it an "accident." It's a predictable consequence, as are all of these: the Iraqi cops killed by "friendly fire," etc. When you occupy a nation by armed force, against resistance, the way you do it is to kill people every now and then. If you go around asking if they're the right people to kill, it's already too late. So right now the U.S. military is in the business of killing Iraqis or destroying their property: pour encourager les autres, as the saying goes.

It's important to understand, therefore, that despite what all the pundits and middle-of-the-road Democrats say, the United States has absolutely NO "responsibility" to help rebuild Iraq. That's like saying that after burglars have trashed a house, they have a responsibility to stay and help the householders clean it up--just love to have you guys around. Or after a rapist has impregnated a woman, he should move in and help her raise the child. No--the "responsibility" of the invader is to dis-invade and get OUT--and then, of course, pay what's owed to compensate for the destruction. Who should be rebuilding is the only people who did not support the invasion and consequent destruction--the U.N. With the money the U.S. owes for the job. But of course the U.N. cannot and should not possibly do this until the opponent of peaceful reconstruction, the guys who want to do it all their way for their own profit and fuck the Iraqis--namely the U.S. Bush Administration--are out of there. And if the U.N. can't do it either, that's too bad, history is sometimes disastrous. But the people who brought about the disaster in the first place can only pile more on top of it by pursuing the agenda that brought it about in the first place. That many Iraqis are grateful for the chance at building democracy is a good thing; but they won't have that chance in the present course of events, whether or not they realize that--as more of them every day are indicating they do.

U.S. Out. U.N. In.

So i read the ever-irritating Gregg Easterbrook, whose column runs in the Not so liberal republic, in which he feels compelled to blame Kill Bill on those damn Jews that run Disney (and by extension, Hollywood), particularly as regards to its violent content.

some truth to the fiction:

the head of film at Disney, Dick Cook, is a non-Jew, as are 80% at least of the board of directors (led of course by Roy Disney, non-Jew and son of Walt, non-Jew-fan). Sony is run by the Japanese (not Jews as far as i know), Fox is run by Rupert Murdoch, non-Jew-non-pareil, Paramount is owned by Viacom, a cabal of non-Jews if ever there was one, though what about TW, you say? Dick Parsons, not a Jew. MGM is run by Armenians, so blame Silence of the Lambs and hannibal on them, or something.

and re-read my dad's anti-semitism piece, clearly relevant once again...

posted here by me:
no one seems concerned that Plame's networks--networks that were specifically targeted towards WMD proliferation--were rolled up. forget, for a moment, the politics of this. republican, democrat, it matters not. here is what should concern every american--a specialist whose entire job was to smoke out those who could hurt us most, e.g. terrorists or rogue states with WMD, particularly nuclear ones, has been outed, and her network most likely has been rounded up. one can only speculate, but chances are "rounded up" is a euphemism for killed. And let's say that there is a 10% chance that one of those sources who has now been burned was pursuing, oh, say a lost Ukrainian stockpile of enriched uranium, or a belarussian missile that "fell off the back of a truck" or so on. and that trail is now cold. and that missile or material is later used against us.

this is why this story matters. this is why this offense should be punishable as treason (and the death penalty should be an option--i say this as someone firmly opposed to it but in this case if it exists it should be used as a scare tactic), this is what Bush 41 was saying in his now famous quote. Now the partisan in me could take this mighty far, and say that it perfectly encompasses everything that i fear and loathe about our administration, its secretiveness, its mendacity, its inability to discern the difference between moral rectitude and political success... but it doesn't matter. even minus that last sentence EVERY person of moral character, right/left/inbetween, should be enraged by this, and by bush's lack of caring about it.

Fun with the NY Times part 74:

the Sunday edition lead photo was of a bunch of Iraqi children being taught football, American-style, by our troops in Iraq. Yes, i can just see the day when Ahmed and Yousef get the thousand dollars necessary for their helmet/shoulder pads/knee pads, not to mention goalposts etc. oh, and steroids, they will need those too. of course, it shouldn't surprise anyone to note that Iraqi children DO love football, only the kind where are you need is a ball and a flat area, i.e. soccer. And in fact, the MLS did give Iraqi kids a ton of balls/goals/shoes etc., to their credit. but there is something so quintessentially empire-ish about that photo--you know, bringing cricket to the natives and all that...

Also, a question about the Victoria Plame/Wilson affair, best followed here via Josh Marshall: is it true, as some have alleged, that in being "outed" as she was, her network has been "rolled up"? (that means killed in spookspeak)

because if so, rove or whomever did this--but it has to be rove--has blood on his hands and should be spending 10 years in jail, which is in fact the maximum punishment possible for publicly naming a CIA officer.

scum, all of them.

So once again i see Viet Dinh's name in the news. As it happens, before Viet was on Ken Starr's prosecutorial star chamber, before he wrote the Patriot Act (I'm not joking, he is in fact the author of that particular ineffective abomination), I had the pleasure of having a long dinner and debate with him when he was but a 24 superstar on the rise. AT that point, he was Sandra DAy O'Connor's law clerk, had graduated from law school, and had written a screed on affirmative action and its negative implications that had caused much delight amongst the hard right.

Viet was up for a job with a prestigious law firm (Munger, Tolles and Olson) in downtown LA, and my girlfriend's father had invited him to a dinner with the partners. Foolishly, i was invited along with my girlfriend. I went and read Viet's affirmative action article--it was risibly polemical with little independent thought or analysis--a basic partisan hack job. I guess that he was young and a prodigy and an immigrant (vietnamese, obviously) made the righties care overmuch about the article, but i didn't get it. so at the dinner, which was supposed to be a "kiss viet's ass fest", i engaged him on his views. I asked, "have you considered that perhaps white folk get some help from legacy admissions policies at universities?". No, he said, hadn't thought of that. Huh. I asked him about job nepotism--the old boy's network tends to bring in those that are its like--e.g. white folk, in the main. No, he hadn't thought of that either. I asked him to look around at the partners of MT and O--notice anything, Viet? Bunch of white men looking to hire one semi-dark skinned right-winger to give "balance"--did that bother him? at this point well over 15,000 dollars per hour of lawyer were staring bullets at me, but the Petrus was flowing and i wasn't backing down. I told Viet that a college drop out could rip mile wide holes through his argument while drunk, and given how obviously brilliant he was, this was a sad statement on what unadulterated ideological rigidity could do to anyone.

He sort of acknowleged my point. I felt like a winner.

later, i decided to try to produced movies. He impeached a president and rewrote the constitution. i guess i didn't win so much.

Watching NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS is disturbing. To see what an actual alert and forthright left-wing press could be on TV--it is more than a breath of fresh air. How it is possible that no one from neither MSNBC nor CNN can see the obvious market to be cornered truly boggles. This is a case where the corporatist and rightist meme is SO STRONG that it actually overcomes the capitalist one. I can't think of many other places in our society where this can be said. Instead one right wing voice after another is added to the former (and watching JEsse Ventura on Bill Maher, one know-nothing voice after another) and the latter goes for "personality" TV with second rate and soft anchors. There is a desperate desire for a true left wing voice on tv, one that is unabashed in its pursuit of its agenda, as dogged as Fox but without the palaver about being "fair and balanced." I could even forgive Fox TV some of its dissembling if they just would ADMIT that this is right-wing TV, all the time. Then you would know that honest voices were being heard, even if you didn't necessarily agree with them. FOR FUCK'S SAKE, ROGER FUCKING AILES RUNS THE NETWORK!!!! surely it would be not overly difficult for him to stop lying for the seconds long enough to say, "Yeah we are the right now get over it". But he just can't admit it, just can't tell the truth. A strong left wing voice, presenting facts like Moyers was tonight, tough but fair (and almost literally eviscerating ex-non-jellyfish Christine Whitman, wow what a devastating presentation) that can make OUR arguments is absolutely priceless. Our voices need, require, such a thing to happen.

so i'm off to make 200 million or so and to make it happen. wish me luck.

more NPR fun! for all your friends!!!

sometimes the targeting on ad-based demographics becomes so disturbingly...accurate? terrifying?...NPR's "All things Considered" sponsored by (not going to mention "commercial free" will let that pass) THE DEAD, no, not the ultimate film of John Huston's career, but rather the warmed over rehashed LSD besotted meta-wankery of messieurs Lesh et al--e.g. the Jerry Garcia lickspittle brass band. words fail.

fucking pathetic.

better than dealing with the horror festival which is our administration, at least for a day. now leave me alone.

so this morning on NPR i hear some woman who is a honcho in the republican party here in California continually (or continuously, or quite possibly both) refer to the "democrat" party without rebuke from the reporter. How can a professional reporter let this wack-job right-wing Rush limbaugh renaming of one of the TWO major parties in our country go unchallenged? for those who don't know, far right elements of the republican party feel that called the Democrats the "Democratic" party is a bridge too far, and that they should be known as the "Democrat" party.

I have never suggested that the Republican party be called, for instance, the "no talent ass clown" party, or "Antonin Scalia's bitches", or the "2nd in votes, 1st in gerrymandering" party etc.

not me, nope.

"Donald Rumsfeld was right yesterday when he said that anyone who criticizes the administration is giving comfort to the terrorists. If we learned anything from September 11, it’s that dissent cannot be tolerated in a free society. If we resolutely fall in unquestioning lockstep behind our leader and approach this crisis like serious Christians and Jews, then we can beat back this tide of autocratic religious fundamentalism that threatens to engulf us all. "

Yet more proof that Neal Pollack is the greatest writer in the history of seriocomic political post-modern meta-blogdom, perhaps the greatest -dom of them all.

I agree that it is important that you buy his book, which may or may not prove to be the greatest book ever written, based upon how good it will be.

As Atrios is reporting, it looks as if CNN has removed their wolf blitzer question of the day. the obvious reason is of course that the poll keeps getting responses skewed against the fool, or president, or whatever we are calling him these days.

of course, it would never ever ever ever ever occur to CNN that maybe, JUST MAYBE, this is because they have a groundswell of more progressive viewers? that maybe, just maybe, being an actual counterpoint to msnfoxbc news might lead to an increase in neilsens? of course, one could argue that accurately presenting actual news items would lead to the same result, but i think that is even more of a fantasy than seeing them pull to the left.

a boy can dream.

fun back and forth with the columbia journalism review regarding their crappy article by David Greenberg, ably destroyed by Bob Somersby at the daily howler.

first my post to them, then their reply. enjoy.



On Fri, 5 Sep 2003 rgreen@mediaventures.com wrote:

> i would assume, after reading www.dailyhowler.com
> 's quite vicious and entirely accurate
> take down of Mr. Greenberg's article regarding lies and journalism,
> that you might either want to a) issue a retraction (given the
> vacuousness and inaccuracy of greenberg's work) or b) hang your heads
> in shame. either way, a sad day for journalism when even CJR can't
> come within 100 miles of intelligent analysis of the most important
> issue of our day.
>
> i am both a creator and consumer of media, and i have finally managed
> to start reading articles as mendacious and absurd as greenberg's (and
> i will not bother to enumerate the list of mistakes and shoddy
> analysis contained therein, Mr. Somersby does that more than well
> enough) while seeing their emptiness as i read, rather than having
> that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach afterwards. I tend to
> assume (partially based, i admit, on Stanley Rothman's rather
> tendentious survey from 1980 that started this whole thing) that many
> on the board of CJR are in fact Democrats, maybe even (the love that
> dare not speak its name) liberals. Your slavish devotion to
> "fairness" has led to a weird and sick kind of self-hatred that is all
> too perfectly crystallized in greenberg's piece. you should all take
> a nice long weekend in the Hamptons to think about what has gone wrong
> both with journalism in this country and with your own work.
>
> best,
>
>
> Robert Green

Hi Mr. Green. Jeez, you're a self-important kind of guy, aren't you? And a little pretentious? I'm actually going to a ball game. bye.

Mike Hoyt, CJR


Well, they got me good.

Music, ripping, burning and so on, is today's topic. there is an excellent thread over at ATrios on this issue today, but i have a slightly different take. i, like many others, have managed to digitize my entire CD collection. I have approximately 12,000 songs now on my hard drive. I don't share them, a bit because i'm not comfortable with file sharing on that scale and also for security reasons. However, my 40 gigs worth of music, carefully filed and tagged, is easily, in less than a half hour, transferred to a 40 or 60 or whatever gig hard drive via either firewire or USB 2.0. All someone has to do is spend around 120 dollars for the drive, come over, copy the music, and "hey presto" they now are the proud owner of over a thousand CDs worth of music. As the memory technology gets increasingly cheaper and easier and better, i think THIS is the area where the record companies are screwed. people will just exchange memory sticks that will be credit card sized and hold a terabyte and cost probably 30 bucks, all within 10 years or less.

http://community.aarp.org/n/mb/listsf.asp?webtag=rp-legislative&ctx=128

seniors slugging it out over the AARP--well worth the read. Don't piss old people off, that's the lesson I learned...

More fun from the Times today (in case you, and by you i mean the no one that reads this blog):

Two stories--one, the removal of the Ten Commandments stone from the courthouse. i think the weirdest thing about this particular story is the actual content of the commandments themselves. the first four are all self-reflexive--graven image, the sabbath, no other god but me etc. I sometimes think that too many people allow themselves to believe that the ten commandments are all actual legal stuff, and forget that they are also some really pernicious narcissistic bullshit that deserves nothing but the scorn of any intelligent person. thou shalt not kill is a good idea, sure, but it is also something called COMMON SENSE, and can easily be detached from the rest of the commandments, indeed can be detached from the realm of religion (which has done quite a bit of killing in its time, oh yes) and put into the realm of...law. listening to the sadly deluded and sick individuals who are defending judge moore suggests we are getting closer to civil war than many would want to believe in this country. oh, and did i mention that 300 of our fine representatives felt it was necessary to effectively support Judge Moore? sigh. No talent ass clowns, every one.

on the same page (and it's all about juxtapositions this week) we have the continuing debacle of the Houston school system, where all statistics were inflated regarding graduation rates, college rates etc. All done in the name of getting fundie Christian asshole Rod Paige the job of secretary of education under faux fundie born again president george bush. well, that worked, he's there now, spewing forth religiosity from his "pulpit" as sec of ed, a position which oversees public schools, ostensibly the home of the separation of church and state. double sigh. it turns out that everything that paige claimed about the school system he ran was false. it was and remains a disaster where kids are learning nothing. quote of the day:

"Ashleigh Blackmon, a graduate of Yates in 2002, said she did not for a moment believe all her classmates were planning on college but was not sure her school's claims did any harm.

"It doesn't mean anything, because who cares?" she said, and then paused. "But it could mean they lie about a lot more of other things."

No shit, Ashleigh, they sure could.

So the two lead NY Times editorials today say that a) the patriot act is bad and b) dynastic regimes in obscure countries are bad. you know, azerbaijan and all that, some guy giving his kid the job of prime minister. that kind of stuff. but in the first editorial, the writer speaks of Lisa Murkowski's efforts to overturn parts of patriot. good for her and all, but um, didn't her dad Frank hand her his senate seat? goose, gander? pot, kettle? I'm no expert on nepotism, as my father uselessly DOES NOT RUN A MOVIE STUDIO (grumble grumble), but i'm pretty sure there ain't a dime's worth of difference between what Aliyev is doing and what Murkowski has done.

So, remember when you were around, say, 16? And it seemed like little old middle class you was NEVER going to get a date with mary fingerpants, because the other guys had cars already and nicer houses and flash clothing and so on? But you finally worked up your nerve to ask Mary out, and to your surprise, she kind of liked you enough to say, "sure why not?"

so you racked your brain for what you could do with basically no money and no car...maybe hang out downtown and go to a movie? Mary, piqued by your dashing good looks, figured, "why not?" so it was a date. Friday night. Come Thursday, you got nervous (perhaps partially motivated by all your...level, shall we say, of friends, saying "is she really going out with him?"), and happened to chat with her again. "Are we still on?", you asked pensively... and again, Mary was completely on board. "It will be great, i'm so looking forward to it..."

Life seemed good, if only for a minute.

But then Friday rolled around, and Jimmy Testojockorich had tickets, wouldn't you know it, to the Rolling Stones concert! That night! At the _____ Civic Center! And he asked Mary to go with him! maybe 25 rows back, not dead center or anything, and yeah, sure, the STones at this point hadn't recorded a non shitty song in let's say 15 years at that point. But Mary came to you that afternoon and, all sweet and lovely, said "look, it's THE ROLLING STONES! You have to understand! And hey, we can still go out next week, unless i'm really really busy or something...and anyway, here are some extra tickets I have for a show at the movie theater, you totally take them"

and pussy that you were, what did you do? You said, "oh sure that's ok, i totally understand." Your friends were unsurprised, to put it mildly, but happy to have you for another night of smoking weed and wishing you were getting laid.

This scenario played out in almost perfect symmetry this week on a movie i was about to produce. It was going to shoot in September, but a certain actor who will remain nameless (you know who you are) decided to, in spite of HAVING A CONTRACT with us, choose another movie for the same date.

whatever, we will shoot in january. Mary, you will be mine.

i like this football team, and you should too. and hey, they won today! And they were kind enough to do so while my baby (guaranteed cuteness or your money back) refused to sleep. very zen of everybody.

the world remains a fucking nightmare today, so there's that update. Have a nice day everyone!

I'm a member of this organization, and you should be too.

The following is an e-mail going around--major elements of "kids get off my damn lawn" but some good stuff as well. worth a read.




Frank Pierson is a writer/director. He is presently president of the

Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences and formally the president of the

Writers Guild of America, West. He has directed a Star is Born, Citizen

Cohn, Conspiracy, and most recently the critically acclaimed Soldier's

Girl which is playing on Showtime. His writing credits include Cat

Ballou, Cool Hand Luke and the Oscar winning Dog Day Afternoon.




Frank's speech to graduating students:



I've been around a long time. As I look out at all of you graduating

today, I think back to my graduations. All the kids in my graduating

class from elementary school are dead.



All the people in my junior high school graduation are dead.



All the people in my high school graduation are dead.



The people I graduated from college with are all mostly dead.



Are you all feeling okay?



You will soon be the Hollywood of tomorrow, and I'm here to give you a

little taste of the past. And my sense of the future you face.



Hollywood was once a small company town, where everybody knew everybody,

and if you dropped your pants at a party or punched a reporter or danced

with a prostitute in the parking lot, it wasn't on Entertainment

Tonight-tonight. It was even hard to get arrested. Every studio had a

publicity department which paid the Los Angeles cops to stay away from

show business people. The police didn't arrest movie people. They drove

them home.



We all went down to the film factories every day-at Warner Brothers even

actors, directors and writers punched a time clock until the mid

forties. We ate in the studio commissary, where the writers' table was

preferred seating because the jokes were better there. If the New York

writers were in town, slumming, sneering at the movies and cashing big

fat paychecks you found yourself sitting next to Dorothy Parker or F.

Scott Fitzgerald. You could wander off to a sound stage and watch John

Huston or Willy Wyler shooting a scene with Bogart or Hepburn or Peck.

No security. We all knew each other.



It was up close, and personal.



In the thirties screenwriters formed a union. Their first and only

demand was that producers give writing credit only to writers who

actually worked on the film. They were denounced on the floor of

Congress. Variety said they were Communists. Darryl Zanuck, the head of

Twentieth-Century Fox, dictated a letter for all of his contract writers

to sign. It was on their desks when they arrived for work; a letter of

resignation from the new Guild. With it was a note from Zanuck ordering

them to join a union Twentieth -Century Fox was forming especially for

them. If anybody refused they were fired.



Philip Dunne, an ex-New Yorker writer, and one of Fox's major talents,

went to Zanuck and told him nobody was quitting the Guild. Furthermore,

he pointed out that if Zanuck fired all the writers who were Guild

members, he would be firing the front line of his championship polo team.



It was the start of the Writers' Guild.



Up Close and personal. We knew the boss. And we certainly knew who was

boss.



Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia, was a legendary bully, who admired

Mussolini and had his office designed to resemble Mussolini's-with a long

approach into blinding lights, and himself behind a desk, raised a foot

above the floor, ranks of Oscars his studio had won behind him.



He said he made only pictures that he wanted to see, and once the public

stopped wanting to see what he liked, he'd quit. Not for him delegating

decisions to demographers, pollsters and marketing experts. Nobody knew

what a demographer was in those days.



In the sixties, when the old glove salesmen and carnival touts who built

the studios began to grow old and retire to play golf or try to gamble

away their fortunes, their grip on the business loosened. For a while

independent producers flourished. New companies, new writers and

directors burst the bonds of studio imposed style and discarded the

habits of the stage.



In this fluid and diversified atmosphere there was freedom and

creativity, and a minimum of bureaucratic control. The sixties and the

seventies produced movies now looked upon as a Golden Age, The Godfather,

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dr. Strangelove, The Taxi Driver,

Chinatown, Clockwork Orange, Annie Hall, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance

Kid, Midnight Cowboy, Mash, All the Presidents' Men, Network, Bonnie &

Clyde, and a couple I like, Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke. Even

Easy Rider a wild card that symbolized the anarchistic spirit of that

drug ridden time was a Columbia Studio release.



Then, on Wall Street, it began to be noticed that a single blockbuster

movie could make in a weekend what a substantial business made in a year.



Warner Brothers was bought by Seven Arts, Seven Arts was bought by Kinney

Services, which consisted of a chain of mortuaries and liveries, and the

whole mess now is owned by America Online/Time/Warner along with HBO,

Warner Books, Turner networks and CNN. Viacom owns Paramount, CBS,

Showtime Cable and the Blockbuster chain of video stores. Of the 100-odd

primetime shows that will premiere on the four networks this fall and

winter, more than 30-including CBS newsmagazines-will be made by one or

another company owned by Viacom. Another 25 or so will be made by Rupert

Murdoch's News Corp, which owns Fox network. That is almost fifty

percent of the new shows controlled by two companies, one owned by a man

notorious for his micro management, narrow right-wing political

philosophy, and his willingness to use his ideological power.



We had been having too much fun to notice -the barbarians were inside the

gate. The polo games, the writers' table, Jack Warner's lunch time

tennis matches with Errol Flynn, the cops as our friends, all were a

thing of the past. We began to see Harvard Business School MBAs sit in

on story conferences.



Lawyers multiplied.



As the huge debt created by mergers was added to the rising costs of

making little but blockbusters, the risks of making a film forced the

businessmen to be risk averse, to play to the least critical audience:



Teen-age boys with disposable income.



The problem is how to keep this "average" moviegoer, male, 16 to 25, high

school education at best, doesn't read books, gets his news from the

eleven o'clock news if he bothers at all, never heard of Mussolini and

thinks Korea is another part of downtown LA-this couch potato, this

pimply undereducated oversexed slob with the attention span of a

chicken-how do we keep him awake and interested, while staying awake and

interested ourselves.



We have to remind ourselves that this viewer is only another aspect of

ourselves, that we have also in us-as he does-a better part, that needs

to be cultivated and to express itself. There is no single audience with

a single personality. There is the larger audience-currently

under-served-that has vast variety of appetites that we can, we must,

satisfy.



We do manage every year to make a few films that satisfy both the lower

appetite for thrills and excitement and at the same time provide the

deeper satisfactions of art and truth for the viewers who are equipped to

experience it.



To reach and touch the angel in the beast.



Everything else is just working for wages.




In justice there are great things that have been achieved by these

companies-in 1960 to see a black, a Latino on the stage floor except as

an occasional supporting actor would have been unthinkable. Now the mid

level of the corporate bureaucracy and the working place are far freer

and inclusive.



What has happened in Hollywood has happened to us all, because the focus

of international business has shifted from production to distribution.

And further-whoever controls distributions shapes what is produced-to

what will fit under the seat or in the overhead compartment.



Agribusinesses have Kamikaze researchers trying to produce cube shaped

tomatoes easier to pack in boxes (and that will taste like the boxes if

past experience teaches us anything) And of course we already have milk

that all goes sour the same day. Watch the odd, the old, the personal,

the traditional, the idiosyncratic, the family made or the regional

disappear from supermarket shelves that are rented by the foot to

international companies that then stock them with their own water and

sugar products.



Our defense is the farmers' market, the yard sale, the auctions. We had

hopes for the Internet, but that's being turned into a marketing tool.

In the field of entertainment and the arts our last defense may be Tivo

and the remote control.



Liberal critics have raised the alarm over corporate censorship, the

exclusion from theaters and TV of anything except what seems marketable

and the eliminations of anything that might offend somebody anywhere.

But the danger of censorship in America is less from business or the

religious right or the self righteous left, than to self-censorship by

artists themselves, who simply give up. If we can't see a way to get our

story told, what is the point of trying? I wonder how many fine,

inspiring ideas in every walk of life are strangled in the womb of the

imagination because there's no way past the gates of commerce?



This has not happened to us without warning. A rancorous idealist living

in London during the Industrial Revolution wrote the following:



"Corporate globalization has left remaining no other connection between

man and man than naked self interest, than callous 'cash payment.' in

place of chartered freedoms [it] has set up a single unconscionable

freedom called Free Trade. It has converted the physician, the lawyer,

the Priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage laborers.



By the immensely facilitated means of communication, corporate

globalization draws even the most barbarian nations into civilization.

The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it

batters down all Chinese walls.



This constant change, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations,

everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the present from all

past times."





I've cheated a little. In this "quote," I have substituted the phrase

"Corporate Globalization" for the word "Bourgeoisie." The actual

quotation is from Karl Marx, in the Communist Manifesto.



Marx's idea of how to solve the problems he raised we now know to be

fatally flawed, establishing as deadly a repressive society as the one it

briefly replaced, and as dull and one-size-fits-all as the one

globalopoly threatens to smother us with now.



Marx went on to say this: "All that is solid melts into thin air, all

that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober

sense the real conditions of life and his relations with his kind."



Could any conservative preacher state the case more clearly or with more

passion?



You can seize the opportunity to set about meeting Marx's challenge-to do

something about it.



You are now our future, and this is the challenge you face. It is a

bigger challenge than it seems because you cannot recapture something you

never knew. It is your gargantuan task to create this spirit out of thin

air, in the face of resistance and lack of interest, in your own style

and out of your own imagination. Something new and as yet unknown.



To the studios the art of film and TV is a by product of their main

business, a side effect, and like side effects, more likely to be a

noxious nuisance than a benefit. I cry out to you to become a noxious

nuisance, to make a personal investment of passion. It is a moral

responsibility that arises from the role of movies in society.



Movies are more than a commodity. Movies are to our civilization what

dreams and ideals are to individual lives: they express the mystery and

help define the nature of who we are and what we are becoming.



You must become writers with ideas and passion, who write with force and

conviction; you must become directors who have minds enriched by your

lives and not a library of stunts and special effects. Be critics

centered in you feelings and ideas in the culture and society, not in

comparing grosses and applauding computer generated ballets of violence.



Go and make a cinema and TV that express our history and our ideas, and

that foster respect for a civilization in real danger of self

destruction. Be decision makers with dreams and hopes instead of raw

ambition. Tell stories that illuminate our times and our souls.




That waken the sleeping angel inside the beast.



We need this from you as we need clean drinking water and roads, green

parks and libraries; it is as important as the breath of democratic

life. Somehow we need to keep alive in our hearts the vision of

community, shared interests and understanding of our neighbors' needs,

the sense of connection this fractionated society is losing.



We need to recapture the spirit of Main Street. Up close.



And personal.



That is both your challenge-and your opportunity.



God speed and good luck.



We count on you.

My dad says this, and me, all i do is agree:

Since thinking about Iraq these days based on what we get from the American media is like thinking about the invasion of Czechoslovakia based on what you read in Tass or Pravda, immense irritation plus a sense of hubris impel me to set down semi-publicly what ought to be obvious (but apparently aren't) thoughts.

At the present moment the President and his sycophants, such as (for Times readers) the self-inflated fanatic and terminally brain-dead Thomas Friedman ("Fanatic: a man who redoubles his effort as his goal recedes"--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary) are talking about having "won the war" but needing to "win the peace." This is the exact opposite of what has actually happened/is actually happening. To begin with, there never was a "war" between the US and Iraq. There was a coup d'etat, that is, a violent regime change, imposed on behalf of its alleged sponsors (the notional "democratic council") by an invading army--a rare but not unique event (cf., the attempts in Mexico 1913, Soviet Union 1919). This coup was a partial success, as such things are measured. The tyrannical regime was indeed overthrown, the first goal of any coup. The second goal, to install a new regime in its place, is not yet realized, not even close; and if this goal is moralized, as by the pseudo-neo-libs Berman and Hitchens, e.g., it is a failure. Overall, based on what we can see there's no reason to believe that life in Iraq--e.g., public health, life expectancy, freedom from fear, etc.--is any better than under the tyrant, or that improving on this situation will in the long run cost less in material and personal destruction than would have been accomplished by awaiting any other eventuality for Saddam's regime.

The coup having thus failed, at least in the short run, the War then began. That is, what the pundits and soi-disant experts call winning the peace is actually its exact opposite, namely, winning the ongoing war, a many-sided civil war in which the invading force functions as one among several combatants. Compared to the invasion/coup, the conduct of the war is so far an even more abject failure, if we consider what has been happening to the aims of the war:

1) Finding and eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction. This aim has been lost. If there weren't any WMD's, the aim was unattainable, and if there were, the Iraqis were better at hiding them than the invaders at finding them. Zero, for both effort and accomplishment.

2) Advancing in the "war on terrorism" by broadening it. This aim has also come to worse than nothing. Predictably (I can say this since so many of us in fact made this prediction, and any modesty on this score would be false) the fight against "terrorism" has been set back; its sources remain obscure, and whoever it is continues to strike almost at will. Zero again.

3) The main material goal of any war stemming from an invasion is to pacify the occupied territory so that it can be exploited by the conquerors, in this case both by securing its resources (oil) and using it as a buffer against neighbors (Iran, the Palestinians). This goal too is at the moment receding: casualties are mounting among the invaders (they are now higher than during the invasion phase, ie, during what the Friedman types call the "peace"--you'd think they might ponder that fact, wouldn't you?--don't bother); and the populations who've been volunteered for the role of exploitee somehow aren't cooperating. Pacification is about where it was in Vietnam.

On all of these grounds, Hobbes is laughing bitterly in his grave. However, the war is by no means yet "lost," since I haven't yet mentioned its real, and over-arching goals. The first of these was to destroy all international institutional arrangements that resist or might resist domination by the imperial United States; it remains to be seen if this may bet be accomplished, as the hammer comes down on France, Germany, Turkey, etc. Second, and above all, the only true ultimate goal of the invasion and then the war was/is to elect George Bush President in 2004, thus finally legitimizing his rule and, retrospectively, the coup of 2000 (predecessor for the coup of 2003). Since in his own words he does not care how many Iraqis, young working-class Americans and Brits, or international civil servants have to die to accomplish this aim ("bring them on"), he may well win out in the end, turning (as is so often the case) the worse into the better. If I were tempted by cretinous religiosity, I'd say that I was praying every day for this not to happen. Though it might be nice to be religious, since if there were a "god" the one thing we could hazard for sure is that it would not be "on the side of" deranged, self-aggrandizing, assassins--who nowadays are plentiful wherever there is a "god" to be invoked.

sorry, learning how to do this. you can buy my dad's books, they are not lumped together on amazon but are well worth the search.

Something else to mention: the idea for the blog title comes, of course, from the great Brian Eno album of the same name (is it eponymous or not? i'm confused.). that was my idea.

soon i will tell my father of what i have done, and he will be angry, and the mighty winds will roar etc.

Mostly this blog is a way to get my dad to stop sending e-mails to the 20 people who agree with him about everything, and get the thoughts to a broader audience. He is on the editorial board of The Nation magazine, was a political science professor for 35 plus years at Smith College, and has won several awards, some of them possibly even involving what he does for a living. You can buy his books here: if you are so inclined. i may or may not add to this blog depending on if even one person starts reading it. give me an audience and we shall see.