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"troglodyte homonculous"

brilliant.

did you know that we consume 200 billion hours a year of TV in this country?

and that all of wikipedia, in all its languages, and including all its edits/talk pages and so on, totals in human hours 100 million?

pretty mind-boggling. this discussion by clay shirky is well worth following all the way through.

this article from Greg Mitchell at Editor and Publisher is extraordinarily important to read. it discusses press and mainstream opinion maker reaction to colin powell's presentation before the UN 5 years ago today. this presentation, more than any other moment, led us into gulf war II.

there has been much discussion of "what he knew and when he knew it". was powell mendacious or just unprincipled (there isn't any better option i'm afraid, given what we now know from powell and lawrence wilkinson) when he gave the speech?

but it's not the important question. governments lie--it's what they do best. gulf of tonkin incidents are the rule, not the exception. there is one extremely important question that does need answering, however: how does an elite opinion maker consensus develop on an issue, and how can it be that so many "insiders" with special knowledge, allegedly, can be so horribly shockingly wrong.

to whit: there were no WMD's in Iraq and there was a strong body of evidence at the time that this was the case. though many try to ass cover with "clinton thought so too, and germany, and even france" it's all bullshit: scott ritter existed. mohamed el-baradei existed. hans blix was not a figment of my imagination. three people with the most direct knowledge of the situation were quite clear that something was very wrong with US intel, and yet this fact did not penetrate the op-ed pages, nor the salons of washington, nor the idea factories there either. and many of my ostensibly liberal friends bought into it too (or my dad's friends, people like michael walzer, who essentially threw away a lifetime of good work with his argument for the war from the left).

the thing about consensus when it comes to ideas, to memes, is that it seems that any meme that gets all of them: AEI and the WaPo op-ed page and richard cohen and george will and NBC and Fox and on and on and on--should of course be part of a fact-based narrative. but it's not necessarily the case. i often say that truth is the enemy of drama when i'm developing a script based on "actual events"--if the lead character in real life just decided to back away quietly from the situation but we can write him in as having come in guns blazing, guess which one hollywood will choose. every time. and here we see this writ large: war is more interesting than UN inspections. anything can happen! cool visuals!!! embedded reporters!!! realtime hot death action, now with 30% more blood!!!! so fuck the truth, what we wanted was a narrative that would deliver a satisfying kick, and we got one from powell, a man who should be permanently banned from polite society. he was doing the bidding of some evil people, but then he knew that (and he did the same thing in my lai, putting his career on its upward trajectory).

anyway, don't trust the consensus. it's often just a shared hallucination. and never trust anyone who says they know something because "insiders" told them so--the closer you get to power the more necessary it is to share that hallucination (or create it) in the first place, and the less chance you will know what you've done.

UPDATE:
an excellent refutation of powell's presentation, showing that we knew then it was all a crock.

from the american prospect (via the poorman) comes the following fun facts and comments of american talibanical fascist vermin mike "nice lunatic" huckabee:

3. Huckabee Compares America to Nazi Germany

In a speech to the Florida Renewal Project Monday night, which in an unprecedented move was live streamed on the American Family Association's Web site, Huckabee compared America to Nazi Germany. He first implored the audience to renew their "commitment to Christ" and "to our nation, to its heritage, as well as to its future," adding "do we expect the seculars [sic] to do it? Do we expect the unbelievers to lead us, and if so, how will they lead us and where?" He then engaged in an extended description of his visit to the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem with his 11- year-old daughter, who asked, "why didn't somebody do something?" Huckabee, who has called abortion a "holocaust," then issued a dire warning:

... I pray that no father ever stands over the shoulder of his own daughter and after her witnessing the decline and the fall of a great nation, writes, and sees her write these words, "why didn't somebody do something?" You see, I believe the reason we're here is because we are the somebodies. And we're to do the something and if we don't, who will? And if we don't act now, when will it happen, and will it be too late? You leave this conference with this haunting question, and pray that no one would ever ask of you or of me, why didn't somebody do something.

You read that right. Huckabee thinks if the "seculars" are allowed to rule America, our country could suffer the same fate as Nazi Germany. A resounding insult all around from this "Christian leader."

4. Huckabee's Christian Constitution

Huckabee has been consistently cagey about answering questions about his views on biblical law and Christian Reconstructionism. In the Times this weekend, Oran Smith, a conservative Christian activist in South Carolina, portrayed Huckabee as "Houdini," but he really is more like Zelig, adapting his answers to particular audiences to satisfy his radical fans while assuaging his critics.

Huckabee has offered his view that the Bible prohibits marriage between people of the same gender, and hell, between humans and animals, and hence the Constitution should be clear on that point, too. He slaps his opponents around for their lack of support for a federal marriage amendment and a human life amendment. Many supporters of a human life amendment believe that birth control pills cause abortions, and therefore should be outlawed under such an amendment. In a meeting with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register last year, Huckabee sidestepped answering the question directly but strongly suggested he thinks at least certain types of birth control pills should made illegal. In his Renewal Project speech Monday night, on the eve of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Huckabee made yet another inappropriate and insulting comparison, maintaining that overturning Roe is "not good enough," and that letting the states "handle something that is a moral issue is the logic of the civil war."

given how often "secularists" (whatever the hell that mean) are accused of having some sort of specifically "anti-religious" agenda, i would like to throw one out there:

i propose the following:

1. those bastards have to start paying taxes. period.
2. no more blue laws--they should be unconstitutional.
3. hammer the living fuck out of any preacher who ever says anything about politics. they should never be allowed to preach again.
4. absolutely no religious schools of any sort should be allowed, and there should be an even greater attempt to stamp out any religious influence in public school.
5. no allowance for religions such as lubavitch "judaism" or mennonites and so on to separate themselves from their surrounding societies.
6. all televangelists to be non-profit, and to be audited on an ongoing basis. any televangelists who make any money in excess of a living wage (set at the same level as the local living wage and not a penny more.
7. all religions must open their "spiritual" books to the scrutiny of neutral scholars, and must be put on the internet for the perusal of all at any time. no more bullshit secrets.
8. no special privileges for any prelates or officers of any religion. they must be treated like regular citizens, not like doctors or lawyers. or people who actually deserve respect, like janitors or laborers.
9. US to become an asylum for anyone trying to escape religious persecution anywhere in the world.

i'm sure i can think of more, or feel free to e-mail some other ideas of your own. given how often we are being told on right-wing and evangelical websites that there is a "war" coming, it's time for our side to actually give a shit.

also, as usual, where is the ADL when this creep uses the holocaust in such a perverse matter? nowhere, of course, because huckabee may be psychotic but at least he's pro-israel!

i know the following sounds strange to say, but jim cramer is talking sense. and he's not just talking sense--he has put together, in one monster rant (while a couple of incredulous hosts look on in horror) one of the great takedowns of late stage capitalism ever. marx would be proud.

the 50 most loathsome people of 2008 from the buffalo beast.

many a bon mot dropped over there.

a brief labor day nothing:

how is it that on what is an excellent three-day weekend, there is no one in the mainstream of punditry agitating for a shorter work week? i think we all agree three days off is a nice thing. it makes people happy, simply put. more time to listen to music, hang out with friends, chill with the family, go to the lake/beach/pond/crick, time to grab a ballgame (i'm particular to soccer myself, but for most of you that's baseball i'm sure), play a game, and so on.

so, here we are, it's all nice and good, and nothing. there simply is no mainstream pundit who would ever argue for such a thing. that's not so weird, as much of our pundit class is too rich and 4 days-a-week-and-then-the-hamptons to care. but where is labor? where are those trying to get positive steps taken to improve our lives as workers? nowhere. the statistics (less americans now repped by labor unions then ever in our unionized history, wages stagnant to negative for the vast majority of americans, hours longer than ever, productivity as high as it's going to get) don't lie: we're fucked.

how did this happen? labor used to win huge battles: the five day week, the 40 hour week, vacation time and break time mandated, child labor laws, health and safety laws--shit, we were making the world a better place, not just for the working man, but period. the rising tide would lift all boats, and labor would be a respected partner in the business of business. well, when the rich saw how they could get richer, in fact stay that way and hand the whole shebang off to their spawn who had done nothing to earn their place at the (head of the) table, they changed the laws (written by their factotums, the highly paid lawyers) to accomadate such needs. and here we are.

now everywhere you go, someone has a story. i'm not sure which was more depressing: my flight on Northwest, where the whole workforce will be forced to take a 20% pay and benefits cut, or the conversation with Drea, the super cool security woman at my office building, telling me she's got to come in on LABOR DAY!!!!!! or she won't get paid for time off. WTF? anecdotes, you say? sure, but it seems everyone i meet has such a tale to tell.

i think it's bhutan that has a measure for "Gross National Happiness". i think it's time to institute something like that in the USA. i think we won't be near the top of the heap.

Crooks and Liars » Keith Olbermann Delivers One Hell Of a Commentary on Rumsfeld

this one is a must watch, racing, i'm sure, across the leftosphere at light speed as we speak. keith olbermann lays it on the line.

the best i can do is say that i had the chance to meet olbermann, albeit briefly, at the TCA (Television Critic's something that starts with A) party that NBC threw last month, and i had a chance to tell keith that he was the best in front of his boss. not much, but slightly better than nothing.

this commentary reads better than it plays on video, IMO, as keith lets his erudite flag fly way too high for most. but it is really time people started saying to rumsfeld and cheney and every other shitheel in this country when they dare to question the patriotism of those of us who disagree: "ENOUGH!"

so, keith o, nice one, you are the hero tonight. keep it up.

The Poor Man Institute » The competence dodge

i agree with some, if not all, of what is said there. i'll also point out that you need to read about three banal posts just to get at the heart of the thing, and in truth, you'd be wasting your time. read the poorman, read my comment, and move on. life is short and the sun is shining.

i'll highlight my comment, because i'm good like that:

# Robert Green Says:
August 31st, 2006 at 12:34 am

i cannot emphasize enough, in any combination of bold, italic, or blockquote, how right kiche is in #5. just as the editors points out that beinart noticably leaves people like himself out of the equation (a point bob somerby has been making, between insane rants about nothing, for years on the daily howler) when discussing something in which he was inextricably linked, so too does anyone discussing iraq II need to pretend that the actual people who were actually going to execute the actual policy were…someone else. it was as if cheney, rumsfeld, bush (to a lesser extent in this case), feith, perle, wolfowitz et al had just been born in 2001. as if none of them had ever done anything before, not written papers, not…sold weapons to sadaam, not engaged in insane PNACkery, not been wrong going back to their specious bullshit about the soviets in the 70s (and before that, remember colin powell, who really bears more responsibility for iraq II than any human on this earth, was the guy who covered up my lai). these tabulae rasae were there for beinart et al to project their own ideas on, as if the execution would not be effected by the executioners.

there’s a whole separate question about competence–what i’m talking about above is what happens when you say: “i need to protect myself. i don’t know how to use this gun, and the bad guys are coming. i’m going to hand this gun to the completely fucking crazy person standing in the room with me, the one who has both shot his own friends and himself on numerous occasions. now i will feel safe.”

see, the bad guys may really be coming, and your assessment of what to do (get a gun into the hands of the right people to protect you) may be right as well. but if you can’t recognize past patterns of behavior as being just as important to weigh in your decision of ultimately what to do about your problem,

YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT.

A letter published on Altercation, and a damn fine one at that:

Name: Tim Kane
Hometown: St. Louis, Mo
Dear Eric: I wanted to thank you for directing me towards Norm Birnbaum's piece on Monday. I would have to say that it contained some of the best analysis concerning current politics that I have yet read. It was efficient, short yet breathtakingly brilliant. To my knowledge, I had never read him before, but I will be looking out for everything I can get from him. First I must say that Birnbaum's piece reminded me why I am so sympathetically fond of things Jewish. Having grown up in a Jewish neighborhood, with lots of Jewish neighbors, I've probably been to as many Bar/Bah Mitzvas (spell?) as any non-Jew, but my affinity has always been deeper than that. It's the realization that the need for plurality to protect the Jewish community lead the Jewish people to apply their influence, skill, intellect and support to helping create and implement Roosevelt's New Deal social contract - which provided plurality, but also distributed wealth more evenly creating the great post World War II economic boom (which doubled global productivity in 30 short years). My father was an uber-mechanic with only a high school education, who gained a supervisor position in a factory that gave him an upper middle class wage - something his father could only have dreamed of, and allowing for him to send me to private schools and college. And my father's siblings did much better than he. Birnbaum's piece reminded me of all these things and renewed my appreciation for the Jewish community in America and while I am glad of where I grew up. And for those who have never had Jewish educators, perhaps it’s harder to appreciate the contributions they make. As Americans, they have been the greatest Americans and all of us have benefited immensely. It seems to me that Birnbaum's piece reflects a reasonable, rational dissent in the Jewish community. Again, the skill and efficiency of his assessment simply amazed me, creating an irony whereby in trying to debunk the myth of Jewish intelligence, he manifests it all over again in the process. Brilliant really.

His assessment of the situation of American Jews and Israel helps me understand Spielberg's movie "Munich". Munich presents a case of Game Theory gone awry. According to Robert Axelrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation" the best, most rational strategy, where two parties are in an iterative relationship with no discernable end, is to cooperate. This phenomena explains why I can trust the person who cuts my hair but not the person who sells me a used car - one represents and ongoing relationship with no foreseeable end, the latter does not. The second best strategy is "tit-for-tat": I punch you in the nose, you punch me back. The thing about tit-for-tat is that it should lead the parties back to civility and cooperation - that is unless one likes ones nose broken. The dark side of Game Theory is that if a party learns that the game is going to end, even many moves from now, it pays to stop cooperating immediately. This phenomena is illustrative of Chamberlain's Munich circa 1938 - to the Western allies (France and Britain), cooperation was rational. By bending over backwards, Chamberlain was trying to send a strong signal to Hitler his intent to do the rational thing, participate in cooperate, civil diplomacy to avoid war. What Chamberlain couldn't grasp is that Hitler saw the game of European diplomacy coming to an end. Hitler saw himself vanquishing his (or being vanquished by) opponents and so logically wasn't interested in diplomatic civility or cooperation. Of course this was both irrational and yet logical - Irrational in seeking an end to the game, but once arriving at that position, became logical to end cooperation and civility in diplomacy. (This same lack of civility and cooperation, by the way, is what really frightens me about Bush and the Neocons in American politics.) This brings us to Spielberg's Munich. He demonstrates the insanity of a continued game of tit-for-tat. The refusal to cooperate suggests that the game is being played by extremists who propose to end the game, as Hitler attempted, by vanquishing their opponent. This view exists on both sides, and as the assassination of Rabin by a fellow Jewish Israeli suggests, not only are their extremist on both sides, but they are willing to cooperate to eliminate moderates on both sides. I have no doubt that this phenomena contributed to Arafat not cutting a deal back when Clinton oversaw our politics. What I now see, from viewing Spielberg's film and reading Birnbaum's piece is that there is a dissenting school of thought in the Jewish community that suspects that the on going tit-for-tat strategy is insane, destructive and perhaps has a nihilistic end - which could never be good for the Jewish community, even if it somehow succeeds, and that salvation lies in pluralism, strictly construed and rigorously applied; In other words, coexistence.

At the end of Spielberg's Munich, the protagonist turns his back, not just on the game of 'tit-for-tat' and the insanity it imparts upon him, but also upon the non-pluralistic premise behind Israel, choosing instead to live the life of a Jew in pluralistic America. To Spielberg, this is much more rational. As Birnbaum suggest, the homeland for American Jews, is not Israel, but America. Spielberg's Munich and Birnbaum's piece make excellent bookends for making the case of a dissenting opinion in the Jewish community. Birnbaum correctly points out the security that comes with functional plurality, for Jews, of course, but also for all. He also points out that the Neocon-Jews are making a Faustian bargain with the evangelical Christians who could turn on them the minute they realize that Christ's second coming is not occurring and perhaps is stalled, and hung up because Jews refuse to convert to Christianity as prophecy says they will on the eve of the second coming. (The evangelicals propose, by their actions, to manipulate God into implementing the second coming simply by recreating the conditions so prophesied in the book of Daniel and Revelations, conveniently ignoring Christ's commandment "though shall not test the Lord thou God). He also points out that the Neocon movement is a reaction against modernism and a refutation of the enlightenment and all its fruits, one of which being our pluralistic constitution and all the protections it affords and has built into it. By aligning with the Neocons one signs up for a brave new world yet to be defined. For a community known for its shrewd business acumen, this is a notoriously and intrinsically bad bargain) By definition, though powerful but still relatively small, in a world of tribe-against-tribe, the Jews just don't have the numbers that would suggest they would succeed long term. Then there is all that blood shed and misery that comes with the tribe-against-tribe paradigm. Wouldn't it be better to just opt for functional pluralism, and get back to the game of making money, making babies, and pursuing knowledge and enjoying everything that comes along with those pursuits? Thanks so much for pointing me towards Birnbaum's piece. That was great stuff.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE HOLLYWOOD COMMUNITY
from Rob Schneider

[reprinted without permission of either variety or rob schneider, FYI]

I, Rob Schneider, a l/2 Jew, pledge from this day forth to never
work with Me1 Gibson-actor-director-producer-and anti-Semite.
Even if Mr. Gibson offered me the lead role in “Passion of the Christ 2”,
I, like Bernie Brillstein, would have to say “NO!" Even if Me1 had a juicy voice-
over role in his new flick “Apocalypto” andI spoke ancient Mayan, I, like
Bernie Brillstein would still have to say “NO!”
Even if “Apocalypto”is a gigantic smash and Mr. Gibson is quietly forgiven
by Hollywood’s Power Brokers, and I was offered a lead role opposite Me1
Gibson’s Father, (the Mad Max of Holocaust deniers) I, like Bernie Brillstein would likely have to say "NO!"
Even though I have just completed principal photography on my directorial debut in my upcoming motion picture "Big Stan" (A Prison Comedy) in which there is a Nazi gang leader, which apparently Mel would be PERRRR-FECT for, and I had a Time Machine and could go back in time and RE-CAST the lead Nazi, I, like Bernie Brillstein would most likely have to say “NO !
Of course that would be only after i talked with my financial backers,
some of whom share Mr. Gibson's hankering for a good bottle of Tequila.

Because, after all...

I don't get to call all the shots.

Sincerely Yours,

Rob Schneider


P.S. You won’t see ME at Taverna Tony’s in Malibu anytime soon!

Audit Finds U.S. Hid Actual Cost of Iraq Projects - New York Times

you know, when we had bush come in as president with the whole "CEO" style, IIRC, it was a good thing. clear up some bureaucracy, make stuff happen. and his biggest single contributor, again IIRC, was Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay. Further, the company that supplied the plane that Bush used when he was flying to and fro Florida to steal the election: Enron. Who, and i'm pretty sure IRC here, took california and treated her the way Jack the Ripper liked to treat a whore.

And here we are, a few years and a few hundred thousand people killed later, and what do we get?

The State Department agency in charge of $1.4 billion in reconstruction money in Iraq used an accounting shell game to hide ballooning cost overruns on its projects there and knowingly withheld information on schedule delays from Congress, a federal audit released late Friday has found.

The agency hid construction overruns by listing them as overhead or administrative costs, according to the audit, written by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, an independent office that reports to Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Called the United States Agency for International Development, or A.I.D., the agency administers foreign aid projects around the world. It has been working in Iraq on reconstruction since shortly after the 2003 invasion.

The report by the inspector general’s office does not give a full accounting of all projects financed by the agency’s $1.4 billion budget, but cites several examples.

The findings appeared in an audit of a children’s hospital in Basra, but they referred to the wider reconstruction activities of the development agency in Iraq. American and Iraqi officials reported this week that the State Department planned to drop Bechtel, its contractor on that project, as signs of budget and scheduling problems began to surface.

The United States Embassy in Baghdad referred questions to the State Department in Washington, which declined to comment immediately.

it sounds so very "Chewbacca" or "Star Wars" or whatever the hell andy fastow was calling his latest scam.

kee-rist, they literally turned the damn country into enron. on every possible level.

so jill was on some right-wing radio station in seattle yesterday, having a back and forth with some mouth-breathing fool who commented about jill's being an environmenalist: "so what, you aren't a capitalist?"

now, that this is an either/or is so risibly stupid it causes actual pain in my neck. but while jill talked about RFK Jr.'s book, where he discusses allowing regulation to walk hand-in-hand with capital, i see a different issue.

the issue at hand is one of measurement. and until we fix it, we are probably hopelessly lost. economics (and, for that matter, the more meta econometrics) is a "science" that studies amongst other things the nominal "value" of objects in society. how much do we pay for a barrel of oil? well, 78 dollars is what standard economics tell us it is "worth". an economist will argue that in fact this is just the "Free Hand of the Marketplace" at work, establishing value, and that all they are doing is providing tools to measure the transaction, but that is a load of crap on two levels.

1. oil isn't really 78 dollars a barrel. oil costs 78 dollars a barrel plus all the money that must be spent in the future to deal with the ramifications of the use of that oil in the present. this should be obvious to anyone with a high school education. yet we blithely, as a society, pretend that there is no measurable future cost so that we can keep living the dream here in the present. funny word that, measurable, because it leads to...
2. the measurements of trade, which are our financial instruments, created by or weighed up by the "science" of economics and econometrics. and of course neither of those disciplines are able to force measuring the actual cost of things into their price, nor does the consensus in either discipline really try (and yes, there are plenty of economists who will take a crack at it, but they are on the fringe and don't seem to have any impact) to make a public argument about it.

so. we continue to pretend that our trade exchanges are based on some accurate measure of utility plus market valuation plus government regulation and so on. and it's all bullshit. plain and simple. if you factored in the true cost to our world of products in the energy sector, taking into account let's say 50 years or so of forward-utility, you would find that without question wind-generated power was cheaper than oil by a factor of...well, by a lot. and you could more accurately measure the cost of ethanol (cheaper because we don't have to ship it from the middle east where we cause wars over oil, more expensive because of the pesticides and energy needed to grow corn etc.) accurately. and so on. and when we discovered just how unbelievably wrong we were about the cost of a barrel of oil, or of putting a new coal plant on-line, we'd move to an alternative. and maybe in so doing, we'd make the world a little less horrible for our children. as well, to stop relying on oil, we'd be doing a HUGE favor to the person on the street in the middle east, whose leaders wouldn't be able to steal all the resources and buy them off with sops. instead, those countries would be forced to generate new ways of thinking and doing business.

now, back to our regularly scheduled husbandry.

this banner ad was taken from thomas hawk's website this morning. i don't know much about crying, or children, or crying children, so help me out here: does that, or does that not, look like a wee one feeling bad?

cough hypocrite cough hmmm what? well, it's apparently not so bad to "abuse children" (ed. note, not an admission of anything, just the largest amount of sarcasm i could compress into two words) if you are getting paid to advertise.

UPDATE #2 BELOW:

*****************GREATEST UPDATE I WILL EVER GET TO HAVE BELOW!!!!!***************

on the day when my wife and i are in the eye of the media storm (appearances on ABC, CNN Int'l, Inside Edition, and Scarborough Country for Jill), some thoughts on how Swift-Boating has become divorced from partisanship and transmogrified into a technique for disseminating information about any perceived enemies.

it's a very effective technique, as my wife has found to her chagrin. and its carrier is the Mainstream Media, an (un?)witting accomplice in spreading slander and innuendo.

this guy started the ball rolling. he quite reasonably had a strong opinion (and a strongly negative one) about jill's photos of crying children. the photos are provocative, and intentionally so, so much so that no one should be surprised that they elicited angry responses. as they are polemical as well, those responses could well have been on the level of either aestechics or politics (i've gone back and forth in my own head as to whether the photos' titles are too "on the nose" in their politics, but ultimately i think their lack of subtlety is appropriate to the times in which we live). the guy above did neither. he reacted, quite literally, as if jill had committed a crime, not just any crime, but child abuse.

it's a serious accusation. one would think that before making such an accusation, a rational person would in fact try to ascertain if indeed such abuse took place. as there were many people at the shoot (assistants, models' parents, agency reps etc.) and as they were all findable relatively easily, there was no need to make any such accusation without doing so. and the guy above did not. he just shot off at the mouth without thinking, and became his own worst enemy (he claims a left-wing mentality that is not apparent from his behavior).

here comes the swift boat part. as we all remember, the SBVFT were able to promulgate a series of lies about John Kerry through the intelligent use of the internet and of the mainstream media. essentially, what they did: they used a website to say all kinds of things about John Kerry's Vietnam service, in order to make him look like a coward rather than a hero. after their claims were put on-line, the MSM was able to report on "controversy surrounding john kerry's vietnam record" without having to actually find out if the underlying fact claims were valid. as superbly detailed by the daily howler, it took 2 months before any serious journalist actually dug into the claims made by SBVFT--that didn't stop cable news, the big papers, and everyone else from talking about it--and by that time, the charges (false though they were) had stuck. kerry was S.O.L.

all of this brings me to yesterday's LA Times article by Steven Anthony-Barrie. This is the first (and only) piece of journalism that has been done on Jill's work where the reporter actually...reported. he called parents involved in the shoot, the model agency, jill, and so on. this is how reporting works--two sources for every fact claim, that kind of thing. and the article, to my mind, is eminently fair and accurate.

which in turn brings me to the prior reporting from both "American Photo" Magazine and the New York Times (and, to a lesser extent, the Sydney Morning Herald). these papers merely "reported the controversy" without doing anything to find the underlying truths. they are and were, therefore, nothing better than gossip spreading half-assed articles written by lazy people with no ethics. harsh words, i know, but i believe strongly that the MSM is getting ever and ever worse about this. i blame various people, but really Drudge should shoulder the most blame. he says some bullshit, and that makes it ok to discuss in the MSM without verifying his claims.

well, i expect a farrago of insane comments (previous commenters from both that guy's site and from boingboing have said that amongst other things "you and your wife should have aborted your children" "you are nazis" and so on. those are the middle-lights--there are some higher!) as we are dealing with people who think nothing of leaving vicious comments on the guest books of children's websites. as this happened on both our children's sites, we have now had to password protect them. sad. pathetic. without question, the quality of commenter from boingboing in particular is extraordinarily low--all personal invective and no thoughtful anything. i guess that is what pseudo-techno-libertarianism will get you.

you can hear jill talk about the work here: as well, you can hear her talk about the work today on MSNBC/ABC and a few other TV places. maybe. we'll see.

comments are being heavily moderated--if you are enraged by the voices in your head, your comment will be deleted. if you think jill is a terrible photographer who doesn't know how to focus a camera, your comment will be allowed to stand.

UPDATE:

Jill will be on MSNBC live with Rita Cosby filling in for Joe Scarborough WEDNESDAY at 615ish Pacific time.

***********GREATEST UPDATE OF ALL TIME**************************

the bullying creep who started all this, Andrew Peterson, has on his "Thomas Hawk's DIgital Connection" blog an ad that is running. that ad: a old man's face morphing into the face of a....wait for it...


wait some more...

oh hell, it's the face of a crying child.

LOLOMG11110000111010))!11111 pwned

what a loser. a hypocrite. and a wanker. i'm laughing so hard i'm crying. thanks to the reader of his blog who sent me this, as that person wishes to remain anonymous. after all, you can imagine what crap that person would have to put up with.

apparently, his ads rotate, so this one is not up today. but what a thing. it's not really surprising, is it? i mean, if you really cared about the poor abused children, wouldn't you actually do something more than leave a pseudonymonious blog posting? how, exactly, were we supposed to believe he ever cared about anything other than his career?

in case you were wondering where i get it,

i get it from dad.

his essay on religion (printed on some dead trees somewhere) below:

NOTES ON RELIGIOUS BULLSHIT

I.

“Film ignites the wrath of Hindu fundamentalists,” says the NY Times. No it doesn’t, not for a moment. This headline mindlessly concedes to “religious” belief the status always claims but never earns–of being an excuse, even a justification, for any variety of stupidity or depravity that is available to small-minded people. There are certainly (partial) explanations of this kind of bad behavior, but there are no excuses for it–or everyone would be engaging in it, instead of just witless mobs. What ignited the wrath etc. in fact was not the film (Water) but a fanatical desire of men to maintain the criminal institutions of male tyranny, to go on justifying the oppression of women, and to find apparent excuses for unleashing their impulse to violence. All this is then called “our religious beliefs” by the people who act out ignorance and depravity; and the media of discussion, not to mention occasional, self-styled multi-culturalists, reproduce this self-exculpation as though it had an actual intellectual or “cultural” content. This is pure blather. Hindu “culture” doesn’t demand the oppression of women, Hindu men do that. One might as well say that Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, and Violet Liuzzo “ignited the wrath of white racists,” or that Emmet Till “ignited the wrath of defenders of Southern womanhood” by (allegedly) whistling at a white woman. No, the racists and oppressors and fanatics wilfully ignite their own uncontrolled wrath, and they always find an excuse to do so when it becomes too much for them to keep in check. They need no actual ignition, but just any visible instance of what they have learned to treat as a self-justifying spark; their combustion is wholly internal. If they were not ignorant and depraved persons, they would respond as any version of reason would tell them to respond to a serious communication, with their own serious counter-communication. Of course, religious belief can make room for such seriousness, as for example many post-Aquinas Catholic theologians have done by carving out a place for secular reason within the overall framework of their theology. But it’s not the theology that helps them to do that, it’s rather Aristotle’s very secular (and for intelligent persons, necessary) account of what constitutes a reasoned argument. (He’s not the only one who did that, but he is the one Aquinas relied on to find his own escape hatch to secular rationality.) Religion, fatally, provides plentiful alleged justifications for intellectual and moral defectiveness to those who need them. It provides no independent justifications of its own for intellectual and moral reason.

II.

Religion is harmless only when it makes no serious truth claims on its own behalf. To clarify: I have a friend who believes that there is a realm in which the souls of the departed still exist in some way or other, and that she has witnessed communication with that realm. I doubt the validity of that evidence; it’s all too easy to fake, and has been faked over and over again. Still, there are no grounds on which I can assert the falsity of her claim–how could I possibly know–and it would be churlish of me to do so. Nothing depends on truth or falsity here, after all. There’s no way in which her conviction can lead to repressive demands on my own behavior, nor does the possibility exist that she will behave in a way I would consider unethical because of that conviction. That kind of spiritual belief is truly private, truly harmless, and truly (assuming against the odds that fakery is not involved) unimpeachable.

But that is not the case with, especially, universalistic religions: i.e., the great monotheisms. They pose no problem as long as their claims remain in the realm of purely mystical, personal, experience (but then they aren’t really universalistic). But the generalized truth claims of, say, Christianity and Mohammedanism can’t both be accepted: one or the other has to go. Either Christ came to redeem all of us, or some of us, or didn’t actually do anything of the kind. And if he wasn’t a redeemer but just a persuasive guy, then there’s no reason to take anything he said seriously unless it happens to comport with something I believe on other grounds; the same with Mohammed. (This is why the Sermon on the Mount is such a favorite with Leftists, among whom it possesses as much as but no more authority than say the Gettysburg Address does with Unionists.) More crucially, if I am given as a reason for doing or not doing something I might or might not want to do, that it is or is not the Christian thing to do–that’s simply a non-reason as far as I am concerned. Sure there’s a lot of Christians in the world, but there’s a lot of people who believe all sorts of stupid or wicked things, and it simply isn’t possible to reason from the firmness or generality of someone else’s belief to the validity or invalidity of my own. This is not an inconsequential conclusion, in that if I am correct then religious belief ought to remain an absolutely private affair (not individual, but private: the two words do not at all mean the same thing). So the belief of some–many--Christians or Muslims that the truth of their convictions gives them either a duty or a right to legislate rules that might apply to me, or to anyone, Christian or otherwise, who does not believe as they do, is a recipe for tyranny. Nothing else. That coincidentally one or more of those religiously based convictions might be in my estimation defensible is beside the point. I have many beliefs to which I am sincerely and firmly wedded that I would never dream of legislating for other people (e.g. that in our society general utility can be maximized only if individuals practice birth control; that racist and anti-Semitic beliefs are morally noxious; that “substance abuse” is potentially both self-destructive and socially harmful; that the world would be much better off in the absence of Christianity and Islam and Hindu nationalism; and so on). We can believe in the rightness of some path and yet have absolutely no intention of legislating it for others. Only beliefs about truly public matters ought to be treated as legitimate subjects for legislation, and by the same token no religious belief can be truly public: widespread, perhaps, but not public. And what makes the belief about some matter “public” is that reasons can be given for it that don’t depend on my acceding to or adopting someone else’s special system of belief; they are reasons accessible to any member of the public. Some distinctions between “public” and “private” are debatable (see my parenthesis), but this isn’t one of them.

III.

When you hear the word “blasphemy” used in any context whatsoever--except approvingly, as in “I try never to let too much time pass without blaspheming against at least one religion”--you know you are in the presence of a committed enemy of free speech and free thought. There’s never enough blasphemy to go around, it is in fact the original source of all free speech.

IV.


There’s a common confusion that comes about when we invoke the example of some allegedly good person who was, or good behavior that was, apparently inspired by religious belief. But it’s a fallacy (the “genetic fallacy”) to judge a belief by its genesis; we judge it by its outcomes. Anyhow, those religious persons who find reasons for good behavior have usually done so in spite of or in addition to, not because of, their religious commitment. Martin Luther King, e.g., is often invoked as an example of the value of religious conviction in addressing public matters--though one would do much better with the example of Joan of Lorraine, who certainly would never have liberated Orleans if she hadn’t thought herself to be the Sword of The Lord . But anyhow examples like King are self-destructive, because they’re not about truth but about utility–precisely the ground on which a true believer wishes never to stand! Make utility your argument and the next thing people will be giving you the counter-example of Son of Sam, or the Crusades. Bayard Rustin, an atheist, a homosexual, and an early Freedom Rider, had exactly the same political beliefs as King but a lot less success in communicating them to the world at large. That’s either a testimony to King’s charisma or to the American people’s general inattention, but not to his Christian beliefs, since more Americans who shared those beliefs were opposed to or indifferent about racial integration than not. What King did was make his version of Christianity compatible with American constitutionalism, thus having it both ways. If he hadn’t been able to do so, then all the good Christian intentions in the world wouldn’t have produced whatever success the Civil Rights Movement ultimately had. And if the actual truth of Christianity, rather than merely King’s own upbringing, was truly the ultimate cause of King’s behavior, that’s a pretty poor recommendation for Christianity, given the continued malodorous state of race relations in the U.S. forty years after his death. Perhaps God likes racial discrimination after all?

V.


My own belief is that the violence and oppression attendant upon the expansion of Christianity’s claims (or Islam’s) are worse than its alleged benefits; but the argument started when I make that statement cannot be settled by any so-called empirical data. In fact, all serious theologians have the same method for dealing with that argument, which is that a truly serious concept of “god” is not about a god who’s into details, like who wins which war, or makes a million, or gets a bases-loaded triple in the 8th inning of a playoff game, or any of that ridiculous nonsense that is a sure hallmark of imbecility whenever you find anyone who believes it. Serious theology (all of it, regardless of particular religion) is about the nature of the universe, and right or wrong serious theologians are not going to try to kill anyone or take over a government on its behalf. It’s the ones who think their god has rules that you and I have to live by or we must be punished for our sins, who would leave the world better off if they all just popped out of existence. And note that what I say here doesn’t apply to the conscientious objectors like say the anti-Nazi Pastor Martin Niemoller (“First they came for the Jews and I said nothing...”), who refuse to collaborate with horrendous wrongdoing, always a defensible stance on any ground; but don’t dogmatically try to run people’s lives. Niemoller didn’t reject the Nazis because they weren’t good Christians, but because they were murderers. Being his own kind of Christian may have helped him to be able to make that distinction, but lots of people who weren’t any kind of Christian were able to make it, and some earlier than he did. Famously the Huguenot descendants in the village of Le Chambon sheltered thousands of Jews from the Nazis under the leadership of their pastor and his wife, but that wasn’t because they were believing Protestants–just ask the remnants of German Jewry about believing Protestants. It was because they’d endured hundreds of years of persecution themselves and understood what it was all about and that it must be resisted. Same thing about the Black churches in the US--most of them, anyhow. They’re about adapting white Christianity to the experience of the descendants of slaves–not vice versa.


VI.

Another pernicious confusion: Of course secularism turned into an ideology may also be dogmatic (though hardly ever, in our society, punitive), but ordinary, honest, science is not in any sense “dogmatic,” no matter how authoritative it makes itself sound, because it’s always open to counter-demonstration. It’s not dogmatic to insist absolutely that Boyle’s Law, or the law of entropy or gravity, or evolutionary theory, are “true,” in the sense that though testing them whenever a reasoned suggestion is made about a need for testing is called for, simply denying them is dogmatically and wilfully ignorant. Scientists may be dogmatic (“science” never is) in the sense of not listening to possible alternatives, but since they’re always challengeable by other scientists, that doesn’t last long. Religious dogma, however, is not testable, therefore not challengeable in that sense. You can only disagree with it, and not have a moral leg to stand on in its terms, until and unless you make a theological revolution and reverse the terms. Whereas the scientist always has a leg to stand on as long as she follows agreed-on procedures; and there’s no problem about what those are, since even her most dogmatic opponent will insist that he too followed those same procedures, and this can be checked. Someone is not morally errant, but wrong, and over time it’s possible to find out who (could be both, of course, or even neither, as with quantum vs. wave theory). Dogma, however, always denies not just the other person’s conclusions, but the other person’s very way of seeing as invalid. Also, we have to avoid a phony symmetry here. Creationism, e.g., is not just “another way of seeing;” that claim is typical of the homage irrationalism pays to rationalism even while pretending to scorn it. Instead that kind of religious dogmatism is a refusal to engage in the kind of acts of seeing that are open to everyone, not just to the true believer. Such comprehensive doctrines that invalidate the non-believer’s way of thinking, and are punitive etc. on top of that, are incompatible with democracy, since the justification of democracy is that people can reason together to find the best alternative for themselves, without being subject to exclusion. The creationists, e.g, withdraw from the democratic community, perhaps in only a small way, but ultimately perhaps in a very large way–the possibility of good faith debate on anything has been undermined by them. None of this is to say that some religious Americans don’t have genuine grievances, but simply that not every response to a grievance, religious or otherwise, can be justified sensibly or is compatible with democratic civility. And a grievance is not any more deserving of respect because it’s religiously based (cf World Trade Center!), and a lot of the time less. Because what you’re dying to say is, Give me a reason, not this mindless bullshit!

VII.

If you can go an entire week without being enraged by at least one loathsome hypocritical oppressive execrescence of organized religion somewhere in the world, you seriously need to see a psychoanalyst or an A-list neurologist.

Tom Friedman's Flexible Deadlines

every time an otherwise well-read or informed friend says to me, "that tom friedman is a great writer/thinker/globalist/monkeyeater" i vomit in my mouth, just a little bit.

here's reason #14050503043040 why.

and for those who didn't read it, matt taibbi's demolition of friedman in NY Press was one of the funniest things i've ever read. as he points out, if a wall comes down, how do the windows stay intact?

Roger Ailes

As National Taxpayers Union President Dr. John E. Berthoud told The Examiner, “You can’t tax like Reagan while spending like Dean.”

Reagan raised taxes 3 times in his tenure and ran a massive deficit. Dean ran a balanced budget the entire time he was governor of vermont while bringing health insurance to all of the state's children. "Dr." Berthoud is a liar and an ass, and the Examiner in its myriad forms is a pathetic paper for publishing such claptrap without conscience. what the hell is wrong with these people?

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Addressing Byron York's confusion

everyone is wrong except me and my friends.

not.

as i said in response to the excellent post from GG above:

i think there is a fallacy at work with the labelling of left and right that parallels quite well the fallacy of "swearing means it isn't true".

there is a strong tendency to dismiss arguments by mainstream reporters and pundits because of the "fever swamp" nature of the blogosphere, an atmosphere rife with "hate mail" and "language you wouldn't want your children to use" etc. The Washington post kerfuffle was a great example, but there are others. sometimes this semantic issue crosses over into the real world in amazing ways--i'm constantly stunned that we've seen literally millions of words written about whether or not V Plame sent J Wilson on his trip and that's nepotism. every time i see this, i think, "so was joe wilson not an expert on niger? did he not know people there? was he not qualified?" if my wife recommends me for a job for which i am qualified, it doesn't meet the definition of nepotism.

we keep being told semantics, labels, and signifiers are more important than facts that are verifiable and established. and it makes me crazy.

it even ties into my whole "post-modernity used to be on the left but has moved with horrifying consequences to the right" meme, but that's a post for another day.

this story should make your head explode, unless you hate everything good about our country. secret trials and testimony, no habeaus corpus, people held in jail after they have been found innocent of the non-charges against them--it has it all, and so much more than even King George the Third could have thought of in his wildest dreams.

but it's here, and now. it makes me ashamed to be an american, more than almost anything else about the past 5 years.

precis version:

the uighurs, ironically, are favorites of conservatives and neo-cons alike, as they fight the chinese gov't in NW china. their cause has been taken up by right-wing republican lawyers, real top people as well.

their plight is so much more awful then can be believed--they have been declared something twice. first they were declared "enemy combatents" then, rather pathetically, "non-anti americans". of course, neither judgment was based on real law in a real courtroom, just kangaroo bullshit. but one thing is clear--they are utterly totally completely innocent of any fucking charges against them. all of them. they are innocent. and they rot in jail. think about that for a minute then weep for our fucking country.


that's my comment at digby's house.