Los Angeles V. New York: Driving Edition

So, in a (not findable on line as far as i can tell) article from Los Angeles Magazine a few years, we discovered that the PhD traffic pattern studying guys at UC Berkeley had taken a long look at many different urban traffic systems. they'd discovered that LA drivers could drive, on average, 20 MPH faster in full traffic than any other drivers they studied. LA drivers have actually adapted to their conditions and, in a funny way, evolved to deal with them.

Now i'm in NYC. i'm staying on what is probably one of the loudest corners in the universe, near both a major hospital (sirens from ambulances), a fire station (ditto), a boombox bass cranked up collection (seriously), and, of course, regular NY drivers. A regular NY driver hits his or her horn at any and all provocations. This Onion article pretty much nails what is wrong with this perfectly. i've watched a guy lay on his horn in the west village while a cab wouldn't go for some crazy reason. could it be someone else was backing up and the cab had to wait? why yes, of course that was it. but asshole guy still laid on the horn, despite the fact that tons of young children surrounded his car on all sides. when i pointed out that he might want to wait for the cab to be able to move...well, you know how that goes with New Yorkers.

Motherfucking ass-stain cum gargler!!!!

now little violet can say it too! awesome! and the cabs, when someone is getting dropped off or picked up and the cab dares to not drive off and crush them, well that's worth everyone honking, even though this goes on every day all the time and everyone knows it. getting in the far left or right lane on an avenue means this WILL happen. doesn't matter. gotta honk.

NY drivers: you suck at driving. you suck at figuring out how to avoid these situations. you misunderstand them and behave with total insanity about them. then you make fun of LA.

so i say to all of you what i said to him:

eat me, taint clown

Hullabaloo

blah blah tristero at digby's blog blah blah. i'm right-er than him anyway. but not more right. if you know what i mean. kakutani's review is here, and as lousy as you would expect. she's the kind of person who walks down a wide boulevard that has been nicely cleaned by the rains the night before, but still somehow manages to find a pile of shit to step in. then she smears it all over the damn sidewalk and inevitably you step in it too.

so...

two things:

one: don't go crediting Kakutani with anything. she is a terrible writer, a mediocre thinker. i don't give a shit about her reviews of larry mcmurty or richard ford--reviewing fiction is a meaningless enterprise for serious humans, but it does help or hurt sales, and about that we should care not ne whit. however, when she writes about politics, she is invariably shallow and asinine in her thinking. she never rises above a combination of ninth grade thinking mixed with nasty and vicious rich-person-dinner-party social observations. she did it to clinton and several others. she is not an ally. it's like people cherry picking chris matthews--look, he was really good here!!!!! and ignoring the fact that he is a fuckwad. she is too.

two: you can't take fukuyama seriously, ever. he is like james cramer--36,000 dow forever? no? ok, get off the public stage, your pundit card has been revoked because you are stupid. period. end of history? fuck off, dude. you wrote that shit in 92 and oh...my...god...were you wrong. embarrassingly so. but we keep giving asshats like this credence--so don't be surprised when he helps lead us into a fucking war of fucking choice like the idiot he has proven himself to be.

and kakutani, loser that she is, falls right into the "because he was one of them it is particularly important" trap. wrong. because he was one of them he was wrong and stupid. and evil.

The Poor Man Institute � Beyond the infinite

see, this is a blog post about my own comment at another (reflexively meta) blog. the comment is about how republicans have taken post-modern post-derrida philosophy and turned it into will-for-power. now i'm blogging that comment.

see, republicans? THIS is how you do meta--pointless and inane navel gazing that comments on itself even as it empties itself of meaning in the process.

get it?

The Corner on National Review Online#091836

hey tim graham of the corner at National Review--

I've seen Crash, but not Hustle and Flow, but doesn't it seem there's great disagreement between Terence Howard's roles? In one, he's a slick Hollywood producer, disappointed that white boss Tony Danza makes him dumb down the black character in his sitcom.

well, if by "producer" you mean "director" and if by "slick" you mean "not as slick as his cohorts" then you...well, then you are still an idiot. just an accurate one.

i'm thinking of generating a quick opinion about something about which i know naught, but don't worry--i'll get my facts wrong.

Attytood: Good night and get lost! Chris Matthews exhumes McCarthy

A fine article by the always excellent Will Bunch about The Horror That is Chris Matthews.

but i wanted to highlight this excellent comment by "pope Ratzo"

So what if there were communists in the US in the '50s? Haven't we realized by now that the entire atmosphere of fear that was created during the Cold War was just as phoney as the fear of "terrorists" is today?

It's the shrieking of morons like Matthews that's created all the fear that keeps people like George Bush in power, and might have propelled McCarthy into the White House if it hadn't been for a few newsmen with balls like Murrow.

More people die from toenail fungus in this country than terrorism, yet we've shredded our Constitution, sunk our economy, spent our future on a useless war, and given our country to psychopaths like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. All because of a fear of something that's not real.

Yes, terrorists brought down the WTC on 9/11. No it was not the end of the world, any more than Pearl Harbor. But in 1941 there was a MAN in the White House who exhorted us to DENY FEAR instead of a weasel who cries "Yellow Alert" and wants us sheiking in our boots.

I live a few blocks away from the tallest building in the world. If it comes down, it'll land on my rose bushes. It's up to us to not be cowed by the fearmongers.

Posted by: Pope Ratzo at March 7, 2006 05:05 PM

exactly, dude. exactly.

NewsHog: ABC And The IED's From Iran That Were Made In The UK

so imagine the most ridiculous over-the-top possible way that deadly technology, the kind that is killing our soldiers, would have made it to Iraq. whatever your guess is, you haven't gone to far enough into crazyville. cuz right downtown there is a world where British special services fucks up a sting operation with the IRA, a sting operation that exposes new quality infrared triggered bombs to the IRA. well, would you believe they sold that tech (the IRA) to other terrorist orgs, and that it ended up in Iraq, where it is killing british and american troops?

Of course. of course that is what happened.

MEMRI TV

this is the craziest thing i've ever seen. sheer amazement. see as iranian students dutifully take notes about the "proof" that tom and jerry was all about getting the jews image better.

what the fuck is wrong with these people?

gothamimage makes a great point in the comments, and though it is lonely there, that isn't a reason to not highlight!

what, and who, is "Dubai"? and not in a jonah-goldberg-i-didn't-do-a-google-search kind of way, i mean really, following up on gotham--when GWB says "Dubai" and "Arab" in this context let's be really clear; he mean those arabs with whom one can do business. like the sheikhs. he doesn't mean the population of Dubai, who after all have NOTHING to do with this deal. he means the cronies who were installed at the head of a jury-rigged kleptocracy 80 years ago.

so next time you are wondering if being against the port deal might indeed make you a racist, just remember--the worst it does is make you anti-kleptocrat. and being a kleptocracist isn't that bad a thing.

Following is the ending to an otherwise superb Charles Pierce piece
at The American Prospect:

It constantly eludes me why what should be the most aggressive, most skeptical, and most irascible press corps in the world seems so ready always to turtle up. There isn't even a practical reason to believe that Dick Cheney looked into the soulful jowls of Brit Hume and found his troubled inner soldier there.

What's he going to do if you don't write stuff like this? Shoot you?

Forget I said that.

OK, charles seems to get a lot about what is wrong with the washington press core (and with joe klein as a representative thereof) with razor sharpness. but then, at the end, just like Lindsay Jacobellis, he stumbles.

The answer to charles' question? really, i have to tell anyone? money, power and fucking, and the confluence of the three. that's why joe klein is like he is. that is why the washington press core eats whatever shit is handed to them these days.

someone figured it out: pays these fucks enough money and we can co-opt them completely! and lo, media deregulation happened, and the news sector became the entertainment sector, and instead of having to co-opt with some sort of "reason" (like in the days of James REston, say, where you agreed that communism was bad over a bottle of scotch and he then changed his copy), you just get the fuckers paid. fat coin. 50 million here, 500k there, whatever. money. oh, and you get them laid. with hot girls/boys. and a nice house in cleveland park or georgetown or wherever.

it
is
so
fucking
obvious.

funny thing, that's what the bush people do best: corporate cronyism. that will cost all of us ten trillion or so dollars when all is said and done. the greatest shift of human wealth in history. the pundit class is, relatively speaking, kind of cheap. a 10 dollar hooker.

mediawhoresonline, how i miss you.

Dakota Today

excellent south dakota perspective on the "rapist bill of rights" that the governor is considering signing, a bill that would in fact make all abortion illegal in the state and subject doctors to jail time.

no need to go to mt. rushmore or the black hills if this one passes, at least not in this family.

if the democrats want to be taken seriously, then they need to make hay out of the fact that meet the press will have peter king, john warner and arnie gropenfuhrer as their three guests this weekend.

a press release might read:

"democrats will no longer go on MTP until it stops having 2 to 1 republicans to dems, let alone this weekend's ridiculous and insulting 'mix' of 3 republicans. given that the american people continue to give incredibly low marks to republicans in congress and the president in particular, it is also an insult to the american people. If MTP cannot commit to balance, then they can go over to Fox News Channel, another station that democratic politicians will not be appearing on in the future."
Harry Reid (in my dreams, obviously).

i mean, how hard can it be to PLAY FUCKING HARDBALL ONCE IN A WHILE? (speaking of shows that should be boycotted by Democrats...)

This post sponsored by my anger, now with thirty percent more vitriol!

i have a friend, let's call him (again) jon although his name is john. good guy, works in the biz, he's smart, nice, good politics etc. so he looks at this dubai ports deal and he says (perhaps to himself first, later to me): "don't hate this deal just because it is the bushies. i mean, maybe they are the right people, the UAE folk, for this job. maybe we are being racist. maybe, just maybe, we should give bush the benefit of the doubt."

and i know, you're thinking yourself, like Kevin Drum and some others--we are just being knee-jerk here. let's look at this on the merits, separate from whatever our feelings might be about the monkeyspunk running our country.

it seems so...tolerant...so...liberal...so...nice...so...meritocratic.

YOU

MUST

BE

KIDDING

have these people been asleep for the last five years? do you think there is even the slightest chance that every day that we learn more about this deal will be another day that we realize the bushites are incompetent crony capitalists who would sell their grandmom to the arabs after they were done shooting her in the face? am i being too harsh? too "bush-hatey"?

let's see: john snow ran CSX and still holds stock in his trust. CSX sold their stevedoring business to Dubai ports. John snow was on the committee that unanimously approved this deal. it turns out this deal circumvented US law. how? in such a way that cronies of the bush administration could get more money. huh.

that's funny. not the haha kind, the beat-my-skull-against-the-wall-until-it-leaves-bloody-stains funny.

and if anyone thinks that Dubai ports would do the best possible job running our ports efficiently and safely, please line up for drunken hunting lessons with mr. cheney. line forms (pun intended) on the left.

Free speech, even if it hurts - Los Angeles Times

In re David Irving, holocaust denier, getting sentenced to jail.

just wanted to remind everyone--the thing that sucks about free speech is that assholes get to take advantage. the thing that's great about free speech is everything else. david irving, professional liar scumbag and anti-semite, should not go to jail. he should just be hated and shunned by all polite society.

if you don't believe this, you don't really believe in free speech, "for me but not for thee"

what about o'reilly et al? why glenn g is slightly off the mark regarding the coming together of left and right on issues of "liberty". Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Are there American political values that transcend ideology?

Where Glenn states that

The set of precepts composing core American political values is clear and uncontroversial to most. We are a nation that lives under the rule of law. No man is above the law, including the President. Presidents do not have the right to engage in conduct which Congress makes it a criminal offense to engage in. To avoid the President seizing the powers of a King, the powers he exercises must always be checked and balanced by the Congress and the courts. In order to ensure that we have a representative government, only the people, through their Congress, make the laws, and everyone, including the President, is required to abide by those laws. We are a nation that is ruled by the people -- our elected officials do not rule over us -- and when we enact restrictions through our Congress on what our Government can do to us as citizens (as we did with FISA), those laws bind all citizens, including our elected officials.

None of those principles is even arguably liberal or conservative in the contemporary, political sense of those words. They are the defining American principles of government which has guided our country since its founding. And the Administration’s radical theory that any matter relating to national security threats "is for the President alone to decide" and that neither Congress nor the courts "can place any limits on the President's determinations" – which even bestows on the President the power to ignore Congressional laws or to wield war powers against American citizens on U.S. soil – could not be any more contrary to all of these core principles.

These are the principles that led Americans, in 1978, to enact a law, in response to decades of abuse of eavsdroping powers by Administrations of both parties, which made it a criminal offense for our government to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial oversight and approval. We collectively decided that we want aggressive eavesdropping against our foreign enemies, and the law we enacted enables aggressive eavesdropping. But we also decided that we trust our government to eavesdrop on Americans only with judicial oversight, not in secret and with no oversight. Through our Congress, that was the law we passed, and with that law, we imposed restrictions on the powers which our government could exercise against us.

he ignores the fact that there exists in this country a group who dedicates themselves on a daily basis to this very fundamental aspect of American law. they are called the ACLU. they are attacked regularly by the right, and not the "fringe" of which Glenn speaks, but rather by o'reilly and limbaugh and malkin and so on, e.g. "mainstream" conservatives. and say what one will about "classical conservatism"--these are the current exemplars of conservatism in the public sphere.

to quote a certain king, sorry, president of ours, "they hate us for our freedoms."

and that is what makes the modern left different from the modern right. where once the left was all for "speech codes" and punishments therein, it has all flipped, and now it is the right who attacks all kinds of speech as "treason" and so on.

just sayin'.

HaloScan.com - Comments

for what it's worth--dick cheney set to the rocking sounds of filter's "hey man, nice shot"

Reuters AlertNet - U.S. religious group condemns Iraq war

so the world council of churches believes bush is bad, iraq was a mistake of a war etc.

and many on the left will approvingly link to this, saying "see, even religious folk are on our side now."

in fact, i see it already has a link as dailykos.

and yet, the moment religious groups show too much fealty to the right (the brewing North Carolina republican registration of church members scandal) we will say "see--religion mixing with politics! bad!!!"

say it slowly, say it loud, whisper it in the ear of a loved one, whatever, just say it: religion is the problem. it's the problem when you agree with it, and the probably when you don't.

hypocrites.

UPDATE: THIS POST GOT PULLED BY THE WAPO TWICE TONIGHT. ANYONE WANT TO TELL ME WHY?


Responding to the washington post online and their continuing insistence that a) comity is more important than truth and that b) jack abramoff was a bid democrat, i write as follows:

if one thousand readers respond to a story, using language so foul it would curl the very hair of a sea captain, and those thousand responses were right on the facts--would their intemperate language change the underlying facts?

it's a yes or no question.

let me save you the trouble. no. the facts would remain. swearing is the reddest of herrings.

deb howell either lied or was hideously incompetent.

you covered up for her by removing non-profane posts which made substantive points that were not refutable and that put you in a terrible light. they showed that you were compounding your initial lie with further ones.

that's two really ugly lies, both which happen to support a republican narrative, one that (provably) has been deliberately crafted.

your readership, particularly on line, skews both left and sophisticated when it comes to these things. we saw through this in, oh, 2 minutes.

you aren't servicing that readership. that's bad business practice.

you should be fired. deb howell should be fired in disgrace. Derek Willis should either show us his evidence or be fired. sue schmidt should prove to us she doesn't do what she is told by republican operatives, or she should be fired.

you aren't just bad reporters and editors, you are people whose ethics are anethema to everything i believe in and try to teach my daughter. it's sickening.

profanity, or lack thereof, changes none of this.

So the NYTimes front-pages Sudan today. And midway through the third graf comes this little bit of kistof-ian gratuitous religiousity (with a backhanded karate chop at the left!):

Fighting between rebel groups and government-backed militias has destroyed entire villages, killing more than 200,000 and displacing about 2 million people. Both the United States and the United Nations have been criticized for responding too slowly to evidence that the African Union peacekeepers were having little effect.

Evangelical Christians have been particularly outspoken in their calls for a more active American role, and Mr. Bush's remarks, in a question-and-answer session in Tampa, appeared to focus increased attention on the issue.

NATO has played a small logistical role in Sudan thus far, primarily airlifting African troops. Until recently, government officials had said NATO might do more, but all the discussion has been about providing equipment, communications and other logistical support.

i put in all three paragraphs there to highlight the extraordinary incongruity of that sentence. let's look at the "and" there--when you read papers by kids learning to write, they often struggle with the concept of "but" (hell, when you read scripts by fully grown adults you will see the same thing) being oppositional, not THIS, but THAT. i think that David Sanger, front pager for the Times, has forgotten how "and" works. it tends to link two related thoughts in one sentence. are we supposed to assume that bush is throwing out red meat to the base by highlighting something of signifigance to them? if so, Sanger should report that directly. he has both things in the same sentence, after all.

of course, i'm giving the benefit of the doubt where none is due. let's imagine a scenario--kristof grabs sanger for lunch at the office. they go somewhere midtown--i want to go with smith and wollensky, but i'm guessing--and kristof bends sanger's ear for an hour and a half about two things: one, how good it feels to buy cambodian hookers, and two, how the evangelicals really do get it on darfur better than anyone, really they do. and how remiss the times is in covering that fact.

cut to the next day, and sanger is preparing his column. he asks kristof for input, and kristof suggests highlighting the evangelical involvement in darfur. sanger, rushed for time, shoves something in there. eh voila, total nonsensical writing on the front page of the times!

and hey, the left wing blogosphere has been highlighting sudan troubles for 2 years. we have a couple of million readers in total over here. our readers are active. but i didn't note an utterly weird sentence about us in there. or about john kerry, who brought darfur and sudan up repeatedly in his campaign.

the times continues down a suicidal path. it will never be seen as being pro-evangelical enough, and it will lose its core readership, its base, if you will, of left-leaning folk.

How the blogosphere ate my brain, an essay

As usual, Glenn Greenwald is on fire, here.

he puts the NSA scandal, and its potential arc, in the context of the Watergate scandal. he's not the first to do, though he is the most articulate. that glenn guy is a really good writer and thinker. there's a big future ahead for him i suspect in policy. i hope spitzer is aware of him.

that said, i think he's a bit off base here in his Watergate analogy. what has changed since then? what is the key change in how the public consciousness is provoked and shifted? why, it's the internet! the internet changes everything. and it's not clear, in this case, that it changes things for the better.

let me explain: i was talking to friends last night, facetiously to an extent, about "scandal fatigue". I mean, every time Peter Daou makes a scandal list it is increasingly depressing. so why doesn't any of it stick? why, for instance, could whitewater go on and on, despite early and frequent exonerations of the clintons? well, it might be that those were the old days, when newspapers could focus on such things with real resources. the days before the 24 hour news cycle.

at first, it seemed with the advent of the cable channels that focus was what they did best. if they got their teeth on something prurient, slimy, or trashy, they just wouldn't let go.

and then came drudge. some won't remember, but before it turned out he was a shill for the republican party (and i'd love to know if they sought him out or if he...offered his services. natas si drol and all that. hope his soul is toasty currently) he was a paradigm-shifter. you could sit at your desk at work and Bam! news! hot and fresh. and though the cable news nets wanted to blow him off, and the networks even more so, how could they once he started putting up real numbers, breaking real stories? Of course, we found out later those stories were bullshit plants by Lucianne Goldberg and her hellspawn, but that wasn't the point--for all their haughtiness, the newspapers and networks, the opinion shapers, had to take note.

and they did.

then, to speed this travelougue up a bit, instapundit gets going, and then comes mediawhoresonline (lamented, missed, asskicking rip-roaring monsters they were) and bob somersby at the daily howler. then atrios and kos. and here's where it gets interesting. Markos decided to build something different--a real community. and dailykos is (re)born. then an interesting thing starts to happen. diaries and posts come so fast and furious it is impossible to keep up. and they rush by--ever pushed out by the one that was posted two minutes later.

but it gets even more complicated. as it happens, every post has the possibility to reference some other expert's take on something: "jane's got something new on plame, read here" or "glenn really nailed the NSA thing, read here" or "look what CNN just posted here" and so on. it's relentless, and it leaves us no time to focus on any of it as we try to focus on all of it. it's a new paradigm of how to process information, and it's never been tried on a mass scale before. all source material on everything is ubiquitous and omnipresent, and expert commentary is available often about 5 minutes after a new piece of info surfaces.

and it is amazing! it's amazing how many brilliant thinkers and writers and polemicists are out there--all at my fingertips. 24 hours a day! such a profusion of public thinking and writing is unprecedented in scope in the history of the world.

Gutenberg was a piker compared to bennett cerf. sorry, but it's true.

but with such a massive shift in how information interfaces with all of us, one must ask--what effect has all this had on our ability to make change happen in the off-line world? and i believe the answer is: it has lessened it. because information is now flowing faster than our ability to incorporate it, deal with it, and use it. by the time we've really pondered on anything, something new happens.

[as a side note here--some might say "well, these particular people who are running the country are so corrupt, so venal, and so incompetent that it is THAT fact that makes it hard to focus. it's the old "do stony things happen more often when people are stoned, or is it just that it seems that way because...you're stoned." i'm saying the paradigm shift just coincidentally happened at the same time as the vogons taking over our country.]

anyhoo--net of all this is, cheney shoots some old guy in the face, and it knocks the new diary off the front page, and out of mind.

so, what to do? well, we are going to have to figure out how to manage this process in such a way that we break through the noise (and by we i mean "the left" or "the left blogosphere" or "rational scientific people" or "secular humanists" or "brights" or whomever.) anyone but fucking rick warren or james dobson or al-zarqawi or the republican party and its apologists. we haven't got it right yet.

one possibility: imagine a world in which the democrats in concert with the blogosphere (hey, if there is a blogosphere can their be a blogosopher? just askin.) just don't comment on whatever new shit flows down the intersewer. "cheney shot someone in the face? hope he's ok. anyway Bush broke the law with the NSA thing." repeat eternally until you've made your point.

i guess i'll cross post this at my kos diary you know, for the irony of it all.

Metal Sludge - W. Axl Rose throws suprise listening party for Guns n' Roses recording "Chinese Democracy" in NYC! - The Power & Glory since 1998

look at this photo and then please ask yourself:

what

happened

to

axl

rose?