so over at some writer's blog, some guy who claims to know my friend who was at this dinner the other night...

it's a bad intro. i'm not a writer. i'm a (recovering) development executive. here's the thing about being a development executive. and it's good news/bad news.

good news. once upon a time i'm playing on my hardscrabble soccer team in the LA Municipal league. this was a team i'd put together in one of the mid-level divisions (the core of which would go on to dominate in the top division later), we played at some shitty fields, but we had a good time. i had a writer friend on the team (several), most of them not getting much work. some of them seemingly living in their cars. but we were all friends, and my junior junior junior exec career was just beginning, so i was a beacon of hope for these guys. one friend and his partner had done a t. corghasson (spelling?) boyle short story adaptation, and a pretty damn good one. no one had bitten, but it had got them meetings around town. which, of course, pays very little rent. but here i am at my new fancy job (pay? 27,000k a year.) reading, oh, conservatively, 8 scripts every tuesday (spec day!!!), all on a rush, all needing synopses and comments, and should my bosses actually read them?. plus a manuscript, usually on wednesdays, 500 pages and could you turn it around in 2 hours? and is it any good? and about 15 scripts a weekend. and the notes: mother of gog and magog, the notes! massive tomes, documents that would stand the test of time! oh mighty notes, i must have written an asimovian output of them. and to some damn good writers--some of the top in the industry. i had been working in the biz for a year or so. no background in film. but these guys had to execute my notes, or be fired.

but i continue, as is my way, to digress.

so my friend, let's call him John, though his real name is jon, has written this adaptation of boyle. and i force my boss to read it, because my boss has been fixated on this brilliant moon ghost story thingie. for years. but no one has been interested. so he likes the boyle script, brings the writers in for a meeting, and lo! and behold! they get hired. and they get a nice chunk of change, something around 6 figures. and suddenly, i've hooked my friends up with a great paying gig. and that is just fucking cool.

that's the good. the bad, and here josh f only gets it half right: sure, often the gig requires saying "this is grrrrrrrrrreat" about steaming piles of ordure. but more often, in my experience, it requires coming up with endless stuff to say about why, oh, i don't know, a story about the gadget guy at the CIA should be about a low level engineer type who discovers the secret to cold fusion. in other words, auto-job-justification. pages and pages. notes on notes. notes on drafts that are based on previous notes rewritten to meet previous notes all of which are contradictory. and if the writer is "good", all of which have been executed faithfully, because by jove if the character needs to be more "somber" yet "funnier" somewhere in the same set of notes, you had better deliver.

you think i need barton fink to give me that barton fink feeling? i've got a thousand barton finks!

i once told a certain director from a certain country where they wear a certain kind of shoe made out of a certain naturally growing substance about a certain script that became a certain movie with academy award winning actors/editors/producers/production designers/composers and so on...i told this guy, upon receiving the (greenlit, budgeted and ready to roll, full fee to the director who was like a boss to me, in that i worked for him) script, that it sucked. ass. that it would be a mistake to make it.

i was fired.

just in case any prospective future employers are reading this, i just want to make very very clear: message received.

back to my regularly scheduled ranting.

The Washington Note

so the other thing today--valerie plame was working on something important? you don't say? covert? you don't say. involving nuclear proliferation (which, for the morons in the crowd, is the same thing as nucular proliferation)? huh. Iran? really? funny that.

so to summarize: A covert operative, one who our government spent enormous amounts of (our) money training, sent out into the field where she made relationships with people in dark and dangerous places, who further put her life on the line in the service of our country and against the proliferation of the most deadly weapons on earth, who in turn came back to the states to try to get the government response just right, and who's husband has been called a national hero by no less than GB 41, that's the person they chose to out?

if you can't figure out why this is the most evil act imaginable by government official, you are beyond hope. there is a special place in A.Q. Khan's heart for you, though.

Here is the report,
in all its gory glory, about the right wing-ed imbalance on the Sunday wind breakers aka Press the Meat et al.

basically, you will be shocked shocked shocked to find that the damn things have more conservatives than liberals, that positions seemingly held by a majority of americans are not represented etc.

i've always wondered--that guy Scott Ritter, ex-marine, ex-head of the Iraq WMD task force--yeah, you've heard his name, oddly he never ever seems to get on these shows.

which is funny. because he is the only person involved who had any kind of voice (and who wasn't, say, insane, like your ramsey clarks of the world) in the national media who got the WMD call right. everyone else who pontificated was just wrong wrong wrong. not ritter. that got him disinvited from the party, apparently. weird.

Debt and Denial - New York Times

Krugmania! Now more than ever.

since most can't read the above without the magic password from the times selectoton, here is an excerpt, and a choice one at that:

"Last year America spent 57 percent more than it earned on world markets. That is, our imports were 57 percent larger than our exports.

How did we manage to live so far beyond our means? By running up debts to Japan, China and Middle Eastern oil producers. We're as addicted to imported money as we are to imported oil.

Sometimes large-scale foreign borrowing makes sense. In the 19th century the United States borrowed vast sums from Europe, using the funds to build railroads and other industrial infrastructure. That debt-financed wave of investment left America stronger, not weaker.

But this time our overseas borrowing isn't financing an investment boom: adjusted for the size of the economy, business investment is actually low by historical standards. Instead, we're using borrowed money to build houses, buy consumer goods and, of course, finance the federal budget deficit. "

Good times, people, good times. As someone who lives at the epicenter of the housing bubble, i feel it is incumbent on me to set 100 dollar bills on fire while drinking expensive champagne. that's what the neighbors do around here, anyway.

The Moderate Voice - White House Faces Renewed Credibility Problems On Katrina

In.Comp.E.Tent.

the people who run our country are not very good at their jobs, if one doesn't count auto-nest-feathering and bomb-dropping. though it must be said we've dropped a lot of inaccurate bombs in Iraq these past two years.

anyway, democrats--competence is the issue. competence. run on it. make it your platform. make it your frame. i don't care if you say that "republicans used to be competent, but they've lost their way". whatever. the point is, forget everything but this--democrats get things done, get social security checks showing up every month, run medicare effectively, punish wrongdoers etc.

These republicans couldn't hit water from a rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

Match Point Review, WITH TOTAL SPOILERS, so if you haven't seen it, don't read this.

Match Point was by far my favorite mainstream movie this year. my favorite underground movie was done by a sub-ethnic group so obscure, using non-narrative techniques so different from western studio ethics, that i can't even tell you about it. fine, one word. turkmenistan.

but back to match point. what makes this movie so different from today's standard thriller (for the sake of argument, let's call that "Derailed", so very down the middle)?

well, remember Jim Thompson: "there is only one plot: things are not as they seem."
now more than ever. every scene in every thriller must be fraught with potential peril. the audience must be kept waiting to know just what is coming next. they can't be in on the secrets of each character--BOW DOWN TO THE MIGHTY REVEAL PEONS!!!!

that's the way it is. and don't even get me started on M. Night's third revealatorium--it is but to puke. but that's a post for another day. back to match point.

the genius of this movie is that in every scene, where you are programmed to wait for the other shoe to drop...it never does. if a character says he or she is doing something, that's what they are doing. when someone appears out of the blue--the tennis player who shows up in the second act, say--they are there to illuminate some aspect of our main characters, not to reveal the real reason behind their dastardly plan. and yet, rather than become dull or episodic, this has the effect of making the movie feel like a real story, with the flow that comes from a good novel with an omniscient (and not faulty) narrator.

because this is a great little story, a taut and intense plot, well shot and well acted. in fact, until the third to last scene, it is a movie that could have directed by...well, um, who does good thrillers these days? anyone? hitchcock. it feels like a solid hitchcock movie. in that antepenultimate (look it up) scene, where jonathan rhys-meyers tells a ghost that if existence has specific meaning, then he will be caught--well, it is woody allen, so you are right to guess he won't get caught. but that doesn't detract from the last scene at all--it's just a sop for the insider types. like me.

jon and scarlett both give superb and naturalistic performances as well. you believe them both--they never oversell their characters, they just inhabit them (with one proviso--that doesn't look like much of a groundstroke on J R-M, but hey, he's better than DiCaprio's basketball skills in "The Basketball Diaries").

it's a beautiful piece of work--i'm excited to watch it again on ppv.

Rolling Stone : God's Senator

Just to be clear--it isn't only muslim fundamentalists who are utterly batshit crazy. sens coburn of ok and brownback (as this article makes clear) are loony. full of hate for their fellow man. soaked in contradiction that they clearly aren't smart enough to absorb and deal with. utterly religious, and unable to incorporate new ideas into their orthodoxy.

welcome to the future as long as we secularists are unwilling to fight harder and meaner for what we believe.

Paul Craig Roberts: Who Will Save America?

a representative quote from former reagan administration official roberts:

Before flinching at my assertion of blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even to a naif.



he's pissed. and scared.

"What next, bearded one?" - signandsight

more on the whiny little pathetic creatures who can't take some ribbing of their prophet, from a german journalist.

brilliant.

Salon.com News | "Everyone is afraid to criticize Islam"

says it so well. why are we allowing ourselves to be fooled into "respecting the feelings" of these assholes?

hirsi ali is a hero in the truest sense. she deserves the kudos of the entire free world. here is an excerpt:

Was apologizing for the cartoons the wrong thing to do?

Once again, the West pursued the principle of first turning one cheek, then the other. In fact, it's already a tradition. In 1980, privately owned British broadcaster ITV aired a documentary about the stoning of a Saudi Arabian princess who had allegedly committed adultery. The government in Riyadh intervened and the British government issued an apology. We saw the same kowtowing response in 1987 when [Dutch comedian] Rudi Carrell derided [the Iranian leader] Ayatollah Khomeini in a comedy skit. In 2000, a play about the youngest wife of the prophet Mohammed, titled "Aisha," was canceled before it ever opened in Rotterdam. Then there was the van Gogh murder and now the cartoons. We are constantly apologizing, and we don't notice how much abuse we're taking. Meanwhile, the other side doesn't give an inch.

What should the appropriate European response look like?

There should be solidarity. The cartoons should be displayed everywhere. After all, the Arabs can't boycott goods from every country. They're far too dependent on imports. And Scandinavian companies should be compensated for their losses. Freedom of speech should at least be worth that much to us.

But shouldn't Muslims, like any religious community, also be able to protect themselves against slander and insult?

That's exactly the reflex I was just talking about: offering the other cheek. Not a day passes, in Europe and elsewhere, when radical imams aren't preaching hatred in their mosques. They call Jews and Christians inferior, and we say they're just exercising their freedom of speech. When will the Europeans realize that the Islamists don't allow their critics the same right? After the West prostrates itself, they'll be more than happy to say that Allah has made the infidels spineless.

What will be the upshot of the storm of protests against the cartoons?

We could see the same thing happening that has happened in the Netherlands, where writers, journalists and artists have felt intimidated ever since the van Gogh murder. Everyone is afraid to criticize Islam. Significantly, "Submission" still isn't being shown in theaters.

Cross Posted at my daily kos diary, where maybe someone will read it.

It's hard to admit that your lifelong beliefs, inculcated from people who were otherwise quite perceptive and accurate about the state of the world, could be so horribly wrong. but facts are facts. the point of being a secular humanist, nay the very definition of one, to me at least, is that when new information comes in that refutes other firmly held beliefs, and that information stands up to scientifically based scrutiny, you change your beliefs to accomodate this new information.

Right?

So, a bit about me. i was raised by a social democratic professor father, and an early and ardent feminist mother. i lived either in London, where such beliefs were mainstream, or in Northampton, Massachusetts, about as liberal a college town as one could find. i think i went to my first gay rights march when i was 7, in 1975 or so. i was surrounded, literally, by people who believed that difference (later known as diversity, or multi-culturism) was to be celebrated. i guess the extreme version of this would say that headhunters in borneo were behaving in a manner appropriate to their culture, and who were we to judge them?

it always annoyed me that my parents were mostly right about everything political (although supporting one quixotic campaign after another [Fred Harris for President in 1976 for instance] ,was ultimately a useless endeavor), so where was the chance at rebellion? But something about the whole 70s/80s progressive beliefs always rubbed me the wrong way.

Moral Relativism was one central component of that group of beliefs which made up the "Academic Left" of that era. Let's call that the philosophically grounded version of the simpler concept of "tolerance." ultimately, tolerance is a profoundly Liberal (and liberal) sentiment: that one should listen to and respect the beliefs of others, especially if one disagrees with those beliefs. one root of this belief comes, at least in part, from the central nature of the protection of minority rights that Hamilton held so dear, as he made clear in his Federalist papers. those guys were very open minded for their time, the founding fathers. they were...tolerant. obviously within the proscribed area of possible reality of the 1770s, but nonetheless still very open to other's ideas.

Tolerance was so central to my upbringing, that it curled off into the P.C. of late 70s/early-mid 80s. P.C., as some will remember, was an internal issue of the Left (we used to make jokes about how we had to mention every agenda at every meeting--"what will the anti-fur pro-vegetarian radlebfems think" etc.) back then. it was later seized on by the Right as a club against us, and in retrospect, it was the beginning of the Right using our own belief system to get their own power boosted.

so where did all this multi-culti stuff lead? well, i would argue to two places. first (and grist for the mill of a second post, i don't want to deal with it here) i believe it became the linchpin of the criticism of the left, and of progressivism in general, in a way that allowed people to take what were once racist beliefs but could now be subsumed under the rubric of "anti-affirmative action" in the negative, or "i'm a proud white man celebratin' my heritage with this confederate flag" in the proactive mode. in turn i think this hurt our standing in the real world of american politics, and some of what tom frank talks about in "What's wrong with Kansas" comes out of this same place. these are bad things, but much less pernicious than the second outcome. and here we come to the present day, via the magic of cartoons, of all things.

we all know the story by now, how the muslim world has reacted in the main to the publication in a danish newspaper of mildly critical and marginally satirical cartoons depicting mohammed in various different ways. the muslim reaction was predictable--salman rushdie gave us a preview, and theo van gogh as well. islam has a shitty track record at inculcating criticism and improving from it. rather, it tends, as a religion, to lash out at criticism in ways we are all seeing now. I absolutely do not want to single out Islam here--all the major monotheistic (or polytheistic, in the case of Hinduism, or something-or-othertheistic, as in buddhism) religions can't handle logically grounded criticism, but some deal with it better than others. it is central to jewishness to push against the religion for many jews, and always has been. but really, all religions are pretty much terrible for progressivism, whatever good lefty catholic priest or unitarians might say to the contrary. Sam Harris has made the case quite brilliantly in "The End of Faith" that in fact moderate religious folk are the most dangerous people of all, as they allow us to believe that somehow these religions are sane or rational. they are neither, none of them. they are all ancients wrong-headed attempts to understand a world that is utterly different from the one we live in today. they fuck us up. bad.

but as a liberal, as a lefty, i'm supposed to celebrate this diversity of belief. i'm supposed to respect people's religious values. i'm supposed to believe that our country very existence comes from such beliefs. and no matter how weird, one is supposed to tread lightly when criticizing such beliefs. in this country, we have in Mormonism and Scientology two of the craziest fucking set of precepts one could imagine. you would have to be a fucking science fiction writer to come up with that shit.

oh. right. funny, but sad clown funny. shakes the clown funny. bad funny.

so i find myself, as is my wont, perusing your dailykos, your atrios, your americablogs, and yet on no strong intelligent lefty site can one just boldly state the obvious: You can't write a cartoon about your prophet? he's that insecure? your belief in him is that insecure? i can't express my opinion because of your insecurity? THAT IS FUCKING LAME AND IRRATIONAL, AND A BELIEF SYSTEM THAT IS SO FUCKING DELICATE AS TO FEAR ATTACKS FROM CARTOONISTS IS AN EMBARRASSMENT TO ALL RATIONAL HUMAN BEINGS!!!!!!!

sorry, yelling there. i've calmed down a bit. why can't otherwise right (and by right i mean left) thinking folk say this? because religion is the bridge too far. to belittle religion is to be racist, or anti-diversity and multi-culti, and it is ingrained into us on the left that this is a very.bad.thing.

well, that's wrong. it's just plain wrong. their are elements of the right who can say the obvious about islam with far greater accuracy than our side can. i'm not going to link to the horror festival otherwise known as Little Green Footballs, but trust me, those paranoid whack jobs over there are far more comprehensive and right-on in their analysis of islamic behavior than anyone on our side is, even Juan Cole, one of my favorite writers. don't get me wrong--if you turn the right towards the insanity and shortcomings of Christianity in its myriad guises, they revert to type, and will attack you for daring to say their god is as stupid as mohammeds. but still, what is wrong with us on the left that we can't see this situation for what it is: example number 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 that religion is one giant death cult and that ultimately the battle that matters will be between rationalists and god freaks.

get on the right damn side of the ramparts, i say.

Cross Posted at my Daily Kos diary

some excerpts from the The Onion, sorry I mean the NY Times select op-ed page. The comedy comes when you juxtapose Friedman's column, where he warns himself not to drink the kool-aid, gets thirsty, looks around for something to drink, and says "hey kool-aid, oh yeah". a long gulp later, he reminds himself, "don't drink the kool aid!"

in and of itself, hilarity! but even better is when you move your eyes mere inches to the right side of the page, where you see krugman smash friedman's column with a sledgehammer of truth, or to continue the metaphor, some tonic for the truth troops. excerpts from each below. put all liquids down before reading.


Friedman (the italic portions are his internal narrative--they are very funny in an unintentional on the page but didn't make the on-line version, and Friedman's non-internal narrative will be in bold, to stir or save confusion.)

"Well, it wasn't exactly Nixon to China. But it wasn't bean bag either. I'd say the president's State of the Union speech, when it came to calling for an end to our oil addiction and a real push to improve our educational competitiveness, was more like Nixon goes to New Mexico. It was an important change in direction and tone -- but still a long way from China, a long way from a definitive change in policy and implementation.

Oh, come on, Friedman, get real! The president throws a few paragraphs your way and you go all weak in the knees. Show some spine, man! You need to trash this thing. You know these guys are not serious. This is a president who once called for putting a man on Mars and then just dropped it. You assumed they were going to do the Iraq war right -- remember? Look where that got you, you moron. You should have listened to your wife!"

I'm going to go ahead and guess that he wrote this before he heard the US Energy Secretary saying "When bush said 75%, he didn't mean it." or that he didn't see the Saudi Ambassador's quote about "really, you guys are giving us the shaft? let me get a quick word with my bitch friend Georgie." Or perhaps he missed the fact that the administration is laying off scientists who study alternative fuels even as we speak. hey, it could have happened. maybe he doesn't get a news feed at the office. he certainly wasn't reading kos yesterday, i can tell you that.

more TF

So here's my bottom line: I'm glad the president is changing his rhetoric on energy and says he is changing his funding priorities. It makes for a great headline. But he has to go much further if he wants to make a great difference. There's no pain-free solution. Remember how President Kennedy ended his May 25, 1961, State of the Union speech calling for a moon shot? He said: "I have not asked for a single program which did not cause one or all Americans some inconvenience, or some hardship, or some sacrifice."

Pigs will fly before Bush says that.

You may be right. And if he fails to carry through with this energy initiative, I'll be the first to rip him for it. In the meantime, I prefer to give him a new reputation to live up to. You never know. ..."

I want to make a bet right now. Thomas Friedman will not "be the first to rip him for it." i don't think he'll be the 1075th. If he rips Bush, he will be stumbling into a party where only the host and two alcoholics are left, mumbling over the last shots of Jaeger.
Again, to be clear--this initiative--and there aren't html tags that could make the word initiative be ironic enough--this initiative lasted exactly as long as it took bush to speak it. then it ended.

now on to the shrill one. he doesn't write with the same...panache as TF, so no need for italics. just bold. And shrill. so very shrill.

"So President Bush's plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan -- floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole -- to send humans to Mars.
But what did you expect? After five years in power, the Bush administration is still -- perhaps more than ever -- run by Mayberry Machiavellis, who don't take the business of governing seriously.
Here's the story on oil: In the State of the Union address, Mr. Bush suggested that "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol" and other technologies would allow us "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East."
But the next day, officials explained that he didn't really mean what he said. "This was purely an example," said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped on Tuesday night: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of cuts to its budget.
"A veteran researcher," reports The New York Times, "said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol."
Why announce impressive sounding goals when you have no plan to achieve them? The best guess is that the energy "plan" was hastily thrown together to give Mr. Bush something positive to say."

huh. look at that. very same page as friedman's ruminations come krugman's refutations. what we at my college called a harsh biscuit. tierney and friedman must hate krugman. he just crushes them every damn time.
i don't really have anything clever to add to PK. he is the master and i am a mere acolyte. The other op-edders must beg Gail Collins every time not to let Krugman destroy them on their very own page. yet he does. it does, however, make one wonder about the standards the times has for its op-ed writers. then one remembers A.M. Rosenthal and Safire-on-Atta-meeting, and one realizes there aren't any.

(One last point--the alert reader will note that i have edited Friedman to make him look worse than the actual op-ed. this is true. but tom friedman, for his many crimes against coherent thought, logical analysis, and good writing, deserves no break, not from me, not from anyone. it's his megaphone and he is the one yelling in all our damn ears with his nonsense. so tough titty, Tom.)

Some chit-chat at firedoglake (and elsewhere) about paid plants in the blogosphere. most people seem to be focused on comment plants--either churning them out for marketing reasons (if you keep posting comments then later when you post something relevant you will seem like a trustworthy person) or political--stirring the pot with (usually) republican talking points.

it's all true, and soon we will find proof. i'm hunting for it right now, talking to my marketing and promotion contacts, and will have something concrete within days. but the real question, one that relates nicely to the armstrong williams/maggie gallagher/the list is fucking endless with right wing hacks payola non-scandal is this: who amongst us in the blogosphere is a paid shill who is not announcing same? given the current state of world affairs you would have to be a fool not to think that one of the top ten right wing bloggers is getting paid sub rosa by somebody scaife-y. or CIA-y. not to be paranoid or anything.

to think anything else is to be a fool. they (the right wing noise machine, also, oddly enough, the name of my new band) are playing hard, playing to win. i hope those on the side of decency and light and puppies will do the same.

this post sponsored by "The Death and Resurrection Show", Killing Joke, from the last (and quite great) album from them.

test

Back and better than ever new and improved.

so let's start with the report about Jack Kelley and his fabulistness, if you know what i mean. Pace The Onion: Holy Fucking Shit! This guy lied about everything and anything. He was a sociopath of the first order, and i am surprised bodies didn't turn up when other journalists went to investigate.

1) Unnamed Sources. here the key point rears its ugly head (just like in Shattered Glass--i guess no one wants to learn this lesson--more on that later)--if you can't pin someone down as to who said what to them, and that disability is institutionalized in the very format of your system, not much of a surprise when problems come up, no? i mean, you could basically say to your boss "yeah yeah this guy really said it, i have WRITTEN notes (wow, you wrote them down? they must be true)" and as far as i can tell from the somewhat discreet langauge of the report, your boss would say "print that sucker". pathetic. but what the authors of the report fail to discuss (as David Ehrenstein does quite brilliantly in this week's LA Weekly) is the EFFING MOTIVATION of the people giving you material anonymously. i won't cover too much ground here--david's discussion in the weekly should suffice--but this point seems obvious, and maybe we can get at the why of this disaster here.
a) perhaps the desire to get scoops, combined with the need to keep one's job, wrapped up with a post-Watergate isn't-deep-throat-the-coolest-thing-ever reportorial mentality will lead people to TURN OFF THEIR BRAINS. why, anonymous gov't official says that higher up official is "really focused on doing what's right for the country right now"--no shit? wow, and you'll let me print that? that your boss just cares too much? that is so...brave...you just want the truth to get out in my FRONT PAGE STORY YEAH FOR ME I WILL GET A RAISE AND MAYBE A PULITZER.

guess where this mentality takes you, friend. Bob woodward, the worst reporter on the planet, a truly stupid and vapid and sad little man masquerading as a....well, they put it best in the report at USA today. for some reason kovach et al believe a reporter's characteristics are "...easy to describe: independence, skepticism, curiosity and distrust of authority. " huh. so that's how they would describe woodward? jeff gerth? elizabeth bumiller? nedra pickler? Fox News? Paula Zahn? Tim Russert? These people fucking love authority! they ARE authority! They hang out at Press club functions and make haha googly-eyed jokes about this shit with the very people they are supposed to be "independent from, with a healthy level of distrust" (I made that quote up, but fuck it, gotta get with the times and The Times). HAHAHAHAHA oh shit i just snarfed my cognac. i'll ask hitchens to clean it up. back to my point--woodward's book is as bad, if not worse, than kelley's mendacities--woodward describes spin as fact, in truth he creates a narrative in which all spin MUST be fact, and in true Kantian fashion, because Woodward himself is doing the reporting. the very authorial voice he uses forces spin to be true. again, better writers than me have broken this shit down, but woodward is a dangerous man who must be given his day of reckoning by his fellow journalists.
b) in the report, a reporter at USA today is described as finding some of Kelley's stories "incredulous" . This bit of nonsense managed to both be spoken by a reporter at our finest McPaper, but was also left uncommented on by the three wise men of the report staff. i'm incredulous with laughter, or something.

Also--this asshole Kelley had the temerity to not pay his translators, and keep the money for himself. oh how i hate this detail--all these people saying "he was so good to me i didn't see it coming". Nope, i don't believe it, if this guy was ripping off hard working people in third world countries so he could buy a bigger bible (more on that later too) or whatever, he is just a pathetic piece of rat excrement. i can't imagine anything worse, he basically stiffed his waitress 10000. bastard ratfink fuckwad.

Last but not least, i love how they got through the whole report without mentioning that Kelley's "trustworthy demeanor" and "likablity" were largely a product of his religiousity. not one mention. fucking NYTimes at least had the sac to admit that Blair's blackness was a potential issue. this is the one area where i really feel let down by USA today's examination staff. Kelley talked a lot of shit about how important god was to him, over and over ad nauseam. some people eat that up, and it makes them more susceptible to lies. piousness can be that way. this has been true since they invented religion, but somehow the stupid part of the human genome survives through to this day to lick religion up (ewwwwww.)

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.