Xark!

In support of terrorism

These people are out of their minds, displaying the kind of fanaticism that goes beyond laughable and into the dangerous. Michael Scheuer, appearing on Fox News, tells Glenn Beck ""The only chance we have as a country right now is" for bin Laden to "detonate a major weapon" in U S. Yep, they are WISHING for Americans to die so that they can push their political agenda.

It's time for Republicans to call these people what they are and to distance themselves from such lunatics and a network that promotes them. Seriously, folks, come back to reality.

The betrayal of the Fourth Estate

I have attempted to be discreet on the decline and fall of the media empire, mostly because I am still in it. With layoffs and furloughs announced every quarter, the consequences of being brutally honest could be dire. But I am disgusted by the complete hypocrisy of the newspaper industry, whose leaders are staking a claim to the sacred art of journalism, as if it has sole rights to it. The assertion by newspaper executives that newspapers are the torch-bearers for a community (or global) moral and ethical center would be laughable, if it were not being used to cloak the greed of corporations that have enjoyed healthy profit margins for decades, all the while failing to invest in anything other than expanding their arrogance. 

These corporations profess it is their duty to hold the world to a higher standard but conveniently overlook their failure to substantively investigate major issues and their own increasing immersion in the very organizations they profess to watchdog. Three words. Yellow cake uranium. Need more? WMDs. Economic meltdown. Climate change. Want a book? Death by Journalism.   Into the Buzzsaw.

(Note to press: You are supposed to COVER politicos not hang out with them.)

The flu will test who we are

"Flu is a highly political issue, to put it mildly," Terry Jones wrote this morning, and that's what I'm going to talk about -- not the science of it. Because science is only part of what we'll be facing in the coming days.

Whether or not history records April 2009 as the genesis of a global pandemic, there are some things we can expect with near certainty: Rumors, reports, controversy, credibility gaps and fear. So please bear these things in mind and, if you agree with these ideas, help spread them. Because fear is a deadly virus, too, and just as networked media can help spread it, network media can also serve as an immune system response to fear IF WE KEEP OUR HEADS AND WORK TOGETHER.

McCain Admits "Republican" and "American" Not the Same Thing

I always knew this, but it's big of him to admit it, anyway.

(from MSNBC.com)

Tropic Thunder's Defensive Politicking

Perhaps some of you have been following the controversy surrounding the film "Tropic Thunder." And it's not as if the cast and film crew were unaware that their work would raise some eyebrows, as their omnipresent media campaigning demonstrates. Robert Downey Jr's role as a white actor who dyes his skin to play a black soldier is discussed in just about every interview and set piece on the film that I've seen, with each focusing on how the point of the film is to mock Hollywood, not offend "real" people. And, given what I've seen of the film's reviews, their strategy seems to have worked. Stiller is given much credit for an entertaining film that turns Hollywood pompousness on its head, and Downey earns raves for following his Iron Man success with an iron-jawed, intentionally self-absorbed caricature. So, why is there so much controversy? Probably because the filmmakers and reviewers all anticipated the wrong controversy, and this error in judgment tells us a lot about the current state of identity politics and cultural politicking today.

What's scaring me today

A friend sent me this link to a minor, if interesting, piece:

"Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed....
 
DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies — which apply to anyone entering the country, including US citizens — are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism...

We knew it was happening.  I'm glad they've finally admitted it.  It's a step in the right direction.  "Secret laws" are wrong and can too easily become evil.  (I do not use the word "evil" lightly.)

The US slipped across a line in the last few years.  Once upon a time the Constitution was honored in the breach nearly as much as in the maintenance.  You can argue that it even started off that way. 

The "line" crossed is that we're no longer even paying lip-service.

R.I.P. The US Bill of Rights.  c. 1789 - c. 2004.  215 years isn't a bad run.

One of the reasons I want Obama in office is that, despite the fact he's going to screw me in taxes and probably do significant damage by socializing many private programs (it's a Democratic Party view of life) *and* take my guns, I think McCain will try to go status quo on "civil liberties" (once called "civil rights").  I'm guessing Obama will be the best in that direction, and it *might* be enough to recover.  I want the full Latin:  "status quo ante bellum".  (No, not *that* far ante bellum, for all you Yankee readers reading far too much into this.)

I hope Obama's at least somewhat as idealistic and he wants to appear, and I think it would be good for our next President to be an ex-civil rights lawyer who comes at least partially from a culture on the wrong side of the power base.  He's more likely to think about how to limit the power base (not that any politician can be successful without participating in the power base).

McCain comes from a family tradition of trading individual rights for the security of the country (i.e. military service).   I think that's beyond a good thing -- that's a noble and laudable tradition.  All honor to him.  (I say that quite seriously -- no sarcasm at all.).  I like the idea of a Commander-in-Chief who's been there making the decisions.  He, personally, knows the cost of war better than most anyone else, certainly better than Obama.

Such tradition must, however, influence his thinking.  The problem with trading civil rights for security is that civil rights are not our income, they're our capital.  What happens when you spend your capital living day to day instead of investing?  That's right, eventually you have no capital left to spend and the bills still come in the mail. When you're flush in civil rights, such a trade might be reasonable. When you've built up a deficit you should stop spending -- that applies to civil rights just as much to dollars, and the Bush administration has run up quite a debt in both. 

I sure do miss the old Republican Party -- and by that I mean the goals of minimal Government, individual rights and responsibilities and leaving social activism to societies.  And yes, I do realize that what I miss is more mythology than history.  So what?  What's our current mythology?

I just hope our next President keeps the space program going so in a few hundred years people can get the hell out.

And last, I'll offer an apology:  I'm currently reading a dystopian post-H5N1/global cooling apocalyptic near-future SciFi novel right now, so perhaps I have an overly pessimistic view of things and certainly an overly cynical one.

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...

South Carolina Primary Numbers

So here's a few numbers from the South Carolina Democratic Primary. They are, of course, unofficial, and gleaned from sites such as CNN and Charleston.net:

Total number of votes cast
Dem Primary (1/26):     530,322 (54.5%)
GOP Primary  (1/19):     442,918 (45.5%)
Total:                                 973,240

87404 more voters went to the polls in the Democratic Primary than GOP primary. Yes, it was raining and cold on the 19th. It was overcast and cold on the 26th as well. In fact, as Dan and I walked to our polling place, it was sprinkling and windy and made my eyes water.

2004 Dem primary:      280000

Using the total number of votes in both primaries, here are some figures calculated by xark and rounded:
Percentage of total votes in both primaries:
Obama             30%
McCain            15%
Clinton          14%
Huckabee      13%
Edwards           9%

Another fun figure:
If you take the top two vote-getters in each  primary,  Obama and Clinton  for Dems and McCain and Huckabee for GOP, the Dems got 44% of the total  number of votes cast, compared to  28%  for the  Republicans. Interesting, if nothing else.

And away we go

It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. REM

Once,  the biggies controlled the pipelines, deciding whose content was disseminated and how.  But no more. Thousands of little conduits are siphoning the power from the few and allowing art and information to flow up, over, around to audiences, albeit smaller ones, everywhere.

We've witnessed the phenomenon of Radiohead's Web-only album release. Here's another example of a breach in the wall: Ingrid Michaelson.  The NY-based singer/songwriter's road to fame, if not quite stardom, ran through MySpace, where her music was found by TV types, scoring her an Old Navy commercial and a few seconds on Grey's Anatomy.  Now she's gaining traction as an indie darling, with coverage in the likes of The New York Times and  Rolling Stone. Her second album, Girls and Boys, has been rereleased and is doing nicely on Billboard.com (meaning there's radio play) and iTunes.

Why is this so cool? She's never been signed to a label.

Oh yes, the end is coming.

Bad credit

If you've been rabidly keeping up with the pending mortgage crisis in the U.S. and its global economic consequences, good for you.  I've been out on the town with princesses.

However, if you would like a lovely explanation of just what the hell the "credit crunch" is and why people everywhere are aflutter about looming defaults of thousands of borrowers, visit one of the top sites for U.S. news coverage: the BBC.

This little Q&A lays out nicely what the problem is and why it matters.  It's bizness news in English (no pun intended) for those who would like to be economically literate, but aren't masochistic enough to have an MBA. It's from September, but there are lots of links to news stories on the site if you'd like to know more.