Walter Cronkite

I wasn't really a TV news-watcher during his heyday (actually, it was a habit I've pretty much avoided all my life), but Jesse Walker sums up my feelings nicely here:

It [Cronkite running for president] was a joke, of course. But it was a wistful what-if of a joke, and it resonated. Time soon ran letters hailing the idea. "He knows more about national and international problems than any other two candidates put together," declared one reader, "and, as a duty, I think he would accept the miserable job." Four years later, the newsman was still fending off suggestions that he run for the office and "make a difference." Can you imagine anyone spouting such a fantasy about any of our anchors today? Maybe Stewart or Colbert, but not someone who delivers the news with a straight face.

And that's good. Cronkite's influence was a product of the three-network era, a time we should be happy to have put behind us. I'm sorry to see the man die, but I'm glad no one was able to fill his shoes.

QotD: Female characters in SF and Fantasy

Some wag once remarked that she judged a book or movie by 1) whether it had more than one female character of note who, 2) talked to each other, 3) about something other than men. It’s amazing how few works pass all three of those tests.

Lois McMaster Bujold, interviewed by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net, 2009-06

Has blogging jumped the shark?

Megan McArdle links to an interesting post at 11D, asking if blogging is dying:

3. Norms and practices. Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to. It's a lot of work to look for good posts elsewhere, and most bloggers have become burnt out. Drezner and Farrell had a theory that even small potato bloggers would have their day in the sun, if they wrote something so great that it garnered the attention of the big guys. But the big guys are too burnt out to find the hidden gems. So, good stuff is being written all the time, and it isn't bubbling to the top.

Many have stopped using blogrolls, which means less love spread around the blogosphere. The politics of who should be on a blogroll was too much of a pain, so bloggers just deleted the whole thing.

[. . .]

5. Reader burn out. You all are not clicking on the links like you used to. I'm not really sure why. In the past, if I was linked to by a big mega blogger, it meant 10,000 new readers in one afternoon. Now, a link by a mega blogger sends over a couple hundred readers. Readers are probably tired out of trying new stuff. Maybe we've sent you to too many crappy places over time and you're sick of it.

[. . .]

9. Link Monitoring. In the past, I could easily figure out which blogs had linked to me and then send them a reciprocal link. For whatever reasons, Google Blog and Technorati aren't picking up the smaller blogs, and I have no idea who's linking to me.

I'm not sure why I've been blogging for five years . . . it's certainly not the money, booze, and groupies! I've thought about stepping away from the keyboard every now and again, but I don't actually write as much as I once did, so large chunks of my "blogging" time are actually copy-paste-and-code sessions, rather than writing.

The blogroll has certainly diminished in importance over the last couple of years. The Red Ensign bloggers, my primary affiliation, has diminished to about a dozen active blogs, of whom perhaps 5-6 produce the vast majority of posts. Other blogrolls I'm on have similar profiles of activity. Blogrolls don't matter compared to when I first started blogging back in 2004.

I remember worrying about SiteMeter and the Ecosystem, as they showed me what my visitors were reading, where they came from and where they went. Time has also not been kind to the ease of gathering that sort of information, as more readers come in from search engine results, RSS feeds, and goodness knows what other channels. If/when I move the blog over to the new site, I may not bother including the links for those tools. They're no longer all that useful or informative.

I do miss the cameraderie of the early blogging years . . . but as more of the early blogs go dark, the replacements are less likely to be bloggers and more likely to be Twitterers, Facebookers, YouTubers, Farkers, Slashdotters, and all the other Web 2.0/New Media options that are now available. What was that old expression about the only constant being change?

QotD: The Palin resignation

It is possible that Sarah Palin was both unfairly mistreated and personally attacked by the media and many on the left, and that her family was rather ruthlessly and mercilessly run through the ringer . . . and that she’s a not particularly bright, not particularly curious, once libertarian-leaning governor who sadly devolved into a predictable, buzzword spouting culture warrior when she was prematurely picked for national office by John McCain.

These two scenarios can coexist.

As for quitting her position as governor 18 months early, her rambling press conference statement was bizarre. If she’s quitting because she’s tired of politics and is ready to return to private life for good, good on her. If she’s quitting the job she ran for and committed to because she thinks she’s now too big for the office and wants a higher profile to position herself for national office, then she deserves all the scorn and derision coming her way.

Radley Balko, "Dear God, Please Let This Be the Last Time I Feel Compelled To Post About Sarah Palin . . .", The Agitator, 2009-07-06

Al Stewart - the making of Sparks of Ancient Light

With the recent turmoil in Iran, the song "Shah of Shahs" has a very interesting resonance.

QotD: Expanding online copyright rules

I'm with Jeff Jarvis: Good God. The scary thing here is not necessarily that we will see some new federal law requiring that the L.A. Times give expressed written consent every time I link to one of its pieces, but rather that some damn fool freedom-reducing scheme like this is likely to be introduced at the federal level in the not-too-distant future, given the economic and political clout of these very large, very troubled, and very connected organizations. And the fact that a respected judge is so breezy about jigging the nation's laws to prop up a single struggling industry reminds us afresh how ingrained is the bias toward seeing the government as a cost-and consquence-free solution to anything perceived as a problem.

Matt Welch, "Richard Posner: Expand Copyright Protections to Save Newspapers!", Hit and Run, 2009-06-26

Movie review of the year

It's not a movie I was ever likely to see, so it took a really amazing review to catch my attention:

Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review — except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

[. . .]

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

[. . .]

Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

" . . . a few common errors are occurring here"

Ryan Sager has some interesting thoughts on the western reaction to the Iranian election and its aftermath:

I believe the Iranian election was stolen. Millions of Americans believe the same. Millions of Iranians believe the same.

But how, exactly, have we come to hold this opinion?

[. . .]

Now, the strongest evidence that the election was stolen comes from the behavior of the regime since the voting took place. A ridiculous figure was apparently assigned to Ahmadinejad (upward of 60%), the votes were “counted” before any such thing could have taken place, and the vote totals by province are ridiculously fishy.

[. . .]

It seems a few common errors are occurring here (many familiar from our look at The Roots of Anti-Vaccine Insanity):

* Projection: Americans are projecting their hatred of Ahmadinejad onto the mass of the Iranian people.

* Confirmation bias: People, on both sides, filter all the information they take in through their own preconceptions — particularly easy to do when all the information coming out of Iran is a mishmash of rumor and propaganda.

* Halo effect: Thinking only bad (or good) things about the Iranian regime makes one think all of its characteristics and actions must be bad (or good).

While these are all good points, we should also keep in mind what Christopher Hitchens said yesterday: "any voting exercise is, by definition, over before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council determines well in advance who may or may not "run." Any newspaper referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts, and all the rest of it, is the cause of helpless laughter among the ayatollahs."

I guess I'll pick this one up

Jean Jennings looks at P.J. O'Rourke's latest collection of essays, Driving Like Crazy:

I was out of work and landed an interview with Mr. Davis in August 1980. It would be wise, I thought, to actually read the mag [Car and Driver] before I barged in for the face-to-face. So I went to the library and checked one out. This is where you Google "library check out magazines" to figure out what in God's name I just wrote. Google will not explain that the magazines in libraries are older than the ones moldering in dentist offices; the one I found was a little more than a year behind — July 1979 — but fell open to "Palm Beach Weekend," an O'Rourke classic in which he reviewed an Aston Martin Volante. These are the lines I remember thirty years later: "If you're paying $70,000 for an automobile, you obviously don't have the sense God gave seafood," and, on why he wasn't driving the wheels off of it, "How'd you like to inform the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company that it just bought $70,000 worth of burgundy freezer wrap?" We'll just skip the line that made me wonder what kind of magazine I was about to walk into, the line that almost shut down the post office with incoming hate mail. In fact, it could be why "Palm Beach Weekend" is the one classic that didn't make it into P.J.'s newly published, precious archive of some of the best automotive road-trip insanity ever written.

Cruise gets "Coshed"

One of the most brilliantly snide movie reviews I've ever read:

Valkyrie: Well, the son of a bitch did it. He found a way to make you cheer for Hitler.

Full list of mini-reviews here.

Making fun of Time, time after time

Radley Balko and Jeff Winkler have a lot of fun choosing the worst Time magazine covers of the last 40 years. There were many, many choices, but the judges finally cut the list down to only ten:

The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years
Mr. Luce's mag does satanism, porn, crack, Pokemon, and more!

From William Randolph Hearst's ginned up hysterical stories about marijuana to the "10-cent plague" comic book scare of the 1950s to The New York Times warning of "cocaine-crazed Negroes" raping white women across the Southern countryside, the media has always whipped up anxiety and increased readership via thinly sourced exposes of the next great threat to the American way of life.

And since the British sociologist Stanley Cohen defined the moral panic phenomenon in the early 1970s as hysterical overreactions to imagined threats to social order, no publication has done a better (by which we mean worse) job of scaring the crap out of post-baby boomer America than Time, the top-selling newsweekly that's dropping subscribers like the mythical meth mouth drops teeth. (Hot tip to Time: If you're looking for a cutting-edge panic to get those ad rates up again, we hear people have been freaking out about "sexting" lately.)

The winners were:

• 10. June 19, 1972: The Occult Revival
• 9. April 5, 1976: The Porno Plague
• 8. August 6, 1984: The Population Curse
• 7. September 15, 1986: Drugs: The Enemy Within
• 6. May 7, 1990: Dirty Words
• 5. May 13, 1991: Crack Kids
• 4. July 3, 1995: Cyberporn: On a Screen Near You
• 3. Nov 22, 1999: Pokemon!
• 2. March 19, 2001: The Columbine Effect
• 1. June 7, 2004: Overcoming Obesity in America

QotD: Writers as heroes

Netflix describes [Nim's Island] fairly accurately: "When the young island-dwelling Nim loses contact with her scientist father, she reaches out to her favorite author for help. Problem is, the writer — of adventure stories, no less — is a recluse who hasn't left her house in years . . ."

What is it with this recent mania of casting various writers, living, dead, or fictional, as story heroes? Don't people know how distracted and dissociative and generally unphotogenic we really are? There are *reasons* we live as we do . . . The ending of this one was sweet, but unconvincing, even though "and then the writer gets the scientist!" is deeply appealing. Although I did like the author's various interactions with her long-running series hero. "You've been working on Chapter Eight for three months! Either drop me in the bloody volcano, or figure out how I'm going to get out of this one!" "Quiet! I'm doing *research* . . ."

Lois McMaster Bujold, writing to the LMB mailing list, 2009-06-08

To dream the impossible dream . . .

The headline really caught my attention:

Canada considers selling Via Rail, CBC
As the nation grapples with a record deficit, two of Canada's most iconic companies may be up for grabs.

It's a summary of a report in the Globe and Mail, probably intentionally highlighting the things of most concern to their readership. I'd love to see the CBC privatized, but I doubt that the government will do that. VIA Rail wouldn't survive in the private sector — at least in its current form — as it's running too many uneconomical long-distance routes that don't come close to paying their way.

Star Trek, militarily speaking

Michael Peck looks at the military side of Star Trek:

Twenty-third century warfare isn't all it's cracked up to be. You'd think that weapons and tactics would have progressed in 200 years. But the new Star Trek movie shows that the United Federation of Planets has a lot to learn about warfare.

A military analysis of young Cadet Kirk's War isn't easy. Director J.J. Abrams' frenetic rock 'em, sock 'em style can be tough to follow. But here is Star Trek's vision of future warfare. (Warning: all sorts of spoilers ahead.)

* The villainous Romulan ship pulverizes Federation vessels with volleys of torpedoes. Yet no Federation warship employs electronic jammers, decoys or point defense phasers. Very depressing. Two hundred years later, missile defense still doesn't work.

* But why does the Romulan ship need torpedoes? If its energy drill can bore holes through planets, then it can slice a starship like a phaser through butter. Future humans must still learn to master dual-use technology.

Some amusing notions, although trying to apply military principles to anything in the Star Trek universe(s) is not likely to yield useful results. Gene Roddenberry, the originator of the first series, appears to have had little or no respect for military organization — think of a non-insane Admiral being portrayed in the original series. Military solutions were the last resort of the producer/screenwriter, even when the problem was clearly military.

For example, it makes lots of sense, dramatically, for the two officers at the top of the command hierarchy and the chief medical officer to be off doing Ensign's or Lieutenant's work on boarding parties/away teams/survey teams/etc., but militarily? Please. Commanding officers don't just wander off, taking the second in command and other senior officers, putting themselves at risk of capture or death and leaving the ship and remaining crew "offstage". Courts-martial all around!

The movie didn't commit the same errors as the original series, although you have to wonder why a starship — fleet flagship, no less — doesn't appear to have anything resembling a Marine contingent aboard for close-combat and boarding exercises. And sending your acting First Officer, your (apparent) third officer, and Ensign "KillMeQuick" Redshirt to conduct a HALO assault? Um, yeah. Good luck with that.

Update: Comments are open on this post, should anyone be interested . . .

Update, the second: Inveterate Trekkie James Lileks finally weighs in with a Star Trek review:

3. I had a pot of coffee before I went, and the fluids asserted their needs to be released during the Juvie-Kirk-Steals-A-Car sequence, and I was grateful for that. Kids stealing a Mustang in the 24th century while listening to 20th century rock is like someone stealing a Prius today and CRANKIN’ UP THE SCARLATTI.

4. Nimoy needs stronger Fixadent.

5. The fine Starfleet tradition of staffing their biggest, most modern ships with people who just graduated from school yesterday — or this morning, or not at all — appears to have started early on.

6. The script writers had the phrase "Kirk is choked" on a macro key. [. . .]

And a few other points. Bottom line: Loved it. Loved it, loved it. O I loved it. Except for the moments not seen because I was out on the aforementioned errand, I loved it all. The opening was just a big shovel of chocolate for the fans — been a while since you saw something with NCC on the hull fire phasers and get hit with torpedos and generally blow the hell up, eh? Here. On the house. And it's emotional, too — thus was Odysseus born!

Star Trek: excellent reboot

Just got back from seeing Star Trek. I'm vastly relieved that they didn't screw everything up . . . and on top of that, they did a far better job than I'd hoped.

To be honest, I've been less than thrilled with the idea of "rebooting" the Star Trek universe, but I must admit that they did exactly the right thing. The casting was absolutely brilliant, the characterizations were just about perfect (except, perhaps for Uhura), and the story cracks along at a great pace.

Victor spoke for all of us on the way home from the theatre . . . "I can't wait for the next one!"

Update, 11 May: Now that I've seen the movie, I can actually read some of the reviews I've been carefully ignoring for the last few weeks:

The problem they handed to director J.J. Abrams (Alias, MI3) was to reset Star Trek successfully in the manner Batman had been reworked under Christopher Nolan. Orders don't get much taller than that. The goal was to introduce a whole new generation to the physiological triumvirate of Kirk, Spock and Bones and their world aboard the majestic USS Enterprise.

I therefore came to this eleventh Star Trek movie with a degree of scepticism. Would J.J. trample on my childhood memories or respect them with the deference I so baldy wanted?

But my fear was greater than that. I didn't want my view of the original series sullied in the fashion that the Star Wars prequels did to the original trilogy in my mind.

I'm therefore completely ecstatic to report that this is not the case here. Star Trek manages the astonishingly tricky balancing act of delivering an entirely fresh, yet wholly familiar, slice of Trekdom. But more than that; it's really entertaining on so many different levels.

To achieve that there is, however, a nettle to grasp, and one we're presented early on, and even has some exposition in the middle of the movie to underline. It's this: anything that we previously knew about the fate of any character, race or consequential events is effectively erased. Therefore, from this point onwards these adventures of the USS Enterprise and her crew are not tied in any fashion to those previously presented in the five TV series and ten films (or animated series).

There was one WTF? moment where a particular concept of time travel was introduced as the reason for taking a particular course of action . . . but that was nicely explained later on as being a deliberate misdirection.

At the end of my press screening the 500 or so people attending applauded, which, given the hard-bitten nature of hacks, is the sort of emotional response I've rarely experienced.

There was an outbreak of applause at the end of our showing, as well, although it wasn't the entire audience taking part. The last time I remember that happening was at a fan screening of Serenity.

Old car articles, revisited

P.J. O'Rourke has a new book coming out called Driving Like Crazy. Andrew Wheeler offers his initial review:

The most debilitating disease that can strike an aging writer isn't cancer or alcoholism or writer's block — no matter how many writers each of those has felled over the years — but the insatiable desire to argue with and correct his own younger self, the urge to redo and fix all of the things he now thinks he did wrong the first time through. That urge led Wordsworth around in circles, endlessly bulking up The Prelude while avoiding work on the much longer work it was supposed to be a prelude to. It led Asimov and Heinlein and many others to tie up loose ends — much better left loose — in earlier works, and countless others to clean up and rewrite and expurgate books that suddenly didn't look as exciting and vibrant as they had when they were written.

And now the same fever has struck P.J. O'Rourke; Driving Like Crazy is a collection of his writings on cars — mostly from the early 1980s — rewritten and reorganized and stuck together to resemble a book with a single narrative . . . which, of course, it can't be. He was smart enough to know that he couldn't touch his classic essay "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink" — which leads off this book, after the new, depressive introduction, "The End of the American Car" — but he throws in a new piece on essentially the same subject immediately after it to take a few jabs at his younger self, and, more subtly, to point out to the reader that the younger O'Rourke is not to be trusted and wasn't having nearly as much fun as he said he was.

In spite of the caveats, I'll almost certainly end up buying this one . . . although I have found the earlier P.J. O'Rourke books to be more entertaining reading than the more recent ones (Holidays in Hell and Parliament of Whores are both excellent).

Twitter's weakness

Evgeny Morozov makes some good points about Twitter not being well suited to certain kinds of communication:

Who knew that swine flu could also infect Twitter? Yet this is what appears to have happened in the last 24 hours, with thousands of Twitter users turning to their favorite service to query each other about this nascent and potentially lethal threat as well as to share news and latest developments from Mexico, Texas, Kansas and New York (you can check most recent Twitter updates on the subject by searching for "swine flu" and "#swineflu"). And despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform's unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter's role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine flu.

First of all, I should point out from the very outset that anyone trying to make sense of how Twitter's "global brain" has reacted to the prospect of the swine flu pandemic is likely to get disappointed. The "swine flu" meme has so far that misinformed and panicking people armed with a platform to broadcast their fears are likely to produce only more fear, misinformation and panic.

His quoted examples of individual Twitter updates illustrate quite nicely how quickly it can turn into a game of Telephone (or Chinese Whispers to the Brits).

He also makes the following somewhat ironic statement: "In moments like this, one is tempted to lament the death of broadcasting, for it seems that the information from expert sources — government, doctors, and the like — should probably be prioritized over everything else and have a higher chance of being seen". As illustrated in the last two posts, the mainstream media have been doing their level best to hype up the panic levels and make the situation seem even more scary than it already is. Given that, it's just as well that fewer and fewer people take their "authoritative" news from those sources!

CBC's calm approach

Following yesterday's post on OMG-WE'RE-ALL-GONNA-DIE! panic mongering, here's how the CBC pitched the news last night (from a posting by "pnjunction" on this Fark.com thread):

Just finished, here's how the CBC evening news went:

swine flu
swine flu
swine flu
tamil protest in TO
DUI manslaughter conviction
swine flu
swine flu
tamil protest in TO
pitch more swine flu coverage on late news ("how worried should you be?" I'm dying to find out!)
swine flu
sap story
a couple of arts stories
pitch more swine flu coverage on late news
sports
weather
swine flu 'update'
tamil protest in TO (I get it, university ave is closed)

That's just one dose of daily news and I'm ready to jump off of my 8th-floor balcony rather than hear about it again. Also, I feel like I am at that stupid protest (actually it's only a couple blocks away from my apt, I heard some of it earlier) after having seen all of that stock footage of it .

As Drew Curtis said, it's a potentially bad public health situation, but it's not the apocalypse, and all the media pantswetting is not helping. The CBC is not alone in this, of course, as the British media have spent the last 24 hours publicizing an off-the-cuff comment by an EU official as a formal travel warning to the US and Mexico. As Gawker put it, "Even in Mexico, the epicenter of the deadly outbreak, and home to a far, far worse health care system than we have, it's only killed 103 people. That's a lot fewer people than have been killed in the Juarez drug war this year. This is a page B-3 story that's gone all A-1."

OMG! We're all gonna die!

In case you haven't been paying attention (like, well, me), here's a quick summary from the media: Mexican Flu! It's the pandemic we've been warning you about for years! You're all gonna die!

Drew Curtis (of fark.com fame) clarifies the underlying complexity of the situation:

Finally, something of substance has appeared in the news. Swine Flu will kill us all. EVERYBODY PANIC.

First off, I mentioned this in my book in the chapter on Media Fearmongering (which, if you read it, you're already recognizing the signs in MSM today). The problem with being the guy telling everyone not to panic is that if you're wrong, you're an idiot. As opposed to being wrong when predicting the apocalypse, in which case everyone just laughs at how silly you were for predicting the apocalypse. If you want to win every argument with no danger of coming down with "Long Term Idiot Stigma", be a consummate pessimist. If you think about it, probably every argumentative asshole you've ever met is one.

- The Mexican Government estimates that 86 people (or more) have died from Swine Flu. Okay, that's tragic. But why the hell are we taking their numbers at face value? For starters, if you read the fine print the death numbers being tossed around are estimates. There are 18 confirmed deaths so far. Which ain't awesome, but it's a damn sight better than a hundred.

- In quite a few articles I've read, I've seen statements to the effect of researchers aren't sure why the cases in the US and Canada appear to be milder than the ones in Mexico and none have resulted in death. I know we'd all like to pretend that Mexico has its act together, but last time I checked Mexico was a third world country with third world healthcare. Do the math.

- Speaking of no one having died in the US and Canada, not only has no one in a first world country died from Swine Flu yet, but so far no one's even rumored to be in danger of dying. And most of the confirmed cases got better on their own after a few days at home. EVERYBODY PANIC

Update: Reader "Ben" sent the following related comment:

Did you hear about the high school in California that closed because ONE kid was /mildly/ ill... they sent everyone home while they check to see if it's even the swine flu.

THEY SENT EVERYONE HOME AND DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE KID HAS!

what if its' only food poisoning?

Bureaucrats, especially school board 'rats, don't get paid to make decisions sensibly. They get paid to implement board policy, however ill-advised and clumsy it may be. As someone once said, no bureaucrat has ever been fired for following written policy, while those who try to do the "right thing" too often end up as object lessons for new staff.

This is probably another variant of the "zero-tolerance" notion that's embedded itself in school board administrative policies. Nobody will be held to be in the wrong, or have made a mistake as long as they followed the set procedures. There's probably a policy document detailing what to do in the case of various health-related issues, and this'll be the "big red button" option.

How the media's mistakes became "the truth"

It's been ten years since the Columbine massacre, and (for those who remember any details) much of what passes for common knowledge about the attack is wrong, as Greg Toppo explains:

They weren't goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver's Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren't in the "Trenchcoat Mafia," disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn't been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and "fags."

Their rampage put schools on alert for "enemies lists" made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren't on antidepressant medication and didn't target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers' journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information — including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors — indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.

The way the media covered the horrific event, and the emphasis placed on certain "facts" had wide ranging effects elsewhere:

At the time, Columbine became a kind of giant national Rorschach test. Observers saw its genesis in just about everything: lax parenting, lax gun laws, progressive schooling, repressive school culture, violent video games, antidepressant drugs and rock 'n' roll, for starters.

Many of the Columbine myths emerged before the shooting stopped, as rumors, misunderstandings and wishful thinking swirled in an echo chamber among witnesses, survivors, officials and the news media.

Police contributed to the mess by talking to reporters before they knew facts — a hastily called news conference by the Jefferson County sheriff that afternoon produced the first headline: "Twenty-five dead in Colorado."

A few inaccuracies took hours to clear up, but others took weeks or months — sometimes years — as authorities reluctantly set the record straight.

The delay in clearing the record meant that school authorities in other areas were often stampeded into ridiculous disciplinary measures that did nothing to improve student safety, but often increased alienation and mistrust between the students and their teachers and school administrators.

If the original suppositions had been true, the actions of many school principals and board administrators would have made copycat attacks more likely, not less: by increasing suspicion of "loners" and students who were further from the norm in fashion, reading tastes, and all the myraid other ways teenagers try to express themselves.

H/T to Jesse Walker, who also noted:

The persistance of such myths may be as interesting as the myths itself. Many of the tales that Toppo attacks were actually debunked in the immediate aftermath of the killings. In an editorial I filed less than a month after the massacre, I wrote this:

In the weeks since the Littleton slaughter, we've learned that most of what the media initially told us about the Columbine killers wasn't true. They weren't Nazis. They weren't especially racist. They weren't necessarily Goths. They might not even have been members of the clique of outcasts called the Trench Coat Mafia, which, by the way, wasn't originally called the Trench Coat Mafia.

QotD: "America is kooky"!

Here's a stone truth: Every political protest, and indeed just about every political gathering, is filled with kooks, on account of America is kooky! A commentator's protest kook-detector works great when he disagrees with the protest, then gets turned off when the kooks on his side get busy. It has ever been thus, and it will always be.

Matt Welch, "Army of Dicks Goes After Dick Armey", Hit and Run, 2009-04-16

Amazon still not clear of the "#amazonfail" zone

The Twitterati were up in arms over the weekend as Amazon.com appeared to conduct a publication purge of Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) books and other products from their online catalogue. Brennon Slattery rounds up the state of play:

Hundreds of LGBT book titles were stripped of their sales rank by Amazon.com over the weekend in what the online store is calling a "glitch." The books involved in the apparent snafu — which included such classics as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room — were deemed "adult" by Amazon, which, due to an unexplained new adult policy, removes a title's sales rank. The problem was revealed by author Mark Probst.

After discovering that the sales rankings for two new high-profile LGBT books were missing, Probst noticed his book, The Filly, was also devoid of this information. Without the ranking, titles are more difficult to find using Amazon's search function, as bestselling and high-ranking titles are predominantly displayed. Probst complained to Amazon and received this reply: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude 'adult' material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Since then, Amazon has informed various members of the press that the problem is a "glitch" and "it's being fixed."

Amazon has always been a pretty media-savvy organization, and it's baffling that they'd either deliberately conduct a purge of this nature or that if it really was just a "glitch", that they haven't been far more pro-active about explaining and apologizing to their customers.

QotD: Weird Al honoured

Apparently SNL has just bestowed upon me the highest honor imaginable — my name has become a metaphor for masturbation. So proud.

Weird Al Yankovic, Twitter, 2009-04-12 01:46

Damian Penny hangs up the keyboard

I'm sorry to see this announcement (although, honestly, not as surprised as all that):

When I started up my old Blogspot site in late 2001 — one of many, many sites which proliferated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — I had no idea I'd keep at it as long as I did. And I've enjoyed every minute of it.

With a child on the way, however — not to mention an ever-increasing workload at my firm — I think it's time to make a graceful exit. Or a hiatus, at least. This is something I've been mulling over for a while, as I've found it increasingly difficult to keep blogging at my usual pace, but I've never been able to pull the trigger. My dithering over the issue made Brett Favre look like the model of decisiveness. But today's as good a day as any.

I've been reading Damian's blog since shortly after he started it, and I know I'll miss it on my "regular round" of blogs. Of course, blogging is one of those itches that comes back . . . he may find himself sneaking back to the keyboard in spite of the family and work . . . once you've had a soapbox, it's hard to go cold turkey (to mix a few metaphors).

QotD: Paranormal phenomena in Science Fiction

Most folks who read my science fiction novels probably notice that, unlike Star Trek, Star Wars, or Babylon 5 (to name three examples), I never write about phenomena like telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition. There are reasons for this. Chief among them is that psychic doings make bad writing entirely too easy. Paint yourself into a corner, plotwise? Then have your hero teleport out of it.

Another is that science fiction deals in real possibilities, based on our understanding of the universe, and the way science has let us learn and do more every century. I write about starships because I have reason to believe we'll have them someday. I also think faster-than-light travel will be possible, perhaps even time travel. The most fantastic thing I write about is the possibility that someday we might be free — yeah, I know it's a stretch, but the possibility is there, nonetheless.

However psychic phenomena are an altogether different kettle of gagh. Very early in my life, I realized that, if such power actually existed, there wouldn't be a single politician or religious leader on this planet left alive and standing above his charred and smoking shoetops.

L. Neil Smith, "Zenna", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-04-06

The Guardian accepts the future, moves towards it

You can call the old Grauniad a lot of things, but old-fashioned is no longer appropriate — they're converting to Twitter:

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

• Newspaper to be available only on messaging service
• Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters

They're twitterating their entire archive, too:

1927
OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day otherwise *sigh*

1940
W Churchill giving speech NOW - "we shall fight on the beaches ... we shall never surrender" check YouTube later for the rest

1961
Listening 2 new band "The Beatles"

1989
Berlin Wall falls! Majority view of Twitterers = it's a historic moment! What do you think??? Have your say

You'd have to admit that it really does capture the essence of Guardian coverage, wouldn't you?

Ten years on

Hard to believe that it's been ten years since The Matrix was released:

Filmed mostly in Sydney, Australia, and anchored by a hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves in a breakthrough role) and his battle-worn leader Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), The Matrix follows a group of intrepid rebels as they rage against their machine overlords, which farm energy from a humanity trapped in an immersive hyper-reality.

Featuring kinetic action sequences soundtracked to the industrial thump of acclaimed artists like Meat Beat Manifesto, Ministry and others, the Wachowski brothers' film attracted ecstatic praise from cinema auteurs like Darren Aronofsky, M. Night Shyamalan and Joss Whedon. The film also utterly captivated writer Gibson, who explained in the book The Art of the Matrix that "Neo is my favorite-ever science fiction hero, absolutely."

Still one of my favourite films. But there should have been only one.

QotD: Bailing out newspapers

I have never had anything but contempt for America's "greatest" newspapers. During my lifetime, a little over six decades, they have never been anything but contemptible. Everything that was foreseeably harmful to individual liberty — or later proven to be so — they have championed. Everything that would have been good for it, they have opposed.

Regarding a small, exceptional handful of dire matters of life and death — the ugly little war in Vietnam comes to mind — where they finally aligned themselves with the proper, decent, moral, and Constitutional side of the issue, they were opinion followers, not leaders.

Now, according to the "new media" to which I happily switched ten years ago or more, in preference to being libelled, threatened, and lied to on a continuous basis as a member of the nation's Productive Class, America's "greatest" newspapers, on the brink of financial collapse as millions of other readers and advertisers make the same change I did, are looking to be "bailed out" by the current political administration. They've agreed to stop making political endorsements, giving us to wonder what good they'll be after they seal this devil's bargain.

L. Neil Smith, "No Bailout for America's Newspapers!", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-03-29

Outsiders simply don't understand that "sorry" means "go screw yourself"

Stephen Marche gets to the point quickly:

It began with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, which has recently run a couple of Canadian items, some of them long. That never used to happen. 30 Rock had that great line about Toronto: "It's New York without the stuff." And on the show How I Met Your Mother, one of the central characters, Robin Scherbatsky, is a Canadian expat trying to make it in New York; Canada is a running joke of the show. Unfortunately, none of the Canadian comedy is that funny or accurate. The jokes mostly involve maple syrup, the cold and/or the pronunciation of the word "about," which 97% of us don't actually mispronounce. The Great White North casts a long, ludicrous shadow - Canada in the American comic imagination corresponds roughly (very roughly) with the region of the country that stretches from Northern Ontario to Alberta and does not include cities, or the Maritimes, or the West Coast. The only other gag Americans seem to get is how polite Canadians are. ("How do you get 10 Canadians out of a swimming pool?" "Say, ‘Hey guys, can you get out of the pool?' ") Even this joke, complimentary to us, isn't mildly true. Canadians are one of the rudest peoples on Earth. Outsiders simply don't understand that "sorry" means "go screw yourself."

What explains this resurgence of Canada jokes on U.S. television? There are two possibilities. We are the last group that can be made fun of without risk. Political correctness has made almost every other ethnicity off-limits. Americans can't even make fun of the French anymore. The "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," as The Simpsons once called them, have turned out to be right in nearly every disagreement with their American cousins. It's quite easy to make fun of Canadians because Americans can't really distinguish us from themselves. So it's innocent. They're more or less making fun of people who are like them.

John Stossel interviewed by Reason.tv

QotD: Newspapers versus News Magazines

Time magazine has a list of the ten most endangered newspapers.

That's interesting, because our paper had a list of the ten most endangered magazines named Time. Seems like a duel on a Titanic lifeboat before it's winched down the side, no?

Or not. I remain enthusiastic about the paper's survival, for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the pleasant sound my whistling makes as it echoes off the tombstones. I do think we'll survive. Newsmagazines, less so. I can't remember the last time I bought one. Not even after 9/1l1 — even by then the desire to remember an event with a glossy print recap had vanished [. . .]

I think the last time I looked at a newsmagazine, it was full of things that were Generally Wrong or Growing Concerns or Worrisome Trends, with lots of ads for acid-reflux pills. The default mode of these magazines a long time ago seemed to be banging the tocsin with a bloody shirt, to horribly mix metaphors, and it's not surprising; the default position of journalism is reminding us how far we live from the fabled borders of Utopia, and how we might speed the journey through the magic accelerating powers of wise, targeted legislation.

James Lileks, Bleat, 2009-03-11

Fearmongering

Anthony Randazzo points out that most of the government's intervention in the market has served to prolong the misery, yet not to actually improve the situation:

At this point, the depth of the recession has largely been created by the panic started by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and President George W. Bush. "If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down," President Bush said about the economy as he urged for bailouts last September.

Dire warnings of "catastrophe" or "before its too late" without any clear definition of what those concepts really mean are similar to, and no less troubling than, Mafioso scare tactics. It is this fear that has been driving the government to quick, impulsive action that is only worsening the problem.

Clearly fear and panic didn't start the recession. There were system-wide failures due to a toxic combination of excessive growth optimism, a belief the boom would go on forever, a lack of healthy fear of losses, incompetency, and coercive regulations. But as Fidelity Investments executive Edward Johnson said this week, "We can only hope that the government's cure doesn't further sicken the patient."

Looking back, most legislators regret passing their first cure — the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bill — as fast as they did. There wasn't a clear and present danger at the time — just Secretary Paulson saying if we didn't give him unlimited powers the sky would fall in and economy would collapse. No one understood what Paulson's forecasts of catastrophe would result in, but they didn't want to find out. Terrified, 'doing nothing' was not presented as an option and $700 billion was approved to buy up toxic debt.

Ironically, after a month of discussion the Treasury decided that buying troubled assets wouldn't work after all and decided to go with capital injections instead. But this all took place many weeks after TARP was passed, and the world hadn't ended. So much for the need for speed that was used to push the bailout through.

It's gotten so bad lately that it seems as though every time the markets finish a day in the black, someone from the government has to get up on his hind legs and proclaim another impending disaster (or worse, further government intervention) . . . and the market goes down again the following day.

The economy won't recover until all the malinvestment has been worked out of the system; much of that mistaken spending was as a result of governments trying to prolong "the good times". Stability is essential to long-term planning for any business . . . and in today's climate only a fool would assume that the current situation will stabilize in a hurry. No stability means that no sensible business is going to take any risks they don't absolutely have to take — and building new facilities and hiring new staff count as risks in this market.

Of course, the cycle isn't complete without mention of the news media: they're geared to report bad news, and there's a plethora of bad news to report at the moment. In an ironic twist, this is the first time that economic turmoil has seriously threatened the jobs of newsmedia workers in all areas: at least in the living memory of most current reporters and editors. This only encourages further negative connotations to every piece of economic news they report.

It's like a reworked version of the old joke about a recession is where your neighbours lose their jobs and a depression is when economists lose their jobs. From the media point of view, this is an economic apocalypse because it's directly affecting them and their fellow media types.

QotD: Newspapers

See enough movies and you'll quickly discover that nobody likes the news media. No matter the political viewpoint of the director, the writers, or the actors — from socialist Nick Nolte, to conservative Bruce Willis, to libertarians Clint Eastwood and Curt Russell — TV and newspaper people are invariably portrayed in movies as dimbulbs and dillholes. Media people invariably take this as praise (they actually think they're in the middle of the conventional political spectrum), a sign that they're doing their job right. Their utter inability to see it for what it really is, the lowest rate of customer satisfaction in Western civilization, is another reason they're going under.

L. Neil Smith, "Rocky Mountain News: Not R.I.P., Good Riddance", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-03-01

Mark Steyn returns to Macleans

He's back, and demographically feistier than ever:

Anything happen while I was gone?

Oh, yeah. The collapse of the global economy. Armageddon outta here. The ecopalypse is upon us. Down south, President Obama has abandoned the gaseous uplift of "the audacity of hope" and warns we're on the brink of the abyss. In the old New Deal, FDR warned that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." For the new New Deal, President Hopeychangey says we have nothing but fear itself. Get used to it. In Russia, the nation's wealthiest oligarchs have seen their net worth decline by two-thirds. They can't steal it as fast as it depreciates. Even yard sales of Soviet nukes to chaps with Waziristani business cards won't make it up.

The only thing booming is declinism. In Britain, the Baby Boomers are now "Baby Gloomers," according to the Daily Telegraph's Elizabeth Grice, who gives the impression she's working it up into a book proposal for one of those slim volumes of contemporary manners one keeps in the guest "loo," amusingly illustrated with line drawings of once prosperous middle-class couples reduced to trawling the supermarket shelves for bargain "wine boxes" and microwaveable "Italian-style" focaccia. In the U.S., Steven Kotler thinks this is no time to get hung up on details. The planet is going to hell. So what's the big picture? The rooty-tootiest root cause of all?

Answer: motherhood and apple pie. If we didn't have so much motherhood, we wouldn't have all these people eating apple pies, manufactured in a plant in Guangdong and then shipped on some massive floating carbon footprint all the way to Price Chopper in Cedar Rapids. Motherhood is the root cause. As Mr. Kotler says:

"You don’t need to ask what you need to do for the world. You already know.
"Stop having children. It's that easy."

It really is! So he's calling for a five-year moratorium on having children, planet-wide. The Soviets had five-year plans but Mr. Kotler wants a five-year ban — "because a billion less people is a great place to start." Key word: "start." Experts agree that the carrying capacity for the planet is about two billion people. Actually, they don't agree: some of the earthier-than-thou eco-types say it's only 300 million. But Mr. Kotler doesn't want to sound like an extremist or anything, so he's starting with that best-case scenario. If the planet's carrying capacity is two billion tops, we need to unload a good 4½ billion. And, while no one outside of Dutch hospitals is arguing for compulsory euthanasia (yet), not adding to the total would be "a great place to start."

Do you sometimes think that perhaps Agent Smith's diatribe about humanity as a virus somehow got mislabelled as a biology lecture?

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren't actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? — A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we . . . are the cure."

Rick Santelli: new revolutionary

H/T to Cjunk, guest-blogging at Small Dead Animals.

What Slumdog Millionaire can teach

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse

Wired has an introduction to Joss Whedon's latest project:

The show from the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly revolves around a mysterious organization that erases the memories of men and women — so-called Actives — and imprints them with a different personality for each "engagement."

Programmed with somebody else's expertise, the Actives render exotic services for weird clients, then forget all about the mission once they return to their spa-like headquarters.

The catchy premise of the show, which premieres Friday on Fox, gives Whedon a nearly endless canvas for exploring sex, murder and other complicated ares of human existence.

Whedon has built his daring Dollhouse around Eliza Dushku, who stars as Echo, the lead Active. Dushku, an executive producer on the show, played Faith in Whedon's Buffy series, and here she assumes one fresh identity after another. Echo's memories of previous engagements have been "wiped" — although not entirely.

Whedon and his ever-shifting star spoke to reporters about sex, multiple personalities, brainwashing, crossbow hunting and the roller coaster ride they've got planned for Echo and her fellow Dolls over the next 13 weeks.

Addressing those "Inconvenient Errors"

The Science and Public Policy Institute website has a summary of the most obvious errors in Al Gore's movie. While the report was issued in 2007, the errors are still in wide circulation as established scientific "facts", so there is clearly still a need for the other side to be heard:

A spokesman for Al Gore has issued a questionable response to the news that in October 2007 the High Court in London had identified nine “errors” in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. The judge had stated that, if the UK Government had not agreed to send to every secondary school in England a corrected guidance note making clear the mainstream scientific position on these nine “errors”, he would have made a finding that the Government’s distribution of the film and the first draft of the guidance note earlier in 2007 to all English secondary schools had been an unlawful contravention of an Act of Parliament prohibiting the political indoctrination of children.

Al Gore’s spokesman and “environment advisor,” Ms. Kalee Kreider, begins by saying that the film presented “thousands and thousands of facts.” It did not: just 2,000 “facts” in 93 minutes would have been one fact every three seconds. The film contained only a few dozen points, most of which will be seen to have been substantially inaccurate. The judge concentrated only on nine points which even the UK Government, to which Gore is a climate-change advisor, had to admit did not represent mainstream scientific opinion.

Ms. Kreider then states, incorrectly, that the judge himself had never used the term “errors.” In fact, the judge used the term “errors,” in inverted commas, throughout his judgment.

Next, Ms. Kreider makes some unjustifiable ad hominem attacks on Mr. Stewart Dimmock, the lorry driver, school governor and father of two school-age children who was the plaintiff in the case. This memorandum, however, will eschew any ad hominem response, and will concentrate exclusively on the 35 scientific inaccuracies and exaggerations in Gore’s movie.

This is still relevant, as shown by this alarmist headline on the Yahoo.ca home page yesterday:

It will come as little surprise to find that the report dovetails nicely with the agenda of Gore's film. It's also amusing that the page editor couldn't manage to find an appropriate photo of a car in North America driving through floodwaters and had to substitute a European image instead.

A non-instrumental interpretation

H/T to David McMillan for the link.

Welcome to EncycloWikiBritannipedia

The Encyclopedia Britannica has decided to join 'em, since it hasn't beaten 'em:

In a move to take on Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica is inviting the hoi polloi to edit, enhance and contribute to its online version.

New features enabling the inclusion of this user-generated content will be rolled out on the encyclopedia's website over the next 24 hours, Britannica's president, Jorge Cauz, said in an interview today.

He also used the opportunity to take a swipe at Britannica's upstart nemesis and Google for helping to promote Wikipedia via its search rankings.

"If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia," he said."Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?"

Mr Cauz, who is visiting Australia, said the changes were the first in a series of enhancements to the britannica.com website designed to encourage more community input to the 241-year-old institution and, in doing so, to take on Wikipedia in the all important search engine rankings.

"What we are trying to do is shifting ... to a much more proactive role for the user and reader where the reader is not only going to learn from reading the article but by modifying the article and — importantly — by maybe creating his own content or her own content," he said.

Clearly, their initial tactic of deriding the Wikipedia model — where any Tom, Dick, or Fatima could actively edit anything — has not paid off the way they'd hoped, so this is their remaining best option. I suspect their benchmark of 20-minute turnaround for user edits will be unsustainable . . . unless they fail to attract enough active users, which would be the nightmare scenario.

QotD: Hot, Flat, and Hypocritical

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America's ability to fall for absolutely anything — just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts — along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a "Green Revolution"? Well, he'll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

I've been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about — in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn't make them up even if you were trying — and when you tried to actually picture the "illustrative" figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Matt Taibbi, "Flat N All That", New York Press, 2009-01-14

QotD: The Business Cycle

I am not an economist, nor — unlike a half-vast majority of the hairsprayheaded newsies who have somehow lately, miraculously, become overnight experts on all matters economic — do I pretend to be one on TV.

What I am is an individual who has worked hard for forty years in a difficult, exacting, and not terribly rewarding profession, which has nevertheless offered me the opportunity — an expensive one, but worth it — of telling the truth, exactly as I see it, without having to worry about what interests, corporate or otherwise, I might offend. And it seems to me that this is the moment — the very moment — when whatever I have sacrificed for that opportunity will now begin to pay off.

About halfway through those forty years, I made the acquaintance of Robert LeFevre, that great libertarian storyteller and teacher, who showed me (although I had already had suspicions in that direction) that what my generation had been indoctrinated to call the "Business Cyle" of boom and bust throughout American history was actually a government cycle of interference with the economy, followed by disaster, followed — usually — by government's backing off until prosperity restored itself, whereupon the idiotic cycle started over again.

In the 19th century, economic turndowns were called "panics", and from 1776 until 1929, two facts about them were incontrovertible. First, each and every one of them can easily be shown to have been the direct result of some particular stupidity on the part of the federal government. And second, as soon as government withdrew from the part of the economy it had damaged, the economy began to heal itself. Until 1929, no panic had ever lasted longer than about eighteen months. When the big Crash came in '29, and the Franklin Roosevelt regime decided to interfere even more, the resulting Great Depression lasted twelve years.

L. Neil Smith, "Collectivism's Last Stand", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-01-18

Star Wars, sorta

Joe Nicolosi asks his friend Amanda (who's never watched a whole episode of Star Wars) to recount the story. Here's nearly four minutes you won't get back:

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Turning TV Scifi to Movie dreck

John Scalzi risks everything to point out that it's a rare TV show that can survive the transition to the big screen. In particular, he enrages one particularly enthusiastic fan-base:

Speaking of fans, I've just marked myself for death among the "Browncoats" for suggesting that Serenity, based on the TV series Firefly, might somehow have been a miserable failure. The Browncoats love their favorite series with a passionate fervor that is usually reserved only for religious icons or the Green Bay Packers, and will not brook the idea that the series and the movie based on it were popular flops, even though the show didn't last a single full season and the movie had a terrible $10 million opening weekend. "Well, Fox didn't know what to do with the series!" they'll exclaim. "Universal didn't market the movie correctly! It did great on DVD!" Yes, yes. I know, Browncoats. Come here, have a hug. Would you like a tissue? No, that's okay, you can keep it.

Lesson: It's great to have loud, passionate fans of a series, but they're only worth $10 million in opening weekend box office. Also, making a movie out of a TV series no one but hardcore fans saw? Not a recipe for popular success.

Scalzi'll need bodyguards for the next few SF conventions he attends. Real ones, not just guys in Star Trek security costumes. Browncoats aim to misbehave.

Whitewashing Valkyrie

H/T to Ghost of a Flea.

I'm currently reading Richard Evans' second volume of his Third Reich trilogy. The final volume is to be published this month now available. Very highly recommended, based on reading about 2/5ths of the work so far. Rather than being strictly chronological, Evans writes about various aspects of German life during the rise of the Nazi regime. I've read many books about Nazi Germany, but in some ways this is the most disturbing of them all for the details the author provides on so many day-to-day aspects of life.

Update: Hmm. I guess if I go to the effort of recommending a set of books, it might help if I actually gave you the details, right? Like maybe even the names of the books?

• The Coming of the Third Reich
• The Third Reich in Power
• The Third Reich at War

The French view of The Prisoner

Emmanuelle Richard looks at the profound cultural influence Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner had in France:

"Patrick McGoohan finally escaped," a reader of the French newspaper Le Monde noted with loving tenderness yesterday in an online forum dedicated to the late visionary behind the cult TV series The Prisoner. The sentiment came just short of asserting that the actor, writer, and director was better off dead, but then, the French have had a distinctly existential relationship with their revered secret agent man for 40 years now.

The Prisoner was arguably the most popular vehicle of libertarian ideas in socialist France over the past half-century. Ask a Parisian to name an Ayn Rand book and he'll give you a blank stare; mention The Prisoner and you'll likely hear back the French version of the series' catch-phrase, "Be seeing you" — Bonjour chez vous! Unveiled just months before the May '68 riots, this philosophical and rebellious series struck a nerve in an overwhelmingly Catholic country at a time when its long-haired youth were loudly questioning authority.

[. . .] For young French people to watch the Village community hound and almost lynch Number 6 in this episode for the sin of being "unmutual" (that is, for insisting on his privacy instead of happily joining the collective), was to turn a cherished French ideal on its head. In the episode, those who refuse to conform are subjected to "instant social conversion" via frontal lobotomy. When French fans felt outrage at this brain-deadening cure to "individualism" — a word almost always used as a pejorative in France — they were unwittingly swallowing a libertarian message without ever having heard the word.

QotD: Hamas and civilian casualties

It is commonly said that by storing weapons in mosques and firing rockets and mortars from residential areas and school yards, Hamas is using human shields in Gaza, a war crime. But the truth is really worse than that. Hamas doesn't endanger civilians in hopes that it will deter retaliation; it does so in the hope and expectation that civilians will be killed and wounded.

This tactic is part of a larger strategy to create tragedy and disaster, which the Palestinians have developed into something akin to an industrial process. They build tunnels, but they do not build bomb shelters. They do not, apparently, suspend classes in schools in the midst of bombardments. And Hamas, with the tolerance if not approval of most Gazans, uses schoolyards as launching zones for rockets and mortars. Think about it: is there anything about a schoolyard that makes it a particularly desirable place from which to fire ordnance? No. Hamas uses schools (and mosques, and residential areas generally) in this way in the hope that civilians, especially children, will be killed.

John Hinderaker, "Manufacturing Disaster", Powerline, 2009-01-11

Latest deployment to Afghanistan

Congratulations to my friend Damian "Babbling" Brooks, who will be the first embedded blogger with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan:

This has been in the works for awhile. Years, in fact. Memos went up the chain of command, and back down again. Never any luck. And then, just recently, approval.

I'm going to Afghanistan.

I can't say when, but it will be shortly. I can't say exactly where, nor how long I'll be gone for. DND is understandably picky about that sort of thing. But if the creek don't rise, I'll be posting from over there at some point in the fairly near future, so watch this space.

This is a first for a Canadian blogger. A fairly narrow first, but a first nonetheless: bloggers have served, but not really written about it; American bloggers have embedded with Canadian troops; Canadian bloggers have gone over unilaterally. But to the best of my knowledge, a Canadian blogger has never before been invited on a CF-sponsored visit.

He'll be out-of-pocket a few thousand dollars (he doesn't work for a media firm that might pick up his expenses), so if you can afford it, please make a donation to help defray his costs.

To confirm all of your suspicions about "abstract art"

Aelita Andre is having her work included in an abstract art exhibit at the Brunswick Street Gallery. This would not be particularly newsworthy, except that it came to light that Aelita is 22 months old:

Back in October, Fitzroy commercial gallery director Mark Jamieson was asked by a Russian-born photographer whose work he represented to consider the work of another artist. Nikka Kalashnikova showed Jamieson some abstract paintings by an artist called Aelita Andre; Mr Jamieson liked what he saw and agreed to include it in a group show, alongside work by Kalashnikova and Julia Palenov (also a Russian) at his Brunswick Street Gallery later this month.

Mr Jamieson then started to promote the show, printing glossy invitations and placing ads in reputable magazines Art Almanac and Art Collector, in which the abstract work was featured. Only then did he discover a crucial fact about the new artist: Aelita Andre was Nikka Kalashnikova's daughter, and she was then just 22 months old. She turns two tomorrow.

"I was shocked and, to be honest, a little embarrassed," Mr Jamieson said of his response to the revelation.

He thought hard about whether or not to proceed, and talked it over with his colleagues. "And then I thought, 'Well, we'll give it a go'."

Mr Jamieson says the Brunswick Street Gallery has a policy of supporting emerging artists, though that policy doesn't usually extend to artists quite so young. He stands by his decision to show the work but concedes some people will think the gallery is doing the wrong thing.

To be fair, Mr Jamieson deserves some credit: if he genuinely believes that the art is of professional quality, it should qualify to be shown with other abstract art pieces. I'm hardly a fan of that style of art myself, so I'm indulging in a little quiet amusement, but if someone is willing to pay (their own) good money for it, great. I'd be much less amused if it was a public institution putting taxpayers' money on the line, of course.

Update, 12 January: Very much related:

A controversy recently erupted in Sweden over an article published by the philosopher, Roger Scruton, in a magazine called Axess. He argued in it that Western art no longer had any spiritual, let alone religious, content; indeed, it had become afraid of the beautiful, from which it shied away as a horse from a hurdle too high for it. The result was a terrible impoverishment of our art.

The same magazine had published, shortly before, an article about Islamic art in which the author said that such art was inseparable from the religious ideas and beliefs that it embodied. This passed without remark: no one wrote in angrily to say, 'So much the worse for Islamic art.'

Professor Scruton's suggestion that western art had become impoverished as a result of its radical repudiation of anything transcendent in human existence in favour of the fleeting present moment, however, exasperated and infuriated the professional art critics of Sweden — as, indeed, it would have done the art critics of any western country. They reacted with the fury of the justly accused: for it is the professional caste of cognoscenti who have consistently applauded the trivialisation of art and its relegation to the status of financial speculation at best, and a game for children showing off to the adults at worst.

Detroit's pursuit of perfection

It's long since passed being a joke . . . the Detroit Lions are now only one loss away from having the perfectly imperfect season. No team in NFL history has lost all 16 regular season games. That's bad, but it still doesn't justify this:

Detroit News columnist Rob Parker asked coach Rod Marinelli, "On a light note, do you wish your daughter would've married a better defensive coordinator?" Parker has been a consistent critic of Joe Barry, the team's defensive coordinator and Marinelli's son-in-law. Marinelli ignored the question. But Fox analyst Terry Bradshaw didn't. On the post-game show, the Hall of Famer said, "You know, Rob, you're an idiot. You're just a flat idiot. You have disgraced your profession and they ought to kick your butt out of the locker room."

Bradshaw is right — Parker is a disgrace.

Movie gunfighting

Gregg Easterbrook has an issue with the latest installment in the 007 movie series:

We've now endured two movies of the rebooted, supposedly "realistic" James Bond franchise, and at this point I'd like to go back to supervillains controlling outer space death rays. Supposedly, "Quantum of Solace" is "realistic." This film has four scenes in which multiple foes fire machine guns at Bond at close range for extended sequences, and every one of hundreds of bullets misses. Bond in response kills many bad guys with super-accurate long-range single shots from his small-caliber pistol, always while running — he isn't even bracing the gun with two hands. Though conveniently Bond's pistol is one of those movie guns that never has to be reloaded no matter how often it's fired. Dozens of guys with automatic weapons missing at close range is realism? CIA agents trying to kill an MI6 agent by chasing him in a public place while firing machine guns is realism? An ultra-luxury hotel in the middle of the Atacama Desert is realism?

In the movie's most absurd scene — and by saying this I don't mean to take anything away from the other absurd scenes — Bond is put into an elevator with two MI6 agents assigned to prevent his escape; in seconds, Bond knocks both unconscious on his first punch, and escapes. Prizefighters elaborately train to try to knock people unconscious with one punch, and almost never achieve this: Bond throws two punches and knocks two guys unconscious. (Of course in "Mission Impossible III," Tom Cruise was in an elevator with three guys and knocked all three unconscious with his first punch.) If Bond movies bear no relation to reality, I'd rather see gadgets and girls than absurd fight scenes. Meanwhile, this is the third consecutive Bond plot — spoiler alert — that turns on a high-ranking traitor in MI6; "Quantum" also throws in a high-ranking CIA traitor. There is no cheaper spy-movie plot device than having high-ranking people suddenly revealed as traitors, forcing the super-spy to fight his own agency: all three "Impossible" movies turned on this cliché, too.

This is how to review a bad book

Victor sent me a link to this review, saying that even though he hadn't read the book in question, the review itself was an amazing read:

Bad Book Month
In Which I Read Bad Books on Purpose

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

Oh, my. This book justifies Bad Book Month all by itself. It's appalling. The redeeming factors are few and far between (mostly Charlie, because he's sweet; and maybe Jasper), but they're helpless against the overwhelming gag factor.

The most appalling element, however, is how popular this novel is. How many teenage girls are drinking this up and screaming for more. I fear for my gender's future, for what they're learning about love and relationships through this series.

[. . .]

Because of the amount of anti-Twilight stuff out there — though, granted, it only equals the smallest fraction of the pro-Twilight fangirl mania — I'm not going to write a review. I'm not going to go into the disturbing way Bella and Edward's obsessive relationship is portrayed as true love, or how borderline abusive it is, with Bella's complete lack of self outside Edward and Edward's controlling, emotionally unstable behavior. I don't have anything new to say on the topic.

I am, instead, going to provide you with a catalog. A count of various elements in the book, which should give you a feel for exactly how numerous its flaws are.

SF books as they should have been titled

Eric Oppen sent these links to one of my mailing lists. They're too good not to share (if you don't read SF or Fantasy, this may not make as much sense to you, though):

MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits

MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits, Part Two

MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits, Part The Last

Some of these are flat-out brilliant:

QotD: The long, slow, lingering death of science fiction

Since its inception around the mid-19th century, SF had always been the literature of promise. It told stories of a universe that was knowable and lawful, in which rational human beings were capable of applying what they learned from it to make life better for everyone. For the most part, the central element was the advance of technology. But the driving ideology was almost always some form or another of socialism.

As we all know, socialism failed. At the height of its popularity it caused widespread starvation and deprivation, wrecking whole economies wherever it was applied. It inspired childish, petulant dictators — idealogues who were eager to do anything except give up an idea that didn't work — to put millions against the wall and send millions more to places like Siberia because the people couldn't (the dictators said "wouldn't") gladly transmogrify themselves into New Collectivist Mankind, or whatever the slogan was at the time. In the end, it finally destroyed the most enormous empire history had ever known.

With every failure of socialism, the promises made by socialist- inspired SF rang more hollow until, sometime in the late 1950s, the genre tried to turn itself inside-out, becoming skeptical of science and technology — instead of junking its broken ideology — becoming increasingly inner-directed and "psychological" as the real world grew more unbearable for disappointed leftists to look upon. Sliding into something resembling nihilism, SF writers lost interest in a future that — however else it might turn out — would not be socialist. And as SF writers lost interest in the future, readers lost interest in SF.

The sweeping nature of this change may have been difficult for the average consumer to notice at first. As literary SF was dying a slow, agonized death on the racks, SF in the movies and on TV appeared to flourish. But it was a narrowly-defined kind of SF, wedged between the anachronistic feudalism of Star Wars and the paramilitary fascism of Star Trek without any room remaining for individuality, let alone individualism.

Exactly like the dictators who were willing to sacrifice millions, rather than give up their precious but unworkable ideology, America's northeastern publishing establishment was willing to let SF die out, rather than give up the socialism of its youth and embrace a new philosophical and political viewpoint that offered real hope for the future.

L. Neil Smith, "New Maps of Bulgaria", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-11-23

Opinion polling, explained

Newspaper readers

QotD: Toxic fans

Excessive praise is even worse when it is unwanted praise, or what specialists refer to as dissonant encomium. James B. Stewart, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about Mike Milken and Ivan Boesky led to his 1992 best seller "Den of Thieves," said in an e-mail message that he once upset his publisher by refusing to go on Rush Limbaugh's show after the talk-show host heaped praise on "Blood Sport," his 1996 book about Bill Clinton. This is like having Phil Gramm describe you as being even zanier than Al Gore.

The dark side of flattery, according to P. J. O'Rourke, is attracting a fan base you may not want. Once described as "the funniest writer in America" by Time and The Wall Street Journal, O'Rourke suspects that this raised his profile among libertarians, who for some reason think of themselves as a pack of wild cutups.

"There's a nutty side to libertarians, starting with the Big Girl, Ayn Rand, and going straight through Alan Greenspan," O'Rourke told me over the phone. "When I go to Cato Institute functions, there's always a group of guys who look like they cut their own hair and get their mothers to dress them, with lots of buttons about legalizing heroin and demanding a return to the gold standard. The institute has tried to weed them out over the years, but they still turn up at the bigger events. As soon as I see them coming toward me, my heart sinks."

Joe Queenan, "Enough With the Sweet Talk", New York Times, 2008-11-14

Where SF and Libertarianism meet

Katherine Mangu-Ward looks at Tor Books, a publishing house known for printing science fiction books with strong libertarian themes:

Science fiction has long served as a kind of mad scientist's basement lab for testing out different political,economic, and social arrangements. Tor's success suggests that science fiction's commitment to meditations on the importance of human freedom remains strong, as mainstream writers borrow more freely from the once-ghettoized genre, indulging in science fiction–style hypotheticals that probe both the outer limits of and existential threats to liberty.

"Libertarianism is very much part of the intellectual argument of science fiction," says longtime Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden. "It's impossible to be a part of the argument of science fiction without engaging both broad libertarian ideas and also specifically the whole American free market intellectual tradition."

Science fiction novelist Cory Doctorow, a self-described civil libertarian whose Tor titles include the brilliantly paranoid young adult novel Little Brother, suggests why science fiction writers think so much about alternative worlds. "It's completely unsurprising that people who, you can imagine, aren't at the top of the pecking order in high school would turn to science fiction," says Doctorow, who is also co-author of the wildly popular geek blog Boing Boing. "The people who write it have often not been beneficiaries of the authoritarian system. They're the people who don't fit in exactly, and if you always rub up against social constraints, you're the kind of person who's willing to sit down and have a good hard think about whether this is the best way to do things."

Two decades after the death of the trailblazing author Robert Heinlein, the connection between science fiction and libertarianism remains strong, continuing to yield fascinating results. Some of the most interesting are coming out of Tor Books.

The Screedblog debuts

James Lileks finally decides to split his blogging interests into separate channels:

Happy news for everyone who hates it when I . . . go off on things. The off-going has been segregated to its own blog. A real honest Wordpress blog. I had to customize a template, and it doesn't look like I want it to look yet, but there's time enow to tweak, as the Shakespearean meth-head said. Behold the Screedblog, home to all the future intemperate bilious remarks on annoyances great and small. In the future there will be three blogs: the Strib blog for local stuff, the Screedblog for politics, and the Bleat for personal and pop-culture stuff. Why the segregation? Frankly, I want to avoid boring and annoying the people who simply do - not - want - to - read that stuff, and find that it impinges on their pleasure of the Bleat. There are sites I visit that frequently lurch into current events, and while that's fine and well and good it's the assumption that A) I must automatically agree with the unspoken precept that All Smart People Think This Way, Don't You Know, and B) I give a tin fig. So, a blog for tin-fig givers.

The strange, unlamented death of libertarianism

Jacob Weisberg says the final rites over the corpse of libertarian theory, based on how badly the situation has become due to the Bush administration's total devotion to radical libertarianism:

A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little. One line of argument casts as villain the Community Reinvestment Act, which prevents banks from "redlining" minority neighborhoods as not creditworthy. Another theory blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the trouble by subsidizing and securitizing mortgages with an implicit government guarantee. An alternative thesis is that past bailouts encouraged investors to behave recklessly in anticipation of a taxpayer rescue.

There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.

To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already? We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by libertarian ideas. I don't have much patience with the notion that trying to figure out how we got into this mess is somehow unacceptably vicious and pointless — Sarah Palin's view of global warming. As with any failure, inquest is central to improvement. And any competent forensic work has to put the libertarian theory of self-regulating financial markets at the scene of the crime.

Remember all those Bush appointees waving their copies of Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, while abolishing vast chunks of the federal government, ordering the mass withdrawals of American troops from all foreign lands, and selling off millions and millions of federal properties? Yeah, me neither.

How did those long-standing bastions of New Deal-era socialism, Fannie and Freddie, survive the gutting of all government involvement in the economy?

The answer is, of course, that George Bush is about as far away from a libertarian true believer as you could be without requiring people to refer to you as "Der Führer" or "Dear Leader" or "Big Brother". Big government projects? Check. Massive military spending? Check. Meddling in the free markets? Check. Vast increases in all kinds of regulation? Check. Imposition of further restrictions on individual freedom? Check.

Jeffrey Miron does the heavy lifting to refute Weisberg's bizzare notion that libertarians had anything to do with the current financial mess:

Whatever one's views of libertarian policies, the incontrovertible fact is that the U.S. has not pursued such policies. Not in the past 10 years. Not in the past century. Indeed, except for a brief moment before Alexander Hamilton engineered the first U.S. bailout of financial markets, not ever. If the U.S. had truly been the "Libertarian Land" that Weisberg alleges, a huge range of policies that have helped fuel the current situation would have been radically different.

In Libertarian Land, banks would not be chartered, defined, and regulated by government, as they have been in the U.S. for over 150 years. In particular, banks would have the right to "suspend convertibility," meaning they could tell depositors, "Sorry, you can't have all your money back right now," during banks runs that threatened bank solvency. This is precisely what banks did in key financial panics during the pre-Fed period, when suspension was illegal but tolerated or encouraged by regulators. By so doing, banks reduced the spread of panics and solvent but illiquid banks did not fail in large numbers.

In Libertarian Land, the Federal Reserve would never have been created. This means the Fed could not have turned a normal recession into the Great Depression by failing to stem a huge decline in the money supply. This decline and the related bank failures occurred because the Fed's existence was taken as indication that banks could not, or should not, suspend convertibility, as they had done successfully in the past. Thus in Libertarian Land, the Great Depression would probably not have occurred.

Update: I should also have linked to Matt Welch's round-up of reactions to Weisberg's article.

QotD: Orwelling Orwell

It is not an accident these [George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm] have disappeared down the memory hole. The Establishment has decided it is more important for you to feel empowered than for you to be empowered.

Nick Packwood, "An unbroken line", Ghost of a Flea, 2008-10-21

The "Tate" of the union address

An interview with meaningful impact. Brilliant delivery.

The deeper meaning of Palin's SNL appearance

Greg Beato looks beyond the surface of Sarah Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live:

Like Patty Hearst brandishing a semi-automatic carbine during a SLA bank robbery, Sarah Palin didn't actually do much during her celebrated appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend. But it was a shocking tableau nonetheless. After mocking Palin relentlessly for the last month, the liberal terrorists at SNL actually kidnapped the vice presidential candidate, brainwashed her, and made her complicit in their crimes against democracy.

Is it time, perhaps, to get serious about the War on Punchlines? Surely it must have been tough for conservatives to watch Palin's uncharacteristically docile performace; instead of Sarah Barracuda, she was Miss Congeniality, reduced to accepting smarmy compliments from Alec Baldwin. But she was there on her own accord, apparently without preconditions. And however much one might want to rail about the show's liberal bias and its double standard—would Barack Obama have been treated so dismissively?—it ultimately makes the most sense to simply treat late-night comedians like late-night comedians—and that means realizing they're exempt from journalistic notions of fairness and balance.

Update: Welcome, New York Times readers! Do feel free to look around, but you'll quickly figure out that this is just a quotation from a longer piece by Greg at Hit and Run. I recommend you go there for the rest of his post.

Christopher Buckley, official heretic

Christopher Buckley is no longer an employee at National Review, the conservative magazine founded by his father. It's not for corruption, drunkenness, debauchery, or even badly written columns. It's because he's endorsed Obama:

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen's mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn't want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it's pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review — a friend of 30 years — emailed me that he thought my opinions "cretinous." One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have "betrayed" — the b-word has been much used in all this — my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, "Cancel my subscription," I was able to quote the title of my father's last book, a delicious compendium of his NR "Notes and Asides": Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted — rather briskly! — by Rich Lowry, NR's editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

Proving, if it needed further proof, that conservatives can lose their cool just as gracelessly as liberals . . . and at equal speed.

I can easily understand someone holding generally conservative views still being unable to endorse McCain: he's not conservative in the majority of his opinions, and he's dismayingly populist where he's not alarmingly authoritarian. Obama is no prize for the small government fan, but the differences between him and McCain may well lead wavering conservatives to stay away from the polls or even pull the lever for "the opposition" rather than the devil they know all too well (because nobody would want to "waste their votes" by voting for Bob Barr, right?).

Jon asks 680 News if they're also rooting for a depression

Jon (my virtual landlord) sent the following query to 680 News:

Just sent this to 680 News, the tossers:

Hello —

Just a quick question for you about your editorial position: your current headline notes that the TSX has seen a "slight rebound" after a 1200-point drop. That "slight rebound" is currently, as of 4:03 pm, 734 points. That's hardly slight.

Just wondering why you're being misleading on this by referring to a rebound of 700-plus points as "slight."

Certainly Rogers has to understand that once we hit recession or worse, it will be the cable and cell phone accounts that will be first against the wall in many household budgets. So why would you want to egg on economic disaster? I can see why the Toronto Star would want to cheer on a recession — more people will be sleeping on and under newspapers, so they stand to gain from increased sales. But I can't see why Rogers would be rooting for a collapse.

Just wondering.

Jonathan Piasecki

He says he'll update me if they respond.

Weird Al: cultural pioneer

Weird Al Yankovic is far from being "thoroughly disposable":

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Yankovic's first music video, "Ricky," in which he reimagined Toni Basil's "Mickey" as an ode to I Love Lucy. The clip introduced the world to an accordion-playing spaz with a coif like Rick James and a voice like an urgent goose. Though many people at the time considered Yankovic to be thoroughly disposable — just another Reagan-era fad, like parachute pants or the Contras — he never went away. In fact, Yankovic had his biggest hit just two years ago, when he reworked Chamillionaire's rap hit "Ridin'" as the geek-pride anthem "White & Nerdy" ("X-Men comics, you know I collect 'em / The pens in my pocket, I must protect 'em"). The song was Yankovic's first track to break the Billboard Top 10.

But Yankovic isn't just popular. He is also the unlikely forefather of the infectious, hyperlinked, quasi-referential comedy that's become the lingua franca of the Web. Yankovic's influence can be seen in the slow-jam pinings of Obama Girl, the cross-cultural pairings that turn Yoda and SpongeBob SquarePants into hardcore rappers, and in the nimble hands of that couch potato who farts out "Bohemian Rhapsody" with his palms (1.8 million YouTube views and counting). You can even detect traces of his style in the perfectly metered wordplay of "Lazy Sunday," the 2005 Saturday Night Live short that earned YouTube — and viral humor — its first barrage of mainstream attention. "Ever since I was old enough to listen to music, I've been listening to Weird Al," says 30-year-old "Sunday" cocreator Andy Samberg. "For my generation, he's a huge influence."

QotD: Bush Administration: Special Victims Unit

I guess fighting one elective war isn't enough for the Bush administration. Or the Senate. Or the media.

But it's pretty clear that the White House, helped by a codependent Congress and media, has yet again manufactured a consensus for massive intervention. The last time they managed to pull this off, of course, the United States invaded Iraq. And that has worked out so well that they've decided to start a brand extension or spin-off series: Intervening massively into the economy. The bailout package as Bush Administration: Special Victims Unit.

Think about it and the parallels are disturbing: a high-ranking, respectable, above-the-fray cabinet member working the ropes to achieve bipartisan cooperation; a pliable Congress where appeals to patriotism always trump appeals to principle (sadly, those two things are almost always construed as oppositional); and a media that is fueling the fire (the dread MSM's role in spreading the Bush admin case for war has been pretty well-documented; in terms of the bailout, the most hysterical champions for intervention have been in the print and TV press). Time magazine's next cover story, I learned watching Morning Joe this AM on MSNBC, is actually an essay on "The New Hard Times" and compares our current day to those of The Great Depression. Ominous parallel or coincidence: In the Depression, people formed lines for free soup; today, people form lines to . . . buy iPhones?

Nick Gillespie, "The Iraq War, but This Time as Economic Pearl Harbor", Hit and Run, 2008-10-02

Publisher attacked over The Jewel of Medina

Mike Riggs rounds up the reports on the firebombing of Martin Rynja's home in London. Rynja is the publisher of Sherry Jones's controversial novel The Jewel of Medina:

Since losing her contract with Random House, Jones has pinned much of the blame for her book's ups and downs on Denise Spellberg, a professor at UT-Austin. In her efforts to dissuade anyone from publising Jewel, Spellberg has argued that it "use[s] sex and violence to attack the Prophet and his faith," and called it "soft core pornography." But Jones is either naive or scrambling to deflect attention by arguing that pejorative labels are the culprit here, or that all would be well if only radicals could read her book:

"The planting of that bomb is Martin Rynja's letterbox was not about my book," Jones said, noting that the novel was not yet available in Britain. "It's not about the content of my book. It's not about the ideas in my book. It must be about the rumors and innuendos....I feel that the people who resorted to violence are responsible," Jones emphasized. "But her use of the word 'pornography' has done nothing to help the situation."

More at Galleycat.

QotD: Don't panic (yet)

No matter how many times you'll hear it said over the next several awful days in Washington, this is not a binary choice between Henry Paulson's re-regulatory bailout and Great Depression 2.0. The 1930s will never happen again, thanks to a whole host of innovations and insights over the past seven decades. And even though the current mortgage-backed securities crisis is undeniably beginning to leak out from Wall Street, I'll reserve the kind of panic Bush seems eager to foment until maybe the economy actually stops growing, unemployment actually gets within shouting distance of Reagan-era levels, and the stock market does something scarier than fluctuate a whole lot.

As the participants in our June 2008 roundtable on the economy (including Donald Boudreaux, Ron Paul, and Megan McArdle) repeatedly pointed out, the one thing that may speed and deepen a so-far-nonexistent recession into something worse is the same kind federal overreaction that put the "great" in the Great Depression in the first place. I would have thought we'd all learned our lessons since then, but tonight's speech really hit home that it's no longer safe to take for granted any market literacy whatsoever.

Matt Welch, "The Four-Paragraph White Flag", Hit and Run, 2008-09-24

Amusing "Cease and Desist" notice

John Scalzi links to this NSFW cease-and-desist notice that may or may not be actually from Ann & Nancy Wilson to John McCain:

Cease and Desist, You Old Fart

Dear John McCain,

When we first learned your campaign was using our admittedly awesome 1977 classic "Barracuda" to introduce your terrifying joke of a running mate, we tried to be civil. As we wrote in our press release, "The Republican campaign did not ask for permission, nor would they have been granted that permission. We have asked the Republican campaign publicly not to use our music."

It gets a bit, um, earthier from that point onwards.

Vote for Chester Brown in Trinity-Spadina!

Graphic novelist Chester Brown is running as a Libertarian in the Trinity-Spadina riding, against incumbent Olivia Chow (NDP):

What changed 48-year-old Brown's beliefs from passive anarchist to active Libertarian was how the issue of property rights factored into the tale of Riel's legendary resistances. While starting work on the script in 1998, he picked up The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages by John Bethell, and was further influenced by the argument that the institution of private property was the biggest factor in the improvement of Western civilization.

"I realized there was a need for an agency that would protect those rights," says Brown. "And that agency would be the federal government."

Otherwise, the Libertarian philosophy would rather keep politicians as far out of people’s lives — only defining crime as a situation where somebody else was affected. For an artist like Brown, working full-time for the past 22 years in an illustrative medium that is all about being an outsider, the party turned out to be the one that suited his outlook.

"Politically, maybe I'd have considered myself among the NDP types, although I wasn't really all that interested," he says. "Yes, it was a nice thing that there's money distributed to poor people. Their stance on social issues or drug laws is something that generally fit my own.

"Becoming a Libertarian wasn't the easiest thing for me. At first, I thought, aren't those just a bunch of right-wing assholes? But when I met other party members I discovered there was a lot for me to agree with."

It must be said that Brown has a realistic view of his chances: "I'm pretty sure my political career will be coming to an end on October 15."

It wasn't a market failure

Ronald Bailey looks at the potential devastation of the insurance industry as the claims pour in from the Texas coast:

The fact that insurance companies refused to insure property located on storm-wracked coasts is not an instance of market failure. A market failure supposedly occurs when the price of goods and services do not reflect the true costs of producing and consuming those goods and services. That's clearly not what happened here. The market is practially shouting at people, "Don't build something you can't afford to lose where hurricanes periodically crash ashore."

Instead the state "insurance" scheme is an example of government failure which occurs when a government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and resources than would occur without that intervention. In this case, it's the government that's telling people that it's OK to build in dangerous areas and then not charging them enough for the "insurance."

It's one of the biggest omissions from media coverage of hurricanes . . . the largest reason for the increasing damage toll isn't that the storms are necessarily more powerful or more frequent, but that many more people have been moving into areas that are subject to greater risk from those storms. Government meddling in the insurance market distorts the necessary pricing signals to property owners . . . usually forcing insurance companies to provide below-cost policies in high-risk areas or requiring private insurers to underwrite the losses of quasi-public or public insurers.

It wasn't a market failure

Ronald Bailey looks at the potential devastation of the insurance industry as the claims pour in from the Texas coast:

The fact that insurance companies refused to insure property located on storm-wracked coasts is not an instance of market failure. A market failure supposedly occurs when the price of goods and services do not reflect the true costs of producing and consuming those goods and services. That's clearly not what happened here. The market is practially shouting at people, "Don't build something you can't afford to lose where hurricanes periodically crash ashore."

Instead the state "insurance" scheme is an example of government failure which occurs when a government intervention causes a more inefficient allocation of goods and resources than would occur without that intervention. In this case, it's the government that's telling people that it's OK to build in dangerous areas and then not charging them enough for the "insurance."

It's one of the biggest omissions from media coverage of hurricanes . . . the largest reason for the increasing damage toll isn't that the storms are necessarily more powerful or more frequent, but that many more people have been moving into areas that are subject to greater risk from those storms. Government meddling in the insurance market distorts the necessary pricing signals to property owners . . . usually forcing insurance companies to provide below-cost policies in high-risk areas or requiring private insurers to underwrite the losses of quasi-public or public insurers.

Television will never be the same

Gregg Easterbrook outlines the new TV shows to premiere on the TMQ channel this fall:

"Detective Wormhole." A police officer from a mirror universe is teleported to New York City and must search for a scientist who is about to destroy the Earth by turning on a super-advanced atom smasher. Running joke: In his reality, New Yorkers are incredibly polite.

"Incomprehensible." Ten people of diverse backgrounds awake to find themselves on a beautiful island guarded by the Loch Ness monster. They locate a series of mysterious prophecies warning of the destruction of humanity. A stranger appears in their midst without explanation. Beneath the island are stairs leading to a cavern full of Mayan ruins. A rescue plane circles above the island, sending radio messages in an unknown language. Gradually they discover they are acquiring superpowers. They find an extremely strong power generator that appears to be of extraterrestrial design. Five figures dressed in white robes walk out of the water and refuse to speak. A room of scientific experiments is found, many in progress, as if the scientists had just left the room. They come across a table set for an elaborate feast. One day a child holding a lamp appears ...

"CSI: Park Service." Someone didn't take out the trash. Jimmy Smits and Jenna Elfman will stop at nothing until they find out who.

[. . .]

"How Low Can You Go?" Television network executives compete to win a big promotion by coming up with the most exploitive reality series. Weekly reality show-within-a-show is the highlight. In the pilot, Tom green-lights "Tenement," in which volunteers are locked in an abandoned apartment building full of famished rats. Stephanie backs "Platinum," in which attractive women have 24 hours to see who can make the most money as high-class call girls.

[. . .]

"Dexter and the Housewives." Cutting-edge situation comedy about a serial killer who tortures ditzy women to death in their over-decorated suburban homes. Zany, madcap action as the hero uses power drills and rotary saws on his helpless victims in extremely graphic scenes, all the while engaged in hilarious misadventures with a roster of wacky, zany friends. USA Today gushes, "Combines 'Hostel' and 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.'"

British publisher to print Jewel of Medina

I would have to say that this was an unexpected development:

Finally — or, So soon? — Sherry Jones has found a publisher for her lusty Islamic love story (and it has its own heavily-sourced and lengthy Wikipedia entry!):

[British] Publisher Martin Rynja (of British publishing house Gibson Square), describing himself as "completely bowled over by the novel and the moving love story it portrays," called Jones's book "an important barometer of our time":

"In an open society there has to be open access to literary works, regardless of fear," Rynja said in a press release. "As an independent publishing company, we feel strongly that we should not be afraid of the consequences of debate. If a novel of quality and skill that casts light on a beautiful subject we know too little of in the West, but have a genuine interest in, cannot be published here, it would truly mean that the clock has been turned back to the dark ages."

Given the situation in Britain these days, I'm actually astounded that a British publisher is willing to step forward and become a target publish this book.

The unreal world of modern art

Nick Gillespie looks at the economics of the modern art world:

[. . .] Don Thompson, a business professor at Toronto's York University and author of the insightful and compulsively readable The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, argues that the two activities [owning art and appreciating art] are increasingly indistinguishable. Thompson spent a year touring auction houses, talking with dealers and even hanging out with artists, who emerge as altogether less interesting than the buyers and sellers around them.

Consider the case of British advertising legend Charles Saatchi, one of the central figures in Thompson's study of "the curious economics of contemporary art." Married to voluptuous TV cook Nigella Lawson, Saatchi is "the prototype of the modern branded collector," a tastemaker who doesn't just collect art but creates whole markets in the stuff, no matter how bizarre, sensationalistic or banal it might seem on first (or second, or third) blush. He adds value simply by his association with or interest in an artist.

Back in 1991, Saatchi commissioned "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" — a 15-foot tiger shark suspended in a giant glass tank — from Damien Hirst, whose reputation he had largely created via early patronage. Saatchi reportedly had fallen in love with Hirst's work after seeing "A Thousand Years," an installation featuring a rotting cow's head, flies and a bug zapper.

An artist friend of mine once said that he'd rather have work that appalled and disgusted viewers than to have their indifference. That's an encapsulation of what so much modern art is all about — the strength of the provoked reaction is key, while the actual "artistic" aspect can be all but absent. The degree of art involved is always open to debate, but the shock is what it's all about for many artists.

How to construct an authoritarian youth movement

As usual, I'm a bit late to find this story in The Times, but it being a long weekend, some of you may not have seen it yet either.

This is a scene from Dennis Gansel's latest film, and, given his previous one, the acclaimed Before the Fall, about the Nazification of German youth, it's clear the director has a bone to pick. "I have a grandfather who was really supportive of Hitler," he confides. "He said, 'When I was your age, I was leading a division in Russia.' And I have very left-wing parents. So, as part of the third generation after the second world war, it is something I really want to explore."

In Die Welle (The Wave), the setting is present-day. Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) invites his students to participate in an experiment. Put their faith in him and he will deliver a unique insight into the mind-set of a citizen in a totalitarian state. What begins as a playful study in psychological manipulation — a few drills in collective behaviour, time trials in entering the room — soon runs away with itself. By midweek, Wenger is recoiling in horror. His acned darlings have been transformed into an ersatz Hitler Youth — the title's self-styled "Wave" — complete with uniform, badge, salute and an eagerness to jackboot all nonbelievers. "It isn't about politics at all," Gansel says. "It's more about group dynamics and psychology."

If the film sounds far-fetched, it isn't. Bar some dramatic licence, it is modelled on a very real experiment that took place in a schoolroom in Palo Alto, California, over one week in April 1967. Known as "The Third Wave", it achieved similarly sensational results, a textbook case for psychologists.

Update: Jon sent me a message saying "I am certain that a TV special on this was made some time in the late 70's or early 80's. I think this may have been it: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083316/".

"Unpleasant Profession" coming to the big screen?

According to a news item today, Robert Heinlein's novella "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" is to be filmed:

Phoenix Pictures principals Mike Medavoy, Arnie Messer and Brad Fischer will produce the adaptation of "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag," which they describe as a complex psychological thriller with plenty of action as well as some love interest. A title change is likely.

The deal with the "I, Robot" helmer closed several weeks ago, and the project will likely shoot after the Greek-born, Aussie-raised Proyas finishes the Nicolas Cage-starring thriller "Knowing" for Summit.

Originally published in 1942, the offbeat tale centers on a man who becomes increasingly disturbed when he realizes he cannot account for his activities during the day, or even explain what he does for a living. He divulges his problem to the husband-and-wife partners of a private detective agency, and their investigation leads to a series of revelations they could never have fathomed.

After the disaster that was the "reinterpretation" of Starship Troopers, I have to say that my expectations have been set very low for any other Heinlein work translated to other media.

H/T to Jill Tallman for the link.

Timeline of internet memes

In case you've ever wondered whether "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" came before or after "I am Canadian!", you can find the answer here.

Breaking the hockey stick?

Bishop Hill pulls together the story about the famous "hockey stick" graph for the non-mathematically inclined:

There has been the most extraordinary series of postings at Climate Audit over the last week. As is usual at CA, there is a heavy mathematics burden for the casual reader, which, with a bit of research I think I can now just about follow. The story is a remarkable indictment of the corruption and cyncism that is rife among climate scientists, and I'm going to try to tell it in layman's language so that the average blog reader can understand it. As far as I know it's the first time the whole story has been set out in a single posting. It's a long tale - and the longest posting I think I've ever written and piecing it together from the individual CA postings has been a long, hard but fascinating struggle. You may want to get a long drink before starting, and those who suffer from heart disorders may wish to take their beta blockers first.

H/T to Brian Micklethwait.

QotD: Worldcon

I don't know why anyone else goes to Worldcon, but I go to see many of my friends who aren't otherwise in the same place at the same time and have a big ol' ball staying up late and saying terrible, hilarious things. What sort of hilarious things? Well, let me just say this: The moment that I, Ian McDonald, Paolo Bacagalupi and Blake Charlton tried to sell an anthology to Lou Anders at Pyr Books by saying "Two words, Lou: Unicorn Bukkake" was not actually the most disturbingly, howlingly funny moment of the con.

(Also, if you don’t know what "bukkake" means, for God's sake don't look it up. Especially at work. For serious, man.)

John Scalzi, "Denvention 3: An (Oh, Probably Not) Brief Recap", Whatever, 2008-08-11

QotD: That peculiar Canadian moral stance

During the Beijing opening ceremonies, Peter Mansbridge farted out an opinion to the effect that Western governments considering a boycott could hardly ignore a "quarter of humanity" but managed to leave the entrance of the Iraqi delegation totally unremarked. Canada is in the peculiar position of being able to say whatever it wants about its largest trading partner, say nothing that is not muttered from kowtowing position to its second largest parter and to do so while sporting a smug grimace in place of a smile. This as we celebrate "the Olympic spirit" and recapitulate every moral and strategic failure of the 1930s.

Not to worry; I expect Canada's future Prime Ministers will have no trouble finding another meaningless apology to offer the survivors.

Nick Packwood, "One World, One Dream", Ghost of a Flea, 2008-08-09

More free advertising for Westboro Moonbat "Church"

It's a PR coup for the pathetic wankers who announced they'd be coming to Canada to protest at Tim McLean's funeral:

Canadian border guards have been told to bar a fanatic church group that was planning to protest the funeral of a man beheaded on a Greyhound bus, reports say.

NDP MP Pat Martin told the Winnipeg Free Press that Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day sent the alert to border guards Thursday.

We should have let them in, and given them no media coverage at all. Instead, we're giving them exactly what they wanted, and we're giving them plenty of air time to push their noxious views. Brilliant move.

The Phelps family carries on a long, long history of moronic hatred

Victor sent me this link with a comment that "Take a look. If it has you boiling with rage too, I think you'll see my point."

The daughter of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, based in Topeka, Ka., told CTV.ca she and several other church members will go to Winnipeg on Saturday to demonstrate against what she described as McLean's "filthy way of life." Shirley Phelps-Roper said his life was emblematic of Canada's moral decay.

"God handed us a gift," Phelps-Roper said in a phone interview on Thursday.

She said McLean deserved his death by beheading on a Greyhound Bus last week.

"(His death was) supremely unemotional. You got God shaking in rage. There is no emotional component . . . He was a rebel against God. He was taught to be a rebel by his parents. He came from a rebel country . . . They brought this wrath upon his head. And it sucks to be him and it sucks to be them," Phelps-Roper said.

She said his brutal murder was a sign from God.

Ms. Phelps-Roper is, as they say on Fark, an attention whore. The media loves having her and her ilk around, because they can always make an otherwise unexceptional event highly newsworthy. She not only knows almost nothing about the case, she's actually boasting about knowing nothing. In her view, Tim McLean's horrible death is proof that God meant him to die.

In this instance, her band of merry morons don't even need to show up: they've got media attention paid to them and their "cause". It would play right into her hands to try to block her from entering Canada, as that would allow her more opportunities for media attention.

It would be best if the media could manage to somehow ignore her and her "church". Without the TV and print coverage, she'd be just another unhappy, paranoid whackjob with obsessions. With the media as a partner, she's able to increase the world's already bountiful supply of misery and anger. Nice work, guys.

Whole thing here.

The durable myth of recycling = efficiency

By way of Tim Blair, a link to the article in which John Tierney declared himself a target for hate mail from schoolchildren, environmentalists, and municipal workers by pointing out the origins and true costs of the recycling hoax:

Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense — for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations — while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.

The obvious temptation is to blame journalists, who did a remarkable job of creating the garbage crisis, often at considerable expense to their own employers. Newspaper and magazine publishers, whose products are a major component of municipal landfills, nobly led the crusade against trash, and they're paying for it now through regulations that force them to buy recycled paper — a costly handicap in their struggle against electronic rivals. It's the first time that an industry has conducted a mass-media campaign informing customers that its own product is a menace to society.

I've always had my doubts about the modern recycling movement . . . and how it seems to have become more a replacement religion than an economic or even environmental concern. I knew the stated economics were dodgy, in that it seemed that the claimed benefits from recycling more and more "stuff" seemed ever smaller, while the actual costs clearly were growing. People now recycle as a moral imperative much more than as an economic necessity, and municipal governments everywhere are just as trapped in a no-win situation as J. Winston Porter (the former US government official who set the ball in motion back in 1988):

"People in New York and other places are tilting at recycling windmills," says Porter, who left the E.P.A. in 1989 and is now president of a consulting firm, the Waste Policy Center in Leesburg, Va. "There aren't many more materials in garbage that are worth recycling." Porter has been advising cities and states to abandon their unrealistic goals, but politicians are terrified of coming out against recycling. How could they explain it to the voters? How could they explain it to their children?

Indeed, how do you gracefully admit that you've brainwashed an entire generation with nice-sounding nonsense? The scariest thing is that this article was published in 1996! Not only has nothing changed, but things have gotten worse, as more municipalities have insisted on moving further and further in a pro-recycling direction.

"Rush" in their early Randroid phase

Original link from Wired:

Stripped of the band's usual banks of synths, amps, peripherals and extracurricular percussion, Rush simply rocked back in the 1970s. And while there is much to be said for technology, and the way it has changed the group's music, it was refreshing to watch them tear the heart out of "Anthem" without the use of anything other than bass, guitar, drums and pure energy. I haven't been able to stop watching that video, more than a week later. It's a bracing reminder of how pure riffage can get when there's little put in its way.

Which made me think: Which Rush rules the most? Is it the stripped-down outfit that avoided synths and turned out brain-teasing grinders like Fly By Night and 2112? The keyboard-laden prog-rockers that made Moving Pictures, Grace Under Pressure and Power Windows? Or the back-to-basics revisionists that turned out Counterparts and Test For Echo? Or is it a moot point, given the band's productive continuum?

False alarm about free speech suppression on Blogger and Blogspot

There was much consternation yesterday when several prominent blogs were all flagged as being in violation of Blogger's terms of service and locked (with a 20-day termination notice). Castle Argghhh! was monitoring the situation, and offered sanctuary to many of the bloggers who'd been suddenly deprived of their blogs.

I have a blog over there (http://quotulatiousness.blogspot.com/, my emergency backup blog), but as I only post there when there are problems here on the main blog, I don't know if mine was one of the locked blogs . . . because Google (who own Blogger and Blogspot) quickly unlocked the blogs for their owners and sent a letter of apology with an explanation of the problem.

Another argument for media bias?

Poor old John McCain is in hot water with the media again . . . this time, it's that ultra-left bastion of socialist bile, The Wall Street Journal:

Is John McCain Stupid?

Is John McCain losing it?

On Sunday, he said on national television that to solve Social Security "everything's on the table," which of course means raising payroll taxes. On July 7 in Denver he said: "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't."

This isn't a flip-flop. It's a sex-change operation.

H/T to John Scalzi.

Kerry Howley's battle with self-negation

Kerry Howley recounts a panel discussion she participated in with other women who've been paid for their ova:

Last week I participated in a panel discussion with three women who had, like me, exchanged some ova for cash. It was in a bar basement; everyone was drinking; and my co-panelists — Valerie Bronte, Diana Fleischman, and Marie Huber — happened to be insanely funny, smart people who changed my mind about a few aspects of the process.

I spent my allotted time explaining that my emotional response does not seem to conform to the acceptable cultural script. Reporters call and ask "How painful was it?" and "Do you regret it now?" It wasn't painful, I reply, I'm quite happy to have had the experience. Awkward silence. They ask whether I know someone else they can talk to. I'm never quoted. In conversation I generally feel pushed to say that I feel somehow traumatized, and I have at times felt ashamed for not feeling more seriously affected by the transaction. I've since come to recognize this as a kind of emotional bullying, a push to elicit expected emotional responses.

It's funny that some people who would be horribly offended if someone else indulged in a gender stereotype can ?thoughtlessly? do it themselves:

There is nothing I can say here that won't contribute to my life sentence of buried self-negation, but it's worth noting that [Melissa] Lafsky [of the Huffington Post] is bounding the range of acceptable emotional responses available to half the population. (Of course you were traumatized! Don't you know how emotional women are?) I've no doubt that some women, perhaps many women, are distraught after their ova retrievals. But why on earth would we all have the same reaction? Why not allow women — most human beings — to individuate emotionally? And why does Lafsky want it to have been so troubling for each and every one of us?

Denial of temporal reality

James Lileks forces me to confront the ugly reality . . . it actually has been a long time:

I thought the video for "Brothers in Arms" was done by the same director; it had a hand-drawn style. Turns out the director did do a Dire Straits vid — but it was the "Money for Nothing" video, the one that really made everyone who had cable feel as if they were living in the future. Computer graphics and lyrics that referenced the medium itself: Marshall McLuhan would have approved.

Wonderful things were done in the few years between the rise of videos and the rule of computers; "Money for Nothing" was the Steamboat Willie of its time, I suppose.

Wikipedia says it best:

"The song's lyrics are written from the point of view of a blue-collar worker watching music videos and commenting on what he sees. To achieve the effect of such a layman making such casual everyday commentary, Dire Straits' lead singer and songwriter Mark Knopfler used a vocal style known as Sprechstimme."

By which I mean, Wikipedia’s anal tone and self-serious community has managed to suck the juice out of that plum, too.

Has it been a while? It’s almost been a quarter century.

Just gaze upon it, O Ye Boomers, and Despair: there are 24 year-olds out there right now drinking Starbucks and texting friends and using iPhone GPS to arrange dinner plans who were zygotes when this video came out. This video was an oldie on MTV when next month’s Playboy centerfold was born. To them this looks like a 1935 movie looks to someone born in '59.

WFB's other writings

A short Gawker round-up of some of William F. Buckley's less predictable output:

Slightly late to the game of fond remembrances of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. is Fox News correspondent James Rosen's essay on how the founding editor of National Review was a frequent contributor to Playboy. Many of the details Rosen digs up about this sideline beat, so to speak, are fun, but the association isn't quite as counterintuitive or shocking as he'd like to think it is. "Yes, in a union difficult to imagine involving any of today's leading conservatives . . . the bard of East 73rd Street wrote for Hugh Hefner's oft-vilified Playboy, on and off, for almost four decades, on topics ranging from 'the Negro male' and Nikita Khrushchev to Oprah Winfrey, the Internet, and Y2K." That's a poor use of the word "bard," and also an impaired judgment. P.J. O'Rourke and Christopher Buckley have both written for Playboy and they're "leading conservatives," if not shrieking TV banshees like Ann Coulter. But even back in 1963, when Buckley the Elder made his debut in a transcribed debate he'd had with Norman Mailer, the byline and the magazine were actually rather suited to each other in a strange aesthetic way.

A few less things to worry about

John Tierney tries to quell some fears:

For most of the year, it is the duty of the press to scour the known universe looking for ways to ruin your day. The more fear, guilt or angst a news story induces, the better. But with August upon us, perhaps you're in the mood for a break, so I've rounded up a list of 10 things not to worry about on your vacation.

Now, I can't guarantee you that any of these worries is groundless, because I can't guarantee you that anything is absolutely safe, including the act of reading a newspaper. With enough money, an enterprising researcher could surely identify a chemical in newsprint or keyboards that is dangerously carcinogenic for any rat that reads a trillion science columns every day.

What I can guarantee is that I wouldn't spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things.

Of course, the human mind is optimized for worry so having a mere ten knocked off the worry list only makes room for more concerns to occupy us.

I should just stop whining . . .

. .. as I did in yesterday's lament about not being able to watch P&T's take on climate change . . . because through the kind efforts of Tom Kelley, I got to watch this episode of Bullshit! . . . and (with the right plug-ins) you can too.

Thanks, Tom! But I'm still going to buy the DVD set when it comes out.

Penn & Teller on Climate Change

It was probably inevitable that Penn & Teller would get around to doing an episode of Bullshit! on climate change:

[. . .] Thursday's episode on environmentalism opened with a morose-looking Penn Jillette waving a magazine as he recited one ecotastrophe after another — drought in Africa, flooding in Pakistan and Japan, snowless winters in New England and Northern Europe — I snapped to attention. ''It says right here in Time magazine — the weather's gone nuts and we humans are to blame!'' Teller wailed. "We have bleeped up the environment and now we're going to pay for it!''

Yeah, that global warming is pretty bad. You know, Al Gore says — oops, never mind. Turns out Penn's not reading from the infamous Time cover story of 2006 on global warming, the one headlined BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. No, this Time is from 1974, and the headline is, ANOTHER ICE AGE? And all those violent paroxysms of nature are the pernicious work of global cooling.

Yes, back in the days of disco, the news media echoed with predictions of the world's imminent demise from ice rather than fire. Newsweek warned that temperatures had already dropped ''a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.'' By 1985, Life declared, "air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the earth by one half.''

Too bad I won't get to see it until this season's episodes come out on DVD . . .

Barack Obama's love affair . . . with the media

Steve Chapman tries to understand the complaints coming from the McCain team about excessive worship of Barack Obama:

I came into the office the other day, wearing an "Obama 2008" cap, a "Yes We Can" button, a "Team Obama" T-shirt, carrying an "Obama for Change" tote bag filled with Obama bumper stickers, made a stop at the Obama altar in the newsroom, strewed some rose petals, chanted a few hosannas, lit a votive candle and had a sudden thought: Is the news media's love affair with Barack Obama getting out of hand?

John McCain and his campaign staffers have a sneaking suspicion it is. They put out a video with footage of journalists acting gooey about the Democratic candidate, to the strains of "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You." According to the campaign, "The media is in love with Barack Obama." McCain's people say that like it's a bad thing.

That'd be an "oops"

The Telegraph reports that a New Hampshire newspaper had an unusually embarassing typo: the newspaper's own name:

This Monday readers of New Hampshire's Valley News were surprised to see the paper's name spelled "Valley Newss" on the front page masthead.

The following day the newspaper, which covers the Upper Valley area straddling New Hampshire and Vermont, published an "Editor's Note" acknowledging the error.

"Readers may have noticed that the Valley News misspelled its own name on yesterday’s front page," it read.

"Given that we routinely call on other institutions to hold themselves accountable for the mistakes, let us say for the record: We sure feel silly."

I'd actually expected the report to be about the Manchester Guardian, which was notorious for editing problems many years ago (hence the occasional nickname "The Grauniad").

Fan fiction . . . possibly not legal under Canadian law

John Scalzi links to a discussion of fan fiction under Canadian law:

For all you fanficcers out there, an interesting take on fan fiction from the Canadian legal perspective, i.e., whether fan fic would be legal in Canada if it ever went to court there. The author suspects not and notes that in Canada (and much of the rest of the world outside the US) there's an additional layer of complication in that the author is assumed to have a "moral right" to a work which includes some strictures on how the work (and the characters within) is to be used. There is no moral right issue in US law, of course, because we in the US don't have morals. Or something.

Ah, but just what is "fan fiction" I pretend to hear you ask? Here's a good answer (from the LRC article):

This is fan fiction, and it's all over the web, at sites such as http://www.fanfiction.net, and http://www.sugarquill.com. Though its roots are in the science fiction book world, the phenomenon really took off with the TV series Star Trek. By the series' second season in 1967, fans were writing their own episodes and sharing them with like-minded friends. Drawing on Star Trek characters and settings — referred to as the canon — they placed the characters in narratives not contemplated by the show's writers, very often with subversive results. Most famously, these early fan writers perceived a repressed sexual passion between Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk and began writing stories exploring this relationship. Thus was started a roaring sub-culture of fan writing, largely by women and for women, about homoerotic relations between ostensibly heterosexual male characters. Stories of such relationships — known as slash from the "/" used to connote a pairing (such as Harry Potter/Severus Snape) — continue to make up a major proportion of fan fiction.

Social scientist Camille Bacon-Smith, in her book Enterprising Women, identifies a number of sub-genres beyond slash which give a good sense of fan fiction's diversity. Sub-genres include mpreg (where a man gets pregnant), deathfic (where a major character dies), curtainfic (where the characters, typically a gay male pairing, go domestic and engage in such comfortably bourgeois exercises as shopping for curtains together), and AU (alternative universe, where the characters are displaced into an entirely new fantasy setting). Sexually explicit sub-genres — often tagged as 'kink' or 'with plumbing' — include PWP (porn without plot or 'Plot? What plot?') and BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism). And universally deplored as the worst cliché in the genre is the Mary Sue story, in which the fan writer writes her thinly-veiled self into the plot. 'Infinite diversity in infinite combinations' is fandom's abiding motto.

Should you feel the need to read some bad fan fiction — of which there is an incredibly large and possibly endless supply — you can cut right to the chase by visiting http://www.godawful.net/, who claim they've "scoured the 'net since 1998 to bring you the foulest fan fiction available and we like to think that we're responsible for many a dry heave and sleepless night, but the truth of the matter is, we just showcase these abominations. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank those deluded souls actually writing Godawful Fan Fiction, without whom this site would never have been possible. Or necessary."

QotD: Batman = Richie Rich

I was thinking about the upcoming Batman movie, and I suddenly realized: Batman and Richie Rich are basically the same character.

They both have butlers (Alfred, Cadbury), they both have sidekicks (Robin, Dollar), they both dress in ridiculous outfits (bat costume, short pants with bow tie) and they both have adventures in which problems are solved by the appropriate use of incredibly expensive material possessions.

The main difference is that Richie Rich's parents weren't shot to death in a filthy alleyway right in front of him, but tell me that wouldn't have improved Richie's back story.

Lore Sjöberg, Grading Batman's Gear", Wired, 2008-07-15

Kerry Howley dissects Grand New Party

Kerry Howley views with disdain the recent book Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam:

My friends Reihan and Ross have written an extremely savvy book about how to reinvigorate the GOP with a new narrative and a new coalition. Because I like the Republican party flaccid and moribund (all parties, actually), I hope their book is celebrated, widely reviewed, and ultimately ignored. And because I find most of their social policy troubling, I hope that even those dipping into the book for some new ideas take time to question the assumptions within it.

I don't think I am overstating the R&R position when I say that my friends would like to return us to a more traditional and less pluralistic concept of family life. Through social and tax policy, they would privilege heterosexual two-parent families, fund marriage promotion programs, encourage the stigmatization of single parenthood, subsidize motherhood among married women, increase taxes on the childless, and so on. In short, they would structure incentives to encourage women to use their bodies in the one way most appealing to social conservatives.

[. . .]

Privileging one, dominant idea of the family comes with costs that R&R never really grapple with in their breezy book, and those costs fall almost exclusively on one gender. Through the tax code, R&R wish to change the relative prices of women's options, rendering childlessness more costly and early motherhood less so. They want the federal government to stake a position on the proper role of women, and that role involves a heterosexual marriage with children. While conceding that this is politically infeasible at the moment, R&R write that "we should be willing to stigmatize illegitimacy by tying a tax relief to responsible parenting." (Responsible parenting=parenting by legally married couples.) This is a policy that punishes poor women unable to find marriageable men, gay and lesbian partners unable to access legal marriage, and any other number of people who are responding rationally to their environment, doing the best they know how for the kids they have.

Dr. Horrible won't sing along for Canucks

I was all keyed up to watch the first web-episode of Joss Whedon's latest creation, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but discovered — to my horror — that it's only available within the United States:

Well, crap!

Gonzo remembered

Kurt Loder reviews the new documentary on Hunter S. Thompson:

The late Hunter S. Thompson was a dazzling writer who in his days of greatness — from the mid-1960s to the mid-'70s, approximately — misled a lot of younger writers into believing that if they just ingested enough drugs and alcohol, they, too, could write like Hunter S. Thompson. It didn't work that way. In the end, it didn't even work that way for Hunter anymore.

In "Gonzo," Alex Gibney's moving new documentary about Thompson, we meet the man foursquare: not just the brilliant, rampaging star of the "new journalism" of that period, but also the irascible crank, the drunken gun nut, the public menace. Hunter was much-loved by his many admiring cronies, among them Bill Murray, Keith Richards and Johnny Depp (who narrates the film). "On the other hand," says his ex-wife Sandy, "he was absolutely vicious." Such balanced candor is rare in any documentary, and it makes "Gonzo" the most transfixing film about a troubled artist since the 1994 "Crumb."

I first read Thompson's writing in the mid-1970s, and it was a jaw-dropping experience at that time. I thought his Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 was utterly brilliant . . . it actually made me much more aware of the American political system almost in spite of itself. The word pictures were so arresting, so outré, that they still stick in my mind now, literally thousands of books later.

His later writings fell well short of the full-court brilliance of his best stuff, but they still had glimmerings of his earlier power with words. He kept returning to the same themes — and sometimes the very same phrases — over and over, as his writing got less and less original, and (frankly) less and less readable. I recently read one of his last collections, Hey, Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk, and it was only a pale shadow . . . but even near the bitter end Thompson was still capable of startlingly accurate word pictures. Perhaps they stood out more because they were surrounded with so much dross.

QotD: That dreaded "lurch to the right"

I make a point of looking at the Economist each week, in order to see what this part of the establishment are thinking. I can not normally stand to read it for than a couple of minutes (as it makes me feel unclean), but that is enough time to find some utter absurdity with which amuse people.

However, this week I think I have come upon the worst Economist article of all time:

The title, featured on the front cover, is "McCain's lurch to the right" . . . For those who do not know British "political speak", "lurch to the right" is what the Labour party (and so on) have long said whenever a Conservative party politician gives any sign of not agreeing with everything the BBC and Guardian newspaper hold to be correct.

Paul Marks, "Latest attack on John McCain: The worst 'Economist' article of all time?", Samizdata, 2008-07-05

"Mr. Hubris? Call from Mr. Nemesis on line two."

There aren't enough shades of ironic to cover this one:

Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers has admitted that a laptop containing financial and personal details of thousands of staff, suppliers and contributors has been stolen.

After months of criticising "criminally careless" government departments for losing confidential records, the company has been forced to send out an embarrassing letter telling journalists they may now be at risk of identity theft, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

There's a silver lining to all this — they can re-use all the headlines like this one:

Hard to disagree, isn't it?

How to fill in a slow news day

What do you do when you're a crusading newspaper reporter, and there's nothing to crusade against? Well, if you work for the Mail on Sunday, you manufacture a bogus story. First, you artistically create a headline to catch the reader's attention . . . like this one:

After years of working for free, Down's syndrome man must PAY to wash councillors' dishes

Then, having arrested their notice from the scantily dressed starlets and fringe royals down the side of the page, you then build on the headline with carefully crafted misdirection:

A Down's syndrome man and Special Olympics champion who has been working for free for years is now being charged a fee to wash councillors' dishes.

Good. You've reinforced the message in the headline, so you can assume that the lazy reader will skim past the essential information in the next sentence:

Virgil Taylor has been helping to wash up, wipe tables and set up trolleys in a restaurant used by town hall staff for 17 years as part of subsidised adult care services.

Note the extra careful phrasing here: part of subsidised adult care services. It encourages you to read that as if Mr. Taylor is a volunteer for that program, in spite of his own disabilities. Now we move on to another delicate piece of misdirection:

Every week Mr Taylor - who won a gold medal at the Special Olympics in Glasgow in 2005 - has attended 10 sessions run by the William Knowles Centre in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset.

But now savage cuts have ended the subsidies and the 34-year-old will have to pay £2.50 per session for the 'privilege' of cleaning up after councillors.

You are now aware that Mr. Taylor is a Special Oympian, a gold medal winner, no less, which makes it seem to be even more unfair that he's being charged money to be allowed to help out, right?

Now, we can bring in the outraged parent who sums things up nicely:

His outraged mother Joan, of Winscombe, said: 'Virgil does not get paid for his time at the Town Hall. But I would never stop him going as it makes him feel useful and he is so proud when he puts his uniform on.

'He does this for nothing but he loves it and that is the most important thing.

'How and why should he pay? The £2.50 per session will really eat into his savings.'

Okay, we've pretty much got all the readers on-side now, angry at the skinflint, evil, oppressive council, right? Great. So we can pretty much assume that they're too upset to parse out the actual details buried in the remainder of the article.

But a more careful reading of the situation reveals it's not quite what the reporter wants you to think: Mr. Taylor isn't a volunteer. He's a participant in the adult daycare program, which until now has been provided free of charge by the local government. As part of the program, Mr. Taylor helps out in the council cafeteria — as a form of occupational therapy — not as an unpaid volunteer.

The new fee being introduced will probably be a tiny percentage of the cost of running the program (remember, up until now it's been free). This is what the outraged parent has to say about the change:

Mrs Taylor said: 'I save the Government a lot of money keeping him with me and I would not have it any other way.

'I am an honest person and the underhanded way we have been treated sickens me.

'Those at the council should hang their heads in shame.'

Did you catch that little slight-of-tongue there? She "save[s] the government a lot of money" by keeping her own son at home. Breathtaking illustration of the culture of entitlement: her son isn't really her responsibility . . . he's the government's responsibility . . . and she's being public-spirited by looking after him (except when he's in the almost free government-run adult daycare program).

"You looked like a still/From Cecil B. DeMille"

Al Stewart's "Last Days of the Century" from a concert in 1988.

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ . . . it keeps coming back in links

Megan McArdle discusses the at-that-time-unexpected permanence of the blogosphere, specifically what one wrote then may still be used against you now:

I suspect that I shall spend the rest of my life being pursued by lefty bloggers who think that linking this six year old post is a substitute for argument. Nonetheless, it occurs to me that while I have repeatedly dealt with it in various places, I probably haven't here. So here's the deal. I'm going to talk about it now, because it was, frankly, a pretty stupid thing to write, and mea culpas are good for the soul. Then I'm never going to talk about it again. I have yet to see anyone deploy it against me who could even vaguely be accused of acting in good faith. On the other hand, there are readers in good faith who are surprised by it, and I think I owe them an explanation.

[. . .]

Why did I write it? In part, because blogging was a new medium for the warbloggers, and many of us had an unfortunate tendency to say the kind of ridiculous things that one says without meaning them at bars in 3 am, except in print where everyone can enjoy them forever. If you've ever declared that people who jump queues should be shot, you have some sense of what I mean.

And I was young, and lots of things seem inappropriately funny when you're young — in your mid-twenties, empathy is often largely theoretical. This is perhaps the only good thing about aging.

This is indeed the danger of our always-searchable blogging past: it can, and will, come back to haunt you. And it's not just bloggers . . . anyone with an ancient Usenet account can find their early maunderings preserved online. Lots of private email messages are out there, too, although (thank goodness) not everything is yet. Expect SMS and chat logs to show up soon. Data may or may not want to be free, but it'll be a rare bit that doesn't show up on the net sooner or later.

Apologies to Omar Khayyám fans for the butchery of the poem in the headline.

Coming soon . . .

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Doom, gloom, misery, despair, etc., etc.

I've linked to excellent counter-examples, but it's a constant in the media world: bad news sells. James Lileks reacts to a particularly irritating example of the-sky-is-falling journalism:

It is amusing, really — after sticking people's heads in the muck every day for years, promoting every faddish scare, fluffing the pillow beneath every yuppie worry, swapping the straight-forward adult approach to news with presenters who emote the copy with the sad face of a day-care worker telling the children that Barney is dead — in short, after decades of presenting the world through the peculiar prism that finds in every day more evidence of our rot and our failures, they wonder why people are depressed. Hang the banner, guys: Mission Accomplished.

Of course, not everyone feels this way; I'd guess that people who watch television news are more inclined to pessimism. But there's another side to this: the pessimism among some may not stem from some impotent feeling that one is a cork toss'd in a sea of cruel destiny, that you can't do anything, that nothing will get better — no, the pessimism may arise from the suspicion that there's something abroad in the land that's had a good hardy larf about "Horatio Alger" and all the other manifestations of individual initiative for 30 years. The cool kids and the clever set have always smirked at that sort of stuff. You can get them going if you make a speech about our ability to solve things, but you'd better phrase it in the form of a government initiative, or brows furrow: well, then, how do you propose to do it?

The bottom of the page says "Average rating: two out of five stars." Our confidence in the media to undermine our happiness is being chipped away, too. We're in worse shape than we thought.

In this corner, the Associated Press. In this corner, the entire blogosphere

The Register reports on AP's heavy-handed rebuke to The Drudge Report:

A major news agency has claimed that a blog's quotation of its stories is copyright infringement and has demanded they be taken down in a case which could redraw the lines of acceptable blog behaviour.

The writer behind the blog has told OUT-LAW.COM that if AP continues its case it will be taking on the entire blogosphere. "Linking to news articles with short excerpts is common practice throughout the web, both on individual blogs and on social news sites," said Rogers Cadenhead, who is behind blog Drudge Retort. "If AP intends to fight this one out, it'll be the case of AP v. Everybody."

Though a spokesman for AP has told The New York Times that the news wire is rethinking its position Cadenhead said that the notices have not actually been retracted yet.

There is a line between quoting an article and violating the copyright of the originator. If you quote several hundred words of an article, it's pretty clear that you're over that line. But in this instance, AP is objecting to the use of text as short as 33 to 79 words.

Clearly, this issue will be of great interest to anyone who's ever quoted an article from a major news outlet . . .

Victor reviews Manufacturing Consent

Victor posted his review of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent on his new blog:

[. . .] what Chomsky's theory seems to need, what it has to include to function, is that the world is full of people who cannot think for themselves. He even outlines this theory with the "Political class" and what would seem to be the Proles from 1984. That is where his theory is flawed, in my opinion. He states that their role is to "Follow orders and not to think", and I must admit, there are people who do that. The problem arises with the fact that there aren't as many as all that, as Humanity is a curious creature, that asks why.

What I learned from this documentary is that there are certain techniques the media uses to influence how they appear to the public. I learned that the media itself selects topics, emphasizes certain points more than others, I learned that they filter information out of given materials.

Essentially, the media is given full control of what they produce, however that isn't actually the thing I feel I learned the most. I feel that the movie presented a very poor image of humanity, based on the fact that he's essentially segregating people into Stupid and Not Stupid. Of course, that's a rather weak claim in today's society, however I feel it's true regarding this subject, and the views of Noam Chomsky.

Why so gloomy, America? Because of the media

Gregg Easterbrook points out that while Americans think that the country as a whole is doing badly, they as individuals are doing well. The media's "if it bleeds, it leads" emphasis on doom and gloom has much to do with this:

The Democratic National Committee recently ran an ad blasting John McCain for saying the country is "better off" than in 2000. Yet, arguably, except as regards the Iraq war, Mr. McCain's statement is true. In turn, Mr. McCain is blasting Barack Obama for suggesting that international tensions are not as bad as they've been made to seem. Yet, arguably, Mr. Obama is right.

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

The case that things are basically pretty good? Unemployment is 5.5%, low by historical standards; income is rising slightly ahead of inflation; housing prices are down, but the typical house is still worth a third more than in 2000; 94% of Americans do not have threatened mortgages, and of those who do, most will keep their homes.

Inflation was up in 2007, but this stands out because the 16 previous years were close to inflation-free; living standards are the highest they have ever been, including living standards for the middle class and for the poor.

All forms of pollution other than greenhouse gases are in decline; cancer, heart disease and stroke incidence are declining; crime is in a long-term cycle of significant decline; education levels are at all-time highs.

People are subject to so many negative images from TV coverage, and so many hard-luck stories in newspaper reports, that it's no wonder that they believe that the rest of the country — the rest of the world, actually — is spiralling down the toilet.

It's a truism that bad news sells, and that good news isn't as popular. The individual media outlets probably have less overall influence than they did 20 or 30 years ago, but the overall tone still emphasizes bad news . . . and we're all much more likely to pay attention to doom and disaster than to positive or neutral reports. It even makes sense: good news won't generally make much immediate difference in our day-to-day lives, but the local car plant shutting down or a major bridge collapsing in the city will loom large in our short-term view. We're attuned to bad news, and the media serve up to us what we pay the most attention to . . . it's a vicious circle.

How bad is the FCC?

Jesse Walker illustrates some of the worst problems with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) :

The commission is corrupt. I don't just mean the sort of corruption where the chairman loosens his tie, puts his feet up on his desk, and doles out favors to the companies that scratched the right backs —p though you'll find plenty of that in the commission's history. Even when the body is being relatively transparent and above-board, it is beholden to politically connected lobbies. The FCC controls an important economic resource. Naturally, important economic interests try their best to influence its decisions.

The most flagrant example of this might be the welcome the commission gave to FM radio. The technology was an enormous leap forward: It allowed stations to broadcast without static, and it allowed more signals to coexist on the spectrum. It also worried RCA, which was investing heavily in the development of television; the company fretted that consumers might not pay for both a new FM radio and a new TV set. RCA didn't control the patent on FM, so it pressured the FCC to favor the other technology. The regulators obliged, and a series of roadblocks appeared in FM's path. The most destructive decision came in 1944, when the commissioners suddenly reassigned the FM broadcasters' portion of the ether to television, instantly rendering every FM receiver obsolete.

[. . .]

The commission is sanctimonious. For seven decades, the nation's scolds and censors have used the FCC as a tool to shape the sounds and images allowed on the airwaves. In 1952, for example, then-commissioner Paul Walker announced with satisfaction that his agency had "surveyed the programming of some of the television stations in operation, and found that some of them had reported no time devoted to broadcasts of a religious nature. We felt in view of this fact that regular renewal of their licenses would not be in the public interest." The stations quickly revised their schedules, and the commission agreed to renew their licenses after all.

[. . .]

The commission is technocratic. The next time someone tells you central planning is dead, remind him that there is an arm of the federal government that decides in advance how different chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum will be used, and that it also reserves the right to determine which entities will be allowed to use it. It's true the commission has adopted several market "mechanisms" in the last few decades: FCC-approved broadcasters now have the right to sell their licenses to other FCC-approved broadcasters, and spectrum is usually distributed by auction rather than pure fiat. But even an auction can be bent to the planners' will.

Scalzi calls Fox News on their (not-so) hidden racism

John Scalzi works up a head of steam at Fox News over a particularly slimy trick:

Fox News Would Like To Take a Moment To Remind You That the Obamas Are As Black As Satan's Festering, Baby-Eating Soul

Back in the day — you know, when presidential candidates were respectably white — news organizations called potential First Ladies "wives." But now that black folks are running, we can get all funky fresh with the lingo, yo. So it's basically fine for Fox News to use "Baby Mama" for Michelle Obama, slang that implies a married 44-year-old Princeton-educated lawyer is, to use an Urban Dictionary definition of the term, "some chick you knocked up on accident during a fling who you can't stand but you have to tolerate cuz she got your baby now." Because the Obamas are black! And the blacks, they're all relaxed about that shit, yo. Word up. And anyway, as the caption clearly indicates, it's not Fox News that's calling Michelle Obama "Baby Mama," it's outraged liberals. Fox News is just telling you what those outraged liberals are saying. They didn't want to use the term "Baby Mama." But clearly they had no choice.

Meanwhile, over at her personal site, Michelle "Fox News' Ethnic Shield" Malkin defends Fox News' use of the "Baby Mama" phrase by essentially making two arguments. First, Michelle Obama once called Barack Obama her "baby's daddy," and as we all know, a married woman factually and correctly calling her husband her child's father is exactly the same as a major news organization calling a potential First Lady some chick what got knocked up on a fling. Second, the term "baby-daddy" has gone out into the common culture; heck, even Tom Cruise was called Katie Holmes' baby-daddy, you know, when he impregnated her and she subsequently gave birth while the two were not married, which is exactly like what happened between Michelle and Barack Obama, who were married in 1992 and whose first child was born six years later.

QotD: The press secretary

The release of former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's tell-all memoir has Washington buzzing, though there's a certain Capt. Renault-like phoniness to all the indignation: Are we really all that surprised that this administration — or for that matter, any administration — would ask its press secretary to lie, mislead, or dissemble in front of the media?

Should we really be shocked-shocked! that the White House might also keep its press secretary out of the loop when it comes to brewing political scandals, so he can convincingly feign ignorance when the press queries him about them?

While ostensibly serving as a liaison between the press and the president, White House press secretaries serve really only one function: to boost the president's image. White House press offices are little more than public relations machines for the administration they're serving.

Radley Balko, "The Public Spinmeisters: Why do politicians get a well-oiled PR machine at taxpayer expense?", Reason Online, 2008-06-10

No bad press, revisited

I posted a short piece last week about the owner of Nathaniel's Restaurant in Owen Sound, who probably didn't agree with the old saying about there being no such thing as bad press, after his business came to the notice of the media for firing laying off a waitress who'd shaved her head for a cancer charity fund-raiser. Yesterday, he apologized:

Dan Hilliard is offering his apology to Stacey Fearnall, a waitress who no longer works at the downtown eatery after shaving her head for Cops for Cancer.

Hilliard is also apologizing to the Canadian Cancer Society, Cops for Cancer and the public "for failing to resolve the issue."

Hilliard says the public outcry after the story broke has been devastating for all involved and has upset the staff, who he describes in a news release as family.

Hilliard says Fearnall was not fired — but was offered to take the summer off to spend with her children and husband.

He says he has not received a response from her yet on the offer.

Zero time to blog . . .

. . . late start to the day, early finish as well, followed by a soccer game. No available blocks for blogging, so I'll just leave you with the latest Zero Punctuation episode and head back to the salt mine.

What is at stake in BC's kangaroo court

Brian Hutchinson gives an overview of the ongoing quasi-legal star chamber:

None of the main players starring in this quasi-judicial drama actually live or work in B. C. Not Mr. Steyn, not the editors responsible for Maclean's, and not Mohamed Elmasry, a Muslim who launched a complaint to the B. C. Human Rights Tribunal on behalf of all Muslims in this province.

Neither Mr. Steyn, nor his editors, nor Mr. Elmasry were in sight when the tribunal panel began the week-long hearing yesterday. Mr. Steyn will not testify, say lawyers for Maclean's. Nor will Mr. Elmasry, the aggrieved. So why bring the complaint forward here? Because Mr. Elmasry can. This thanks to provincial human rights legislation of a breadth and elasticity not known in other parts of Canada.

Mr. Elmasry, the president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and a highly controversial figure himself — especially among Jewish groups — claims the Steyn excerpt denigrated and vilified Canadian Muslims and promoted hatred of an identifiable group.

He is not obliged to demonstrate what harm occurred to whom, or to what degree. Maclean's magazine and Mr. Steyn could still be found to have violated B. C.'s Human Rights Code. No proof of damage is required.

Meanwhile, if found to have violated the code, Maclean's faces sanctions, including payment to the complainant "an amount that the member or panel considers appropriate to compensate that person for injury to dignity, feelings and self respect or to any of them."

The magazine could also be ordered to stop publishing certain ideas and points of view. Lawyer Faisal Joseph, representing the complainant, asked the Tribunal yesterday to use its "discretion" and order Maclean's to publish a suitable response in its pages. That, or publish the panel's ultimate findings. Such are the frightening aspect of this case.

"Strict rules of evidence do not apply" in cases before the Tribunal, noted its chairwoman, Heather MacNaughton. A lawyer and a veteran of human rights inquiries, she made the comment yesterday afternoon, when allowing an Ontario law student — yet another non-B. C. resident — to deliver for the complainant testimony about the "Islamaphobic" Steyn excerpt.

As several writers have pointed out, it's difficult to imagine Steyn and Maclean's being found innocent: the language under which the Tribunal operates pretty much guarantees a conviction. This is, in that sense, merely the opening act of the drama . . . after they are found guilty, then the real legal case can start to unfold.

Update: Iowahawk gets to the heart of the matter:

Announcer
Thanks to stepped up enforcement and random internet checks, Canadian speech crimes have been cut nearly in half over the last three years. It's a record all Canadians can be proud of, but it's only a first step.

Man's Voice (echo-y reverb)
Stupid foreigners!

Announcer
Experts estimate that only 1/2 of 1% of all Canadian speech crimes are ever prosecuted, because most occur in the shadowy silence of private thought. It's time that all Canadians work together to recognize and report these non-verbal crimes before it's too late. If you know or suspect someone of harboring or contemplating offensive or otherwise un-Canadian ideas, please report to your Provincial Human Rights Office.

Man's Voice (echo-y reverb)
Stupid foreigners!

Sound FX:
jail door slamming shut

Announcer
This has been a public service announcement of the Royal Canadian Mounted Human Rights Police, reminding you to Think Before You Think.

Live-blogging the end of free speech in Canada

My old drinking buddy, Andrew Coyne*, will be live-blogging the final gasp of freedom of speech in Canada starting at 12:30 EST today. Tune in, turn off, get nauseous.

Just a head's-up: I'll be live blogging the case of Mohamed Elmasry vs. Mark Steyn/Maclean's before (sigh) the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, direct from kangaroo-courtroom 105 of the Robson Square Provincial Court building in Vancouver, starting sometime after 9:30 Pacific/12:30 Eastern Monday morning and going on for, I don't know, days. Just hit refresh.

All the dense legalese, with twice the politically correct jargon!

* Okay, we drank together once. At a blogstravaganza. I doubt he could pick me out of a police line-up.

Drug War "highlights"

Nick Gillespie gathers together some of the more memorable moments of the War on [Some] Drugs:

If the recently concluded HBO series The Wire is arguably the most aesthetically accomplished fictional indictment of the decades-long war on drugs, there is no shortage of contenders for the most absurd bit of prohibitionist agitprop, from the unintentionally hilarious 1936 movie Tell Your Children (better known as Reefer Madness) to the widely parodied 1987 public service announcement in which the role of "your brain on drugs" is played by an egg frying in a skillet to an early 1990s TV ad in which the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles counsel a grammar school kid offered a fistful of joints ("Get a teacher," advise the Turtles, "get a pizza, get real").

Then there's the latest offering sponsored by the Office of National Drug Control Policy's National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, a mockumentary called Stoners in the Mist, featuring a pith-helmet-wearing narrator explaining the strange customs of the slack-jawed, amotivational, Lava lamp-loving inhabitants of "Cannabis Isle." Online at abovetheinfluence.com and featuring squirrely navigation and a rhythmic drum track more stupefying than anything produced by Cheech & Chong, Stoners underscores what most Americans already knew: Real winners don't do anti-drug websites.

Here's a short magical mystery tour, culled from the foggy memories of reason's editors, of decades of advertising and small-screen messages that inadvertently made childhood just a little more bearable. And drugs — even NoDoz — just a little cooler.

Robert Asprin, dead at 62

Fantasy and science fiction author Robert Asprin (known as "Yang the Nauseating" in the SCA) died yesterday. My friend Diane sent me this message which had been forwarded to many SCA mailing lists:

Forwarded from the Glenn Abhinn list:
From: "Alsinda de Rochabaron"

I write this with a heavy heart. Today, sometime between 2 pm and 5 pm, Yang the Nauseating passed away.

I spoke to him around 2 pm - to confirm that I was to pick him up at 5 pm and take him to the airport. He was to go to a convention in Ohio this weekend - MarCon. At 2 pm, everything was fine. When I arrived at his house, he wasn't outside, didn't answer his cellphone, didn't answer his landline. Of course, as I was trying to figure out what to do, someone came up behind me and I had to drive around the block. (The French Quarter.) I called him again as I made the block, but still no answer.

I *thought* I had a key to his house, but I wasn't certain I had it with me. I tried to call another one of his close friends (who works in the Quarter), because I knew that he would have a key, but I couldn't get him. So I parked the car and dug through my briefcase and found the key that I thought was for his house. I did get in with the key, but it took some tugging and pushing.

I found Yang lying on his bed, with a book in one hand (a Terry Pratchett book, no less) and his other hand by his side, his glasses just beyond. To all extents and purposes, it looks as though he had decided to take a nap. But I could tell he wasn't breathing and he had no pulse. I called 911.

The paramedics and firemen arrived quickly and were quite nice and very good. They actually worked on him for 30 minutes, which sort of surprised me, because there was no activity on the heart monitor when they hooked him up. It might have been standard protocol. Whatever the case, they tried very hard, but couldn't bring him back.

I have been in touch with his literary agent, who in turn notified his family. Because Yang was also an author, the news is already spreading very quickly. I am very sorry to have to share this news with my SCA family, but I wanted everyone here to hear it from me before you read it on some sfnet board.

Yang was 62 years old, born June 28, 1946. He had no obvious health problems, but he was also notorious for avoiding doctors. To those who knew him "way back when" - Isolda, John the Bearkiller, and many others - he was very pleased with how the SCA has developed since the "bad old days" of freon can helms with women not allowed to fight in the lists. He would have come and played with us more if he could have.

Lady Alsinda de Rochabaron

I met Bob in the late 1970s at a convention in Michigan . . . he was, at that time, demonstrating that he didn't suffer fools gladly. I asked what in retrospect was a stupid question and got a snappy answer that let me know just how stupid my question had been. You'd hardly say I was a close acquaintance.

A victory for military bloggers

In a surprisingly liberal development, the US Army is now encouraging serving troops to write blogs:

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, who heads the Combined Arms Center [CAC] and Ft. Leavenworth, told his soldiers in a recent memo that "faculty and students will begin blogging as part of their curriculum and writing requirements both within the .mil and public environments. In addition CAC subordinate organizations will begin to engage in the blogosphere in an effort to communicate the myriad of activities that CAC is accomplishing and help assist telling the Army's story to a wide and diverse audience."

Lt. Gen. Caldwell, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, is a blogger himself, contributing to Small Wars Journal. He made waves in January when he wrote that "we must encourage our Soldiers to . . . get onto blogs and to send their YouTube videos to their friends and family."

On the downside, of course, this is still not official policy for the entire army.

Drug frenzy

Jacob Sullum pens the headline of the week:

How Hysterical Do You Have to Be for Newsweek to Suggest That You're Overreacting to a Drug Menace?

This doesn't quite make up for Newsweek's anti-crack hysteria circa 1986 or its anti-meth hysteria circa 2005, but the magazine's latest issue includes a careful, balanced story about Salvia divinorum that could serve as a model for how the press should handle controversies involving psychoactive substances. Noting salvia's longstanding use as a Mazatec folk remedy, its modern use as an aid to introspection, and its medical potential, author Brian Braiker says media attention attracted by YouTube videos of teenagers smoking salvia "is spooking legislators and law enforcement" into banning the plant and arresting people for possession.

Yahtzee kinda likes Grand Theft Auto IV

Lemons to video lemonade

When you can't afford studio time to record a music video, what are your options? In Britain, you can take advantage of the omnipresent Big Brother cameras:

But all is not lost. Boing Boing reports...

The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, 'performed' in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Data Protection Act and then stitched the results together for their music video.

Yahtzee answers his critics

Oh, just in case you've never watched a Yahtzee review . . . er, not safe for work. Or if you're squeamish. Or if you're one of those people who hasn't yet grasped that life is a contact sport. Toughen up, princess!

QotD: Peter Jackson Isn't A Better Choice

Anyone who suffered through the Star Wars prequel trilogy — or Godfather III — will understand when I suggest that it's not always wise for a director to return to his old stomping grounds. Jackson left Middle Earth as a hero to geeks and film investors, and on such a creative high note, he essentially slacked through King Kong and no one gave him any crap for it. That being the case, what's the upside for him to re-direct in Middle Earth? If he does it perfectly and sticks the dismount, it's still not fresh. If he screws it up, the fan response will make the Phantom Menace backlash look like a group hug.

Jackson put a huge target on himself by agreeing to return to Middle Earth; getting someone else to direct gets him out of the line of fire. Now, if it works, he'll still get (producer) credit. If it fails, the audience will blame del Toro — because among other things, he's not Jackson, or more accurately, the imaginary Jackson who did the film perfectly.

That said, I don't think Jackson hired del Toro just to aim flak toward someone else. I think he hired del Toro because Jackson's aware that — contrary to O'Hehir's worry — these films need someone who isn't very much in love with either Tolkien or the world that he made.

This has to do with the subject matter, namely, The Hobbit. That book, written by Tolkien to amuse his kids, is a twee bit of fluff at best. Beloved, yes, but a bit squishy in the middle. This is fine for bedtime readings and Rankin-Bass animated adaptations, but for the continuation of one of the most successful film series of all time, every installment of which was nominated for Best Picture? The Hobbit needs someone willing to slice through the fat and mush and not ask himself WWTD (What Would Tolkien Do?) at every critical juncture. Jackson did this with The Lord of the Rings, which is why, among other things, the film series is thankfully Tom Bombadil-free, but The Hobbit needs an extra wash of astringency. Del Toro's love of the fantastic has never descended into huggy cuteness, which makes him perfect to save The Hobbit from itself.

John Scalzi, "Is Guillermo del Toro the Right Man for The Hobbit?", AMCTV SciFi Scanner, 2008-05-08

Wil Wheaton also offers some advice

After yesterday's John Scalzi link, today's writer-offering-kindly-advice link goes to Wil Wheaton:

hillary clinton: the psycho ex-girlfriend of the democratic party

[. . .] It's over. She knows it's over. It's been over for almost three months, but she's been moving the goalposts and cynically and cravenly pandering to voters in a way that's not only insulting, but is embarrassing. John Cole frequently says that he can't believe he ever supported Bush, and I can now join him in saying that I can't believe I ever supported, defended and believed in the Clintons.

The thing about all of this is that, with a Clinton victory in the primary about as likely as jumping off the roof of your house and landing on the moon, it's become clear that this whole thing isn't about Democrats or beating McCain (who is inexplicably running for Bush's third term) or saving our country from the catastrophic failure of the Bush years. No, it's all about her. It's about her ego. It's about refusing to admit that she did her best, but voters (except those encouraged by Rush Limbaugh to cross party lines and fuck with our primary) have pretty clearly said "No thanks. You're a good senator, but we want something different now."

It's been crystal clear for weeks, yet she refuses to put party and country over personal ambition and drop out of the race, forcing Barack Obama to not only run against McCain and the Media, but also against her. It's particularly galling, because she can only win if her campaign can force Democratic superdelegates (one of the worst creations in the history of politics) to tell millions of Democratic voters — many of them first time voters who, like me, finally feel truly inspired by someone — to go fuck themselves.

Freedom of the (virtual) press?

Kathy "Five Feet of Fury" Shaidle is being harassed over a blog post — which merely quoted a section from a national newspaper:

So now this chick Mitra Kermani is calling me on the phone, telling me to take down this post.

I not-very-patiently explained to her that I can post whatever the hell I want on my blog, because this is Canada not Ooongaboongaland, that I got my info from a national newspaper and linked to it, so she has to take up her complaints with them

Based on the original story, you'd have to say that major Canadian corporations must not be running the country, because the kind of trouble Loblaws put up with would be unthinkable in most countries. If the corporate world really did run everything, there'd have been a scurry and hustle on the part of police and courts to cater to the whims of the all-mighty corporate leadership. Obviously that didn't happen in this case . . .

QotD: Audio recordings

I am, sadly, old enough to have been assistant manager at an A&A Records and Tapes and to remember the excitement and trepidation that came with the introduction of the CD. It was not just the new colder sound of these things but a sense of loss at all that acreage of cover art reduced to the CD's smaller footprint. They were so compact we used to shelve each CD in a cumbersome plastic box three times its length; the new digital format seemed all too easy to steal. Little did any of us see where that logic would lead.

Nick Packwood, "The return of the repressed", Ghost of a Flea, 2008-02-14

Like shooting conservative fish in a barrel

Radley Balko posts a link to the most popular 50 pages on Conservapedia under the heading Compensate Much?:

Advice for new bloggers

My usual piece of advice is to blog frequently, but Megan McArdle provides an even better word of advice:

Note to all new bloggers: this sort of thing is generally, at least in the blogging circles in which I travel, considered to be rather poor form. Worse, indeed, than accidentally neglecting to provide a link to someone you have already conceded to exist.

That doesn't excuse me for forgetting the link — I shouldn't be so careless on that score. But if you use substantial parts of another blogger's post, you should mention that you found it somewhere else. Direct paraphrase without even attempting attribution is regarded with less horror by bloggers than it is by English professors . . . but not all that much less horror. Especially since linking a source is a lot faster and easier than footnoting.

The answer to the question I posed in the title is, basically, "Always!" As Nick Gillespie noted yesterday, "there's no cost to acknowledging sources—if anything, it's a sign of erudition and plugs an author into a broader network of thinkers." Besides, as he also noted, if you go over the line you're very likely to be caught.

I'd add to what she says about linking being "a lot faster and easier than footnoting" that it's also significantly more useful for the reader. That argument seals the deal every time for me: if I want you to have to work hard to understand what I'm writing, I'd be an academic, not a blogger.

Book reviews . . . of DOOM

You know those books you read but would prefer that nobody knew that you read . . . no, not those ones. The worst trash you read. Everyone seems to have some reading vice like that. David Hines knows exactly what you feel:

You think that paragraph alone would make this book awesomely bad, but no. IT GETS MORE SO. Yes, you will be horrified by a lot of this, because Mike Harmon's adventures are by turns awesomely horrific and horrifically awesome; I freely confess that I cannot stop reading these books, because *I have to see what Ringo does next.* I do, however, have a finely-tuned defense mechanism: whenever something trips my circuit breaker, causing me to cringe away from the page, I utter aloud a cry that resets my noggin. You will probably need it yourself, so I provide it here, as a public service: "OH JOHN RINGO NO."

GHOST is Ringo's own admitted Lord King Badfic, his id run wild. By his own account, he was trying to write several books he was actually contracted for, but GHOST kept nudging at him, and finally he just wrote the damn thing to *make it go away* so he could get back to fulfilling his contracts. Ringo locked the spewings of his id away on his hard drive, until he mentioned in passing on an online forum that yeah, he'd written another book, but it was *awful* and would never see the light of day. Naturally, folks were curious, and when Ringo posted a sample, nobody was more surprised than him to find that the response was, more often than not, "Hey, man, I'd buy this."

So his publisher put it out, and the books are now doing pretty well for them. I'm sure this is a pleasant surprise if you're Ringo or his publisher, but it's also got to be a little embarrassing; he's committed the literary equivalent of charging money for folks to watch him roll naked in a pile of dead and smelly fish. And then being begged for encores. As of this writing, I have only the first three books in the series, because dammit, I will buy crap, but I refuse to buy crap in hardcover. That's *expensive.* I mean, I could be spending that money on *guns.*

I've read a few of these, and David is being very precise in his review. Ringo is a very good writer . . . and this series is gut-churningly disturbing. David continues:

I feel about the PALADIN OF SHADOWS series the way that a lot of people feel about ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN: it is so horrifically awful that it becomes TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME. Unless, of course, you have triggers about some or all of this stuff, in which case my recommendation is TO RUN AS FAR AND AS FAST AS YOU CAN. I will, however, say that GHOST and its sequels are *excellent* for reading out loud to people, particularly friends who are horrified and actively begging you to stop. (And you will be inclined to disregard such pleas, because you will need to share the pain.)

Amusingly, John Ringo himself liked the review.

Two Gents

The best money you'll ever spend on amateur theatre . . . need I say more?

H/T to Meredith Hubbard.

Linguistic hypersensitivity

It must be a slow news week, because there's no other explanation I can think of for this article to be published:

"Nappy-headed hos," the phrase that cost radio shock jock Don Imus his job and triggered a debate on how far free speech can go, was named on Thursday as the most egregious politically incorrect turn of phrase in 2007.

Trailing behind that phrase in the annual survey by Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com), a word usage group, were "Ho-Ho-Ho" and "Carbon Footprint Stomping," said the group's president Paul JJ Payack.

"Ho-Ho-Ho" made the list after a staffing company in Sydney, Australia suggested to prospective Santas they drop their traditional greeting in favor of "Ha-Ha-Ha" so as not to invoke images of the derogatory slang term for women.

"Carbon Footprint Stomping" is a phrase used to describe flaunting environmentally "green" activities by doing things like driving gas-guzzling Hummers and flying private jets, which in these energy-conscious times might be considered the height of political incorrectness.

Okay, Imus was a twit — not that that was in any doubt before he uttered his prize-winning remark — but the other two examples are just dumb. Dumber than that, however, are the folks at Lindsey Gardiner's publishers who "asked [her] to eliminate a fire-breathing dragon from her new book because publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations."

How far detached from reality do you have to be to think that mentioning a mythical creature (already very well established in fairy tales) would somehow expose the publisher to being sued? More disturbingly . . . what if their fear was not only well-founded, but mathematically likely? The article doesn't say where the publisher is located, but in some jurisdictions it might be a consideration (the publisher is in Britain, which explains everything).

Their list of choices is rather unconvincing, as evidenced by the term "race card" somehow making it as a contender in 2007 . . . when it was in common use well before the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995 (and in Britain in the 1960s).

So, how seriously should we take this list? Not very. This is how the announcing organization describes their methodology:

The Global Language Monitor uses a proprietary algorithm, the Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) to track the frequency of words and phrases in the global print and electronic media, on the Internet, throughout the Blogosphere, as well as accessing proprietary databases. The PQI is a weighted Index, factoring in: long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum, and velocity.

In other words, they pull it out of their collective asses. Nice work, Reuters. Here's a quarter . . . call us when you find some real news to report.

H/T to "Da Wife", who sent the link saying, "There is no way I can comment about this without risking that I will be on the list next year."

PTerry pays tribute to Arthur C. Clarke

In a partial BBC transcript, Terry Pratchett says goodbye to Arthur C. Clarke, who died yesterday:

Most notably he was the first British science fiction writer to break out of the genre ghetto. I mean, everyone had heard of Arthur C Clarke — The Goodies made jokes about him, Terry Wogan made jokes about him. He became a national treasure like Patrick Moore.

Before 2001 [the film based he created with Stanley Kubrick], you could see the string, you could see what was holding the rocket ships up. It seems almost a historical thing to relate it now, but just the first time you saw it you thought, "here's something totally new".

The amount of work and effort and research that went into that movie was just astonishing.

What I particularly recall was Arthur complaining the reason the apes never won the Oscar for best make-up was they were so good the judges thought they really were apes.

Is it just me?

I've never watched an episode of The Wire (the "best show on television"), nor did I ever see an episode of The Sopranos (which I gather from recent articles was the previous claimant to the "best show" accolade); I generally watch little-to-no broadcast television. I'm sure that's most of the reason I'm getting heartily sick of all the fin-de-siecle sturm-und-drang about the end of The Wire that seems to be clogging up every blog these days.

Even Reason, one of my favourite sources of information (both in print and online), has been posting their fair share of pissing and moaning about the demise of the "best thing on television".

I don't actually have anything to say about the show, but I had to register my petty annoyance somewhere. Guys, if television is that important to you all . . . you need to get out more!

Snarky video game reviews

More of the same sort of reviews here. H/T to Victor for the NSFW link.

Jesse Walker on D&D

Jesse Walker notes the passing of Gary Gygax, the seminal figure in the fantasy roleplaying phenomena of the 1970's and 80's:

Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax has died. It was Gygax, more than anyone else, who turned Tolkien fandom from a premodern pose into a postmodern, participatory phenomenon: Rather than merely reading about hobbits and elves, fantasy fans could enter Middle Earth themselves and create their own adventures. Granted, most of those adventures tended to sound the same. (If you've ever endured a D&Der's detailed account of how he spent his weekend, you'll understand what I mean.) But we knew that from the title, right? On one level it's a liberatory vision, one where anyone can create a world for everyone else to play in. But Gygax gave it a Foucauldian twist: In the end, each of those worlds is still a dungeon.

The comment thread starts off rather well, too:

Episiarch | March 4, 2008, 3:44pm | #
Uh, did you ever play, Jesse? Dungeon crawls were usually the way people got introduced to the game but a campaign could take place absolutely anywhere.

But if you are trying to say that D&D players' minds/imaginations are like filthy damp dungeons, that would be funny.

Hitchens on the New York Times

QotD: Some good advice

With the possible exception of Disney villains, Imagethief cannot think of a group of people that more richly deserve their miserable fates than Hong Kong celebrity Edison Chen and his cavalcade of cupcakes.

If I sound unsympathetic here, that is because I am unsympathetic. Really, how dumb do you need to be? On all sides? Girls, here's a free piece of advice for you from your friendly neighborhood PR man: If you let a guy take digital nudie pix of you, sooner or later those pix are going to end up on the Internet. Not maybe. Not could be. Inevitably. The Internet is like a gravity well for nudity, and there is a 100 percent chance those pictures will end up there someday. Probably the week of your wedding.

[. . .]

But — and I say this with affection for my gender — dudes are stupid. We're especially stupid when it comes to managing technology effectively. We like to portray ourselves as masters of technological realm, with amazing powers of digital wizardry. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and in reality we're as screwed over by modern technology as your grandmother. Probably worse, because at least she doesn't pretend to understand it. We'd rather die — or inflict crushing humiliation on our girlfriends — than admit weakness.

"ImageThief", "Let me tell ya about Edison Chen's dirty photos", ImageThief, 2008-02-13

Banning performances

Hit and Run has a link to a story about idiotic campus officials banning a performance of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins:

A student production of "Assassins", the award-winning musical, was to have premiered Thursday night at Arkansas Tech University, but the administration banned it — and permitted a final dress rehearsal Wednesday night (so the cast could experience the play on which students have worked long hours) only on the condition that wooden stage guns were cut in half prior to the event and not used. Assassins is a musical in which the characters are the historic figures who have tried to kill a U.S. president.

The winner here? Honestly, the potential audience for the play, which was godawful in its original conception and execution back in 1990 (and naturally, retardedly well-received in its 2004 Broadway revival). Assassins features ditties about various successful and unsuccessful attempts to kill various successful and unsuccessful American presidents. It's just one man's opinion, of course, but I dare anyone to listen to, say, the Leon Czolgosz number without wanting to put a bullet in his own head and then exhume the corpse of the Michigan-born killer and re-electrify it. Assassins is SCTV-style deep parody at its best and actual musical theater at just about its worst.

The loser here? Freedom of expression on college campuses, which has been taking it on the chin like Gerry Cooney in the first round.

Proving that I have no taste . . . I rather enjoyed Assassins when I saw it in Toronto in the mid-90's. But good or bad, the reaction of the educational bureaucracy is just insane.

Madonna as director

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian sums up in just a few brief words. You can't accuse them of being over-kind:

Well, it had to happen. Madonna has been a terrible actor in many, many films and now — fiercely aspirational as ever — she has graduated to being a terrible director. She has made a movie so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens. She is also the producer and co-author of the script. If she'd done the location catering as well, they'd have had a Jonestown situation on their hands.

QotD: The BBC view of "History"

On the BBC Radio Four News at 18:00 tonight, there was a story about a ceremony in Spain marking the two hundredth anniversary of a 'liberation struggle'.

The listeners were informed that this was a struggle against the Empire of Napoleon and it had helped create 'modern Europe' where everyone works together. Of course it was actually Napoleon who was working to 'get all of Europe working together' (it was called the Code Napoléon and Continental System). The words 'national independence', what the Spanish were actually fighting for, were not mentioned. And although it was mentioned that the British call the conflict 'the Peninsula War' the name "Wellington" was also not mentioned.

Sometimes I suspect that even North Korean radio presents a slightly less distorted view of the world than the BBC does.

Paul Marks, "'BBC History' strikes again", Samizdata, 2008-02-13

Advice to young writers

John Scalzi offers some unsoliticted financial advice to aspiring writers (and to other creative types):

Why am I offering this entirely unsolicited advice about money to new writers? Because it very often appears to me that regardless of how smart and clever and interesting and fun my fellow writers are on every other imaginable subject, when it comes to money — and specifically their own money — writers have as much sense as chimps on crack. It's not just writers — all creative people seem to have the "incredibly stupid with money" gene set for maximum expression — but since most of creative people I know are writers, they're the nexus of money stupidity I have the most experience with. It makes me sad and also embarrasses the crap out of me; people as smart as writers are ought to know better.

The following advice is not complete; there's lots I won’t be covering here. Some it is repeated from things I've written before but are so far down in the archives I know you'll never find them. Some of this advice may not apply to you; some of it may apply to you but you may be too delusional or arrogant to acknowledge it, or you may decide you don't like my tone and ignore it all because of that. Most of it is applicable to writers who are not new, too, but I don't know how many of them are interested in taking advice from me. This is US-centered although may be generally applicable elsewhere. It's meant for writers but may have application to you in other fields; decide for yourself.

I do not guarantee this advice will make you a more successful writer or a better human being. Follow this advice at your own peril. That said, know that it's generally worked for me. That's why I’m sharing it with you.

Firefly fans, meet Steven Brust

Thanks to a link from John Scalzi's Whatever, here is the page from which you can download Steven Brust's Firefly-verse novel "My Own Kind of Freedom".

You're welcome.

QotD: Those shadowy "others"

Who these "others" are is left unsaid, though one could argue that "information warfare" hardly counts as a "secret strategy." And while it is at least conceivable that the CIA would be stupid enough to cut off Iran's lifeline to an independent media (it is the CIA, after all), ABC's source for this claim, an "Internet columnist" called Ian Brockwell, is of dubious reliability. According to his online bio, Mr. Brockwell's interests include UFOs and climate change, the latter of which he attributes to the perfidy of the former. But here's some free advice for the kids at ABC: Be slightly more skeptical of claims by online columnists whose work can be found on Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel's website, such as Brockwell's crie du coeur against "people fear those who debate the 'Holocaust'?" (Scare quotes around Holocaust in original, naturally).

Michael C. Moynihan, "Who Cut the Cables? An ABC Investigation" Hit and Run, 2008-02-04

New media model needed

Kevin McLauchlan had some very interesting things to say in a recent thread on copy protection (from the Techwr-L mailing list), which I reproduce here with his permission. I'm trying to encourage him to start blogging, BTW.

[. . .] what your argument fails to consider is that there was a large mainstream(ish) demand for movies, music, and other such product (including good ole text-and-pictures, otherwise known as books), in modern formats (computer and portable) that people preferred them, and that the traditional media empires were not meeting that demand. For the first few years, they weren't even aware of it.

There was really no squawk from the traditional media when the first hackers came up with the first methods of recording and presenting audio and video on computing devices, because they were doing it for their own pleasure and convenience, and that of a small circle of their geeky friends.

Much like Bill Gates ignored the internet while concentrating on his then-traditional (office and home-island users of software), the studios and publishers ignored the web and the culture that was rapidly growing it . . . and being grown by it.

When they finally did notice that there was some potential loss of revenue happening to their existing model (in which they'd prospered for decades), they reacted by whining and hollering "Don't do that!", and allowing years to slide by before introducing their own services.

When those services appeared, they were already outdated, and they annoyed people because it was profoundly obvious that their major premise was enforcement, while the minor focus (the needs and desires of customers) was given short shrift at best. That is, they have far less interest in serving their customers than in preventing rip-offs.

Let's see:
- paying customers are made to jump through hoops and are treated like dirt
- non-paying "customers" get variety, convenience, ease-of-use and responsive "providers"

I had some sympathy for producers and distributors when audio and video "piracy" meant that somebody made physical copies of tapes and DVDs and sold them for money. It was supportable that the media companies would go after the makers and sellers of such "pirate" goods. Notice that they didn't go after the consumers of such goods.

But these days, most of the copies being distributed are free. Somebody might be losing some revenue (though there are convincing arguments that it's the old formats that are losing out and the studios/distributors just didn't jump fast enough to be ready for the current formats), but nobody is directly gaining illicit revenue when another bittorrent completes. Yet notice that the industry heavyweights are going after users/consumers, now.

As for all the creative work going away if studios and 20-million-dollar-a-film actors can't get their exclusive rights enforced, not everybody thinks that's such a bad thing. Lots of craftsmen were displaced when horse-and-buggy went out of fashion. Some whined and pouted (and died broke). Some found different ways to make a living or found new industries to use their same skills (like high-end auto-makers still needed people who could work in leather and fine woods).

You might have noticed that there are increasingly high-quality "movies" being produced for YouTube distribution (among all the dreck, of course), and that's with the studio blockbusters still in theatres (and people still paying to see movies on the big screen). Lots of smart, talented people are simply bypassing the corporate model of entertainment and information, and taking their own work to the masses.

That is, the problem — too easy distribution of works in digital form — is also the solution. People who would once have been content to "distribute" their labors-of-love to just a few friends now have the ability to reach everyone on the planet who is interested, and beyond.

It's a solution from the perspective of the people who are driven to produce art and from the perspective of people who want access to art.

Have you noticed that bands and performers that are already richer than god, and who can count on selling millions of copies of their next studio-made album, are still willing and eager to take their show on the road? There are two forces making that work. One is that the performers crave a live audience. As good as it is to polish off a new CD and get paid royalties, they still feel the need to get out where real live audiences are. At the same time, "consumers" who enjoy a studio album are still prepared to shell out big bucks (often hundreds of dollars per ticket) to experience live performances.

If all the major studios and distribution labels were to close tomorrow, I'm confident that there would still be touring rock bands, and there would still be talented people in their own studios creating recordings for internet distribution. It might be a different crop of productive talented people. It might be some of the ones who are already famous and rich — those who didn't go into a big sulk about the departure of the corporate recording business.

The same would apply to film. There'd be an upsurge of live theatre, and there'd be some real gems of recorded video drama appearing among the YouTube crud. True artists and performers simply can't just stop. They are driven. Only the mostly-mercenary ones would fold up their production companies and go away. Maybe they've had their day and rightfully so.

Have you noticed that TV shows like "American Idol" and "So You Think You Can Dance" are not running out of talent? They tour the same big cities year after year, culling from the tens of thousands of people who choose to show up. Yet each year, there are more extremely gifted people among the also-rans and losers. It's not that new kids are growing up and becoming ready. The people who show up are all ages. For whatever reason, they didn't enter the contest previously. And that's just the ones who want fame and fortune (or the chance of it) via that particular route. There are tons and tons more talented artists of all kinds out there . . . I should say, out here, where we real people are. It's only the major studios and the top 2% earners among the "stars" who have a lot to lose if the world's entertainment-delivery model moves on . . . or moves back to an earlier model based on performers getting paid by the number of tickets they can sell to personal, live performances.

The same general argument applies to the written word and to other forms of art. If the concept of copyright was struck down tomorrow, some writers would stop writing. Most would keep doing what they are driven to do.

Yes, there's a shift in fortunes when there's a shift in paradigm. Some people drop out of sight. Some people adapt and continue to prosper. Some people find opportunity that wasn't there before.

There's a certain degree of success at selling MP3s, when the price is low enough. Nobody bothers to build timed expiry or number-of-playings expiry into simple recordings of songs. So people willingly pay a buck or two to download them, even though they could find free copies if they cared to look.

But the example was paying for a video download that was designed to die after 24 hours, whether it was convenient for you to view it within that time or not. That's just sick, and people have no sympathy. Theatrical and DVD releases still pay the production costs and generate profit for deserving movies. Demanding to get more than a buck or so of profit off a file that costs you nothing to serve, and using artificial methods to boost your revenue is ugly, and people shy away from it. The people who dreamed up that scheme are deliberately driving away potential customers; driving them into the open arms of the very "pirates" they vilify.

If people suddenly stop wanting the big-screen experience, then the model has finally changed, and first-run theatrical release will no longer pay the production costs of a blockbuster. Maybe the new model will no longer support $250-million dollar production costs. So be it.

It was a good ride for some people. The next wave will be a good ride for a different gang.

Maybe the new model will support only movies whose cost can be recouped by low-price, paid-for downloads, low enough in price that people will gladly pay the couple of bucks for a cupful of databits that they are going to show in their homes, on their equipment, using their electricity.

Rambo, Rimbaud, what's the difference?

A lengthy discussion of the Rambo series at Reason Online, finds some interesting nuggets:

Twenty years after he last sprayed bullets across America's movie screens, John Rambo has returned in Rambo, a 93-minute feature in which Sylvester Stallone's bulky soldier wields a bow, a machine gun, and his muscle-bound, 215-pound body against another army of foreign villains. If you're rolling your eyes, you're not alone: According to Rotten Tomatoes, just 38 percent of the new film's reviews have been favorable, with its critics deploying such phrases as "torture porn," "jingoistic imperialism," and "the Schindler's List of B-list butchery."

For the most part I'll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its laconic protagonist. But I can't dismiss the Rambo franchise entirely, and even this entry shows a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.

There are three things people forget about the Rambo series. One is the original book. Before there were any Rambo movies, there was a novel called First Blood, written by a young John Barth scholar named David Morrell and published in 1972. It's about a Green Beret called Rambo — the name was inspired partly by Rambo apples and partly by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud —who has come home from Vietnam and is tramping across America. It's also about a sheriff named Will Teasle, who doesn't want the long-haired, unshaven kid bringing trouble to his corner of Kentucky. Their conflict builds until it engulfs the entire town, with countless meaningless deaths. The book is told alternately from both characters' point of view, switching back and forth until their identities essentially merge. In the end they both die.

I don't think I've ever seen more than five minutes of any of the various Rambo films . . . and even after reading this article, I'd have to say that they're still of very minor interest to me.

Eccentric behaviour

Be on the watch for this sort of deviant eccentricism:

According to behavioral psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Schulz, Meyer's reading of entire books is abnormal and may be indicative of a more serious obsession with reading.

"Instead of just zoning out during a bus ride or spending hour after hour watching YouTube videos at night, Mr. Meyer, unlike most healthy males, looks to books for gratification," Schulz said. "Really, it's a classic case of deviant behavior."

"At least, that's what it seems like from what little I've skimmed on the topic," she added.

As bizarre as it may seem, Meyer isn't alone. Once a month, he and several other Greenwood residents reportedly gather at night not only to read books all the way through, but also to discuss them at length.

"I don't know, it's like this weird 'book club' they're all a part of," said Brian Cummings, a longtime coworker and friend of Meyer's. "Seriously, what a bunch of freaks."

Is this the return of "Morning in America"? Naw, probably not.

In the news you've all been breathlessly waiting for . . . the numbers are in:

In a close and bloody box office battle, the bumbling warriors of the spoof Meet the Spartans edged out aged mercenary John Rambo of the franchise flick Rambo to win the weekend box office by a tight margin of just $575,000, according to Sunday's estimates. Meet the Spartans grossed $18.725 mil while Rambo brought in $18.150 mil, but we'll have to wait for the final numbers to come out on Monday before officially declaring a winner. Still, this is good news for both films — well, good news for the Greek fighters and really good news for the Vietnam vet.

I dunno. If one of the things going through bin Laden's head was that America was a soft country incapable of defending itself against theologically motiviated suicide bombers, having a satire of one of the most famous battles in history starring Carmen Electra be the biggest movie in the country might kick off a whole new round of attacks. Then again, it may be a sign that all is right with the world again. Or, more probably, it means nothing beyond the good news that Kevin Sorbo won't be be collecting Social Security at age 67.

Juvenile writer wannabe . . . take hope

No matter how bad it is, you'd have to work long and hard to make something as painfully bad as this:

Scott Westerfeld: Recognition of the House of Eleven took no long time, and the lady midst the compliment was none other than wench Mary, a liaress whom I had met before in the rank combats of her style, and who had left more than one of the Clan Demonus with garrote between chin and breathless breast.

I doff my cap to Mr. Westerfeld for the balls-to-the-wall fearlessness to publicly read some of his juvenilia.

QotD: Bad SF books

[. . .] a lot of SF authors are more interested in the science than the people, so the psychological depth required for good writing is simply missing, whereas romance and mystery authors have to have some minor grasp of psychology, however bad they are. Written by Aspergers for Aspergers.

Rachel Ganz, posting to the Bujold mailing list, 2008-01-20

QotD: Age and aging

Sometimes I suspect that everyone under the age of 50 or so thinks they need to get a promotion every few years in order to think of themselves as successful just because the characters on Star Trek all did.

It was noticeable that in the early series, pretty much every StarFleet admiral was either corrupt, insane or a traitor. They only seemed to ease off this unusual hiring policy once Kirk, Scotty, et al reached pensionable age.

Stuart Burnfield, posting to the Techwr-L mailing list, 2007-10-24

It's not Bullshit, but it is more Penn

If you're a fan of Penn & Teller's Bullshit, you may want to direct your browser here, for a selection of uninhibited, unedited, unshaven Penn Jillette.

H/T to Katherine Mangu-Ward for the link.

QotD: But what do you really think, James?

Insert slippery-slope argument here and an acknowledgment that decades on USENET has biased me in favor of crushing potentially destructive practices, exiling their adherents, sowing their homelands with cobalt-60, raising the temperature of their homeworld to one million degrees, detonating their sun and then ramming a galaxy into their home island universe.

James D. Nicoll, in a comment on Whatever, 2008-01-13

Flashman's creator

The Economist's obituary for George MacDonald Fraser includes a fond farewell to his his best-known fictional creation:

Mr Fraser had known him from the start of his career, when he was dragged bragging and hiccupping from the pages of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and pitchforked out of Rugby; and he had followed him, like some devoted batman, through all his military campaigns, from Afghanistan to South Africa to the Indian wars. He had seen him frozen in a blanket in a corpse-strewn defile on the retreat from Kabul in 1842; almost split neatly in two by a grinning Chinaman in a top-knot while running guns down the Yangtse in 1860; struggling in an Indian swamp, after the great ghat massacre at Cawnpore, with what looked like man-eating crocodiles; and charging, by accident, for the Russian guns at Balaclava. As Flashman accumulated the tinware — the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Medal, the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth ("richly deserved"), both he and Mr Fraser knew it was sheer terror that propelled him, delirium funkens, plus a large measure of luck. The great hero of Jallalabad was, in fact, "yellow as yesterday's custard". But he always emerged in splendour.

And with women. Every Flashman novel writhed with them, preferably all bum, belly and bust, giggling and bouncing at the prospect of an officer "who had raked and ridden harder than most". After the beauteous Fetnab (who "knew the ninety-seven ways of love . . . though . . . the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed"), came Lola Montez and Cassie and Susie the Bawd; and, finest of all, the Indian princess Lakshmibai, her "splendid golden nakedness" dressed in no more than bangles and a tiny veil. It was a serious disaster that could interrupt the tumbling for any long period of time.

QotD: Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, Canadian version

A skeptic might say I am going easy on Martin because I have met him, because he is a Canadian (and there is Canadian mafia), and/or because he gave me a copy of his book. May I reassure you that there is no Canadian mafia. Furthermore, I have met, worked with, and deeply admire Zaltman, so personal acquaintance has no sway. And if you think my good opinion can be purchased with a free book, well, I wonder if we should step into the corridor and discuss this further. (This is the Canadian version of Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense. Or, as we might call it in honor of the national sport, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense on ice.)

Grant McCracken, "Canada, the Martin Paradox, and The Opposable Mind", This Blog Sits at the, 2008-01-10

Vamping it up in your library

A very amusing discussion broke out on the Bujold mailing list, after this gem from Marna Nightingale:

Ok, seriously, can somebody tell me what is up with the Vampires?

I mean, look. They undoubtedly have terrible breath, you'd have to give up garlic, a big church wedding is Right Out, and you really don't ever want to go on a holiday somewhere remote with one. And they don't help with the yardwork. Or the school run.

Presumably they don't mind getting up with the baby, assuming that
a) they have not eated it and
b) they're not out batting about biting the necks of other nubiles,

but surely that's not by itself enough to overcome their other shortcomings as life partners to the extent that my library's romance section has almost entirely taken over by pointy-toothed dudes in penguin suits, is it?

No more Flashman, ever

I was saddened to hear of the death of George MacDonald Fraser yesterday at the age of 82. I've been a huge fan of his work since encountering his Flashman, the first of a series of "memoirs" of the fictional villain from Tom Brown's Schooldays:

MacDonald Fraser served as a soldier in Burma and India during World War II and later rose to be deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald newspaper.

He was still working there when the first Flashman book was published in 1969.

A further 11 followed, the last in 2005.

The inspiration for Sir Harry Flashman came from the 19th century novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays, where the character features as the cowardly bully who torments the hero, Tom.

MacDonald Fraser based his tales on the idea that Flashman's "memoirs" had been unearthed in an old trunk in a Leicestershire auction room.

Despite being a vain, cowardly rogue, as well as a racist and a sexist, the character managed to play a pivotal role in many of the 19th Century's most significant events, always emerging covered in glory.

If you've never read any of the Flashman series, do yourself a favour and pick up the original . . . if you have any taste for history at all, I think you'll be hooked.

John Sutherland wrote:

One sure way to determining true Britishness in a work of fiction is to see whether or not it joins the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, never making it across to the other side. [. . .]

With Flashman, Americans didn't understand the inverted Victorianism that was Fraser's gimmick. Instead of Thomas Hughes's prig Tom Brown (he of the Schooldays) Fraser chronicled the British empire through the dandy-cad who roasts young Tom over the dormitory fire and is, to the relief of decent Rugbeians, expelled by the fearsome Dr Arnold (the most eminent of Lytton Strachey's eminent Victorians) for drunkenness and hanky panky with the barmaid at the local pub.

Fraser was intending amusing travesty, but, underneath it all, the author really believed in Britishness. When the chips are down (when sepoys, for example, are murdering women and children in the Indian Mutiny) Flashman is a gallant and decent fellow (and no racist). Flashy, not unflashy Tom, embodies what made the empire work.

The Flashman novels spoke eloquently to the British reader. They articulated that mixture of cynicism, shame, and pride that contemporary Britons felt about Victorian values and Great Britain.

America just didn't get it. As Fraser recalled in an interview; "when Flashman appeared in the US in 1969, one-third of 40-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir. 'The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers,' is the one that haunts me still . . . I was appalled . . . I'd never supposed that it would fool anybody."

Update, 8 January: Major General Flea has been kind enough to link to this post, and to offer in return a link to Fraser's final article in the Daily Mail:

When 30 years ago I resurrected Flashman, the bully in Thomas Hughes's Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays, political correctness hadn't been heard of, and no exception was taken to my adopted hero's character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness.

On the contrary, it soon became evident that these were his main attractions. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance.

Through the Seventies and Eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue — the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them.

And no one minded, or if they did, they didn't tell me. In all the many thousands of readers' letters I received, not one objected.

In the Nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers and interviewers started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way.

This is fine by me. Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn't an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.

But what I notice with amusement is that many commentators now draw attention to Flashy's (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.

Do, as they say, read the whole thing.

QotD: The key to generating blog comments

The secret to generating a huge number of comments on your blog: Write about Robert Heinlein and fanfic in the same week; each entry is at about 450 comments. By concatenation, this means writing an entry concerning fanfic about Heinlein books would come close to 1000 comments, and that writing erotic fanfic featuring Heinlein and Ayn Rand would generate so many comments that the entire power grid east of the Mississippi would collapse under the load. Given the severity of the weather at the moment, I am loath to do that. We’ll save it for summer.

John Scalzi, "Just In Case You Were Wondering", Whatever, 2007-12-16

Wanted: very high-end experts in brain chemistry

I'm quite upset to hear that Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's Disease:

In a brief note to fans entitled "An Embuggerance," Pratchett, 59, said he was taking the news "fairly philosophically" and "possibly with a mild optimism."

"I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news," he wrote on the Web site of Paul Kidby, who has illustrated many of his books.

[. . .]

"Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)" he wrote in his message. "I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do,' but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry."

QotD: Facebook

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: "So-and-so has sent you a message." Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn't telling — you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren't helpful messages, they're eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote "Hi again!" on your "wall." Like other "social" apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"

If there was any doubt about Facebook's lack of qualification to displace the Internet with a benevolent dictatorship/walled garden, it was removed when Facebook unveiled its new advertising campaign. Now, Facebook will allow its advertisers use the profile pictures of Facebook users to advertise their products, without permission or compensation. Even if you're the kind of person who likes the sound of a benevolent dictatorship this clearly isn't one.

Cory Doctorow, "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook", Information Week, 2007-11-26

Facebook scrambles to repair (self-inflicted) reputational damage

A couple of reports in PC World's daily newsletter about the Facebook debacle:

Facebook could have avoided the strident, weeks-long controversy engulfing its Beacon ad system if, when designing and deploying it, the social-networking company had followed basic social etiquette principles, such as being considerate and candid.

It's not too late, though. Following the common sense and time-tested advice of Mister Rogers and Miss Manners could help Facebook end the nightmare that threatens to harm its business, affect its relationship with advertising partners, and erode its end-users' trust.

That's the consensus from several industry observers and online privacy experts regarding the embattled Beacon, introduced several weeks ago to a sustained chorus of boos.

And then, the response from Facebook:

Facebook is giving members of its social network the ability to completely decline participating in the company's controversial Beacon ad system, a reaction to intense criticism that Beacon is too intrusive and compromises people's privacy.

The announcement was made in an official blog post by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which he also apologized for missteps in the design and deployment of Beacon.

"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it," Zuckerberg wrote.

The ability to skip Beacon altogether is the second major modification to the program. Last Thursday, Facebook gave members more control over Beacon and made the way it works clearer so that people could manage it properly.

This is an excellent example of how difficult it is to build up a strong public image and how easy it is to just piss it away in a moment of brainlessness.

Another good example of "spin"

A story came out earlier this week, heralded with scare headlines like "Internet Facing Meltdown" and "Internet Blackouts Predicted by 2010". I thought it was bullshit when I saw the headlines, but I was too busy to look at the report the articles were referencing to see how much the media was twisting the original information. Apparently the original authors were similarly impressed by the efforts of the spin-meisters:

When a small Illinois IT research firm published a study on the future of the Internet last week, it didn't expect to create an international furor.

"I had no idea it would get spun this way, twisted this way," report co-author Johna Till Johnson, president and a senior founding partner of Nemertes Research, said Wednesday.

"I've read all sorts of interesting stuff that bears little relation to the truth, but people seem to be basing it on the study."

All the study concluded, she says, is that a mismatch between demand and access capacity will be reached in three to five years that will have to be met by billions of dollars in spending by carriers. Otherwise, the next YouTube may be throttled because the Internet will be hard to access.

[. . .]

"We explicitly are not saying the Internet's going to break," she says.

In hindsight, she adds, the firm should have foreseen the reaction from Internet lobby groups who she says put their own negative spin on the report. "They really failed to see that it's entirely straightforward to build their case [for supporting the Internet] around the findings, which were intentionally policy-neutral."

"It surprised me there was this bipolar response that had nothing to do with the findings."

Of course, you might want to always filter any media scaremongering to do with the internet . . . the normal bias of news organizations to emphasize the dramatic is reinforced by the fact that the internet is, in effect, eating their lunch. Not to say that there aren't news items that deserve to be covered, but that you need to keep in mind the agenda not only of the originator but also that of the publicist.

QotD: Hillary Clinton

[. . .] I was happy to find in my stack a new copy of Hillary Clinton's famous bestseller, It Takes a Village, revised, updated, and reissued in a special anniversary edition to coincide with her presidential campaign, by which she seeks to take over the whole village.

Like Castro, like Ceausescu, like many other politicians, Mrs. Clinton prefers to be photographed surrounded by schoolchildren, an image that suggests either a kid's birthday party or a hostage situation, depending on your point of view.

Andrew Ferguson, "Read, Weep, and Vote", The Weekly Standard, 2007-12-03

Go, Royson, Go!

Toronto Star columnist Royson James got a public dressing-down from the mayor for his brilliant column on Friday. The mayor's letter was published on Saturday. James responds, with more restraint than I'd have expected:

[. . .] Mayor David Miller inserted his hectoring presence into the debate — and before you know it, a rhetorical hanging became a "public lynching," the memory of his "Uncle Jim" is exhumed and he has concluded that the very foundation of democracy is being threatened by one columnist raging against city hall spending.

As they say in basketball, no harm no foul. At issue is not whether Toronto councillors deserve to be hanged (I'm against capital punishment, banned in Canada), subjected to public flogging (opposed wherever it's practised), or run out of office (we've just elected them, they're in until 2010). At issue is how do we register our disgust — sorry, our displeasure — at their fiscal indiscretions.

A number of readers have emailed concern about the mayor's "over the top" rhetoric. Some, mine. Others fear I'll be beaten (metaphorically?) into submission, afraid to utter a single contrarian view in future. My bosses, far from moving to censure me, are more concerned that I might be "chilled" into overlooking wasteful habits as council embarks on this crucial 2008 budget cycle.

No worries. Let's just use the mayor's letter to the editor Saturday as the template for all further analysis and critique of city hall. Surely, an ink-stained wretch is allowed to borrow the mayor's own carefully crafted words.

A cursory glance at the mayor's letter, dripping with bile and bluster, reveals no cause for concern that one's criticism must now be facile, gracious or temperate. The mayor provides a list of choice adjectives and phrases that might now be at a columnist's disposal.

Appropriating the title of ombudsman, editor and publisher — in addition to chief magistrate and monarch — in an attempt to control all propaganda, er, communications in Hogtown, the official list of approved words and phrases include: "Beneath contempt," "Shows absolutely no respect for democracy," "stoop so low," "outrageous thoughts," "beyond belief," "hateful ruminations," "absolutely offensive," "loathsome advocacy."

The win goes to James, by knockout, in the second round.

Honest fear

Brian Micklethwait finds an honest expression of pants-wetting fear to be more honest than shameful:

Grayson Perry [. . .] a Brit artist, of the sort that makes you want to reach for the sneer quotes. But, I do give this Other Perry two cheers if not three for saying even this much:

"I’ve censored myself," Perry said at a discussion on art and politics organised by the Art Fund. "The reason I haven't gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat."

This may seem like a half-arsed attack on Islam and/or Islamism, but it is way better than nothing, I think. Half an arse is better than no arse at all. These kind of remarks are adding up. The project of denouncing Islam as the evil crap that it is gradually gains ground, inch by inch, and what Other Perry says is another inch advanced. And I do mean attacking Islam, rather than merely those accused of 'betraying' it by . . . doing what it says. The word is gradually spreading.

Is this one of those "Freedom from" issues? Freedom from fear of having your throat cut for drawing, painting, sculpting, filming, or writing something that someone feels is offensive to their religion? Hard to put on a button or T-shirt, but valid nonetheless.

QotD: Where factoids come from

Decades ago, in the days when I labo(u)red in the Central Laboratory at the bottle factory, one of my collegues was dispatched to a conference on air pollution. Upon his return, he related the contents of a paper there presented.

I don't remember the details, but recall the main thrust of it.

In those days, there were numerous claims that "air pollution costs every man, woman, and child in the United States $137.63 every year" or some such number. The paper in question addressed the source of that widely published figure.

It developed that around 1890, a Pittsburgh (The Smokey City) newspaper had printed an article which reported the cost of cleaning the exterior of each of several office buildings during the previous year.

A a year or so later, someone else totaled those figures, divided by the number of buildings reported, multiplied by the number of office buildings in the Golden Triangle and reported "Air Pollution Cost to Pittsburg Businesses".

Still later, someone took that figure, divided by the population of Pittsburgh, multiplied by the population of the Allegheny County, and published "Cost of Air Pollution for Allegheny County in 1910".

Later, someone divided that by the number of steel mills in Allegheny County, multiplied by the number of steel mills in the state and called the result "Pennsylvania's Cost of Air Pollution".

Later, someone multiplied that figure by the number of states east of the Mississippi to arrive at "Cost to Eastern United States Due to Air Pollution".

Along around 1925, someone adjusted the figure to account for inflation.

In the 1930's someone divided the 1925 figure by the population of the states east of the Mississippi to arrive at an "every man, woman, and child cost of air pollution".

Someone else compared the unadjusted pre-1925 figure to the adjusted 1925 figure, divided the difference by the population of the eastern states to obtain "Increase per capita in Cost of Air Pollution in a Single Year".

Just after WW2 (the big one), the 1930's "every man, etc.." figure was adjusted for inflation, multiplied by the population of the United States, divided by the number of states, and published as "Cost of Air Pollution to Each State".

Finally, after a few more such manipulations over the years, the then- current cost of $137.63 was published.

As noted in the beginning, that's not exactly what the paper said, but the general idea is there. Along the way it was noted that, for example, an alleged total cost for Pittsburgh in 1900 had been divided by the 1914 population of Pittsburgh to get a cost per capita, then multiplied by the 1920 population of Pennsylvania to get a total for the state, even though the population numbers changed from year to year.

The paper's conclusions were:

1) There is a cost incurred by air pollution.

2) No one knows what that cost is.

3) If it is $137.62 per capita, that's just good luck.

4) That the quoted "Cost of Air Pollution . . ." should be scrapped at once.

Robert Netzlof, posting to Yahoo Group "Railroad_Modeling_Still_Makes_Me_Grumpy", 2007-11-21

This nicely explains it

A post at Samizdata exactly captures my own feelings:

In recent times I have attacked the Economist for pretending to be pro free market whilst, when one reads it closely, not really being so. Articles like the one on the Australian elections mean I can no longer fairly make this charge. The Economist having now 'come out' as an openly leftist publication.

I've subscribed to The Economist for over 20 years, but I'm letting my current subscription lapse unrenewed. For the last few years, I've been less and less happy with both the editorial and news reporting aspects of the newspaper. They still pretend to support free markets, but so many of their articles in recent years have been apologies for more state involvement in the economy, more state control of private areas of endeavour, and generally more statism than laissez faire.

I'm going to miss reading it, but . . . I'm really missing The Economist of several years ago . . . not what they're currently publishing under that name.

Different, um, strokes?

I can't possibly improve on the title of the post at Hit and Run, "Bullwhips vs. Octopi in Japan":

The land of tentacle porn considers loosening up on Robert Mapplethorpe [. . .]

Joss Whedon returns to the small screen

There is news of a new Joss Whedon television series, called Dollhouse:

Echo (Eliza Dushku) [is] a young woman who is literally everybody's fantasy. She is one of a group of men and women who can be imprinted with personality packages, including memories, skills, language — even muscle memory — for different assignments. The assignments can be romantic, adventurous, outlandish, uplifting, sexual and/or very illegal. When not imprinted with a personality package, Echo and the others are basically mind-wiped, living like children in a futuristic dorm/lab dubbed the Dollhouse, with no memory of their assignments — or of much else. The show revolves around the childlike Echo's burgeoning self-awareness, and her desire to know who she was before, a desire that begins to seep into her various imprinted personalities and puts her in danger both in the field and in the closely monitored confines of the Dollhouse.

H/T to Ghost of a Flea.

QotD: SF clichés

These shows owe a lot to "Forbidden Planet," or perhaps vice versa; it was just how people saw the future. A logical extension of their own norms. We do the same, of course, which is why Star Trek: The Next Generation had a sob-sister grief-counselor on the bridge. There weren't any women on 50s sci-fi ships. The captain was hard-boiled, the engineers were laconic and practical, and the enlisted men were whooping rabble who'd get drunk and throw a rock through the window of a deserted alien city. You suspect that the authors of these stories were all WW2 Navy vets.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-11-08

Pterry survives "mini stroke"

Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors, just discovered that he'd had a stroke . . . and not even realized it:

But working on one of his manuscripts last August, he started to find it difficult to coordinate his hands and brain.

"I was having a bad day and my typing was going askew. It was as if I was typing wearing gloves."

Terry, who lives with his wife Lyn and has a 39-year-old daughter Rhianna, went to see his GP.

"After going through the symptoms, the first thing she asked was whether I'd suffered any memory loss and I wisecracked back: 'Not that I can recall.' "

Audi kicks Lexus in the yarbles

Grant McCracken gets all analytical about the ad:

This ad satisfies the two objectives of all creative. It gives us engaging and strategic.

Engaging:

"Parking" is visually arresting, impressive, amusing, darn near sublime. Tivos will stop for this one. Consumers will rewind. We will see this ad many times over it's lifetime on the air, and chances are it will be a gift that keeps on giving. It's a little like a magic trick. How did they do that?

Strategic:

This ad takes on the competitor very effectively.

[It mocks the Lexus's] ability to park itself. This is a remarkable accomplishment. It cancels the technological lead of a competitor. Lexus has just given its car thet and Lexus is justly proud. Not everyone is going to use this feature, but we are assuming that Lexus is assuming that the consumer is assuming that any car company with engineers capable of this kind of thing must be very good at everything else it does. The self parking ability is a part that stands for, and speaks for, the whole.

Now we are guessing that when Audi turned to its engineers to ask if this could be replicated, they scratched their heads and replied, "We need 18 to 36 months. Don't call us. We'll call you."

Unlike a lot of analysis of visual media, I enjoyed watching the ad more after reading Grant's posting.

QotD: The net

What's happening here? What is it about the network that makes it so potent? Simply this: the network, in every form, is anathema to hierarchy. The network represents the other form of organization, not a contradiction of hierarchy, but, rather, a counterpoint to it. I've rewritten Gilmore's Law to reflect this:

"The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it."

For the fifty-five hundred years of human civilization, hierarchy has always had the upper hand. Now the network, amplified by all those wires and routers, is stronger than hierarchy, and battle has been joined. But this isn't going to be some full-on Armageddon, a battle between the Empire and the Alliance; this is the Death of a Thousand Cuts. The network is simply kicking the legs out from under hierarchies, everywhere they exist, for as long as they exist, until they find themselves unable to rise again. What it really come down to is this: we are assuming management of our own affairs, because we are now empowered to do so. It doesn't matter if you're a maize farmer in Kenya or a video producer in Queensland; these mob rules apply to us mob.

Mark Pesce, "Mob Rules (The Law of Fives)", hyperpeople, 2007-09-28

Two movies

James Lileks casts a jaundiced eye over the recent movie pairing of Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of our fathers:

"Flags of our Fathers" spent as little time as necessary on Iwo Jima, and concentrated its rambling Mobius-strip narrative on the domestic propaganda uses of the flag-raising photo. The government, for the usual devious reasons, used the photo to bolster support for the war, which was going on for some reason or another; the details weren’t entirely clear. "Letters from Iwo Jima" spends as little time as necessary on the domestic front, but a flashback does give us a hint about Japanese society during the war. An officer assigned to Iwo Jima to enforce political purity — you know, the way the Navy regularly posted officers to make sure everyone bowed to a picture of FDR every day — reveals his moment of shame, when he was forced by a superior to kill . . . a dog. A family dog. That tells us everything, I guess: these guys will kill a family dog in front of the kids. I gather the dog is supposed to stand in for Nanking.

"Flags of our Fathers" informed me that there were no great causes, that the soldiers were a complaining, fractious lot who fought for each other, and there was no such thing as heroes, just "men like our fathers." The two being mutually exclusive, I guess. "Letters from Iwo Jima" told me that the enemy was full of honor and discipline, which was Tragically Misguided, and it was all quite sad because several of the Japanese officers had been posted to the United States, and performed charmingly at official functions where they were accepted as equals before that terrible misunderstanding at Pearl Harbor.

I almost quit the movie after the Yanks shot the surrendered soldiers. The recollection of the first film, with its vapid screaming PR displays and careful elisions and gruff cynical vets recalling the BS of it all, eventually overwhelmed the respectful treatment of the Japanese. If the same traits — death-worship, the nobility of suicide, fixation on honor not as a trait but a code — had been ascribed to Allied forces, it's impossible to imagine a Hollywood movie that would not have treated the characters as absolute lunatics. I have no problem with a respectful treatment of the soldiers who fought on the other side. But the point of the first movie seems to be the unfortunate effect of the battle on Ira Hayes. Clint Eastwood gave the hero of "Letters" an honorable death. Ira Hayes ended up face down in a pig farm.

Of course, this is merely the American flavour of how history is being taught nowadays: only the warts. It's as if British history was completely and accurately summed up by Cromwell, Glencoe, Amritsar, and the concentration camps. (Sadly, some people would argue strenuously that this is the case . . .)

It's not news, it's a Drew Curtis interview

Over on Reason Online, Katherine Mangu-Ward interviews the moving force behind fark.com:

In the golden summer of 1997, small-time ISP entrepreneur Drew Curtis bought fark.com when he noticed all of the good four-letter domains were being snapped up.

Until early 1999, fark.com featured a picture of a very brave squirrel and nothing else. Which, as Curtis notes, "some would argue this is better than what we have now." He briefly considered building a database of Indian curry recipes ("I like to cook, mostly because my wife can't"), but decided to go with Plan B, a site mocking the media (and occasionally Floridians) for their stupidity. Fark, he decided, should be the word for "what fills space when mass media runs out of news." Since then, Fark.com has become the go-to "news" site for the bored at work and sick at heart.

Stepping back from the day-to-day inanity/insanity of the news cycle, Curtis tries to figure out guiding principles behind why networks think it's a good idea to give airtime to 9/11 truthers ("Equal Time for Nut Jobs") or why every issue of Cosmo has exactly the same headlines ("Seasonal garbage") in his new book It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News (Gotham).

QotD: American Media

Indeed, compared to Europe, this country is doing pretty well. It's almost tabloid newspaper free, with a bifurcated media that generally separates celebrity gossip and news into separate publications—although there are exceptions like the New York Post. In Britain, the three highest circulating daily newspapers (The News of the World, The Sun and The Daily Mail) are aggressively low-brow, a mix of top-heavy women and conjecture-heavy, populist reporting. The country's parliament, often praised as an honest, if overly raucous, chamber of debate from which America could learn, is Crossfire on steroids (and with even less honesty and more partisan hackery). The largest-selling paper on the continent is the ridiculous German daily Bild, a tabloid whose softcore front page make its British cousins seem downright priggish.

Michael Moynihan, "There is no truth: The problem with Jon Stewart's media criticism", Reason Online, 2007-10-18