Laugh and Cry
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Lists of top good and bad appear near or at the end of each year, and usually bear witness to how crappy things are, or how how even-more crappy things are.
This week, The Buffalo Beast presented a list of the 50 most-loathsome people in America for 2008 — and it doesn’t leave out President Obama (he’s #50), noting “There’s nothing more loathsome than a likable politician.”
And the list also includes “You” dear reader, average American, listed at #43: “You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American.”
(Illustration found here).
And the Numero Uno of loathsome people from last year?
Yes! Sarah Palin:
- Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency.
Palin should be sentenced to “Hand-to-hand combat with Vladimir Putin and a pack of wolves.”
A great list and a very funny, good read — there’s all kinds of assholes between Obama and Palin, like the Clintons (#18); Joe the Plumber (#20); Keith Olbermann (#37); even the recently-departed John Updike (#38), charged with “Being foolishly wrong about absolutely everything for about a thousand years and counting. Getting rich applying faux gilt, and guilt, to the dull, pointless, overstuffed lives of New Yorker readers.”
I guess there’s no one good when everywhere you look it’s all bad.
(h/t to AlterNet).
Acid Oceans
Filed Under Media, Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
Another nail in the coffin of the earth.
Climate change offered by human-induced CO2 discharges are literally sucking the life out of our oceans.
(Illustration found here).
In a report issued today, the horror of man-made CO2 will quickly make the world’s oceans more acidic and therefore unable to bear life.
From the New York Times:
- The panel, comprising 155 scientists from 26 countries and organized by the United Nations and other international groups, is not the first to point to growing ocean acidity as an environmental threat, but its blunt language and international credentials give its assessment unusual force.
It called for “urgent action” to sharply reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.
“Severe damages are imminent,” the group said Friday in a statement summing up its deliberations at a symposium in Monaco last October.
The statement, called the Monaco Declaration, said increasing acidity is interfering with the growth and health of shellfish and eating away at coral reefs, processes that would eventually affect marine food webs generally.
Already, the group said, there have been detectable decreases in shellfish, shell weights and interference with the growth of coral skeletons.
…
“The chemistry is so fundamental and changes so rapid and severe that impacts on organisms appear unavoidable,” according to James Orr, who headed the symposium’s scientific committee.
Dr. Orr is a chemical oceanographer at the Marine Environmental Laboratory in Monaco, an affiliate of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations body.
And this from Reuters:
- Scientists who flew a modified corporate jet from pole to pole to study how greenhouse gases move found carbon dioxide piling up over the Arctic, but also higher than expected levels of oxygen over the Antarctic.
…
One of the major challenges scientists face is tracking the estimated 30 billion tons of carbon emitted each year by motor vehicles, factories, deforestation and other sources.
About 40 percent of the gas accumulates in the atmosphere, with the rest apparently being absorbed by oceans and forests.
How about some good-old fashioned coal-burning?
‘Let Them Eat Ironic Cake’
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If suddenly a world-wide hate for the arts: A lot of wealthy assholes would be out of work.
The greed of spotlight and treasure extends to just about everyone.
From the UK’s Telegraph on profits from the acclaimed “Slumdog Millionaire“: (h/t Think Progress)
- But the reality of life for Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail is far closer to that of the characters they play in the story of love, violent crime and extreme poverty in India.
The child actors’ parents have accused the hit film’s producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums.
Slumdog Millionaire, according to IMDB, made $10,699,629 last weekend, knocking its total up since its release last fall to $56,065,245, and given the old Hollywood rule-of-thumb about production costs (Slumdog estimated to be about $15 million) — “break even” at double the production cost, the rest profit — so to take Slumdog in that light, $26 million so far has gone somewhere.
And the Golden Globes and the Oscar nominations will only drive ticket sales up.
In the comments section, however, at the Think Progress site several wrote that although they had not seen the film, won’t now because of this story.
Another Slumdog “backlash” reviewed here.
From the Telegraph piece:
- The film’s British director, Danny Boyle, has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education.
But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.
Rubina was paid £500 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received £1,700, according to the children’s parents.
However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive.
They would not disclose the actual sum.
Director and producer of Slumdog issued a statement in response to the news report, in part which noted a “substantial lump sum” will be paid to the children when they turn 18-years-old — a decade away.
No urgent financial-stimulus package there.
Date-Rape Agent
Filed Under Double Standard/Religious, Politics | Leave a Comment
This is bad.
From ABC tonight:
- The CIA’s station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
Just as President Obama told the Islamic world, “Americans are not your enemy,” some sex-crazed rapist puts the feud back into fuel for extremists.
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, Andrew Warren, the 41-year-old CIA station chief in Algiers, had made videos of the sexual encounters and were found in his official residence along with the drugs, Valium and Xanax, the perfect date-rape high-ball.
And apparently this episode wasn’t the first.
- The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when Warren was in Cairo, officials said.
This incident is not only a slap at Muslims, but a real-burn on the CIA.
- “This will be seen as the typical ugly American,” said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. “My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas,” Baer said.
“From a national security standpoint,” said Baer, the alleged rapes would be “not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that’s something the CIA should have picked up on,” said Baer. “This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency,” he said.
Welcome to the age of the real ugly American, Mr. Leon Panetta.
Greed Control
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- “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and 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.”
– Agent Smith, The Matrix
(Illustration of ‘Victory of Greed‘ by Jan Patrik Krasny found here).
Only on special occasion the last couple of years has Maureen Dowd done anything to prick my ears, even on a basic literary level and some of her columns during the presidential campaign last year hinted at some kind of crude use of fairy-tale fantasy (although the West Wing piece was a good, interesting read, but it wasn’t from her), but her exercise today in the New York Times does her good, old justice.
In Dowd’s cross-hair is John Thain, Merrill Lynch head honcho who has joined the growing list of greed-layered entrepreneurs carrying the banner of free-enterprise — the list now includes, among a stadium-sized board room of others, Bernie Madoff, Hank Paulson, Al Greenspan, Ken Lay, with the apparent icon of the whole bunch — Gordon Gekko.
Financial greed is not just a US national problem, but a human trait.
This week Iceland’s government collapsed (did buildings fall, chaos?) as a forerunner to how avarice can be tolerated well beyond just the financial district — but not for long.
In 2007, less than two years ago, Iceland was one of the richest countries per capita on earth, though, everybody sort of wink-winked, nudge-nudged on how it came about, and so few questioned a system which appeared to bring so much prosperity.
And this financial total-global meltdown going on right now didn’t spring up overnight — in long-range historical terms, I guess it would be overnight, as mainly just in the last century of so has economies shifted from physical treasure such as gold, silver or land, to vapor, such as those so-called financial instruments, which didn’t move actual treasure around, but just paper.
And whole governments, along with corporations attached to those governments, pushed this allowance for greed into being — final nail in the mortgaged coffin was repeal of the Great-Depression era Glass-Steagall Act.
And so around to the above-mentioned Mr. John Thain, who yesterday sharply snagged a subpoena on his designer cufflinks from the New York state AG’s office wanting details of his company bonus program.
Dowd then whips in her comments.
First nailing another Wall Street greed-lover:
- How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?
(Now I get why a $400 payment I recently sent to pay off my Citibank Visa was mistakenly applied to my sister-in-law’s Citibank Mastercard account.)
…
The former masters of the universe don’t seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours.
Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.
Dowd makes real-good money and comes from a good-money family, so the “ours” expressed above has yet to reach her level, but I digress.
- In an interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, Thain used the specious, contemptible reasoning that other executives use to rationalize why they’re keeping their bonuses as profits are plunging.
“If you don’t pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise” and they’ll go elsewhere, he said.
Hello?
They destroyed the franchise.
Let’s call their bluff.
Let’s see what a great job market it is for the geniuses of capitalism who lost $15 billion in three months and helped usher in socialism.
And with the infamous $1.2 million office re-deco job — Thain admits the greedy, opulent episode was a “mistake” — Dowd gets vengeful.
- Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O’Neal?
“Well — his office was very different — than — the — the general décor of — Merrill’s offices,” Thain replied. “It really would have been — very difficult — for — me to use it in the form that it was in.”
Did it have a desk and a phone?
How are these ruthless, careless ghouls who murdered the economy still walking around (not to mention that sociopathic sadist Bernie Madoff?) — and not as perps?
Bring on the shackles.
Let the show trials begin.
Yes indeed.
Dowd, however, like many, many others are a bit scared of the word, “socialism,” because if implemented correctly would bring an end to even her social/professional world.
Which is greedy, too, like a virus.