‘And get a note to the milkman: No More Cheese!’
Filed Under Musings, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment
Of course, one can forgive Steve McCroskey for nearly-screaming demands at his wife.
The airport manager was having a real-real neurotic day, was under intense, coronary-inducing pressure, and what the heck, an airliner was in great jeopardy, hundreds of lives were at stake, and Johnny wasn’t helping at all, clowning around, being a total douche-bag.
And on top of all that shit-hitting-the-fan, McCroskey also knew he’d picked by-far the worst-possible day to quit amphetamines and his beloved glue.
Sniffing the glowworm: Saturday afternoon, us up here along the northern California coast felt a 6.5 earthquake, and although I’ve felt quakes before — some long, some short, some weird, some not-so weird — this particular one was among those few shakers that really unsettled me.
So panic-like frightful, the mind rocks-n-rolls like the ground, which quickly creates a most-unnatural state of incomprehension, as though suffering from some form of dementia — walls jiggle and floors move, doors are pitched at an angle, all behaving extreme-paranormal, and all so fast, in seconds, micro-seconds, tenths of seconds.
In a complete-cranked brain rush, I tried to rapidly figure out first, what the shit? and then what to do about it, though both questions burned themselves rapidly together — it’s been said to get under a table or a door jam, but my immediate and most-greatest desire was to get outside, away from this freakin’-ass-haunted apartment house.
Staggering around, bubbling manic thoughts, I managed to get onto the front porch and into the parking lot, though, the quake continued, seemingly forever, and the sight of my pick-up truck rocking back-and-forth is one of them indelible brain-pix that will be there a long time.
Minutes later, standing in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette with neighbors, looking at my still-slightly trembling hands, I felt shaken but happy, feeling most-fortunate, having escape something big and awesome and scary.
Located 27 miles west of Ferndale, out in the Pacific Ocean, 33 miles west-southwest from Eureka, and less than 45 miles slightly northeast of where I sat on my ass, the 6.5 quake was figured to be about 13.5 miles deep and included some 23 aftershocks, including a small one (2.6) this afternoon, all coming from the same area — three of those were rated 4.0 or better (I did feel a 4.4 about two hours after the main event).
(Illustration found here).
During this episode, I did discover a most-useful site from the US Geological Survey, with even an animated, continually-updated animated map of earthquakes in California and Nevada, found here, which appears like lights flashing around the state.
A natural WTF!
A few seconds so overwhelming it’s nuts.
In a flash, one understands how much of our physical life, and especially this crazy-assed modern version, is outside of our control with a lot shit depending on a lot of factors, some close to home and others from far, far away.
My apartment house survived without an apparent scratch (except for some fingernail-claw marks on the front door) and Northern California got off fairly easy on this particular seismic series of events — one major injury (a broken hip) along with 119 reports of damage estimated at $12.5 million to the city of Eureka.
According to the Sunday Times-Standard:
“On the whole, I think we dodged a bullet,” said State Assemblyman Wesley Chesbro, D-Arcata. “It could have been far, far worse.”
Yes, well.
During the last few weeks I haven’t blogged much, too tired due to a new set of work hours — not too creative in the afternoons or evenings, and after surfing the Net with a thoughtful perusal of the daily new events, I’m way-too mentally skewered to intelligently address anything but a Louis L’Amour novel and sleep.
And there’s so much shit currently occurring it boggles the senses, and despite getting pissed about so much arrogant incompetence controlling the planet, the creative ability to write about it escapes like the scent off an empty cup of yerba mate.
Lack of sleep coupled with continuous bad news on all fronts makes one want to take a nap on the floor.
Or maybe mimic poor Mr. McCroskey barking orders: “I want the kids in bed by nine, the dog fed, the yard watered and the gate locked.”
And everything will be good and happy again.
‘Seeing’ Face
Filed Under Musings, Scratching Sounds | Leave a Comment
Just as I figured: Computers are intolerant, racially discriminatory and just creepy.
Figuring out African-Americans was a problem for HP’s newest face-recognition gear:
In the video, Wanda (Caucasian) and Desi (African American) — two employees at what appears to be a computer electronics store — expose a flaw in the webcam software.
As depicted, the software has no problem recognizing Wanda’s face, with the webcam following her face around as she moves up, down, in, out and around.
No such luck for Desi, however, as the camera remains completely static regardless of any movement.
The side-by-side portrayal is quite jarring and paints a strong case in favor of Desi’s conjecture: “I think my blackness is interfering with the computer’s ability to follow me,” and assertion that, “Hewlett-Packard computers are racist.”
HP quickly responded, knowing how these things can get out of PR control.
From HP’s Voodoo Blog:
Everything we do is focused on ensuring that we provide a high-quality experience for all our customers, who are ethnically diverse and live and work around the world. That’s why when issues surface, we take them seriously and work hard to understand the root causes.
…
The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose.
We believe that the camera might have difficulty “seeing” contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.
Eyes speak with forked-robotic tongue.
(Illustration found here).
Another Gone
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Highlights the desperate plight of news gathering: Editor&Publisher, an authentic cornerstone of journalism will cease publication at the end of this year.
The announcement was made Thursday on its online site.
An interview today with Greg Mitchell, E&P’s editor since 2002, on the demise of the newspaper-trade industry/journo-icon can be found at Columbia Journalism Review.
Read a brief Wikipedia-history of E&P here — the magazine was founded in 1901 and six years later merged with a magazine most-aptly called, The Journalist.
And for reaction from the media here.
Sad state of affairs, that it be.
Blog Thyself
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
“The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is that you really want to say.”
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
Writing in this modern age is still the same as in Twain’s day, only quicker and with a lot more adjectives, a word-group the Huck-n-Tom author found abhorrent.
However, we much-so live in an multi-adjective world (notice the much-used hyphen modifiers) as the data and information availability defies the imagination — the red links in this post testifies, but whether any kind of truth is at those links so poses the real question.
Truth is in the eye of the reader and should be in the mind of the writer — even authentic, good fiction is just truth self-created.
(Illustration found here).
Nowadays, writing takes two forms — no longer just the piece of paper/book held in one’s hand, but there’s also a virtual version, found only online.
And having now performed in newspapers and online, the latter is the more personal, especially since no financial compensation is part of the literary mix and no deadlines other than the inherent, obsessive desire to write and have at least one dumb-ass read it, but sadly, has no newsroom — blogging is most likely the equivalent of a professional diary in the form of journalism practiced under the auspices of some-type literature.
Of course, I speak of real writing/journalism/literature — anyone can get a blog, currently there must be a hundred-quadrillion blogs with even a blog for bloggers — but there’s a fairly-insufficient, short-list (how about that for adjective-hyphenated modifiers) of readable blogs where there’s decent writing and good journalism.
If one seeks current events in a somewhat fervent way, there’s only about a dozen blogs or so to be visited on a daily basis and maybe twice that number on a semi-regular basis — I tend to favor those sites with an emphasis on reality, which are few in number.
The MSM has to be verified and most of the time, that’s found strictly online (one extremely-glaring example is the New York Times Pentagon pundit story, on which the MSM’s TV side performed a near-complete black-out).
Blogging is what I do — and it fits.
According to that most-massive of information sites, Wikipedia: Blogging is not a full-time job for most bloggers, nor is it their main source of income. A blogger can also be a doctor, a mechanic, a lawyer or a musician, and thus bloggers typically maintain a variety of professions for which the act of blogging is their communicative outlet with the public.
My “full-time job” in this so-called “variety of professions” is with a northern California liquor store and currently I’m in a kind of the OJTing manager — our long-time manager suffered a stroke and I was tapped to take her job.
She’s doing fine and recuperating well, but not coming back.
Hence not many blog posts the past two weeks — way-too tired to do much more than surf the major news sites.
And, of course, since there’s not many visitors here, not a great crowd has been disappointed when they arrive at Compatible Creatures and it’s the same old shit.
But what the heck?
I’m a freakin’ blogger!
From Andrew Sullivan in a September 2004 piece in Time magazine:
The critics of blogs cite their lack of professionalism. Piffle. The dirty little secret of journalism is that it isn’t really a profession. It’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience, and you’re all set. You get better at it merely by doing it — which is why fancy journalism schools are, to my mind, such a waste of time.
Indeed.
Although a graduate of the fairly-prestigious University of Florida’s J-school (In 1974, supposedly listed second behind number-one Columbia), I OJTed my first journalism job as police reporter — J-school didn’t really teach real-life and the only thing I got from UF was the sheepskin.
One doesn’t really need a telephone to be a good journalist (either print or online), but you sure-as-shit require “a conscience.”
Journalism movies are rare, and those portraying a conscience, rarer still — at least one, Shattered Glass, displayed none at all.
And just last night, I watched a DVD version of the newest, State of Play, a real-enjoyable twisting thriller set in a big-time MSM newsroom with a kind of subtext of new media vs old — and in this case ending happily, the veteran print journalist leaving a late-night, on-deadline newsroom nearly hand-in-hand with the newbie blogger.
Damn-good film, fun to watch and kind of neat to see a reporter as a character in what is way-more an action movie, or shoot-’em-up whodunit then the rigid journalism-first kind of flick, such as, All the President’s Men, or Good Night, and Good Luck.
Read a review of “State of Play” from HuffPost if you wish.
Print guy and blogger gal: Russell Crowe and Rachel McAdams
One disappointment in “State of Play” was lack of any kind of detail in the actual professional working-together of blogger and print journalist — a most-valid point if the newspaper is to survive into the Internet age.
McAdams’ blogger character seems more on site just as a tag-along to Crowe’s version of ace newspaper reporter — spunky for the newsroom — and in a near-final sequence, allows the blogger to click “send” on the big story.
Yippe do da!
The movie also seems to view blogs (and supposedly the Internet at large) as more for trash, tabloid-fueled gossip then any serious presentation of current events — wrong!
The conscience of “State of Play” is that newspaper guys, print journalists, want the last thread in the needlework of a story to be all laid bare — the end is worth what it took to get there.
And what would Mark Twain say about all this media?
He’d most-likely have viewed it as weird, but inevitable.
From 1880’s A Telephonic Conversation:
Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world, — a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer.
You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return.
You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay.
You can’t make head or tail of the talk, because you never hear anything that the person at the other end of the wire says.
Extra! Extra!
Now everyone is the other end of the wire.
Big, Bad Bogeyman Can Still Boogie
Filed Under Just Plain War, Musings | Leave a Comment
Instead of George Jr.’s arrogant rant: “I want justice,” he said after a meeting at the Pentagon, where 188 people were killed last Tuesday when an airliner crashed into the building. “And there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ “
We should follow Andy Borowitz’s reporting:
In a bold new strategy designed to locate the world’s most wanted man, the United States today dispatched a team of paparazzi to find Osama bin Laden.
“If these people can find George Clooney when he’s vacationing on Lake Como, they can find Osama,” one intelligence insider said.
(Illustration found here).
In the face of Dick Cheney’s insanely-ironic blast last month that President Obama was “dithering” on Afghanistan, dickhead and George Jr. more than dithered in December 2001 in letting Osama and his boys slip out of the east Afghan mountains of Tora Bora and flee to Pakistan, a move directly connected and a root-cause of the shit-mess now in the Af-Pak region.
Read a good, comprehensive report on the entire Tora Bora muck-up here.
Late to the game: US military/intelligence — pushed by the Bush White House — total dithered in adapting to the new (though very, very ancient) method of “asymmetrical warfare” (although Don Rumsfeld called for a study [pdf] of such tactics and strategy in 2002), which all insurgency/guerrilla groups practice and continue to this very day, and instead relied on a pure power, “shock and awe,” style, something akin to randomly swinging around a large shovel to combat a mosquito in a crowded theater lobby.
Most-likely scenario — the mosquito will vanish amidst the carnage inflicted on all those innocent-bystander theater patrons.
And Osama has been a weird, terror-like guy a long time.
One of his sons, Omar, has penned a ‘Dearest Mommy’-type memoir that paints a picture of a crazy person from the get-go — war against the infidal above all things, even from being a daddy.
From Time magazine’s review of “Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us Inside Their Secret World” (St. Martin’s Press):
The younger bin Laden fled Afghanistan only when it become clear that Osama was planning a massive attack on the U.S., but he still couldn’t accept that his father was responsible for 9/11 until months later, when he heard the familiar voice on audiotape claiming credit for the attacks.
“That was the moment to set aside the dream I had indulged, feverishly hoping the world was wrong and it was not my father who brought about that horrible day,” he writes. “This knowledge drives me into the blackest hole.”
…
Still, ever the dutiful Saudi son, Omar couldn’t bring himself to break with his family until the day that his father asked his sons to volunteer for suicide missions.
When Omar protested, Osama replied, “You hold no more a place in my heart than any man or boy in the entire country. This is true for all my sons.” Omar writes, “I finally knew exactly where I stood.
My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons.”
Another view inside the infamous bin Laden family can be found here, which concluded: One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”
Osama bin Laden, however (apparently the .01 of the “evil variety”), has become the most-wanted person on the planet and just about everybody on the planet can recognize his mug — and the group he founded, al-Qaeda, is now listed along with Nazis and child rapists as bad, bad bogeymen of history.
Bill Moyers Journal has a good history on Osama and al-Qaeda in campaigns against the West, and especially the US, culminating with those attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
And nowadays, despite all the manpower, firepower, unmanned drones and satellite images, Osama is still at large, causing some to question whether the guy’s still alive (read this), although a lot of horrific shit is still taking place in al-Qaeda’s name.
In Iraq, the group claimed responsibility for the horrific car bombing a couple of weeks ago in Baghdad, which killed 160 people and wounded more than 500, and this despite all kinds of smack-down operations.
This analysis last week from CNN’s veteran war reporter Michael Ware:
While al Qaeda in Iraq has been gutted from within, principally by Sunni insurgents turning on them and assassinating them over recent years, the network still exists.
Al Qaeda, an organization built with the expectation of loss, has endured and will continue to do so until Iraq’s slated January election and beyond.
…
Al Qaeda in Iraq is not the network it once was, it’s not able to deliver multiple suicide bombings on an almost daily basis.
When I was last in Baghdad nationalist insurgents told me there were but a handful of operational al Qaeda cells in the city.
Nonetheless, they warned five committed al Qaeda members can “wreak havoc.”
Yes indeed.
From Al Jazeera English:
The reality is that, whilst direct al-Qaeda actions have been seriously restricted, the organisation has franchised from Somalia to Indonesia and North Africa.
In Afghanistan, it directs or collaborates in Taliban attacks.
Al-Qaeda is mercurial and, like a virus, mutates and adapts.
Also at the link is an most-excellent video on the subject.
In Afghanistan, the US appears to have driven out the group, as top dog Gen. Stan McNasty (oops,sorry) McChrystal told reporters in September: “I do not see indications of a large al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan now.”
So why does the US then continue its presence there?
Matthew Hoh has been in the news lately — he’s the US State Department official who resigned in September in protest over the Afghan war strategy — and this week he was on CNN to discuss the issue, which also included some words about al-Qaeda.
Crooks and Liars had this partial transcript:
ZAKARIA: Do you think – the top military brass have all endorsed General McChrystal’s report and request. Do you think that down on the ground there is a very different feeling?
HOH: Oh, yes. Yes, there is. I think on the ground – and the perspective is that, what is the strategic value of what we’re doing here. Why are we doing this? What are we getting out of it?
It’s not going to defeat al Qaeda. It’s not going to — if you take our two goals as being the defeat of al Qaeda, and then, because of its nuclear weapons and because of the relationship with India, the stabilization of the government in Islamabad, 60,000 troops taking 50, 60 dead a month in this country, and how many wounded and killing how many Afghans, as well, it doesn’t accomplish either of those goals.
ZAKARIA: Why doesn’t it defeat al Qaeda?
HOH: My belief is that, after 2001, al Qaeda evolved. They became, as I like to say, an ideological cloud. It exists on the Internet. They don’t need a safe haven in Afghanistan. They’ve got safe havens in five, six, seven other countries.
In this respect, should the US invade and occupy those “five, six, seven other countries” where Osama’s boys have been operating?
One would hope the obvious is apparent — the fight in Afghanistan, no matter how long and cruel, will not yield Osama bin Laden or any of his boys: Asked whether he would give up bin Laden, Mullah Omar explained in a September 21, 2001, interview with the Voice of America that “We cannot do that. If we did, it means we are not Muslims . . . that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again.”
The moral: When trying to kill a mosquito, much less anything as vaporous and crazy as an ideological cloud, don’t use a big shovel in a small, crowded room.
Crying on the Toilet — ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy…’
Filed Under Media, Musings, history | Leave a Comment
Nearly 50 years have passed since that fateful day in Dallas when JFK was assassinated, and now some new insights have surfaced into those few precious moments in the abrupt transition of presidential power — and it ain’t macho.
In a new book on the November 1963 event, The Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After: Lyndon B. Johnson’s Pivotal First Day as President, by Steven Gillon, paints LBJ as near the break-down point.
(Illustration found here).
Reportedly, JFK’s military aide, Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, could not find LBJ on Air Force One after people had told him Johnson was on board — everyone figured he had departed already on Air Force Two as Kennedy and Johnson arrived in Dallas on separate aircraft — until the general checked the shitter in the presidential bedroom.
Via a piece by Gillon at HuffPost:
What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking.
“I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed,” McHugh recalled.
He claimed that LBJ was crying, “They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’” According to the General, Johnson “was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”
I soon discovered that McHugh had told a similar story when he spoke by phone with Mark Flanagan, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).
Ironically, McHugh gave the interview to the HSCA a week before he sat down with the Kennedy Library in May 1978.
“McHugh had encountered difficulty in locating Johnson but finally discovered him alone,” Flanagan wrote in his summary to the Committee.
Quoting McHugh, the investigator noted that the General found Johnson “hiding in the toilet in the bedroom compartment and muttering, ‘Conspiracy, conspiracy, they’re after all of us.’”
Author Christopher Anderson claimed that McHugh shared a similar, although slightly more dramatic, version of this story when he interviewed the General for his book Jackie after Jack, published in 1998.
In complete contrast to LBJ’s blubberings, Jackie Kennedy was stoic and strong, seemingly in control despite the horror blowing around her.
She was only 34 then, the youngest First Lady in US presidential history.
In an interview (pdf) with historian Theodore White about a week after the shooting (Nov. 29, 1963), Jackie had this to say about the chaos on-board Air Force One, spinning the tale “one brief shinning moment that was known as Camelot”:
“…History…, everybody kept saying to me put a cold towel around my head” (and wipe the blood off: she is referring to the swearing-in scene at the plane, when Johnson is sworn in at the plant at Love Field and she was beside him)… “later, I saw myself in the mirror; my whole face spattered with blood and hair…I wiped it off with Kleenex.
History. I thought no one really wants me there.
Then one second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off?
I should have left it there, let them see what they’ve done…If I’d just had blood and caked hair when” (they took pictures of swearing in).
“Then later I said to Bobby what’s the line between histrionics and drama.
I should have left the blood on.”
In 1995, a year after Jackie’s death, The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston released the interview notes.
Another strange, little-known incident that day — US District Judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes, who administered the oath of office to Johnson, and JFK’s Bible and a three-by-five-inch file card containing the oath.
According to the National Archives:
Judge Hughes, in the process of stepping down the boarding steps, was hailed by a self-assured man who inquired if she wanted the two items she held in her hand.
Assuming he was a security man and because the items did not belong to her, Judge Hughes transferred to the man the file card and the President’s Bible, neither of which were ever located.
Kennedy’s assassination will always be clouded in conspiracy, pity and…romance.
‘Soup’ Gone
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
A life-long favorite is no more: Soupy Sales dead at 83.
Even with all his funny shenanigans, Soupy Sales appeared as a really nice guy.
His show was one of my favorites as a kid and I loved all the characters he created, including the never-seen ‘naked girl,’ and he seemed to have great fun doing all those crazy things.
See a video of one of his sketches here.
Despite all the clowning around, Soupy worked hard to get the right knack and the right posture as he received his grandstand ploy — a pie in the kisser.
Laugh and laugh again, but now sad.
(Illustration found here).
From the LA Times:
As the star of “The Soupy Sales Show,” he performed live on television for 13 years in Detroit, Los Angeles and New York before the program went into syndication in the United States and abroad.
Ostensibly for children, the show had broad appeal among adults who found Sales’ puns, gags and pratfalls deliciously corny and camp.
His cast consisted of goofy puppets with names like White Fang, Black Tooth and Pookie, and a host of off-camera characters, including the infamous naked girl.
The high point of every show came when a sidekick launched a pie into Sales’ face.
Sales once estimated that he was hit by more than 25,000 pies in his lifetime.
The gag became more than hilarious; it evolved into a hip badge of honor.
Frank Sinatra was first in a long line of celebrities who clamored for the privilege to be cream-faced, including Tony Curtis, Mickey Rooney, Sammy Davis Jr., Dick Martin and Burt Lancaster.
Soupy was the man.
Info Ugly — News-Watching Sucks
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
There’s little doubt we’re alive in one of the most-interesting periods in world history as all kinds of nefarious enterprises are starting to come to real-bad fruition — unlike other past-historical upheavals, however (there’s a shitload of these chaos-in-civilization scenarios), we’ll be able to practically watch it unfold right before our collective eyeballs — and ironically, for the vast-mass wad of US and world’s peoples, the coming (please select word choice: cataclysm, calamity, catastrophe, disaster, tragedy) will come as a complete shock.
Bad news-gathering of bad news makes great TV.
This particular pontification on current events and social metaphors came about after a call last night from an old journalism friend, a long-time photographer who’d worked with me years ago on my last newspaper gig down on California’s Central Coast (the Times-Press-Recorder) and wondered if I’d be interested in contributing to an online magazine he was helping put together up in Washington state.
He explained the new publication would highlight stories with a positive news perspective, as most news media carries only bad shit, but would instead focus on good coming out of bad.
Good idea, I guess, and told him sure, I’ll see what can be done.
After reminiscing on personal and professional folklore in and out of the newsroom, we hung up.
A good conversation, as he’s a good friend and a most-excellent photographer (view his stuff here), but there was also something curious in the sense of it — I was tired, so I didn’t ponder the mysterious import feeling within the confine of my ears.
Until this morning — the odd sense, the ring of the idea, positive news, hamstrung the brain.
Although I really couldn’t understand the concept, positive news, apparently there’s a growing market for nothing but — in an age of ugly, seek out the pretty.
Last March, a piece in Newsweek viewed this trend:
People not only wanted to watch good-news reports, they had lots of their own good news to share.
I’m even learning to spin bad news into optimistic gold all by myself.
Watch this: more people losing their jobs has actually led to a massive increase in stay-at-home parents, which is great for childhood development.
Bam.
There’s already a Good News Network, with stories on things like jeans giant Levi Strauss to include A Care Tag for Our Planet on its products, and even a Good News on This Day in History segment (an example: today in 1797, Andre-Jacques Garnerin made the first recorded parachute jump over Paris, France).
Alas, however, good news after 30 days will be hidden behind a subscription firewall.
In reality, there is/are no good news anywhere, layered down, or on top, or spun out of whole cloth — an extreme-depressing proposition, I admit.
These ‘green shoots‘ of optimism are just a cultural perception of the old “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades” view of good vs bad.
Not many feel-good stories came out of the Great Depression era, hence, the 1930s were alive with screwball, romantic movie comedies, and a big song of the time: ‘We’re in the Money.”
In bad times, even lottery ticket sales increase — good news come from dreams.
And the factuality coming at humanity, though, is embodied within the worst form of dreaming — a nightmare.
One aspect of the Internet is speed, how quickly events can be recorded, disseminated and digested across the globe — those damn, freakin’ cellphone cams!
Iran’s presidential election last summer is a pure, prime example.
Online allows anyone, anywhere at anytime to become a reporter, or more like it, a chronicler of events, places and things.
Videos of just about every human situation has cropped up online to be viewed potentially near-instantly by billions of people, which makes the point — way, way-too-much information is thrown at the brain nowadays, and it’s not just via the Internet — witness all that horrifying shit bill-boarded off racked magazines on grocery-store check-out lines; we’re trapped there, forced to read glaring headlines on all kinds of cultural-personality-obsessed, dumb-fuck stories.
(Read a loony essay I wrote last year on media here).
Mixed in with all uploading/downloading/viewing/listening is the professional media — newspapers, TV, magazines, whatnot.
These guys have morphed into something real ugly in the last three decades — the national people, especially all the TV types, pursue nearly-wholly other interests than real journalism (Katherine Graham would indeed let her tit (be) caught in a big fat wringer if she could see her Washington Post as it is today) and the real loser is the US peoples.
Just one glaringly-sad example — the New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning story on the Pentagon’s TV propaganda military-analyst ploy in the run-up to the Iraq invasion — few Americans know anything about that story as it was blacked out by ALL the TV networks (as they were co-conspirators in the scam) except one (PBS).
The continuing loss of anything-near what’s been called accountability journalism is similar to all those failed banks from last year recently giving the same asshole employees huge bonuses — the fat get fatter.
While the national media parades around full of itself, making much of balloon boy and David Letterman’s peccadilloes, the two biggest stories facing the planet are way under-reported – peak oil and climate change, especially the latter, as its influence might be worse than the former, and its arrival quicker.
Although the subjects have been discussed/debated in public, the actual consequences of what’s really occurring and the likely worse-case scenarios approaching have been viewed as fringe or nutcase, and no full-blown balloon-boy-like examinations by the media.
Even with a major climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, only weeks away.
The BBC reports nothing of substance will emerge from Denmark, despite the obvious:
Nevertheless, what is clear from the interview is that what is agreed at Copenhagen is likely to fall so far short of original expectations.
Let’s not forget what is at stake here.
The Copenhagen conference is reckoned by many to be pretty much the last chance the world has to begin to cut greenhouse gas emissions before catastrophic climate change becomes inevitable.
And to make a matters worse, Sen. James Inhofe, a wingnut GOPer from Oklahoma, will supposedly visit the Copenhagen meeting with a “a truth squad of three” to undermine any kind of global-warming agreement in an original-classic case of hauling-off and striking himself along with everybody on the planet directly in the nuts.
Inhofe and others of his ilk will in the near future most-likely be viewed as more than just loudmouth dumb-asses, but near criminals.
Despite the evidence, a Pew Research poll released today reports only 57 percent of US peoples in the survey think there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades. In April 2008, 71% said there was solid evidence of rising global temperatures.
And this: fewer also see global warming as a very serious problem — 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.
The best sites for info: The Oil Drum and Climate Progress.
Coupled with the environment and fuel is capitalism/economics.
And there ain’t nothin’ purty there either.
Might be hard to cobble together a positive news perspective in today’s money woes — except for the mentioned Wall Street assholes — but there are ‘good’ stories there.
I could part of a ‘good’ economic story.
In my day-job/offline profession as a liquor-store clerk, there’s not really a recession, though, business is not booming, sales have maintained a strong course the past two years.
Whiskey is a good tax revenue and when times are bad, people will still smoke and drink, but are frugal about what they inhale — according to Gallup last June, The percentage of U.S. adults who consume alcohol is fairly steady at 64%, and there has been little change in self-reported drinking volume.
Now it’s more bang for the buck: Whiskey, of all the spirits, is making a bit of a comeback, the council said, and showed good performance in a slow market. Premium rum, super premium tequila and premium vodka also grew.
Mine is just one story in the Naked City.
The rest are experiencing a financial nightmare without an apparent end.
As the US Senate haggles over extending unemployment benefits, 7,000 US unemployed a day loose that small income — US employment at 9.8 percent and California at 12 — and one has the fixings for a shitload of bad stories with new jobless claims higher than expected.
Although there’s some indication an economic recovery is on the way, banks are still biting at the gold-plated chafe, so says Elizabeth Warren, TARP’s oversee chair: “You really begin to wonder what it’s going to take to get the attention of the people in charge of these very large corporations…”
Never-ending story with a bad ending.
Here’s a good one.
From SatireWire:
Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.
…
Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the chief executives were first spotted last night along the Rio Grande River near Quemado, where they bought each of the town’s 320 residents by borrowing against pension fund gains.
…
Law enforcement officials and disgruntled shareholders riding posse were noticeably frustrated.
“First of all, they’re very hard to find because they always stand behind their numbers, and the numbers keep shifting,” said posse spokesman Dean Levitt. “And every time we yell ‘Stop in the name of the shareholders!’, they refer us to investor relations. I’ve been on the phone all damn morning.”
Maybe, it’s the end of the world as we know it, but I feel like smiling — for just a few minutes, at least until the next good story.
‘Managed’ News
Filed Under Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
Journalists covering the White House, especially those from TV, sometimes tend to think of themselves as above the crowd, as better than the average asshole reporter digging for stories down in the trenches.
As Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for the Dubai-based satellite TV network MBC, told Think Progress last month: I found that I think they really think that if you make it to cover the White House then you must be bigger than God, therefore, you know, you have to be treated as such.
Except for one gal, the dean (or headmistress) of the WH press corp: Helen Thomas.
(Illustration found here).
Thomas has been covering WH antics for nearly 50 years, starting with JFK (in the photo above) and still running strong into a new millennium with President Barack Obama (photo below).
She still maintains that pure journalism appeal: Those in power hate her.
During his WH press conferences, George Jr. didn’t call on Thomas for three years!
In May 2006, he wished he’d made it four years.
An exchange on the Iraqi War:
Thomas: They didn’t do anything to you or to our country.
Bush: Look — excuse me for a second, please. Excuse me for a second. They did. The Taliban provided safe haven for al-Qaeda. That’s where al-Qaeda trained –
Thomas: I’m talking about Iraq –
Bush: Helen, excuse me. That’s where — Afghanistan provided safe haven for al-Qaeda. That’s where they trained. That’s where they plotted. That’s where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans.
(Illustration found here).
Yesterday, Time magazine held a Q&A with Thomas on the publication of her newest book, Listen Up Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do, and she was still up-front and right-on:
How is Obama’s approach to the press?
Everybody in the White House tries to manage us. There’s always the spin. When Kennedy came in, which was the first year I started covering the White House, there was something called “managed news.” And through the years it has been perfected to an art.
…
Not more than any other President. Nobody likes criticism, and nobody likes to feel attacked, of course. But I think it behooves all Administrations to tell the truth as much as they can, to bring the people with them. You cannot have a democracy without informed people. It shouldn’t be a shock when the public finally learns things.
How’s the WH on secrecy?
All of them are secretive. All of them. But I think we got a lot more out of President Kennedy and especially President [Lyndon] Johnson. He would summon us — the entire press corps — to the South Lawn and we’d stroll around the grounds with him. We’d call them the Bataan Death Marches because the women wore really high heels with pointed toes, and we would be falling all over each other. But we’d take these walks, and he would really let his hair down. We’d get real insight into how much he was suffering with Vietnam. He’d tell us a lot of things, then he would say it was all off the record. But we knew that he wanted us to write it without attribution.
And bloggers?
Everyone with a laptop thinks they’re a journalist. Everyone with a cell phone thinks they’re a photographer. So our profession is sidelined in a way. There’s no turning back. It’s frightening because you can ruin lives and reputations willy-nilly without realizing it. No editors. No standards. No ethics. We’re at the crossroads. So many newspapers that are so valuable are going down the drain. It’s a crisis.
…
I’m praying. I’m praying that we’ll still have newspapers. That’s where you get in-depth information. You can’t get it from headline news or these very brief things on TV or on blogs. They don’t explain anything.
And advice for future presidents?
It would be, Do the right thing. There’s no other place to go.
Continue hanging, Helen, we’d all better off if you did.
Whoa!
Filed Under Media, Musings, Politics | Leave a Comment
Friday morning shocker: President Obama has has won the Nobel Peace Prize — “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
And the Nobel Committee added: “He has created a new international climate.”
(Illustration found here).
This will indeed piss-way-off the GOP and all wingnuts as the award comes much, much early in Obama’s tenure in power — an unprecedented event.
As one reader at Talking Points Memo pointed out this morning: Isn’t it a little soon for this? Maybe after he brokers an Israeli-Palestinian agreement or something like that.
It sounds like the, ‘boy is the world relieved you guys didn’t choose McCain’ award.
GOP chairman Michael Steele responded: “The real question Americans are asking is, What has President Obama actually accomplished?”… and it’s “unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights.” And the president won’t be…“receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”
Whether Obama deserves the award is not the real excitement — the horror stories now will pour forth from the conservative aisle and it will be much fun.
Fragments from a place far, far away and long, long ago
Filed Under Media, Musings, Politics | Leave a Comment
Announced quietly last week was the death of Jody Powell, 65, press secretary to Jimmy Carter, ‘A leader for a change,’ whose presidency inadvertently was the last apparently in Americana’s more sane and serene view of itself as an entity of ideal.
On the cover of the Rolling Stone (left), at the height of glory in May 1977, Powell is teamed with Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff — Powell has the tie and Ham has the hambones — in an enthusiastic stance of a White House still on a political honeymoon with the media and the US peoples.
After a series of ugly events, however, “voters strongly rejected Jimmy Carter’s honest but gloomy outlook in favor of Ronald Reagan’s telegenic optimism…” Thus, the end began.
(Illustration found here).
I’d started this post Sept. 14, the day Jody Powell died (of a heart attack reportedly), but got sidetracked — personal life before writing/blogging, most likely.
A flash memory a few days ago to some song lyrics from a Powell era group, America, and “Sister Golden Hair” (1975) and its opening words: “Well I tried to make it Sunday, but I got so damn depressed. That I set my sights on Monday and I got myself undressed…” released a sad sense of time and growing old and a lot of other shit that only somewhat-advanced age can reveal.
Coming upon my 61st birthday in November, some health issues has caused me to reconsider how I live, the foods I eat, how many cigarettes I can smoke in a 24-hour period, and even worse, how my beloved morning coffee has got to go — the old flesh and blood breaking way down — but the human-body problems I’ve experienced are more irritating and frustrating than anything else.
In reality, health-care is not of this world.
And along with this growing great-hatred for anything to do with the word, ‘bowels,’ there’s another even more compelling reason to become “so damn depressed:” This bizarre emptiness and quiet, and no exasperation feelings.
After raising five children as a single parent, now I’m alone — the kids are all off and fending for themselves, more-or-less, and although I’ve always considered myself a loner-type personality, the last three months have been different with a touch of strange.
A friend emailed a similar difference — also a recent “empty nester,” she thought not having anyone to cook for was fairly sad (sadly, I agree), which might explain my current dumb-ass diet.
Cast as mother/daddy, I lived strange, which I am originally.
And now I feel stranger still (one daughter in particular would respond that would be a lot of strange) and the combination of health and mental issues coming together at the same time led to not wanting to write — which has rarely struck me in 45 years.
Couple that shit with the extreme-ugly pessimistic, but the hard-cold reality of today’s current events: Makes a body sad.
A personal/professional news-addict all of my adult life (as a writer, I consciously began to understand literary scribblings at about age 14 and later worked in actual newsrooms for many years), the current span of people, places and things spread across the news cycle 24/7 are hugely profound — maybe not for eons, or maybe even not never, has the awful scheme of things taken such a planetary, global-like quality, while eventually will explode like an IED (unexpectedly and violently) into everyone’s existence.
(Illustration found here).
Clueless are most of western civilization, especially among the fatted, arrogant Americans.
In the US, as people go about daily lives, eating, sleeping, working, performing mundane tasks like “you help your landlady carry out her garbage,” they’re unaware of the horrors coming.
All of humanity faces two big obstacles not-too-far down the road — global warming and peak oil — I may/may not witness the impact of these two events, but my children sure will, and their children.
In many parts of the world, this hard-cold reality has already IEDed them — in eastern Africa (Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Djibouti) a savage drought has effected/affected 19 million people, and with no food: “My month-old baby boy was taken by hyaenas two weeks ago — somebody found his body 10 miles away from here a few days later,” Habiba Malim, 49, a former nomad, told Christian Aid researchers during a recent visit.
And what about the Mars-appearing Sydney, Australia?
What’s happening down under is a ‘horrific glimpse‘ into a not-so-pretty future.
And peak oil?
From Energy Bulletin in 2007:
Peak oil presents a profound challenge; one completely at odds with demand based forecasts of growth in energy consumption.
The poor standard of fundamental information relating to reserves and future production makes it easy to deny or obfuscate the likelihood of a near-term peak in global oil production.
The low level of new discoveries limits the extent to which the industry can continue delivering such a high level of new capacity.
Meanwhile, there is a real danger that decline rates in mature regions will continue to increase.
The balance between these two may tip in favor of depletion sooner than expected.
As Hirsch et al12 have noted, preparing for peak oil requires two decades of intensive, government coordinated effort. Peak oil critics propose that we take a large risk by delaying preparation.
The analysis presented here signals that making changes now would be far more prudent.
Duh!
And if one had been paying attention, most predictive-research has changed near-dramatically in just the past two years – recent studies on various climate-change and energy issues seem to indicate the situation appears worse than predicted even a year earlier.
Nowadays, this ain’t counting the weird-ass economy, two bad, horribly-run wars, and a Republican Party full of liars, buffoons and deniers — a major problem for the US is the conservative right wing, the so-aptly-called “wingnuttery.”
All enough to get one truly “so damn depressed” to stop.
Yet one must see what is ahead.
Another biggie-problem, which is most-likely tied into global warming and peak oil — getting the grub.
Last week, while sadly surfing the sad news online, I came across a discussion of food distribution at The Oil Drum, one of the better informational, factual sites, and was entitled The Thermodynamics of Local Foods.
The bottom line:
…that only a predominantly local food system will ever be sustainable.
What I mean by sustainable is the ability to endure.
Quite simply and irrefutably I conclude that the current globalized food system is a flash in the frying pan because it doesn’t respect the first law of thermodynamics.
Whatever other argument you might want to make against the global and for the local (and several legitimate ones come to mind) this fatal flaw is insurmountable.
No quibbles, qualification or value judgments need to get in the way of this basic fact.
So, some bad shit coming, huh?
Clueless: How many US peoples understand how food does not originate from Safe-Way?
There’s so much news out there it’s near-remarkable (or has it always been this way, just now there’s more options to get that news out?) and I sit in front of my laptop and watch an age draw to a dramatic conclusion — near-before my very eyes — oh, the vicious cycle of technology!
Indeed, I’m writing/blogging again.
Anyway, back to the late Jody Powell.
(Illustration found here).
In the fall of 1975, a fellow journalist and friend at the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama (where I was then the paper’s police reporter), told me with forceful enthusiasm the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, would be the next president — I didn’t pay a dab of attention, as then Carter didn’t mean shit to me, and the friend, though a nice guy, was kind of a kook.
Well…
A year later, in the Advertiser’s AP wire-room (this was 1976, remember?), my friend and I watched the hammering type proclaim Carter president, beating Gerald Ford and capping a wild political year, and in retrospect, probably the last rational US election.
And Powell was Carter’s for-real, right-hand guy.
From Time magazine in August, 1976:
Except for Campaign Manager Hamilton Jordan, none of the candidate’s 250 full-time staff members has served longer or is paid more ($22,000) than sandy-haired, chain-smoking Powell, 32.
He is also closer to the candidate than even Jordan.
“Jody probably knows me better than anyone except my wife,” Carter has said.
If the candidate wins in November, Powell will probably become one of the more powerful presidential press secretaries in decades.
And life was swell for a couple of years into Carter’s tenure in office.
In the time of the Rolling Stone cover, shown above, life had appeared to soften — the Vietnam war, Watergate, the popular turmoil of the 1960s and early ’70s had left the political/optimism air in the US a bit cleaner, as if a lot of debris had been swept away by all those events.
The US had straightened itself out, would never, ever get into another Vietnam-like situation and the future looked so bright a great many people were forced to wear shades.
However, Carter and his boys — Ham and Jody — knew exactly how to run a campaign, but not a government.
Not only were they inept at handling Congress — even pissing off Ted Kennedy on health care — they got slammed by the economy, a gasoline shortage, Three-Mile Island, among a litany of other shit, and much-of course, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Read a good overview of Carter’s presidency here.
The 1970s in this current age are most-likely similar to what the 1950s were to those in the 1970s — American Graffiti, “Happy Days,” etc. — but nowadays the nostalgia for that seemingly-so-long-ago decade is more for the supposedly lucidity of the time than anything else.
Alexander Cockburn recently posted an excellent look at how the rise of gossip in the 1970s spawned our modern tabloid-cultural society and proclaimed the ’70s “the last sane decade in American political life.”
And Jimmy Carter just a signpost: “It seemed America was tottering into the warm sunlight of sanity. It was Ronald Reagan who truly credentialed nutdom, setting the national thermostat at max degrees F for fantasy.”
And one thing about time: You can think back, but you can’t call back.
Tortured Reading
Filed Under Media, Musings, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
“They stuff people’s heads down the toilet the first day at Stonewall,” he told Harry.
“Want to come upstairs and practice?”
“No, thanks,” said Harry.
“The poor toilet’s never had anything as horrible as your head down it — it might be sick.”
– Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
According to Juan Cole’s most-essential site, Informed Comment, the library at the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison, still with 229 inmates, has 13,500 books in it.
And what are the prisoners favorite book picks?
1. The ‘Harry Potter’ novels
2. Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’
3. Barack Obama’s ‘Dreams from my Father.’
No reason was given for these choices, which are followed in popularity by Muslim religious volumes.
Do they think Guantanamo is a little like Hogwarts Academy and that their torturers were Lord Voldemort?
Do they know that Miguel Cervantes fought at the second Battle of Lepanto in 1571 in which the Holy League defeated the Ottoman empire at sea, and that later on his ship was captured by the Algerians and he spent 5 years imprisoned and enslaved in Algiers before being ransomed — thus reversing an element in their own biographies?
They are said to be fascinated that the new president of the United States has African and Muslim roots.
Although the prisoners receive newspapers, all violent incidents are torn out of them, so they know nothing of the Huthi revolt in Yemen, e.g.
I’m still thinking about the idea of John Yoo as Voldemort.
Can the world get any nutcase nuttier?
keep looking »