The US is getting the shaft in war making.
Two invasions and two bloody, nasty quagmires.

Rare is the Maureen Dowd column that is more than pancake face powder, or a shoe-horned turn at national politics, and rare still is a piece with insight into the US’ two beleaguered faraway wars.
In her column this morning, Dowd touches upon the deathly maze of Afghanistan and how the US is up against some terrible and experienced fighters.
The money graph:

We invaded two countries, and allied with a third — all renowned as masters at double-dealing.
And, now lured into their mazes, we still don’t have the foggiest idea, shrouded in the fog of wars, how these cultures work.
Before we went into Iraq and Afghanistan, both places were famous for warrior cultures. And, indeed, their insurgents are world class.

Along with the IEDs, the savage car bombs and a wicked, back-stabbing insurgency, is a shitload of cruel corruption, a corruption so deep, the the majority of Afghans would take the Taliban over the supposedly
legitimate government in Kabul.
Indeed, the culture of corruption is a way of life, according to some of those 92,000 documents leaked Sunday by the whistleblower website, WikiLeaks.

Why is the US there?
There have been 1,207 US military deaths in Afghanistan and to fuel the conflict there requires gasoline at $85 a gallon — enough said.
The US needs to do a quick shit out of dodge, eagle pull before the situation gets worse.

Massive toxic leaks into the environment can be horrible, whether it be the Gulf of Mexico or a horrible, incompetent-run war in Afghanistan.
On Sunday, WikiLeaks (my laptop won’t load the group’s website) released a shitload of formerly-classified documents on the  Afghan conflict, and the result ain’t pretty.
From the the New York Times:

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

The documents will most-likely raise a stink, but the war will also most-likely continue.
In Afghanistan (as in Iraq), there is no winning for losing.

Despite the Obama White House blubbering about how the leaks “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk,” US Sen John Kerry retorted: “However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

And also on Sunday:

Meanwhile, Nato says it is investigating reports that as many as 45 civilians died in an air strike in Helmand province on Friday.
Although an initial Nato investigation found no evidence, a BBC journalist visiting Regey village spoke to several people who said they had witnessed the incident.

Try and cap this sonofabitch…

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.

“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.

In the past few years, a lot of people and organizations who should have been the standard bearers for news gathering and reporting have dropped the ball big time — Journalism sucks nowadays.

Despite all kinds of media available, the exciting journalistic genre of “investigative reporting” has nearly disappeared off the mainstream radar.

Except sadly at Comedy Central.

(Illustration found here).

Jon Stewart and the The Daily Show has been all over the media this past week as a tell-tale segment of who/why/how the financial meltdown has been covered by the press, especially at CNBC, and especially that nutcase, weirdo Jim Cramer ‘Mad Money’ guy.

Read a good background note to the entire process here.

So Thursday night, Cramer visited Stewart’s show and was beat to a pulp.

The video was all over the media yesterday morning.

See clips here and here and here.

The Daily Show site has the segment posted.

Stewart said he and Cramer are both snake-oil salesman, only “The Daily Show” is labeled as such.

He claimed CNBC shirked its journalistic duty by believing corporate lies, rather than being an investigative “powerful tool of illumination.”

And he alleged CNBC was ultimately in bed with the businesses it covered — that regular people’s stocks and 401Ks were “capitalizing your adventure.”

And Cramer is indeed a financial turd.

Two years ago:

On the truth: “What’s important when you are in that hedge fund mode is to not be doing anything that is remotely truthful, because the truth is so against your view — it is important to create a new truth to develop a fiction,” Cramer advises. “You can’t take any chances.”

The real, core problem is the media, which has morphed the last three decades into a kind of trade-animal with a nose ring, tethered to corporate giants and is really no longer interested in the public good.

This attitude has maybe been reflected by a major arm of media itself becoming news — newspapers are dying if not already dead.

The demise of the old-fashioned newsprint journalist, however, is really a self-inflicted fatal wound.
Ad revenues reflect what’s been happening with the rapid rise of the Internet and have been slipping away for years:

“Newspapers historically have not been on the leading edge of anything.

They tend to react to things that happen to them rather than to look ahead and figure out where they are vulnerable and try to figure out something that will prevent it,” said John Morton, president of Morton Research Inc., a media research company.

To staunch the loss of readers and advertisers, newspapers have put much of their content on the Web. But the transition hasn’t been seamless or quick. Some papers, notably The New York Times, tried to charge fees to access their sites only to pull the plug when the experiment failed. Others dithered while online news aggregators such as Google and CraigsList, the free classified ad site, became part of the landscape.

“Papers are doing a lot of good things on their Web sites now. The only problem is they started 10 years too late,” Morton said.

And journalists are after the big story, the quick, dramatic sound byte and are leaving real reporting behind.
The three biggest news stories of the last two decades — the summer prior to Sept. 11, 2001; the run-up to the Iraqi invasion; and the Wall Street meltdown — were a sham to the mainstream media, a shame to any kind of journalism even in its most basic tenets.

Helen Thomas, who has covered the White House since Kennedy, told a recent panel discussion hosted by Media Matters for America that the press corp surrendered it’s most vital weapon, “skepticism,” as the Bush White House thundered against Iraq: “Questions? There were no questions. Complicit…the press played ball, after 9/11, the press rolled over and played dead…”

When I graduated from the University of Florida’s J-school in 1974, the US press was at it’s zenith.

Watergate, Bernstein and Woodward — It was a heady time, and it also made for a kind of esprit de corps, a pride in a cigarette smoke-filled, IBM-typewriter punching newsroom where all of us felt we were in a profession that could make a difference.

The newsroom was home, the wacked, crazy people who populated it, from the copy desk to the beat reporters, my kind of folks.

I was out of the trade for nearly 20 years, but when I returned to a newsroom in the late ’90s, what a shock — no longer the pride of profession, but a deep, craven desire for a stronger bottom line, newspapers were now owned by giant media conglomerates who cut and nipped until local news and investigative reporting were all gone — just fluff pieces to keep advertisers happy.

Mainstream journalism, especially TV news, is not worth a shit.

If a person in the US is getting his/her news from TV — forget it.

One major example: the New York Times Pentagon pundit expose, a long, detailed piece how the DOD used retired military officers to push the Iraqi war effort — a major news event last year which NEVER made it to broadcast, or cable TV — except a small segment on PBS.

A very large portion of the US public has no idea how they were manipulated into giving the Iraqi war its full support.

Pure shame.

And the shame continues.

NBC — which claims to handle MSNBC and CNBC — has apparently clipped the clips on Friday of Cramer getting nailed on Stewart’s show.

MSNBC and CNBC are sister networks, and earlier in the day, Mediabistro had reported, “A TVNewser tipster tells us MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today.”
…
According to Mediabistro, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had initially alerted fans of his show that Cramer would be putting in an exclusive appearance on Friday’s Morning Joe — but he was a no-show. NBC’s Today Show’s had also promised coverage of the encounter, which similarly failed to materialize.

And even Cramer acted the closed-mouth, teasing asshole.

On his show Friday, he wink-winked at the audience:

Cramer started promisingly enough.

“Before we get started, I want to say something about what happened yesterday,” he began soberly. “A lot of people are talking about what happened. … Although I was clearly outside of my safety zone, I have the utmost respect for this person, for the work that they do, no matter how uncomfortable it was to be on. So I want you to take a look at this clip from yesterday of Cramer vs. Stewart!”

At that point, it was revealed that the come-on had been nothing but a tease, as the clip turned out to show Cramer helping Martha Stewart — on whose program he had appeared earlier on Thursday — prepare what appeared to be a banana cream pie.

“You’re doing a very good job,” Martha said encouragingly.

As the clip ended, Cramer sneered, “Now back to business as usual.”

He never did mention Jon Stewart at all.

Yes, you prick bastard.

Journalism is back to business as usual — a fucking game.

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show is informative, and hilarious.

Mainstream news is neither.

A problem criminally shameful.