Stock Market Does Crummily; Business News Thoughts

The American stock markets had a very bad day on Tuesday. There are two main American stock markets, the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) and the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers). Each of them lost more than three percent of their value yesterday. That may not sound like a lot, but a quick Google search will net a lot of pictures of white guys clutching their heads, so it's at least enough to make white guys who are probably insufferable megalomaniacal pricks clutch their heads.













(Left: Asian Investors clutch their heads, presumably in response to the Asian Market's poor performance. But really, for all we know this guy could have just fucked up a Sudoku or something. I stole this image from CNN, who took it from the Associated Press.)

(Right: A presumably Asian guy puts his head down in presumable despair at the performance of the stock market. Of course, he could be at a race-track, and could be drunk and sleepy or have just lost his rent money. There wasn't a caption at CNN, from where I took this image. It was provided in the context of this story, though, so we're supposed to assume that he's unhappy because the stock market isn't doing well.)

I don't like economic news any more than you. Wait. That might not be true. I might have marginally more tolerance for economic news than you do, but I still don't think that it's a lot of fun to read. There are a lot of stereotypes of businessmen as people who are basically soulless and uninteresting, and those stereotypes aren't always true. But it's undeniable that they describe something about the lower-quality businessmen who have no vision, who constitute a group of people that most of us are likely to come into contact with on the street. Businessmen don't care about anything but money. Businessmen don't read interesting books. The only books businessmen read are books about making your dick bigger, with titles like "The 48 Laws of Power" and "Sun Tzu was a Sissy," a book whose title makes me think that the author, Stanley Bing, was a cunted-out bitch-ass pussy. On the other hand, Eazy E once "saw a sissy-ass punk" before he had to go in his trunk, so maybe it's not so ignominious to use the word "sissy" in the title of your book. Anyway, there are other criticisms of businessmen. Most of them don't know how to dress and they look like they bought their suit off a rack. Since they have devoted their lives to the acquisition of money and not to the cultivation of taste, they have no idea how to tastefully dispose of it once they have a lot of it. Without deriving any benefit from it since they are not in the top two percent of wealth holders, many of them support the destruction of the estate tax, which is one of the factors which threaten to turn America into mid-18th century pre-Revolutionary France and thereafter a smoking hole of something like Morlocks versus Eloi. So. Anyway. There are a lot of bad things about businessmen.

But I've noticed something about business news. It's the only news on television which is reported in jargon. And jargon is only used when people want to sound smart or when they have something to hide. I doubt that business people have too much of an interest in sounding smart by talking about the rise or fall of the price of various equities, so that means that they're probably talking about something that they don't want everyone to know about. That means something. That means that business news is used for actual communication. This distinguishes business news from most other news, because business news is content-rich. Most political news is not content-rich, for a variety of reasons. Businesses own the news outlets, and the owners of the businesses who own the news outlets are heavily invested in governments which both do illegal things and also have the power to ruin the lives of the owners of the businesses which in turn own the news outlets. So political news is, by design, virtually content-free. No one wants to offend a group of investors, who also have the power to use the IRS, NSA, CIA, and FBI against their businesses. Entertainment news distinguishes itself by being irrelevant to everyone powerful, which is why it's so prevalent on Fox News. Fox News is interested in making you as stupid as possible, which is why John Gibson has been covering the fight over the "rapidly decaying" body of do-nothing, gold-digging, sub-literate Anna Nicole Smith. It's also why Brittney Spears's newly bald head has been in the news so much recently. It signifies absolutely nothing, except that something's wrong with Brittney Spears. And I submit to you after extensive personal research that it is not news that a woman in her mid-twenties may be mentally ill.

In Dante's Inferno, the practitioners of various professions can no longer understand each other after the fall of the Tower of Babel. Jargon is introduced by the fall of the Tower of Babel. And when people are talking in jargon, it means either that they have nothing to say (as is the case in literary theory) or that they have a lot to say and are worried that members of the preterite group who are not invited to understand might understand what they're talking about. I think the latter case, that there is something going on here that we're not supposed to understand, is what's going on with financial news. (I also think that something like this is absolutely the case with Israeli foreign policy news, and increasingly with American news of both foreign and domestic kinds, and that was why I created this blog.)

I know that the condition of the stock market does not matter to most of my readership. They're too poor to own much stock, and so am I.

The poor performance of the stock market will have political effects, though. If the NYSE and NASDAQ continue to perform poorly, George W. Bush will be blamed for it. And even though his choice to send lots of people my age into a war zone without having the decency to provide them with proper armor, even though this decision doesn't turn everyone in the news media against him (because the war makes money for the owners of the news media, who also own a lot of businesses which get nice defense contracts whenever there's a war), a bad economy will cause the news media to chew on his ass.

If there is interest in financial news, I'll provide more of it.

COMING SOON: "What is an intifada?" (George Bush once called it an "infitada," which sounds like something that costs 99 cents at Taco Bell.)

Belief in God on the decline in the US

http://www.humaniststudies.org/enews/?id=281&article=0

This article says that fewer and fewer people believe in God in the United States.

Here are the percentages of people who believe in God in various Western European countries.

US 73%
Italy 62%
Spain 48%
Germany 41%
UK 35%
France 27%

Sec. of State says Pres. will not follow law

http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=211539486&p=zyy54xy9z

In this news story, Condoleeza Rice (Secretary of State) says that the President will not follow any law passed by Congress which restricts his ability to wage war. Usually explaining the news is complicated, but not when George W. Bush is in the news. His manichean worldview makes it really easy to write sentences like the one that follows this one. This is absolutely illegal. The message I get from this is: You may have to follow the laws, but the President doesn't. Why? Because he's the President.

This reminds me of being told "Because I said so," when I was a child. It was bad parenting, and it's bad policy.

Explosion in Afghanistan

A bomb exploded near an American base (Bagram military base) in Afghanistan. Dick Cheney was visiting the base at the time. Nineteen people were killed. Dick Cheney wasn't one of them. The CNN headline read "Cheney Unharmed in Afghanistan Blast". My first thought was "Damn. Cheney unharmed. Damn."

UPDATE: The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the explosion, and said that Dick Cheney was its target.

Serbian government not guilty

The International Court of Justice at The Hague in the Netherlands¹ has ruled that Serbia's government is not guilty of the genocide of Bosnians during the 1990s.

This entry is going to change a good deal in the next couple of days. I want to get a lot of information out as quickly as possible. It's getting pretty late right now, though, and I'm going to have to sleep soon.

The Bosnian War was fought between 1992 and 1995.
The combatants: too many factions to name just now, with too many shifting alliegances. Let's get familiar with these names: Bosnians, Serbs, Croats.
The death toll: between 100,000 and 110,000 dead. That's no World War II, but it's a good start!
Why this happened: Yugoslavia broke up about the same time as the USSR collapsed. The reasons for the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia are... not properly dealt with in a blog post. Too damn complicated. Anyway, Yugoslavia broke up. Then right-wing nationalist groups took control of local governments and began going to war with one another.

Today The Hague found that Serbia was responsible for providing weapons to the guys who committed the genocide, but that they were not responsible for the genocide itself. I will write more about this tomorrow, when I have had time to skim the judgment itself.

FOOTNOTE

1. The Netherlands is the European nation between France and Germany that's not Belgium... it's kind of legal to smoke marijuana there, and is the place that Vincent Vega had just come back from at the beginning of Pulp Fiction. They also have an excellent airport in Amsterdam, which I highly recommend.

Sunday Roundup

What's going on in the world?

Well, Richard Bruce Cheney wants to attack Iran^*, but Tony Blair and Vladmir Putin are opposed to that. And they're not the only ones! General Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, says that there is "zero chance" of a war with Iran. And a bunch of generals say that they will resign if they're told to attack Iran.
(Reference)
* By "RBC wants to attack Iran," I don't mean that Cheney wants to strap on and tie-down a pair of ironwood six-irons and march wheezing and fatly into Azadi Tower^$, six-guns blazing. I mean that Richard Bruce Cheney wants to sit idly by in America, continuing to use Jesus-mad jingoism-duped basically-no-better-than-Nazis-(pause)-that's-right-I-said-they're-
no-better-than-Nazis-and-after six-years-of-studying-Nazis-I-should-know Red Staters to make money for Halliburton and Exxon, even though I can't find the part of the Constitution that says that it's okay to use the U.S. Army for personal gain. You know, kind of like how he dodged the Vietnam draft five times, when he was still putting up telephone wire in Wyoming after he failed out of Yale. Richard Cheney... whew. I used to think that he was smart, and then at some point I realized that he was basically devoid of genuine curiosity. I remember noticing that in the middle of an interview I was watching. I realized that he had no interest in the arguments for or against foreign policy positions. He cared only about the allegiance of representatives to "the party," by which he means the Republican Party. Anyway, what a draft-dodging coward fuck^#.
$ Azadi Tower is a big famous structure in Tehran.
# I can't be extraordinarily rendited^& for that, can I?
& Extraordinary rendition is United Statesian for "kidnapping people from foreign countries without the consent of those countries' governments, which means doing it pretty much as secretly as possible".

Cheney's in Singapore right now. Remember that he has left the country to talk about trade with various people (not really, he's really trying to stay out of the country so that he doesn't get indicted when Scooter Libby is found guilty in the not-too-distant future). Something undisclosed went wrong with his plane, and it had to land in Singapore.

The Oscars are happening tonight in Los Angeles. This is one of those funny things that is contemptible and stupid, and a total waste of time and money and energy. But at the same time, it's easy to get upset that Martin Scorsese still doesn't have an Oscar. This guy directed Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed. When Taxi Driver was up for Best Picture, Rocky won. When Raging Bull was up for Best Picture, Ordinary People won. When Goodfellas was up for Best Picture, Dances With Wolves won. When Gangs of New York was up for best picture, Chicago won!!! (Gangs of New York is not a great movie, but for Christ's sake... Chicago???) When The Aviator was up for Best Picture, Million Dollar Baby won. And last year, fucking CRASH won. CRASH, which was made for idiots and which was fun to watch because it was so jammed full of stereotypes. Also, there was a gimmicky O. Henry twist in it! Yick. But so anyway the Oscars are going to be on tonight, and they may be over by the time you read this. If Scorsese doesn't win this year, he may join Alfred Hitchcock in being a guy who has just done a tremendous amount to produce things that make our lives better and who has nonetheless been ignored by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts. Anyway, it's weird to have such contempt for an organization and yet to still hope that they bestow one of their debased awards on someone (who, it must be admitted, is reportedly kind of a snooty, authoritarian asshole).

Well, the judge in the Anna Nicole Smith case cried while he was awarding custody of her "rapidly decaying" body to one among many of her boyfriends. Boo fucking hoo. As Chris Kelly said (you are directed to huffingtonpost.com to read his excellent posts, by the way), if God needed to call home one shrill, bitchy, famous for nothing, nonsense-babbling, do-nothing blonde, why couldn't he have taken Ann Coulter?

There was a car bombing in eastern Baghdad and about forty people were killed (no Americans, apparently), but nobody reports whether it was a Sunni-led bombing or a Shia-led bombing. What the fuck? CNN provides absolutely no explanation of this. So it's just an event, with no significance. Fuck you, CNN.

There's a guy in Florida who abducted a kid. The kid escaped by using a pin to cut through the tape that he had been bound in. CNN released this very creepy sketch of the guy who abducted him:








Happy nightmares.

Meaningless Democratic Infighting Bullshit

David Geffen, who is a music producer (and flamboyantly gay, or so I've read¹) said that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton lie very easily, and that alarms him. A Newsweek reporter asked one of Hillary Clinton's representatives about Geffen's comments, and was stonewalled.

David Geffen supports Barack Obama. So does George Clooney, who gave the maximum amount of money to Obama's campaign as soon as Obama announced. As of 2004, the maximum amount was $2000. I'm not sure if it's the same now. Anyway, Clooney said that Obama was as good a candidate as JFK when he was young or Bobby Kennedy just before he was murdered.

Let's engage in some heuristic ficiton and call the California-based supporters of Barack Obama "Hollywood". Hollywood seems to have cast its lot in with Barack Obama. It has therefore unavoidably abandoned the Clintons.

Choosing Clinton means rejecting Obama. Choosing Obama means rejecting Clinton. There isn't a third choice, unfortunately.

Get used to there not being a third choice. That's America. In fact, there might not even be a second choice.

Which is another way of saying that there may not be a choice at all.

I think Hollywood is overestimating the appeal of Barack Obama to middle America. I haven't lived there in a while, but the part of America in which I was born hates niggers. Even now. And they're just going to look at Barack Obama and say that he's a nigger, and not give it any more thought. Some people might think that's unfair, and might think that people like that have no business casting a vote, but there you go. That's the wisdom of the herd. By the way, your government is murdering and torturing people in your name!

I hear that Fox news has already started besmirching Obama's record. If you still watch Fox News as a source of news, you should go and buy a shotgun and shoot yourself in the head.

Anyway, this bullshit is meaningless, but shit like this is already influencing who the next leader of the world is going to be.

Your vote doesn't matter. You have absolutely no input into the way the world works, except insofar as you can choose what you want to eat (within your budget).

1. I'm just including this piece of information so you can get a better idea of David Geffen. I don't have anything against gayness.

Woman fucked by Ashcroft et. al. for doing job

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/18828res20050126.html

This woman, Sibel Edmonds, pointed out that people working in the intelligence world fucked up while translating documents that described the September 11 attacks before those attacks happened. But instead of being promoted, she got fired and John Ashcroft moved to classify this case ostensibly to protect government secrets but really to hide the incompetence of the FBI.

So remember her.

Request for Comments

This blog now has a readership which includes people I do not know personally. Hi, people. Solidarity, my brothers and sisters.

I want to know what is boring here and what is interesting. I won't promise that I'll change what I write about to suit your tastes, but I want to know what you read eagerly and what you distractedly skim.

Thanks.

Friday, Feb. 21, 2007 TWO

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/02/abughraib200702?currentPage=1
This article in Vanity Fair is about the friendship between a prisoner at Abu Ghraib named Yunis and a good American soldier named Benjamin Thompson.

It's important to read this article to remember that this war is just as much of a class war as any other part of life. The generals order the noncoms to torture people, and then escape punishment when the hammer comes down (the generals escape the punishment). These people are just as bad as Nazis.

It's important to remember that the people who are on the ground are not all Lynndie England-like racist, easily-led sub-literates.

You know, Vanity Fair is a pretty good magazine. It has a bunch of bullshit nonsense in it and pictures of tits and so on that might make it seem legitimacy-diminished, but it's pretty good. I'm going to subscribe to it.

Friday, February 21, 2007

1. Democrats fight Iraq War
2. News about Wii sales
3. Vatican uses Linux
4. William Vollman publishes "Poor People"

1. Democrats draft anti Iraq2 Legislation
   Democrats are drafting legislation this week to get combat troops out of Iraq by March 31, 2008. March 31, 2008 was the date suggested by the Iraq Study Group, whose suggestions George Bush completely ignored.
2. • Merrill Lynch says that 30% of U.S. households will have a Wii by 2011 (link). The Wii has already sold 5 million units.
   • Here's a story about old people playing the Wii in a retirement home. (link)
3. Judith Zoebelein, editorial director of the Holy See and the woman who develops the Vatican's web site (the Vatican is where the Pope lives), says: We don't know what OS God uses, but we use Linux". (link)
4. William Vollmann, encyclopedic and usually fun-to-read author born in 1959, will be releasing a book called "Poor People" on Feb. 27.

Tom Shales of Washington Post on Fox's Daily Show

Tom Shales, Style writer for The Washington Post, has written an article called "Fox News's '1/2 hour News Hour: Right Funny, in Spots". Get it? RIGHT Funny. Because Fox News is conservative, and "right" means "conservative"!

That's the intellectual high water-mark of Shales's confused ramble of an article. He finally concludes of the show that "It isn't terrible," but he makes a bunch of contradictory claims before that, and a few nonsensical ones too. For instance, he says that the "joke" they make about Barack Obama's approval rating among Democrats falling to 99.9% is funny. Which, as any idiot can see, is wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021602098.html

John McCain appraises Rumsfeld

In Bluffton, South Carolina, John McCain said that Donald Rumsfeld would go down in history as one of the worst Defense Secretaries in history on account of his mismanagement of Iraq2.

This is interesting because it shows that there's at least one big split in the Republican Party. McCain is the War Candidate for President in the 2008 election. But he doesn't like the way the war has been managed. Previously, the Bush administration tried to paint people who thought those sorts of things as cowards. They won't be able to do that with John McCain. He spent seven years in a tiger cage after being shot down in Vietnam.

It's also worth mentioning that it was in South Carolina, to the voters of South Carolina, that the Bush campaign falsely claimed during the 2000 Republican Primary that John McCain had a black baby. If you weren't following the news at that time, that claim might be kind of hard to swallow. So here's a link that corroborates it: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/03/21/the_anatomy_of_a_smear_campaign/

Israel For Luke - 1954 - the Lavon Affair

My computer's in the shop and I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Berlin, which cafe is full of people about whom I'd be willing to bet that they actively dislike the Israeli state and maybe even regard it as illegal. I made pretenses a while back that I would try to explain the history of Israel, and Luke asked me if I was going to back that up, or if that was a check that would cause my ass to overdraw on its checking account.

The truth is that metaphorically my ass's financial situation will be driven very near to being in the red by any attempt I might make to explain the history of Israel. Why? It's fucking complicated, that's why. And you can't trust anything anyone writes, because they're writing it from their own very biased perspective. It's like reading 20th century philosophers of the analytic tradition characterize the positions of the 20th century philosophers of the continental tradition, and vice-versa, and from that trying to get a clear idea of what the situation really is and what the fuck is going on other than a lot of football-team-fan-style hating. Needless to say, this requires a lot of reading. A fucking lot of reading. It's like trying to figure out what Fichte wrote in response to Kant when all you have in front of you is the six volume set of Schopenhauer's writings. You all know how frustrating that can be. Well, this is worse. Because it's just like a philosophical dispute, except that there are guns and missles and instead of people just saying stupid things and then everybody getting frustrated at how none of us will ever agree with the rest of us (as happens, as you know, after long philosophical dispute), lots of people get killed and raped and harassed at gunpoint and airplanes get blown up or flown into shit or missles get shot at places where people's mothers live and life turns to shit for a lot of people. Of course, none of them are anywhere near the United States, so there's a strong disincentive to care for probably everyone looking at this blog, I guess.

To give you an idea of how fucked up this Israeli shit is, get an eyeball full of this. It's 1954. Israel and the US are buddies. Egypt is really, really Israel- unfriendly. A guy named Gabal Abdal Nasser comes to power in Egypt through a miliatry coup, and is interested in being friends with the United States. The US finds friendship with Egypt desirable because Egypt is a member of the Non-Allied Movement (NAM). The NAM is a group of countries neutral in the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. It can be thought of as a middle ground between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. NATO is the street gang of US-affiliated countries dedicated to the destruction of the Soviet Union. The Warsaw Pact is the street gang of USSR-affiliated countries dedicated to the destruction of the United States. So if you're the US or the USSR, getting friendly with members of the NAM might not be a bad idea. It might be the first step towarding turning those countries out, and making them your bitch. So that's why the US wants to be friends with Egypt.

And suddenly American shit in Egypt starts blowing up. Some American libraries in Cario and Alexandria get blown up, and so does an MGM movie theater, and some other American businesses get blown up in Egypt.

Now, if you were just looking at the situation from a standpoint that was taking account of only America and Egypt, you might conclude that the America-unfriendly parts of Egyptian society were unhappy with the Egyptian government getting so buddy-buddy with America, the Great Satan (America will not be called the Great Satan publicly until November 5, 1979, and then it will be called "The Great Satan" ("Al-Shaytan Al-Akbar") not by an Egyptian, but by an Iranian named Ayatollah Khomeni. The term "Great Satan," however, was originated by a very prolific and famous writer named Sayyid Qutb, who was Egyptian, and of him we'll surely be hearing more later on this blog. My placing this term in the 1950s is an anachronistic usage of the term, but the idea informing it was certainly in the air at the time.). So you might conclude that Egyptians were unhappy that their government was getting so friendly with 'ol Al-Shaytan Al-Akbar and that they decided to blow up some shit, so that 'ol Al-Shaytan would rethink its move to cuddle up to the Egyptian government and Nasser might rethink his foreign policy, lest he fall prey in the form of bloody, organ-filled shrapnel or shrapnel-filled organs to people who are not happy about their country's having to suppress its metaphorical gag reflex in advance of taking the metaphorical penis of American foreign policy into its metaphorical throat. That might be a perfectly reasonably assumption, based on just taking Egypt and the US into account.

That might be a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it would be dead wrong. Why? Well, this is a dispute in which Adolf Hitler's old stump speech might seem reasonable. Why? Because the Jews were behind it.

Here's what happened. Fearing that the US's cuddling up to Egypt would mean less US support for Israel, certain Israeli governmental officials as well as Mossad agents (Mossad is the Israeli secret police) blew up American shit in Egypt, to make it look exactly like what we at first reasonably assumed had happened. Moshe Lavon, the Israeli Chief of Staff, was forced to resign as a result of this. This whole shitstorm is known as the Lavon Affair. Also, Shimon Peres, a future Prime Minister of Israel and Kadima party member, forged some documents so that he wouldn't be blamed for authorizing this blowing up of American shit in Egypt.

This is one event in a series of events, and I have only given the barest sketch of it here. This thing is called the Lavon Affair. It has lots of players, and their names are important because they will appear again and again, the way the names of draft-dodging members of Ford's cabinet resurface ominously thirty years later, to send the children of America off on foreign wars of conquest whose analogues those Ford-cabinet members slimed out of when it was their turn, as youngsters, to get shot at by people who were tired of imperalist shit because their families had lived through the 19th century and had had enough imperialist shit. It's like trying to trace the route and describe the color of one string in a fabric while the fabric is being loomed together and people keep throwing dye on it. And the fabric has missles and secret police and keeps telling lies, like that your vote matters.

Fox's Daily Show

Fox News is putting together a show to compete with the Daily Show. The Daily Show makes use of that snide "Yeah, Jon, like that will ever work" stuff all the time, and that's not very funny. But this little clip of the Fox show (which is called the half hour news hour, which is also not a funny name... if you want a funny name, how about "Nigger Doctor's Fat Boat"?) is really, really not funny. And they used canned laughter, which sounds exactly the same every time there's a laugh. This thing looks like something that was produced in college, or high school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjIfaMwIFxU

N.E.C. Commercial about cellphones and dreams

An N.E.C. commercial on CNN International just posed the question "What if our mobile phones could empower us beyond our dreams?" (emphasis more or less in the original)

The Death of Irony

Remember how everyone said that the age of irony was over after September 11, 2001?

Ah, fuck you, CNN

So, CNN International has just published some letters from viewers in response to the question "Do you think Iran has been supplying insurgents in Iraq with weapons?" There's a lot of shit that's wrong with this. First of all, what the fuck do we know? Are we weapons engineers and salespeople in fucking Tehran? We're fucking watching you for news (or at least, that's a lie that we tell ourselves), CNN. And they're fucking asking us to write to yourviews@cnn.com. So write to them and tell them that this is lazy shit. Here was the letter I sent:

yourviews@cnn.com
	date			Feb 12, 2007 5:12 PM
	subject			Is Iran Supplying the Shia in Iraq with Weapons?
	mailed-by			gmail.com

Are you people kidding? You're asking us if we think that Iran is
supplying arms to Shia fighters in Iraq? You're asking US? What are
we, weapons inspectors and salesmen in Tehran? We are viewers,
looking to you for information. We are not looking to you to hear the
dumb opinions of people who have no influence on policy.

Also, you people are disgracefully running this bullshit story about
John Howard calling out Barack Obama. Who gives a shit? How about
explaining the differences between the Sunni and the Shia, and showing
some maps of Iran, so that some of my ignorant friends will learn
about where other of my ignorant friends will be killed in the future,
and why they're going to be killed there?

J. Zachary Dover
Berlin, Germany

Furthermore, what the fuck are we supposed to do about this? The Shia are already fighting a war against America (and the Sunnis, too) in Iraq, and there's not shit that we can do to stop it. The President didn't even bother to dignify the Iraq Study Group report (which said that we should have a "phased withdrawal," or, in less euphemistic terms "get our troops out bit by bit"), and the people in the Iraq Study Group have a lot more influence on foreign policy than you or I.

Here's the thing: you don't live in a democracy. Your vote doesn't mean shit. Nobody cares what you think. Nobody cares if you spend your life in service to the country. Forget what your naive high school government teacher told you. Your vote doesn't mean shit, your representatives don't listen to you, and you are probably never going to have any influence on anything in the government unless you buy a gun and shoot someone who is in the government. And then you'll just be able to negatively influence the shot person's health and ability to hold office. You won't actually change policy. If you do shoot someone in the goverment, they'll just be replaced by some other unresponsive prick. It's like killing cops, that way. Killing cops is not endorsed or generally recommended by this blog.

John Howard vs. Barack Obama... are you fucking kidding me, CNN?

John Howard, hateful racist pro-Bush Prime Minister of Australia, said that al-Qaeda would be happy if Barack Obama wins the Presidential election. That's stupid, but what's more stupid is all the time that CNN is giving this, when we could be looking at maps of Iran and learning the names of places where our friends are going to die in the near future. I'm sorry that there's not a way for me to talk about how stupid the Howard-Obama story is without mentioning the story, because it embarasses me to mention it.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Iran

Senator John Cornyn (Junior Senator from Texas) is running the same denying bullshit about America's plans to attack Iran as the Republican party ran back while they were deceiving us into Iraq2.

War With Iran

Look, I can't explain this any better than The Guardian (British newspaper, Labor Party-biased) did here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2010086,00.html

Barack Obama Announces; who will be running

Barack Obama announced today that he will be running for President. Everyone in the world is going to point out that he once wrote a book in which he said that he did coke and weed and drank a lot. Also, he's half-black and his middle name is Hussein. If he wins, I'll take a lot of pleasure in watching lots of people choke.

Obama is a representative from Illinois, and a Democrat. He predicted that Iraq2 would be a disaster.

Obama will fight with Clinton, the junior Senator from New York and former First Lady, for the Democratic nomination.

It looks like Rudolph Guiliani, the mayor of New York whom we all hated so much for being a high school principal until September 11, 2001, when we all loved him for being the only competent person on television, will run for President as well. He is a Republican. Senator John McCain of Arizona, who holds the seat vacated by Barry Goldwater in 1987, and whose life as a stupendous bad-ass is well-documented by David Foster Wallace in the highly, highly recommended "Up Simba," which you can find in Consider the Lobster, will be fighting Guiliani for the Republican Nomination.

So it looks like it will be (Clinton v. Obama) v. (Guiliani v. McCain). This is, of course, subject to change.

Big Brother vs. Jihad

The world is full of unpleasant false dilemmas framed in policy. Since my country was hijacked by villains and Great Britain discreditably went along with them, we've known what the great false dilemma of our time would be: either you're with us or you're with the terrorists. The President himself, drawing on his considerable resources of wisdom and compassion, framed it that way on November 6, 2001. What this means is that the government would consider you a terrorist if you disagreed with the way that they fought the Terror War. Nevermind if you agreed that the goal of policing terror was a good one but you disagreed with the way that the government was going about it, as did Richard Clarke. Clarke wrote a book called Against All Enemies, which book as of 2004 was the best book written about the Terror War. That book is highly recommended.

In a former age, the false dilemma was between Communists and what today we would call unthinking Red Staters. Almost no one would think seriously about the notion of a socialist state, because anyone who did that was in peril of being labelled a Communist. We as a country didn't have a discussion about Marx or Lenin or Stalin, because it was contrary to the political religion of the time. It was sacred to detest Communism, and every red-blooded American did. It didn't really matter that very few of the people who detested it couldn't tell you what it was.

So here's the un-shocking, completely sensible third position that I advocate: I'm not with either party of those fuckers. I'm opposed to allowing religious nuts to fly airplanes into buildings and behead people, and and I'm opposed to indoctrinating people with God-belief until they feel that they have to murder dozens of people in order to please that God.
But I'm also opposed to big McWorld business with its low-quality, barely bar-clearing, business-school-mentality-driven service and policy of paying workers less than a living wage while allowing executives to abscond with dozens of millions of dollars of revenue in end-of-year bonuses.

I'm not the first person to say that Islam is stupid, but it is. It's not any more stupid than Christianity. It deals in principles that you're not allowed to question, and many of its followers want to kill people who question those principles. There's no reason to respect that kind of shit. The only things that make a thinking person take a respectful tone when talking of Islam is the fear of offending and the threat of violence. In this, Islam is the same as the foreign policy of America's very ill government.

Five British Muslims were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to kidnap and murder a British Muslim soldier.

Ibu Izzadeen was arrested on Feb. 8, 2007. He's a British Muslim polemicist who said on September 22, 2006 that Great Britain should become a Muslim state, and that it should achieve this through a non-democratic means. This is so contemptible and hateful that I feel embarrassed pointing out that it is contemptible and hateful. But people don't say often enough that such things are contemptible and hateful, so I'm saying it.

Quit believing in God, you fucking retards. That's the solution. Quit believing in the inviolable righteousness of your country, as well. Quit believing in stupid shit for which there is no evidence. Become adults and join the fucking world of people who can look each other in the eye. Why the fuck don't we mock people who don't deal in evidence?

God damn fucking religion.

Boston Stupidness Update

TBS had to pay $2 million to cover the cost of the police operations in Boston after the Mooninite Lite-Brites were discovered and over-reacted to. They also issued an apology, in conjunction with Interference, Inc. (the guys who put up the Lite-Brites and talked about hair). The mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, spoke like a bitter child, and proved himself to be a worse speaker than the President of the United States. He said that everyone who second-guessed the Boston municipal response should be ashamed. Which just shows that he responded to this like an idiot. And Massachusetts had seemed like such a smart state!

Anyway, the news outlets aren't letting go of this idea that this marketing stunt was intended to cause fear and terror. Which is also stupid, and cloying for attention and ratings at the hazard of the freedom of several people, and you know... shame on those news outlets.

Nonbinding anti-Iraq2 escalation Resolution

Republicans Who Fucked Troops now Filibuster to Prevent Democrats from Passing Meaningless anti-Iraq2 Resolution
The Republican Party, which sent the United States Army to war without body armor, is running out the clock so that the Senate can't vote to pass a resolution condemning President George Bush's plan to send 21,500 more soldiers to Iraq. The resolution doesn't mean anything really, except that the Senators disapprove of sending the extra 21,500 troops. And we already know that. It's a non-binding resolution, which means that no one has to change any of the plans to send troops to Iraq.

U.S. Budget

U.S. Budget Fucks Poor, Gives Money to Warmongers
The Proposed United States Budget for the year starting in October (I think it's October) is 3 trillion dollars ($3,000,000,000,000.00). Democrats in Congress say that this budget is too small and that the President didn't include the likely costs of our ongoing Iraq2 in the budget.

I spent two days making notes on the United States Budget, and I've been thinking about how to explain what I learned while I was doing it. It's a big mess, and I'm not sure how to do it. I ended up spending several hours reading about the difference between wealth and income (wealth is basically the total amount of assets you have, which assets have resale value; income is the amount of money you receive every year as a result of your work and income from investments). I spent a lot of time learning what the distribution of wealth in the United States is, and then, using census information, figuring out how much the tax rate would have to be in order for the top one percent of wealth-holding Americans to pay for the entire United States budget. I came away from all this reading with the impression that our economic shit is severely fucked up in America, and the President hates poor people. Though I didn't need any more evidence to come to the conclusion that the President hated poor people after he abandoned the mildewed ruins of New Orleans, I felt like I had received more evidence to that effect after I spent some time looking at the budget.

I have a little stack of papers in front of me, which papers are covered in scientific notation and scribbled attempts to present the budget in a comprehensible way. But I figure at this point it might be better to provide whatever readership I have with basic information, and hope that whatever I say here provides a good basis for searching the internet to learn more. Or going to the library to learn more. Or whatever. But I think I'm just going to formlessly dump what I learned here, and you will absorb whatever you can.

Here are some of the main points:

1. Medicare and Medicaid are going to be cut. Or at least they're not going to grow fast enough to keep up with inflation. Medicare takes care of poor people who can't afford health insurance (like me, when I live in America, since I can't do shit that anybody finds valuable), and Medicaid takes care of crazy or infirm people who need somewhere to sleep and someone to watch over them while they do it, and someone to make sure that they get their medicine. The fact that the President cut this shows that he doesn't care about sick people or poor people. Republicans will probably talk about how important it is for everybody to take care of themselves, and maybe they'll talk about how it robs people of dignity when the state helps them. But that's all a bunch of bullshit put forth by greedy fucks who owns most of the wealth in America. In 2001, the 1% of the American population controlled 33.4% of the wealth. America has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the Western Democracies. Our health care system is shit. I know lots of people in school who can't afford to go to the doctor when they get sick, and I'm a white guy from a middle-class family.
2. The Pentagon is getting $481 billion dollars. For the sake of ease, let's round that up to $500 billion dollars. That's a sixth of the budget. A trillion is a thousand billions. So you can see that five-hundred billion taken away from three trillion leaves only two-and-a-half billion dollars. It'll probably be pretty hard to know what this $481 billion dollars is used for, since the Pentagon does lots of secret shit and then tells us that they can't tell us what they did, because we wouldn't be safe anymore. So we have no way of knowing if that money was well-spent. Which is another way of saying that you may not be able to have a representative democracy and a big war machine in the same country.
3. $6 billion dollars is all that's going to be spent on escalating Iraq2. Lots of democrats say that this isn't enough. I don't know anything about how much it costs to run the army, so I can't pass an informed judgment on this.
   
4. $245 billion will be spent on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. About $400 billion have already been spent.
   

While I was reading about the budget, I discovered that Halliburton, the company of which Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney was CEO at the time of the 2000 campaign for President, has been doing business in Iran, which might be a violation of the Trading With the Enemy Act. A subsidiary of Halliburton Energy Services called Halliburton Products and Services Ltd. is in operation in Tehran. HPS (Halliburton Products and Services Ltd.) was incorporated in the Cayman islands in 1975. It offers products and services from other parts of Halliburton worldwide. The Cayman islands do not have the same business laws as the United States, and you can get away with a lot more tax evasion there than you can in America, and you can do a lot more illegal shit without being liable for it if you are incorporated in the Caymans. If you saw the Tom Cruise movie "The Firm," the Caymans were the islands where Bendini, Lambert, and Locke did their mob-money-washing shit. Richard Bruce Cheney's origin story is pretty interesting, and I'll get around to it one of these days.


Bird Flu In Nigeria
A woman died of bird flu in Nigeria. You might remember that CNN and Fox kept threatening us with the prospect of bird flu a couple of years ago. Since I'm not a virologist, I don't know if we should be scared of a Captain Trips-type situation. For the time being, I'm regarding the reports of Nigerian bird flu on CNN as a bid for my attention, and nothing more.

Dreamgirls is Bad
I didn't like Dreamgirls. I saw it last night, and I was bored for most of it. Bill Condon directed it. I've liked some of the other movies he directed. In particular, I liked "Kinsey". I didn't like Dreamgirls, though. The characters weren't characters, they were types, and they were bad types. The songs were forgettable except for the main theme, and I think that the only reason I can remember it is because it was played so frequently on television while I was in America over the Christmas holiday. Walter Chaw of filmfreak.net said "This year's Brokeback Mountain in a lot of ways, Dreamgirls is the movie over which it's impolite not to fawn." I agree with Walter Chaw. I didn't like this movie.

Hyundai CEO Embezzles, Gets 3 Years in Jail
I just noticed this story on CNN International, and am passing it on. "Embezzle" means "steal, but in the capacity of an administrator and to steal from a coffer of money that is not (usually) owned by one person".

Background on Israel

The nation of Israel was founded in 1947. This was not regarded by everyone as a good idea. The British had decided to withdraw from the Palestine Mandate, and that forms the most immediate background of the foundation of the nation of Israel. There was also the White Paper of 1939, which put restrictions on the number of immigrant Jews allowed in the Palestine Mandate. A lot of people were real pissed off about that, and for simplicity's sake let's say that it was Jews versus Brits for a while. Nazi concentration camp and extermination camp survivors made the harrowing journey southeast to the area around Jerusalem, only to be thrown in jail by the British, who were running the Palestinian Mandate. It was a bad scene. It's still a bad scene. None of this is going to make sense until a lot of context has been built. Just keep reading.

Things have funny names. Names hide what things are. Who'd guess that "ethnic cleansing" means "murdering thousands of people who are of the same race or ethnic group"? From the name, I'd have thought that "ethnic cleansing" was a Norman Rockwell painting of gypsies taking a bath. With a name like "Palestinian Mandate," you'd think you were dealing with a paper in a briefcase, or a speech that a politician made in front of a crowd. That's what a mandate is, right? No. That's not what this mandate is at all. The Palestinian Mandate was a geographic region. A mandate is created (well, was created) by the League of Nations. The League of Nations doesn't exist anymore. There are three kinds of mandates: Class A mandates, Class B mandates, and Class C mandates. But none of that shit is really important just now. The important thing to remember is that words are confusing, and can be used to referred to things that they don't seem at first to refer to. The point is, don't assume that you know shit about shit.

This is more complicated than the plot of The Godfather, Part II. Just keep reading. Fuck it, if it doesn't make sense. Maybe it will.

We're just going to go through the war of independence. The Arab-Israeli war. Different sides called it by different names. To the Jews, this war was "the war of independence" or "the war of liberation". To the Arabs, this war was "al Nakba," which means "The Catastrophe". This sort of shit happens all the time. Two sides call the same event by two different names, to influence external opinion of the situation. These days, they call that "spin". The Union soldiers during the American Civil War called a battle the Battle of Bull Run. The Confederate soldiers during the American Civil war called a battle, the same battle that the Union soldiers called the Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of Manassas Junction. Like I said, in a sense names don't mean shit. In another sense, names mean a shitload. Otherwise why would a government say that they were engaging in "ethnic cleansing" when what they were really doing is "shooting men and children and women, and sometimes raping the women before they get shot, and sometimes doing that in front of the men and children"? Names mean nothing and everything.

So we begin in 1947. Israel gets founded. As I said, this was not regarded by everyone as a good idea.

Now we jump forward to 1948. Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat, is murdered by members of the Lehi group because they're afraid that the Israeli government is going to pursue a course that doesn't involve war. That's another story. The upshot is that there's a war. Want to see a simplified movie about all this? Watch "Cast a Giant Shadow," starring Kurt Douglas.

The UN had made a resolution to divide the contested lands into two parts, an Arab part and a Jewish part. Jerusalem was to be administered by the United Nations as a protectorate, so that there would be peace there. The Arabs rejected this plan. The guy who was running Jerusalem at the time, Amin al-Husayni, had collaborate with the Nazis during World War II and made broadcasts in Germany telling Muslims to ally with the Nazis in order to exterminate the Jews. Neither side trusted the other.

This thing has gone on too long, so we'll cut to the chase and end it quickly. Wikipedia has it best: "The State of Israel comprises 78% of Mandatory Palestine, 50% more than the UN partition proposal allotted it. These cease-fire lines were known afterwards as the "Green Line". The Gaza Strip and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Transjordan respectively."

This is all just background. Don't worry if it doesn't make sense yet.

Map of Israel

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Magnetic Light Scare (NOT a BOMB SCARE)

Today in Boston, a bunch of Baby Boomers and people in their late 30s and 40s overreacted to a marketing campaign made to promote Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Someone thought that these signs depicting Mooninite were bombs, and they shut down all of Boston to investigate it. They blew up the signs. Then some of the Boston higher-ups (the guys in suits who don't know shit about dick and act like your high school principal--you know, stupid and in control of some aspect of your life) claimed that everybody who was involved was going to get 2 to 5 years in prison for..uh, you know. For something.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force runs on Cartoon Network. You knew that. What you may not have known is that Cartoon Network is owned by a parent company called Turner Broadcasting. Turner Broadcasting also owns CNN, which has been running this story more often than the story on the Anti-Iraq2 Resolution, in which story Senator Kyl (Republican, and from the name you'd think that he was from Qo'noS, the Klingon home planet, but he's the junior Senator from Arizona) trots out the old argument that if you want Iraq2 to end then you hate the individual soldiers in the army. CNN International has been getting a lot of mileage out of this, and we don't even get Cartoon Network here in Berlin. Turner Broadcasting has a really interesting history, which I'll go into later. I promise to update this post with a nice history of rootin', tootin', whiskey shootin', Big-ol'-UN-flag-salutin' Ted Turner and his company. It's a great story, like the story of George Newman in Weird Al Yankovic's cinema masterpiece "UHF".

There guys over at www.zebroshow.com have put together this video. It's an admirable statement about the situation. Solidarity, my brothers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G-D0F4Q9yk

The creators of Aqua Teen Hunger Force held an excellent press conference in which they fielded questions but only provided information about hairstyles. The afro, and the origins of the greasy, slicked-back hairstyle were among the topics discussed. One of the reporters bitchily whined that they weren't taking the issue seriously. The guy pointed right at her and said "Yes we are." These guys are champs. I never really liked the show before, but I'm going to give it another chance now. Those guys didn't lose their balls when the chips were down. I'd say that we all should support them, but probably just about anyone reading this already does, and any such plea for solidarity would be coals to Newcastle. Anyway, solidarity, my brothers and sisters.

In short, THIS MARKETING GIMMICK WORKED. When I came back from practicing the adagio cantabile from Beethoven's 8th piano sonata, I was planning on writing a post about the US foreign policy with regard to Iran. I wasn't planning on writing about Aqua Teen Hunger Force. But look at what I ended up writing about. Thanks, Boston, for over-reacting so much that my inborn disposition toward mocking authority when authority does stupid things dovetails nicely with Turner Broadcasting's marketing campaign! Also, VERY, VERY GOOD FUCKING WORK, TURNER BROADCASTING MARKETING DEPARTMENT.

From Jan. 31, 2007

It's really, really late here in Europe, but I wanted to report that Al Franken will be running for Senate in Minnesota against Republican incumbent Norm Coleman. I support Al Franken's campaign. I have been hoping for about a year that he would announce.

Plame! (and CNN)

You Can Go to War on False Pretenses and get at least 3,084 Americans Killed and People Will Not Stop You, But It Remains to be Seen if You Can, with Impunity, Leak The Identity of a CIA Agent
The title of this part of this livejournal post is the name of one of the musical numbers in Gilbert and Sullivan's 1875 Trial By Jury. (Explanatory Note: No it isn't.)

If you can manage to sit through the watery stool peddled as reporting on CNN, you might notice that they're occasionally running a story about how Ari Fleischer is contradicting Scooter Libby w/r/t the Valerie Plame situation. But who the fuck knows what any of this shit means? I do, and if you read through this carefully, you will too.

First of all, this story is very complicated and has been made intentionally confusing by United States Administration officials (that means "the people who work with the President") so that you'll get tired of reading about it and decide "Fuck it, this is too much work, and it's boring." So here's the really short version: The President said that Iraq was building a nuclear bomb using ingredients from Niger, which is a country in Africa. A guy named Joseph Wilson went to Niger to check out that story and determined that the story was bogus. Joseph Wilson wrote an editorial in the New York Times saying that the President's justification for war was bad. A week after that, Robert Novak (the old man that The Daily Show calls "Douchebag of Liberty") published an article in the Washington Post which revealed that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former Assistant to the Vice President, is now on trial for having leaked classified information. Joe Wilson maintains that this information was leaked to punish him for publishing an editorial which undercut the President's justification for Iraq2. And with Libby on trial now, that brings us (in a grossly simplified way) up to the present.

UPDATE: I realized upon reading through this that I never mentioned why it was bad to leak the name of an undercover CIA operative. Let's assume that the undercover CIA operative had infiltrated a terrorist cell, and was consorting with terrorists on a daily basis. If the terrorist cell gets tipped by Robert Novak in the Washington Post that one among them is a terrorist, that's (at least) the end of that covert CIA operation. I think this is a weird issue. Is it protected by the First Amendment to publish this sort of stuff?

Slightly more complicated version:

In the begining, in 2002, the President of the United States said that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon, and that the men and women of the United States, if they wanted to survive, should agree with him that it was a good idea to go to war with Iraq to prevent the development of that nuclear weapon. CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell both claimed that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, a country in Africa. Yellowcake uranium is something you need to make an atomic bomb. During the 2003 State of the Union Speech, President George W. Bush said "The British government has learned that Sadam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." More explicitly, the President in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, said "Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom could." What interesting to me about this is that it's phrased in such a way that it tacitly admits that the President does not have "final proof". Of course, "final proof" of what is naturally an open question. Here's the transcript of that speech: http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/07/bush.transcript/

So, in late February of 2002, Joseph Wilson, a career diplomat with a backstory like a character in a Tom Clancy novel, was sent to Niger to determine whether a sale happened. His March 2002 report concluded that there "was nothing to the story". Wilson worte an editorial for the New York Times maintaining that the case for attacking Iraq based on Iraq's being in the process of developing nuclear weapons using
materials obtained from Niger was a bad case. That editorial was printed on July 7, 2003. On July 14, 2003, Robert Novak in the Washington Post wrote "his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." (Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/20/AR2005102000874.html ).

And with that, the game is afoot.

It was not publicly known that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. Novak wrote in the Washington Post that she was. Someone told Novak. And that's where this Agatha Christie novel begins. Who told Novak? Moreover, why did they tell Novak? The brief of the civil suit Wilson brought alleges that Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Richard B. Cheney and Karl C. (Christian) Rove told Novak so that Novak would print it as a way of punishing Wilson for maintaining that the Niger-uranium justification for Iraq2 was bullshit.

By the way, the case you see on TV now is called United States v. I. Lewis Libby Cr. No. 05-394.

That's about enough for now. There are other neat sidebars to this story. There are forged Italian papers, the investigation of which was quashed by Berlusconi-owned Panorama, a media congolomerate. There is the complicity of the British in beating the drum for war. But we may return to these later. You now have the basic facts.

Bitching about CNN
By the way, the questions in almost every CNN interview (Christianne Amanpour and Dava Sobel excepted) are patently manufactured garbage, the kind of stuff you end up writing when the term paper is due in three hours and you've only got eight of fifteen expected pages.

ANGELINA JOLIE! (whose mother died of cancer) (also Iran and Iraq)

Angelina Jolie's Mother Dies
Like it says in the headline. She died of cancer. No birthdate was given on the CNN website, but IMDB says she was born in 1950. I had to go here (http://www.woohooblog.com/2006/03/05/angelina-jolies-mother-dying-of-cancer/) to learn that she had uterine cancer. This is "panem et circenses," not "res vera," even though cancer is a serious issue. Lots of people died of cancer this week (if you're interested in uterine cancer information, go here: http://statecancerprofiles.cancer.gov/cgi-bin/deathrates/deathrates.pl?06&058&00&2&001&1&1&1) but this cancer death, out of all of them (670 deaths per year in CA divided by 52 weeks in the year = 12.88 per week in CA) was reported. Why is this one newsworthy? It was only reported because Angelina Jolie is really pretty, which is another way of saying that people like to look at her body and her face, and that her body and her face help companies to make money. Any mention of Angelina Jolie draws the attention. Drawing the attention is the first step in successfully advertising something. Didn't you notice that your eyes were drawn to her name in this livejournal post? So this is not a res vera, even though cancer is a res vera. This is AOL-Time Warner's attempt

THIS IS WHERE THE PARENTHETICAL REMARK BEGINS, AND THE REASON I HAVE PUT THIS IN CAPS AND ON ITS OWN NEWLINE WILL BECOME QUICKLY APPARENT

(AOL Time-Warner owns CNN, and I'll be sure at some future time to explain how Henry Luce's Time, Inc. merged with Warner Communications, which had been created when in 1972 the Kenny Company bought out Jack Warner's controlling interest in Warner Seven Arts. There's a side story here about how Warner Communications used to own MTV until 1984, when they sold MTV to Sumner Redstone's Viacom, which itself had originally been the syndication arm of CBS, created and given independence to allow CBS to show old episodes of "I Love Lucy," which it couldn't do as long as it owned the syndication company outright... which is also an interesting story, because Viacom finally bought CBS in 2000. This formed the background for my fruitless Spring 2004 search for a picture of a child being born, which child was at the same time devouring its mother, which would have been a great part of the title page of a paper I wrote in a Telecommunications 110 class, which paper was certainly far too in-depth for the course. Anyway, there's lots of interesting shit about corporate mergers, but the stories are rarely told interestingly. I'll see what I can do about that in the future, if there's any interest out there in livejournal land in knowing about where your food and entertainment is coming from. Viacom also owns Blockbuster, and has since 1994. Enough of this.) to draw your attention by using Angelina Jolie's name and justifying with a mention her mother's cancer the use of that name.

Iran w/r/t Iraq
I've got to go and wash some clothes pretty soon, so this note is going to be brief. This is a res vera. George Bush, heedless, anti-American President of the United States of America, is forging on with his war in Iraq and has been threatening to attack Iran. Just last week he authorized American troops to kill Iranians who were giving support to anti-government Shia fighters in Iraq. Of course it's not surprising that the President would authorize the killing of combatants, but what this means is that it is now permitted for American troops to hunt down Iranian nationals who are in Iraq. This is obviously a way of provoking a war with Iran. Iran has responded by declaring an intention to give aid to Shia forces in Iraq (http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/01/report_iran_pla.html - that thing is only 4 hours old, so it's fresh, and it's also short and easy to read). Bush says that he has no intention of going into Iran, but he also said that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction which Saddam Hussein intended to use against the United States of American on the North American continent (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html - oh, and by the way, whoever is running the whitehouse.gov website has no sense of irony, because the top of the page reads "Iraq - Denial and Deception," which I had to stare at for about three seconds before I realized that it was referring to the White House's characterization of the Saddam Hussein regime instead of their own regime and their own attitude toward Iraq).

Okay, that's it for right now. You got a little panem et circenses, and then a res vera.

More as more develops.

"Because I told them it had to"; Jon Stewart is a bad interviewer

It's 2 in the morning here, but I wanted to call attention to a couple of things before I go to bed.

Bush says that the escalation will work "Because I told them it had to."
First of all, when Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the House of Representatives, third in line to the Presidency) asked the President why he thinks the troop surge will fix the situation in Iraq, the Presdient said "Because I told them it had to." Here's the link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/2

5/politics/main2397489.shtml And in case that link dies in the future, here's the relevant text: In an interview, Pelosi also said she was puzzled by what she considered the president's minimalist explanation for his confidence in the new surge of 21,500 U.S. troops that he has presented as the crux of a new "way forward" for U.S. forces in Iraq. "He's tried this two times — it's failed twice," the California Democrat said. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.' " Asked if the president had elaborated, she added that he simply said, " 'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is." There's not a lot to say about this except that it's reprehensible and stupid, and bad leadership. It's exactly the sort of thing that happens when the boss says "Just take care of it!" without explaining how it was supposed to be taken care of. Jon Stewart is a bad interviewer, and The Daily Show could be better I've thought for a long time that Jon Stewart was a bad interviewer. I've thought that for a couple of years now. He pulls his punches. When you get Kissinger on the couch, you ask him why he ordered the bombing of Cambodia. (Explanatory note: Henry Kissinger advised President Nixon to continue the bombing of Cambodia, as had been policy during the Johnson adminstration. Why were they bombing Cambodia? Because Cambodia, which lay to the west of Vietnam, was providing aid to the North Vietnamese, who were the enemy of the United States during the Vietnam War (the North Vietnamese were also backed by the Soviet Untion, but that's a whole nother can of worms, and I'm not getting into it right now. It'll suffice right now to say that shit was complicated. But the bombing of Cambodia led to the Cambodian civil war, which led to the ascent of the Khmer Rouge, which was a series of Communist governments in Cambodia that killed between 250,000 people and 1,500,000 people. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Number_of_deaths . "Khmer" is the name of the biggest ethnic group in Cambodia. "Rouge" is French for red, and refers to the fact that the party was Communist. Why is it in French? Because that whole region was dominated by the French during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it was all known as "French Indochina". If you were a world power in the 19th century, you needed to have a colony sommewhere that could provide you with tobacco and coffee so that you wouldn't have to trade with those bastards of other world powers and pay their jacked up prices when you could get the same goods for free by utilizing slave labor. (On an even more deeply nested parenthetical note, you also needed a colony in Africa that could provide you with rubber.) ANYWAY, Kissinger allowed the bombing to continue, which pissed off a whole bunch of people who joined the Reds and subsequently murdered a whole bunch of people who were thought to be in cahoots with the United States (and, let's be honest, a whole bunch of poor schmucks who didn't have shit to do with shit, which is always the way it goes in modern war). So Kissinger materially contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, as well as ordering the bombings in Cambodia, which killed a lot of civilians (which is the way it goes in modern war).) So you can't hold yourself up as a moral authority (which is the covert message of satire, you know, that it bears a moral message) and allow the war criminal to sit there and smile at you. You also can't play nice with someone like Bill O'Reilly, who isn't really worth comment but whom Jon Stewart sucked-up to when he was a guest on the show. When Bill O'Reilly is on your show, you nail him to the fucking wall, the way Al Franken did at that book signing in 2005. You call him a liar, and you back up your assertion. I don't dislike The Daily Show. When I first moved to Germany, The Daily Show was something I missed dearly. But after having been away from it for a while and having had access to international press and having spent a lot more time reading news than I used to in the States, I'm now underwhelmed when I see it. It can still comfort me, but Stewart's show seems more and more disingenuous to me. I don't like the way that they present news and then claim, when they're criticized for being biased, that they're just a comedy show. They're not just a comedy show, and Jon Stewart knows it. Otherwise he wouldn't have turned the interview into a miniature version of CSPAN's "Booknotes". That's the beginning of what I have to say about what I think of The Daily Show. I have another substantial complaint, which is that they often rely on sarcastic sneering in place of well-crafted jokes (you know the sarcastic sneering I'm talking about. The stuff that happens when Jon Stewart feigns naivete and the correspondent says "Yeah, right, Jon. Like anyone in X is ever going to go for that," where X is whatever institution they're talking about.). They rely on that gimmick far too often. If you're doing satire, you have to admit to yourself that you are targeting the people who are in power. Otherwise you seem unserious. And The Daily Show, by virture of talking about serious issues, is a serious show. But when things get a little to unfriendly for Jon Stewart, he always says "Hey, we're just a comedy show!" Despite all these criticisms, I'm still very grateful that The Daily Show is on television. I would gladly write for them. I think the show could be a little bit more informative, and I would be willing to spend my time making it so. And I wouldn't be willing to do that if I thought the show was a waste. Enough for now.

News and Analysis, as Promised

(Part of) Why the people in the Middle East are Fighting
Lots of people know the words "Sunni" and "Shia," but few people know what those words mean.

"Sunni" comes from the word "sunna," which means "oral traditions of the Koran". "Shia" is a shortened version of "Shia al-Ali," which means "Party of Ali," which will be explained soon.

When Mohammed died in A.D. 632, leadership of Islam passed to Abu Bakr, a close friend of Mohammed. This was contested by Ali, who was the son-in-law of Mohammed (he married Mohammed's daughter Fatima), the adopted son of Mohammed, and (according to the Shia) the first convert to Islam.

The Sunnis believe that the Caliph (leader of Islam) should be elected by the religious leaders of Islam. The Shia believe that the leader (in this case, called an "Imam") should be a direct descendant of Ali, and that the Imams are infallible.

So there are two disputes at the heart of Islam. One dispute is about whether a hereditary monarchy or a representative democracy should be in charge of the religion. The other dispute is about whether Ali or Abu Bakr was the rightful heir of Mohammed, and is (as you can see) closely tied in with the other dispute.

The Sunnis are generally more relaxed than the Shia, but not always. Osama Bin Laden is a Sunni.

There are also other splinter groups in the religion, for instance the Wahabists, who are active in Saudi Arabia, and are a splinter group of Sunnis. Osama Bin Laden may be one of these guys. The Wahabists are fundamentalists, and literalists about the Koran. They're like the stupid Baptists of Islam, like the dumb evangelicals who say that absolutely no interpretation should be allowed but that the Bible should be taken exactly as it was given to us (presumably in the King James Version, but the analogy breaks down there because the Koran has to be read in Arabic, otherwise it's considered to be an interpretation).

So, there are these two big factions in the Islamic world fighting over who has the right view of things. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was predominantly Sunni, and the Shia had to keep their heads down (although this is really a simplification because Saddam Hussein was a Baathist, and the Ba'th party (both spellings are common) is a secular pan-Arabic party). "Ba'th" means "Resurrection" or "Reformation". Now Saddam Hussein is dead and the Sunnis are out of power and the Shia are in power. But the Sunnis are still around, and the struggle for control of the country between these two factions (basically) is what the White House refuses to call a Civil War in Iraq. And that's the heuristic version of what's going on in Iraq.

But it's worse than that. Iraq is a big gang war, and a mess. But Iraq does not exist in a vacuum. Iraq has neighbors, and those neighbors have their own alleigances to the Sunnis or the Shia. Iran, for instance, is Shia. And Saudi Arabia is Sunni (well, 15% of Saudi Arabia is Shia, but largely it's Sunni). Syria is Sunni. If the American Army completely pulls out, Iraq will probably become a battleground between the Sunni and the Shia, and (in what is certainly a very simplified explanation) Iran will go to war with Syria over Iraq. (By the way, Syria is to the west of Iraq. Iran is to the east of Iraq.).

That's about it. Check out the map:


If you have read this far, you now know more about the Middle East than do most people in Washington.

White House Correspondents' Dinner
Rich Little has been chosen to host the White House Press Correspondents' Dinner this year, because he will not offend the President the way Stephen Colbert did last year. This would be a case of "panem et circenses," but it reminds us of what we really don't need to be reminded of, that the United States Administration does not like listening to criticism.

A short note about "moving forward"

It can be useful when you're talking to administrative types and other people who have studied watered-down nonsense and like to hear that kind of shit, but the term "moving forward" means nothing. It is used to provide the illusion of progress or the illusion of improvement, but it means nothing. I mention it today in reference to Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. Here's the exchange:

BLITZER: You're moving forward, no matter what the Congress does.

CHENEY: We are moving forward. We are moving forward. The Congress has control over the purse strings. They have the right, obviously, if they want, to cut off funding. But, in terms of this effort, the president's made his decision. We've consulted extensively with them. We'll continue to consult with the Congress. But the fact of the matter is, we need to get the job done. I think General Petraeus can do it. I think our troops can do it. And I think it's far too soon for the talking heads on television to conclude that it's impossible to do, it's not going to work, it can't possibly succeed.

Blitzer said it first, but there it is, nonetheless. And here, "moving forward" means "Ignoring the advice of the Iraq Study Group, and the will of the Senate, and in spite of those institutions increasing the number of troops in Iraq." Cheney says that he and the President have consulted extensively with the Senate, but that is probably not the case. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE, or "Republican Senator from Nebraska," if you're not used to reading this notation) has been comparing Iraq2 to the Vietnam war since August 18, 2005, and has, with Carl Levin (D-MI, or "Democrat Senator from Michigan") drafted a resolution calling for the countries of the Middle East to work with one another to end the sectarian violence there and also condemned the President's decision to send more troops to Iraq (you can find the part of the resolution that says this at the top of page 4 here: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/iraq-resolution/?resultpage=1& ).

You can also see that Cheney is setting the Congress up to take the responsibility for future failure in Iraq2, by saying that "They have the right, obviously, if they want, to cut off funding." This is more of the same "You don't support the troops" bullshit that they've used throughout Iraq2 to scare stupid pussies into holding their tongues and not saying "Woah... we're not the ones sending ill-equipped soldiers to die for nothing!" and I can't even see this as a political issue. I see this as an issue wherein, if you're literate and you've been paying attention, you can clearly see that the Vice President is a liar and is now trying to find a way to blame other people for the mess he's caused, which mess involves the deaths of over 3,000 soldiers and the serious injury of over 25,000 others. Most people who like Fox News and Jesus ("Red Staters," tout court) can be prevented from thinking by mentioning Jesus and waving an American flag, so this strategm will not be recognized by a lot of the electorate (which brings up serious questions for the institution of democracy, but this isn't quite the time to get into that). The upshot is that the failure of the American military in Iraq2 is a political hot potato, and Cheney implicitly admits that Iraq2 is a failure by engaging in this strategm, whereby he intends to blame the hostile Congress for not giving his plan enough time and money to work properly.

But he doesn't have any meaningful progress to point to, which is why he says that they are "moving forward".

Campaign Season Begins; State of the World

If you're a student of the humanities, it's not immediately clear what the point of your studies is. Education is so commodotized that most people think it has value only insofar as it can be sold to someone else as a skillset for a job. So when you study something like I do (German literature and culture), you're forever in an identity crisis. It's not clear what you will be able to sell yourself as. The future is completely uncertain. You have already begun to make decisions that are not banausically directed, and you will probably do so for the immediate future. This confers a tremendous freedom that virtually no humanities student takes seriously. Having committed oneself in the short term to poverty, you free yourself from the political necessity of agreeing with things you think are silly, which you would otherwise have to agree with in order to progress professionally. Once you get a job in the private sector, you will probably have to start brainwashing yourself and bringing your opinions into line with the company's orthodoxy if you intend to advance. Since you are not an owner of any great wealth (otherwise you would not have started work for a company in such a way), the interests of the company will not be your own interests. As the company's interests supplant your own, your own voice will diminish until you are an advocate of whatever the company wants. In a state so regrettably fascist as our United States of America, so controlled by large businesses and so subject to the wishes of the directors of those businesses, this means that the more you wish to advance, the less of a critical voice you will allow yourself to have. Being a student of the humanities means rejecting this banausically directed course of life, rejecting wealth but preserving the capability to criticize business and government, the intertwined centers of power that provide us with consumer goods and regulate our behavior through media manipulation and made-to-order legislation.

Unfortunately most highly visible students of the humanities are justly subject to caricature. By being so, they throw away whatever credibility they might otherwise have. They are tea-sipping, NPR-listening, tree-hugging vegetarians with a smattering of Marx and a sense of what I recognize more and more as guilt that may be the same as the guilt that drives people to involve themselves in Christianity. They are alarmist, if they are politically aware at all. This does not hold for every liberal, and if I were forced to ally myself with the American Conservatives or the American Liberals, I would unhesitatingly opt to ally myself with the latter. They may as a group be weak and indecisive, but they are not as stupid and theocratic and jingoistic as the former. Nonetheless, the lack of appeal of the fearsome and contemptible flag-draped, Jesus-worshipping Fox News-believing America Booster does not increase the appeal of the hackey-sack playing, anti-gun whiner. But any port will do in a storm, and only an enemy of democracy would have withheld support from the Communist Party of Germany when the Nazis arose.

This is probably too abstract and formless to hold anyone's attention. I'm sorry about that. I haven't written in this medium for a long time, and I'm interested to do it again. When I write daily, I can feel my ability to write pointedly and directly quicken. To cultivate that capability I have decided to write again. Well, to cultivate that ability and to provide commentary on the news stories that have been written recently. Virtually everything on the CNN webpage is without content. Virtually all the programming on CNN has been reduced to "chat time," which is what television news producers call that little bit of banter that passes between anchors between stories. I have no patience for this stool. CNN is owned by AOL Time-Warner. This is the sort of stuff that is important to keep in mind. Remember that AOL Time-Warner owns CNN. And remember that there is almost no content on CNN. Now start to work on answering this question: Why does AOL Time-Warner want us to have no information? I don't have a direct answer, but I'm working on it.

The World Economic Forum is being held in Davos, Switzerland this week. Davos is notable to those of us who study German and like long books that most people don't like as being the setting for Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. It's a beautiful place, or at least it looks to be from the pictures I've seen. Maybe I'll go there in the next few weeks.

Let's return to the theme of poverty and the humanities and the purpose of a humanities education. Let's not shit ourselves: the humanities are useless, at least in some sense of that word. What good does eloquence do? Not much, when nepotism and cronyism are the keys to advancement. What good does honesty do? Not much, when dishonesty is the primary means of generating wealth. What, then, do the humanities teach? I couldn't answer that one very well. I knew that I was supposed to be studying German in order to gain mastery of it, and I did that. But most of the mastery I have gained has been developed alone, in quiet rooms with dictionaries and books written by now-dead people. Little understanding has come from time spent in classrooms. Friendships are made in classrooms; contempt is quickened in classrooms. Rarely in my experience does understanding take root in the classroom, though. So what possible use could we humanities students be? Well, I finally have an answer. It is our job to make use of the freedom we have, to be the best citizens we can possibly be. The best of us have our understandings of how mood shaped policy, and how policy shaped the world. We can see things coming before they happen, or we can at least say "When something very like this happened before, the following happened." Most people have little or no idea of how things got to be this way. Remember that 44% of Americans think that George Bush did not mislead the country by claiming that the Iraqi government had ties to Al Qaeda (http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm

), and that poll was taken between Jan. 13 and Jan. 16, 2007. If 44% of people believe that there was some kind of collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, there's a lot of explaning to do. There's plenty of work for careful and meticulous writers who are not owned by companies who want them to do PR. CNN has been running a lot of news stories about Second Life. Second Life is an online three-dimensional world. If you haven't seen it, imagine something like World of Warcraft, without ogres and paladins and scorpions and so on. But this is my question: Does AOL Time-Warner own Second Life, and how is it being commodotized? ("Commodotized" means "to be sold as a good or a service".) To return to the issue of the humanities and their uselessness and what we can do with that uselessness. We can spend our time and our developed critical faculties reading policy and making really good guesses as to what that policy might do. We can write it in simple, direct ways that would allow other people to understand what the policy might do. This requires an iron-clad facility for honesty. Unfortunately, most people don't have that. Fortunately, the bar for this sort of thing is set by Fox News and CNN, and it's not hard at all to clear that bar. Further, it's not hard to be more informative than these news outlets. Which brings me to the whole raisin debt for my writing here again. News is just terrible. The way the news is described is just terrible. But describing the background of any issue takes a really long time, and so almost no one does that, and so almost no one has any idea of how the world has gotten into the state that it has gotten into. Every event that happens becomes part of the exposition for the next event. But each event is treated as though there is no context, and as though it is an ahistoric event independent of all other events. I have been dividing news into "panem et circenses" and "res veras," which is a fancy-ass, educated-out-of-being-able-to-communicate kind of way of saying "Meaningless bullshit" and "important stuff". Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell arguing over her saying "ching chong ching ching chong"? That's panem et circenses. Anything Paris Hilton is involved in? Panem et circenses. Dick Cheney telling Wolf Blitzer that leaving Iraq constitutes defeat and means giving Al Qaeda what they want (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/01/24/criticism-of-me-is-hogwa_n_39524.html)? That's a res vera. John Gibson saying that Barack Obama went to a terrorist training camp in Indonesia when he was a child (http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/24/gibson-obama/)? That's a res vera wrapped in panem et circenses. And when you do something like that, you lose all credibility. There is a lot more of this. A lot more. If you've read this far, thanks.

This is just to say

Vice President Richard Cheney's middle name is "Bruce".

A little closer to the revolution, or something

From Jan. 19, 2007

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/17/bush-sacrifice/

So, what George Bush says is that rich people feel bad when they see the war on TV, and that's a sacrifice like the one that the legless, brain-damaged 19-year-old made. He doesn't explicitly say that, but what he says when Jim Lehrer asks him why he doesn't tax the rich to fund the war is that the people (I guess he means the rich) make a sacrifice when they see the war on TV, and the psychological cost of watching the war on TV is their sacrifice.

Look, I don't have anything new to say about this. That sure is an insensitive man. He doesn't ever say anything I agree with. I don't care about him at all.

I used to say that I would allow the President of the United States to take the bedroom if he showed up at my house at night, and I would take the couch. This was because I thought that it was important that the President be well-rested, because he had to make important decisions. The President's being well-rested was more important than my being well-rested.

But I don't think that anymore. I think if the President showed up at my door, I would tell him that I am unhappy about the war in Iraq and I am unhappy about the low minimum wage and I am unconvinced by his dumb Reagan-style arguments that a low minimum wage promotes business and well-being (I suspect that often those things are at odds with each other, because business owners and CEOs don't re-invest their companies' earnings into the community. They just take the profit in the form of bonuses, and rarely pass it on to the workers.). I would say that everyone I know is embarrassed by him. I would tell him that I think he is almost exactly like an Italian Fascist, and that his rhetoric is Goebbels, chapter and verse. Then I would tell him to leave.