So The Butterfly got curious and decided she wanted to see the train wreck that was supposedly Britney Spears' performance at the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this week. Here it is:
I have to ask...what am I missing? I realize she did a marginally worse job of lip-syncing, and I realize she doesn't have that six pack anymore but...is this really much different than any number of her previous performances? I know she didn't wear a boa around her neck or french kiss Madonna, but...this is exactly what they had to be expecting.
Now...I'm not saying it's a good performance. Far, far, far from it. But I get really tired of the build-you-up-to-break-you-down routine. We're not talking about an amazing artist. She was propped up for years--media folks just couldn't get enough of her--and now the tide has turned on her career, so no matter how she performed on Sunday, it was going to be deemed a train wreck.
Again...let me be clear: this performance is worthless, but I've thought that about most of her performances. It's just all part of a storyline that the actual subjects of the story can't change. And it annoys the hell out of me.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
What am I missing?
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Cowardice on Warming
It’s not just for US media anymore.
These words literally came out of a BBC guy’s mouth:
"It is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet," warned Newsnight editor Peter Barron at the Edinburgh Festival last month.
There you go.
Sunday, September 02, 2007
When You Know You're Sliding
When "serious" columnists argue that, to be free, we need government invading our privacy. (Yes, it's the moron Zuckerman in the right-wing US News, but memorize it because it's what you'll hear as they justify every authoritarian move they make in destroying this nation's freedom and legacy.)
Monday, August 13, 2007
Wizards of Oz
Apparently the same person who told Tommy Thompson, the seriously incompetent former governor of WI who personifies the “Wizard of Oz” and has gotten lunatic praise for it from gullible reporters nationally (as someone who got to go into WI to try to clean up one of his many messes, I know), that he had a chance at the Presidency has convinced DC reporters that Karl Rove is really just going to go off into retirement to write his memoirs. He’ll be campaigning for the next President (actually probably is right now), probably Romney, from what I’ve read. That’s what’s truly scary and what people have never understood about our future. Presidents come and go, Karl Rove never will. (And this story will also suck oxygen from stories about Iran and the economy. How conveeeeenient.)
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Dead Meat
Maybe if it hadn’t whored itself out on Whitewater and Iraq, placed its biggest asset behind a paywall, and driven off its natural constituency for its product with its continual rejection of criticism, the NY Times might not be seeing its debt rating falling ever closer to bottom.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Chrildren's TV Program Kills Off Its Main Character
On Friday, a children’s television show call “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” aired its final episode. Showing on Hamas satellite television, the show features a character named Farfur – an Islamic version of Mickey Mouse.
The show’s finale was more like something I would’ve expected in the Soprano’s finale than in a kid’s show.
Basically the show turns Farfur into a martyr that died at the hands of a Jewish “terrorist” that wanted to take Farfur’s land from him. While disturbing at this might sound in a child’s show. Here is a translated excerpt of a call from a three year old child that was aired on the program:
Saraa' to the child caller: "You saw that the Jews let Farfur die as a Shahid. What do you want to say to the Jews?"
Three-year-old on the phone: "We don't like the Jews because they are dogs! We will fight them!"
Saraa': "No, the Jews are good...the Jews are our friends and we play with them. Isn't that so?"
Child: "They killed Farfur!"
Saraa: "That's right...the Jews are criminals and enemies. We must expel them from our land."
I remember my favorite childhood shows in great clarity. I know they had a great impact on the way I viewed the world at that point in my life. Kids are extremely impressionable – period. And people wonder why there’s such instilled hatred between certain groups in the world. Well, I’d say here a pretty good example.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Mannion Strikes Again
Lance Mannion has a nice series going on what we've said over and over here. Our politics and society are overwhelmingly dominated by overwhelmingly unserious people. His two examples are David Broder and Jonathan Chait but there are literally multiple thousands to come if he keeps this series going. As Sorkin once said, "These are serious times and they require serious people." That was just a movie, but he was in one of his supremely lucid moments. The historians of this period will very likely need a title for this age, like The Gilded Age or something. The Age of the Unserious People will do, and Lance will have started their chapters.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Whatever Happened to Crazy?
Back in 1999, after Columbine, there was a rush to ‘blame’ somebody or something for Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’ actions. They finally settled, for the most part, with music. Columbine was Marilyn Manson’s fault. Case closed. Everybody can sleep soundly at night knowing exactly who was to blame for that tragedy. Uh huh.
Well, we’re going through the exact same thing now with Virginia Tech. Only, we haven’t quite narrowed down the list of culprits yet. Too many guns, not enough guns, video games, liberalism, Korean culture, anti-depressants, Oldboy, “our culture of tolerance for diversity” (I’m sorry, but Camille Paglia just makes no damn sense to me)...really, I’m not totally sure why we haven’t yet tried to find out if he listened to Marilyn Manson. I mean, that worked pretty well last time.
As I wait for the media to actually start mixing in some journalism with their reporting (As Salon’s Joan Walsh said, “I've rarely seen such a big story produce so little great journalism.”), I’m reminded of a classic Chris Rock bit (and after a quick Google search, I’m apparently not the only one):
Everybody is wanting to know what music were the kids listening to, or what movies were they watching. Who gives a fuck what they was watching! Whatever happened to crazy? What, you can't be crazy no more? Did we eliminate crazy from the dictionary?
(Here's the YouTube...it's at the 1:31 mark)
Quite simply, Cho was a tortured soul (for many reasons... shyness, language barrier, rich kids made fun of him, girls wouldn’t talk to him) who had actual psychological problems that weren’t correctly addressed (for many reasons as well). That’s it. There were probably 1,800 different things that could have happened or not happened that might have prevented this from happening. But that doesn’t mean it’s specifically anybody’s fault, nor does it mean that blaming somebody/something for it will magically prevent the next crazy kid/tortured soul from doing the same thing.
From Maha Barb:
Instead of incessantly looking for scapegoats like Prozac, what we need is a massive overhaul in the way our nation, society, and health system deals with psychiatric disease.
I agree with Joan Walsh that we humans tend to look for patterns or causes in order to reassure ourselves that episodes like the Virginia Tech massacre are not completely random. Well, in a sense, it wasn’t completely random; it happened because a young man with a serious psychiatric disorder wasn’t getting proper treatment and supervision. It just didn’t happen because of cultural rot or video games or even Bill Clinton.
The last time a college kid snapped like this was 1966 in Austin. Let’s just say that circumstances were probably 1000% different for him, but it happened anyway. I know it’s harder to sleep at night without somebody or something to blame for all the bad things that happen in the world—though, if you’re conservative, you can just blame Michael Moore and Nancy Pelosi and those evil lie-burals...and if you’re a potential Republican candidate for President, you can get away with blaming these people on national television without any consequences*—but sometimes the world is just too complicated to let you sleep at night. Sorry.
* Again from Joan Walsh: “[C]an you imagine if a major Democratic Party figure, who was once third in line for the White House and who might run for president again, was saying such idiotic and hateful things about Republicans? Can you imagine if, say, Al Gore blamed the Bush administration, or the conservative movement generally, for the Virginia Tech massacre? He would be howled into political exile by braying right-wingers, but it's an acceptable part of mainstream discourse to blame liberalism for the nation's most jarring tragedies. And mainstream media elites wonder why they're losing their audience.” Amen to that.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Matt Taibbi interviews Sy Hersh: I Can’t Say I Approve…
...of these two guys being in the same room at the same time. I mean...what if the building crumbles to the ground or something? We can’t lose them both.
And predictably, Taibbi had something to say about Imus as well...I’ll touch on this a bit more in my next post.Is what's gone on in the Bush administration comparable or worse than what went on in the Nixon administration?
Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he's doing the right thing. I think he's a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He's a believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he's very dangerous, because he's an unguided missile, he's a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can't change what he wants to do. He can't deviate from his policy, and that's frightening when somebody has as much power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as committed to democracy -- whatever that means -- as he is in the Mideast. I really do believe that's what drives him. That doesn't mean he's not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks democracy is the answer.
...
Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a lesson in the way that war ended that could have prevented this war from starting?You mean learn from the past? America?
Yes.No. We made the same dumb mistake. One of the arguments for going into Vietnam was that we had to stop the communist Chinese. The Chinese were behind everything -- we saw them and North Vietnam as one and the same. In reality, of course, the Chinese and the Vietnamese hated each other -- they had fought each other for 1,000 years. Four years after the war ended, in 1979, they got into a nasty little war of their own. So we were totally wrong about the entire premise of the war. And it's the same dumbness in this war, with Saddam and the terrorists.
On the other hand, I would argue that some key operators, the Cheney types, they learned a great deal about how to run things and how to hide stuff over those years.
Monday, April 16, 2007
watching the press conference...
...with the Blacksburg Police Chief earlier, and a member of the media horde complained that he was being "dispassionate."
ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME??? I went to school at Mizzou, the #1 journalism school in the country, and while I wasn't personally a J-major, my roommates were. And I don't remember them taking Judgemental Journalism 101. We now live in a world where you are judged harshly if you don't make yourself the center of the story. Unbelievable.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Question of the Day
What does it say about our culture and the role of sports and journalism in it that Cal Ripken, Jr., cancelled his appearance on Imus but Jeff Greenfeld and Howard Fineman didn’t (and Thomas Oliphant called in support)? Rhetorical, I realize, but I think it proves so much about modern “journalism” today. There was an alternative and it wasn’t chosen. It was called decency.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
The Too Stupid to Even Be Silly Venality of Blog Critics
I’ll let others take apart this tut-tutter’s specific arguments about the riffraff and mediocrity threatening this guy’s culture from blog pollution. I’ll just note that the blogworld resembles, for good or evil, all the other media worlds we possess, with about the same ratio of quality to crap that you see in movies or music or books or tv shows, whatever. Where has this guy, like all blog critics, been as talk radio and Oprah and her spawn and “Jackass” and “Survivor” and “ho” music pull the entire culture down a sink hole? This is the sort of bilge that sounds good at the cocktail parties of the well-credentialed. Are blogs heaven on earth? Of course not. But there are a lot of planks to be pulled from other media’s eyes before blogs deserve this way-too-familiar, self-important crap. Please save your money for quality books. Or read this article that gets it all right instead.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Only 580 days to go...
Dana B. has an interesting thought about the "Kos primary" and the netroots' effect on the 2008 race as a whole. It's a unique view, though I'm kinda confused...
Four years ago Markos Moulitsas (left) was a common blogger. Like me (and many others) he became an early fan of Howard Dean, and in the summer was hired as an Internet consultant to the campaign. His suggestions were not followed, he was let go in the fall, and the rest, as they say, is history....Kos is as influential as ever, yet Obama raised $7 million off of the internet without him. Kinda contradictory, though Obama's surge is very encouraging overall. We all know about the famed blogroll purge and Amnesty Day and all that (you can read the latest about that the ongoing silliness here...somebody's getting pissy), but I think this proves that the concept of the 'long tail' where the big names in a field--music, books, blogs, etc.--are still the big names, but there are so many other voices out there that the big names cannot dominate simply because they raise their voice. That's a very good thing.
Today his site, DailyKos, and fellow consultant Jerome Armstrong's MyDD are the largest Democratic Party clubhouses on the Internet. They are both best-selling authors, and their communities (not blogs, communities) are where new liberal ideas are tried out, where Netroots consensus is built on politics and policy.
Markos himself has not chosen a candidate (although it won't be Hillary Clinton). He has tried, in this cycle, to act as a reporter, although one with an obvious point-of-view and some self-awareness of his influence. Thus his recent attack on Barack Obama is important, and may have done more than Elizabeth Edwards' cancer diagnosis to raise John Edwards' profile among the Netroots.
Then we have today's news. Obama's $25 million campaign haul, from 100,000 people, $6.9 million from the Internet alone, 100,000 total donors. It's a sign of significant grassroots support, as well as institutional support. Obama has become the Tiger Woods of the Democratic field.
Now, I know a lot of middling blogs have seen their hits drop since the blogroll purge (our own hits have dropped about 30% in the last couple of months, but that has infinitely more to do with less people googling La Fea Mas Bella than it does blogroll purges...since, you know, we weren't on any major blogrolls), but this shows that the smaller voices in the blogosphere still have a voice of some sort.
And meanwhile, I got to listen to Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert on the evening news tonight, telling me how absolutely shocking it is that someone else actually raised some money this quarter and that--clutch the pearls--Hillary isn't the runaway Democratic favorite. Good times.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
MC Rove in the House
I’m not sure what’s scarier, Karl Rove stating that he like to “tear the tops off of small animals” or his “dancing”. Either way this video from the Radio-Television’s Correspondent’s Assn. Dinner might cause reoccurring nightmares for weeks to come. That or uncontrolled laughter.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
And finally...
..."some people" say Katie Couric tries a little too hard to seem hard-nosed. "Some people" might say she's not very good at her job.
I kept waiting for John or Elizabeth Edwards to ask her who "some people" were exactly, but they didn't. They cheerfully answered her questions. Elizabeth Edwards said, "We're all going to die." And: "I pretty much know what I'm going to die of now." She said that on hearing that her cancer had recurred, she realized she had a choice -- to go on living her life, or begin dying. She said she had chosen to go on living her life. Katie Couric looked at her as if someone had set off a stinkbomb in the room and then asked another "some people" question, this one about whether the Edwardses were "in denial."
...
Last night on 60 Minutes, Katie Couric quoted John Edwards' remark earlier in the week -- that he was in the race "for the duration," and asked him, "How can you say that, Senator Edwards, with such certainty? If, God forbid, Elizabeth doesn't respond to whatever treatment is recommended, if her health deteriorates, would you really say that?" Thank you, Katie. Thank you for asking that question. The world could not have survived had you not asked it. Of course, "Some people" were undoubtedly thinking it. And it would have been a tragedy not to have given voice to that thought, wouldn't it? Or would it?
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Lou Einstein
I know I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but how sad the world has become when Lou Dobbs is one of its best sources of wisdom. Here's proof:
This is the same Democratic-controlled Congress that millions of voters thought would be so vastly different from the last gaggle of partisan buffoons in the Republican-led 109th Congress. With almost 30,000 young Americans killed or wounded in Iraq, with a half-trillion dollars spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this Congress can do no better than publicly fulminate in futility and bray endlessly without effect on the course and conduct of the war in Iraq. Is there no sense of proportion and higher purpose anywhere in Washington?
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Modern Journalism Today
Here are the first two paragraphs of the CNN story:
During his eight days as a part-time high school biology teacher, Kris Helphinstine included Biblical references in material he provided to students and gave a PowerPoint presentation that made links between evolution, Nazi Germany and Planned Parenthood.
That was enough for the Sisters School Board, which fired the teacher Monday night for deviating from the curriculum on the theory of evolution.
Here's the headline:
Biology teacher fired for referring to Bible
See any connection?
Such is what passes for journalism in 21st century America.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Can They Even Cast Shadows?
Or is there enough to them to even do that?
More BS about Gore, not from wannabe Swift Boaters but from our "media." Newsweek seeking Gore's reelection plans from his pantsize. And USA Today running a story about how he used to be invested in a zinc mine that didn't cause any problems, but other zinc mines have, and how could he call himself an environmentalist??? It's a classic story of putting the "hypocrite" meme out there and CYA with the facts in lower case throughout the article. Here are the points in the story that show that THERE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN A STORY AT ALL AND INCLUDING THESE FACTS DOESN'T CLEAR THE WRITER OF PROSTITUTION.
". . . there is no evidence the mine has caused serious damage to the environment in the area or threatened the health of his neighbors."
". . . he and wife, Tipper, have not decided whether they will renew their lease."
"Last week, Gore sent a letter asking the company to work with Earthworks, a national environmental group, to make sure the operation doesn't damage the environment.
"We would like for you to engage with us in a process to ensure that the mine becomes a global example of environmental best practices," Gore wrote."
"But state regulators consider those permit violations minor and monitoring reports provide a clean bill of health for the rivers in the area, which are a source of drinking water. Community leaders and health officials recall no health problems ever associated with the mining."
"At the same time, the Caney Fork Watershed Association, which works to conserve and improve the waterways in the area, has heard no concerns from its members about the mine's reopening.
"The operation has a record of vigilance in not operating to harm the environment, and we certainly hope that the renewed operation will maintain this record," John Harwood, with the association, said in a written statement."
"The Gores won't speculate on whether they will refuse to renew their lease if the new owners don't follow their request to work with the environmental group, Kreider said. They do plan, she said, to encourage their neighbors to join their effort."
The Repubs didn't do in this country. The news media did. The Repubs just knew how much to leave on the night table when they were done.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Weather, Water, Energy 3-13-07
- The NY Times has done its usual job of mucking up an important issue, Al Gore's account of global warming, and is taken apart yet one more time, this time by RealClimate. Tell me again why this rag is "the paper of record"??? And let's be sure to remember them when we don't take necessary action because the American people are so ignorant about what's happening, as shown by this disappointing and scary Gallup poll.
- Meanwhile, in a country in which reporting on reality is more the norm, Britain has set "legally binding" carbon emission targets of 60% reduction by 2050 within an overall climate plan, including heavy investment in renewables. Here's the logic: "The debate on climate change has shifted from whether we need to act to how much we need to do by when, and the economic implications of doing so. "The time is therefore right for the introduction of a strong legal framework in the UK for tackling climate change." But don't tell the NY Times. They apparently have surplus of moron reporters to assign to the story.
- More takes on ethanol and it and our future. Grist links you to three stories popping big holes in that biofuel bubble. OTOH, a Purdue U study seems to point to ways that biofuels could be more efficiently developed. OTOH, even if the mechanics can be managed, there's always the plain old corruption that we can expect where there are both money and cronies in government to max out.
- More on the emerging problems with buying emission offsets. The key concept is something called "additionality," which basically means that your dollars to "offset" may just be going for pre-existing efforts, not additional efforts. This is going to have to be structured much better before I'm investing, which is, of course, the problem.
- And here's another reason keeping in front of the emissions will be hard. Turns out that more CO2 tends to stimulate soils to release CO2, not store it, as previously believed, through encouraging microbes that increase decomposition.
- The world is changing in front of the Bushnevs and we just have to hope we can survive to the other side. Jeb leaves FL in a more sensible Repub's hands and, voila!!, one of the worst states may be jumping into national leadership. Of course, the Bushnevs will all be living in Dubai by the time the hooey is really hitting.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Leave it to the Editors...
...to take everything I was trying to say yesterday and turn it into a post that's actually creative and original. If I could figure out how to get blogger to let me to post a table, I'd copy-paste part of it, but instead I'll just excerpt it in a table-less fashion:
Incivil/Dangerous: "d*ck"
Civil/Serious: Congratulate people for recognizing that the ethnic cleansing of Muslims is inevitable.
Incivil/Dangerous: "p**-p**"
Civil/Serious: Suggest that our current difficulties could be solved by putting people in concentration camps.