Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Late Show: Get Smart
The King Lives — Season 3 • Episode 14 (1968)
Max temporarily takes over for a king that looks exactly like him in a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda.
Oily — We Hardly Knew Yee!
Harper’s “New” Politics
Getting a bit tired, isn’t it?
New AP Rules: Bad News for Bloggers?
The news agency Associated Press has sparked a furious debate over the fair use of material by bloggers after its lawyers issued a takedown notice last week to a small, independent news site that it claims had quoted too heavily from its news stories. AP said six instances of copyright violation had taken place involving seven items that contained quotations from AP articles ranging from 39 to 79 words. Yikes!
While this may not be an altogether bad thing in some respects, it remains to be seen how restrictive or practicable the guidelines reportedly now being developed by the AP are. The push back has already started with indignant bloggers like Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine and Michael Arrington at TechCrunch leading the charge.
Dick On: Optimism
Dick Driben, independent Whig Party write-in candidate for president, is about optimism. And in this world, with an endless supply of doom and gloom politicians, we need the light of hope. Dick Driben embodies that light.
Medieval Lives: The Philosopher
Once upon a time, when all was shrouded in ignorance, there lived a philosopher. He sought the Philosopher’s Stone, that would transmute base metal into gold, and the Elixir of Life, that would bring eternal youth. “Philosopher” was the closest term the Middle Ages had to “scientist”, but of course we know that they weren’t real scientists, because they had no idea of scientific method. The Medieval world floundered in superstition and ignorance. The Church persecuted seekers after knowledge, medicine was more likely to kill you than cure, and people didn’t even know the shape of the world. But are we sure they were so very ignorant? Or is it us, who don’t know as much as we think we do, about them?
Meet the Natives (Ep.1 — Part 4)
Traditional rabbit hunting using ferrets and nets… If you don’t want to see a bunnies gets their necks broken or can’t stand the sight of a rabbit being skinned, don’t watch.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Late Show: Twilight Zone
To Serve Man: Season 3 • Episode 89
Respectfully submitted for your perusal: a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives: Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment we’re going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the Twilight Zone.
Based on a short story of the same name by Damon Knight. The title is a play on the word serve having the dual meanings “assist” and “provide as a meal.”
Bonus Feature: Hungry Are the Damned!
Stephen Taylor’s “Associates”…
Why does Junky Paul assert something so vile and outrageous, you ask? Apparently, because a scurrilous anti-Turkey and anti-Muslim letter that was anonymously e-mailed to many so-called “counter-jihad” blogs on the web claims that the targets of a recently uncovered criminal scheme in Istanbul “were always non-Muslims.” (No proof whatsoever of this is provided, however.)
And uh-oh! This claim doesn’t seem to be supported by any of the legitimate newspaper reports, although one does mention that three of the “many” victims involved were non-Muslim. Considering the total value of the properties extorted by the gang is reportedly $30 million, there must have been quite a considerable number of victims involved. Rather than being “infidels” it seems being old and lonely made them targets of the scheme — most probably their religion was quite irrelevant to the criminals involved.
As for the opinion that Junky Paul blithely repeats that “The precepts laid out in the Koran and the hadith were adhered to, and the victims were chosen carefully to avoid targeting the faithful”… well, aside from being unsupported by the facts, it turns out to be that of an admitted racist and neo-Nazi apologist — the self-styled “Baron” Bodissey at the nutty Gates of Vienna website.
I wonder if Stephen Taylor is proud of the fact that his “Blogging Tories” has become home to so many hysterical racists, neo-Nazi “spooks” and fanatical anti-Muslim bigots that gleefully leverage traffic from his aggregator to pedal such malicious lies and fabrications to the wider public. Maybe he doesn’t care, but it certainly doesn’t shine much of a favorable light on the “Conservative” Party of Canada whom these people ostensibly support.
Orwell Rolls in His Grave
All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us.
For the moment [Winston] had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it… with the stupidity of an animal. — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
From Rotten Tomatoes:
Director Robert Kane Pappas’ documentary film is the consummate critical examination of the Fourth Estate, once the bastion of American democracy. Asking whether America has entered an Orwellian world of doublespeak where outright lies can pass for the truth, Pappas explores what the media doesn’t like to talk about: itself.
Meticulously tracing the process by which media has distorted and often dismissed actual news events, Pappas presents a riveting and eloquent mix of media professionals and leading intellectual voices on the media.
New York University media professor Mark Crispin Miller says, “These commercial entities now vie with the government for control over our lives. They are not a healthy counterweight to government. Goebbels said that what you want in a media system – he meant the Nazi media system – is to present the ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.”
From the very size of the media monopolies and how they got that way to who decides what gets on the air and what doesn’t, Orwell Rolls in His Grave moves through a troubling list of questions and news stories that go unanswered and unreported in the mainstream media. Are Americans being given the information a democracy needs to survive or have they been electronically lobotomized? Has the frenzy for media consolidation led to a dangerous irony where in an era of more news sources the majority of the population has actually become less informed?
Update: I swapped the video. This one has a much better quality picture and French subtitles.
The American Dream in Reverse?
Are we living in a second gilded age?
“We’ve been living the American dream in reverse... Adjusting for inflation, average wages are lower than they were in the 1970s. Our minimum wage, adjusting for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1950s. One of the things going on is that income and wealth inequality have gone back to the 1920s. We are back at levels that we saw right before the Great Depression.” — Holly Sklar
From Friday’s Bill Moyers Journal, Holly Sklar, co-author of Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All of Us discusses what current economic conditions say about the state of the American dream.
Unfortunately, under previous Liberal governments and even more so now under Stephen Harper’s so-called “Conservative” regime, we seem destined to head down the same path in lockstep with our American friends.
Related: Letters to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) from working families across Vermont when he asked people to tell him what was going on in their lives economically.
McCain v. McCain
The Jed Report offers up one of the more effective juxtapositions of McCain contradicting himself on his support and/or non-support of George W. Bush.
Increasingly, it seems to depend on the day, time and location of when and to whom McCain is speaking whether he’s been a loyal supporter of Bush’s most salient (“transcendent”) policies, or instead, has been a renegade “maverick” bucking the administration on key issues. It’s a bit of a no-win situation for him — on the one hand he needs to court the pro-Bush “conservative” base of the GOP by demonstrating his past allegiance, while at the same time distancing himself sufficiently to attract independents and Republicans disaffected by the current regime. It’s doubtful whether McCain is acrobatically supple enough to achieve that political balancing act over time.
Paging “Dr.” McVety…
Well, in some respects, he most certainly is, but I’m not referring to his nutty and thoroughly dishonest efforts to promote Creationism in public schools by utterly misrepresenting evolutionary science as being an embodiment of the “last vestiges of the horrible scourge of racism”… No, I’m talking about something more questionable that seems to have been hiding in plain sight for many years — his credentials.
Thanks to the intrepid efforts of a number of bloggers, it would appear that “Doctor” McVety’s degree from the highly dubious California State Christian University (CSCU) may be nothing more than a “cheap Korean knock off.” Pictured above, by the way, is the university campus as shown on the contact page of the CSCU’s amateurish website and next to it, the satellite version of the same location. Clearly, there’s no “campus” in the considerable area highlighted (which is just north of the Orange County airport) and street views appear to confirm its absence, unless it’s disguised as a series of commercial warehouses and nondescript suburban office buildings.
Bill Kinnon at Achievable Ends seems to have quite conclusively demonstrated that the CSCU isn’t actually an accredited Christian University or Seminary. No point in re-inventing a well-crafted wheel, so I encourage you to read the whole thing — it’s quite amusing to say the least. ToujoursDan at Culture Choc likewise does some stellar investigative work chasing down the same rabbit holes in pursuit of “Dr.” McVety’s credentials, along the way calling into question his “honorary D.Litt degree” from the apparently non-existent Saint-Petersburg State University.
So, let me add my voice to what might eventually become a growing chorus of bloggers calling on the mainstream press to start doing some serious digging into the qualifications of this man who presumes to speak for the “moral majority” in this country and who is regularly cited in major newspapers and on television as an authoritative spokesman of the Christian Right. Is he a “Dr.” and, for that matter, is he even a “Reverend”? Answering these questions and putting our doubts to rest should be an easy matter if his credentials are authentic. If however they turn out not to be, then perhaps his veracity regarding other matters of public interest such as his high-profile fundraising and lobbying activities should also be subject to a little more curious scrutiny.
Medieval Lives: The Knight
Real medieval knights, shining or otherwise, had little interest in rescuing damsels in distress. Terry Jones reveals they were more interested in the less noble pursuits of killing people, making money and being famous.
Meet the Natives (Ep.1 — Part 3)
The lads from Tanna are introduced to the concept of artificial insemination and find this method of pig farming “very strange” and while they recognize it may be more profitable, it seemingly “goes against nature.” A life drawing class with a nude model and the neighborhood pub are also experienced.
Newsnight: Pluck of the Irish
This is like the dead parrot sketch in Monty Python. Is it dead or isn’t it? Is it sleeping? Is it dormant? It’s dead! — Gavin Esler
Excerpts from BBC’s Newsnight program showing the reaction to Ireland’s negative vote on the proposed Lisbon Treaty.
The Times hailed the Irish “no” vote on the Lisbon Treaty as a victory against “a process hitherto shrouded in jargon and pushed along by the civil servants who invented it.” It said the vote, that was more than 53% opposed, was in Ireland’s own interest, because approval would have meant a dilution of its influence under the proposed changes to majority voting in the enlarged bloc.
