Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
The long promised Lots of Goodies:
Dear Leader Pawlenty has seen the massive 35W-Highway 62 crosstown rebuilding/redesign fall apart, because for some reason he thought that since the state doesn't have the money, he could convince contractors to shoulder the costs themselves, and pay them back later.
I am drinking two cups of coffee now so I can drill through all-a this. First of all see the Ali G video with TV news anchor Sam Donaldson. He's a game guest, in particular with repeating Cohen's obscene gestures. There was a trailer for a new Borat movie this fall but it got taken down by Fox within hours. JAGSHEMASH! Can Cohen stay sharp with Borat and Ali G, or will people be sick of it by then? I don't know, but the many Borat clips on YouTube are sweet.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "Favorite memo ever": watering down the South Park movie to satisfy the MPAA: (via the excellent celebrity-jabber What Would Tyler Durden Do? site)
More coming in a bit. The coffee is making me flush so I'm gonna take a shower
Big Poppa Doom informed everyone that, in a handy and expedient combination of Apocalyptic middle eastern wars and invisible men with booming voices, God is determining our foreign policy. What could go wrong? Catch the video. Editor&Publisher and the WaPo on it.
Bush: I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.
Also the following statement:
One decision he questions: After the successful invasion, "preparing an Iraqi army for an external threat. Well, it turns out there may have been an external threat but it's nothing compared to the internal threat." He did not explain what external threat the Iraqis were being trained for.
FDA 420 political diktat: Last week the FDA published a fancy condemnation of marijuana medical studies -- and in an odd example of a federal bureaucracy trying to dictate rules to state legislatures, condemned efforts at the state level to reform marijuana laws. It's kind of improper for federal agencies to order state legislatures to Jump. Scientific American on it, and here's the FDA statement.
As more than a few people are noticing these days, this is another example of fake politicized science, like ordering NASA scientists to shut up about global warming (read the damn NASA memo). (don't forget that national parks are falling apart and of course the government doesn't care about global warming) Go hang out at smokedot to compensate, and don't forget all those tax dollars flushed down the toilet for the war on drugs.
Net Neutrality: Couple more articles about the impending cancellation of the internet's egalitarian structure. Fortunately, Nancy Pelosi is supporting an amendment that would save Net Neutrality. You can become a "citizen co-sponsor" about it here. The attempt to fix it is called the Markey Amendment. Despite having a serious uphill battle, the word seems to be spreading:
We now have over 75 coalition partners, everyone from the Parents Television Council to the Texas Internet Service Provider’s Association to Consumer Action, and the blogosphere is on fire. We launched yesterday, and net neutrality is just blowing up.
Comic book collectors, video gamers, librarians, hip hop sites, music fans, more video gamers, designers, small business owners, and nonprofits have heard of the issue and are very angry at the telecom cartel’s move.
And now the tech companies have chimed in with Don’t Mess with the Net.
Iraq for Sale: The liberal documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed and others) is working on a new film, Iraq for Sale, about corrupt defense contractors, in time for the election this fall. However, they are trying to get $50 donations to finance production. I advised them that the trailer on their website doesn't seem to work on Mac.
Air Force censors liberal websites: According to someone at the DailyKos, the Air Force is blocking the DailyKos, Atrios Eschaton and TalkingPointsMemo. The roughly equivalent (although more hateful, I would say) rightwing sites FreeRepublic and LittleGreenFootballs are not blocked. More on this. If you are in the military and are trying to circumvent ideologically tainted censorship, try these tips on Peacefire. You can see if a program called SmartFilter is blocking URLs here (we are classed as "personal pages"). There is something odd about how the Air Force seems to be the most fundamentalist branch of the military.
It is also interesting that Armed Forces Radio is extremely tilted towards rightwing commentary that is rebroadcast from civilian sources. It's like 90% conservative. More on Armed Forces Radio bias here and here. This has bad effects, wherein for example, Rush Limbaugh tells soldiers through Armed Forces Radio that the Abu Ghraib torture was basically acceptable to "blow some steam off".
This website is clearly not blocked at many military installations, including the Air Force. However, I have also been sent screenshots of this site being blocked on military internet at a particular place that I won't elaborate on.
MZM meta-scandal: Corrupt defense contractor trying to start a war in Iran, and pretty much everything else too:
Disgraced defense contractor planned to promote democracy in Iran: March 24
By Warren P. Strobel - Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - In a new example of disgraced defense contractor Mitchell Wade's attempts to exert influence in Washington and beyond, Wade and two business partners formed a nonprofit group in 2004 to promote democracy in Iran, according to documents and interviews.
Wade and the two partners, who have been large contributors to Republican political campaigns, formed the Iranian Democratization Foundation in April 2004, according to incorporation papers filed in Washington.
....In November 2004, Congress approved spending $3 million to promote democracy in Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last month asked Congress for a large boost in funding, to $75 million. Behrooz Behbudi, who helped incorporate the foundation, said in a telephone interview that Wade "was supposed to get funds from the Congress" for the project. The two later fell out over business dealings in Iraq, Behbudi said.
Wade, who headed contractor MZM Inc., pleaded guilty last month to bribery-related charges and making illegal campaign contributions. His chief congressional patron, former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, pleaded guilty in November to taking bribes. Wade's dealings, which include contracts MZM received from Pentagon intelligence agencies, are under investigation.
MZM is a fun one. It is interesting how there are so many scandals around Washington, they sort of blend into and overlap each other. MZM was one of Duke Cunningham's corrupt companies, but in the Jack-Abramoff-of-all-trades go-get-em style of DC operators, MZM shadiness has also been a major cause of Katherine Harris' Senate campaign disintegration in Florida, and MZM contractors helped cover up the fake Iraq intelligence in one of the Congressional investigations, by working for the Silberman-Robb Commission for WMD Whitewashing, as TPMmuckrakers have dug up. Isn't DC great? The muckies also said that MZM helped select bombing targets early in the Iraq war:
In addition to its work at CENTCOM, MZM is known to have had contracts to support CIFA, the Pentagon's domestic spying operation; the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force; the Department of Energy's Counterintelligence Office; the White House's Robb-Silberman Commission to study WMD intelligence; the Homeland Security Department's watch center; and the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center.
Check out PrivateForces.com for more on privatized military firms, the sector of the economy that's gonna eat all the others.
Gas Temperature Map: You gotta check this out. It's getting hot out there.
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We can all agree that Hollywood lacks any guts nowadays. Thus, the best "movie" movie of the year would have to shatter all boundaries of taste and convention — make you laugh, cry. Only Gary Busey and Billy Zane have the guts to get us out of this cinema funk. And they have.
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq (Turkish: Kurtlar Vadisi Irak) is hands-down one of the coolest movies I have seen in a long time. It will be a cult classic, it will cause some angry Christian riots in Cleveland. It's that good. According to Wikipedia, it is the most expensive Turkish movie ever. Actual plot details there - mine are purely visual impressions.
It's more cliche than an episode of Knight Rider, more crass than Jerry Bruckheimer, and it owes debts to Full Metal Jacket, Lethal Weapon, Hong Kong, Kurosawa, Ford's westerns, and every late 80's action flick on FX or USA. Check the website for an English trailer (WMV - ok on Mac) – because the version I downloaded was almost totally Turkish.
Set aside the canned "anti-Semitic" reaction. Busey really has no more than ten minutes of screen time as the evil Jewish doctor stealing organs from Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and shipping them to Israel. But someone had to play this unique, absurdly comic villain, finally bringing the unreal Abu Ghraib universe into movie culture through wicked Dr. Frankenstein-style High Camp. (Abu Ghraib really is this pointless & random, I think is Busey's subtext)
Billy Zane is Sam William Marshall, the Coalition Provisional Authority messiah-figure / piano-playing murderous psychotic, usually clad in white. He poses as a "white hat" for the savages: get it? (I think Zane figured he owed the Middle East an outlandish villain after The Mummy - fair's fair)
Zane has an entourage of evil mercenaries – the khaki vests, buzz cuts and machine guns are a fair visual representation of a typical Blackwater Personal Security Detail. In the English teaser he seems to say "When the Turkmen are done, the Arabs are next," and the movie mainly follows the travails of the Turkmen minority in northern Iraq.
I got Valley off a Turkish BitTorrent site (here's the Torrent - it works, be patient). For a little clip hit this link and uncompress it. In that early scene, Zane, his mercenaries and the U.S. soldiers raid the Turkish headquarters in Iraq. He tips over a Turkish flag – cue the dramatic music. They lead the personnel out to the truck with bags over their heads, and in the film version, an officer writes a letter, and puts it and a Turkish flag in a bag, and shoots himself. The raid is true, the suicide, not.
I downloaded a version with poor sound, and extreme flickering (the frames are not synced - it strobes really bad). Also, everything was dubbed into Turkish, including Zane and Busey. No subtitles — though the English-language trailer on the website features their lines in English, so hopefully if when the movie is released in the U.S., it will be a little easier to follow.
This film is awesome, and it would be a huge hit in the states. It reminded me of Reservoir Dogs, Apocalypse Now, the insanity of the news, Bollywood, Rambo, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Natural Born Killers, Lord of the Rings, the Chuck Norris flick Delta Force, a bit of The Matrix (roof escape), anything about Compton. Also reminded me of the book "The Ugly American" - as there is a scene with Zane handing out toys and food to the Iraqis while the media captures it.
(and of course Battle of Algiers and Lawrence of Arabia. And Xbox's "Call of Duty 2": the bazaar levels)
A lot of people die in "Valley of the Wolves." They are killed by a suicide bomber, crazed mercenaries with rocket launchers, jumpy U.S. troops, Zane himself. I took quite a few screenshots and so I will lay out a bit of the action. This movie would be huge in the United States – and it might make Rumsfeld's head explode in anger.
And I'm sorry, it's fun. It's revolting. It's utterly insane and packed with tons of Hollywood cliches, starting with the Noir venetian blind trick in the first minute.
Go look at the IMDB comments for a sampling of reactions. A Turk is pissed because the heroes are gangsters. How many ways could this movie make you angry? That's what makes art fit a certain place and time...
A little more of the cast:
Badass Sheikh Abdurrahman Halis Kerkuki. He intervenes in a beheading-video-in-progress and rides a white horse.
Strikingly similar-looking to the Battle of Algiers guy.
The two-bit Turkish gangsters who save the day in their black suits and white shirts. Tarantino heroes, without a doubt.
Leila, the young woman whose groom is killed in the wedding at the beginning of the movie (see English trailer). She kicks a lot of ass.
I started taking screenshots after the flick started, after the initial raid. Spoiler warning: this outlines a lot of what happens. Don't look at this if you want to be surprised. Including dramatic ending. Although I couldn't fully understand it.
There are a few dozen pictures on the flip. By "Turkish guys" some might actually be Turkmen. Again, I had no dialogue when watching.
Some kind of dedication ceremony. Dear Leader poster in back there.
Prisoners (including those captured from the wedding) are deposited at Abu Ghriab. Busey is furious that the mercenary killed a bunch of the Iraqis in the container. Yes, those are the coolers for Israel.
A dramatic conversation between Zane and the Turkish guy I couldn't understand. There was a bomb under Zane's chair. Zane is essentially holding the crowd of children hostage while the bomb is defused.
The evil mercenaries wasting innocent people. Rambo, anyone?
Sniper & suicide bombing type situation. Lots of wounded soldiers & innocent people.
More of the Abu Ghraib situation. German Shepherd & Lynnie England-style. The beginning of this scene is really shocking.
Public Relations - handing out food and goodies as media watches. Hence the subtle "white hat" metaphor.
Dramatic destruction of a minaret with priest inside.
Ethnic cleansing / forcible displacement of Turkmen, I think, as U.S. soldier watches, confused. There is a monologue of sorts, and I distinctly picked out something like "and then what of the Arabs?" This is pretty much the only place you will hear about the ethnic cleansing of minorities in Iraq – which alarms the Turks.
Sweet religious ceremony. This was really cool.
STAB!
Hostage video in progress. Who is that actor??
Zane has a piano moment.
Widow seeks wisdom from clerics and has a dangerous confrontation, handled calmly
Climactic battle - she is good with a knife. Turkish guys gotta save the day.
Classic Hollywood / Shakespearean ending / Nose ring symbolizes lost love & such.
Just another Day in the Valley.
I am sorry if looking at this spoiled some parts of the movie for you. Who knows how long it will take for this to get onto an American screen? If it never does, we are the poorer for it. This is great Saturday afternoon popcorn fare. I just want to actually understand the dialogue.
Just amazing. Just another day in the valley of the wolves.
A couple interesting things reflect how it's becoming easier to come up with original content and offer it up. First I found a link to a video by some young guys at Systm.org (not to be confused with the pretentious System.net 'global aesthetic conditioning'). They released a short video about 'warspying,' or modifying a wireless video camera receiver, putting it in a cash box, with a little LCD screen on it. The guys drive around town and capture other people's unencrypted video transmissions.
So these guys made a short video, complete with custom circuit diagrams, and distributed it over BitTorrent (high quality Quicktime / Windows Media torrents). Related links: Kevin Rose's blog (or this), one of the guys on the video, a very rich Technorati tag, review of the show on O'Reilly's Makezine.com, also randomculture.com, an earlier project called thebroken.org, switcherman.com is their project blog, they got the /. and CNet stories the lucky bastards.
So this would be an example of putting yourself in the right spots for a PR offensive online.
Stuff like podcasting is becoming increasingly popular and sites like podnova and ipodderx provide a constant source of these home brewed audio broadcasts. The idea is that such content might finally fulfill the promise of the internet etc etc.... Meanwhile people can hook into streams of links like those at Make Magazine put onto del.icio.us.
Looking around at this led me to some interesting sites. Digg.com is sort of like MetaFilter for geeks. Fromtheshadows.tv is another crew that put together some videos including another one about the fun of hacking into wireless data connections ("0wning 2.4GHz" is a great name for an episode)
Meanwhile military guys are starting to release rap music, such as the guys featured in Gunner Palace. There was a major feature on MetaFilter about this with many links.
Hackermedia.net gets points for the obvious name, and links to many other little internet TV shows. My favorite title is "Teh Scene" (not a typo). Good luck to all these kids.
Meanwhile such operations as Guerrilla News Network are still rolling along, and let's not forget the classic video they released some time ago, "Crack the CIA" about the links between cocaine trafficking and intelligence agencies.
Google has gotten this insane three-dimensional flyover map thing... not available to the public yet. Or is it some kind of 3D mapping truck scheme where lasers measure the dimensions of buildings to generate maps. Wow.
I just learned today that there is a peace-based organization down the street @ 1045 Selby Ave., Friends for a Non-Violent World and a buddy of mine is interning there.
You can take CEH (certified ethical hacker) exams now. and practice for them.
Hollywood paid for video cameras in LA to catch bootleg DVD vendors. No comment necessary. Located here to be precise.
Oh great, a 'Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption' as they rule that having PGP software on your computer can be seen as part of malicious intent, in this case against some kiddie porn guy.
Your misc blogs: brainwagon.org , mckinneysucks (discontinued since last January, and I don't agree, but it's funny) freedomhater, israelpundit, neocon-insanity, Sabbah's blog. It's the info age and it's all gravy.
Technorati Tags: cia, google, minnesota, encryption, rap, warspying
The funniest thing to come through lately came from Dan Schwartz, the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries," such as the Communist Manifesto, Chairman Mao's little Red Book, the Kinsey Report, the Feminine Mystique, and why not, Nietzsche and Keynes. Those fine people at Human Events, a batty rightwing journal, have done it again with their panel of righteous judges. Darwin, Mill, Nader, Gramsci and Adorno were also noted as dangerous writers.
Lebanon: Robert Mayer on PubliusPundit.com has a good summary of the complexity of Lebanese electoral politics. I am a little sketched out by the wave of 'pro-democracy' talk purportedly coming from Lebanon, but nonetheless I like the picture at the top of their site because like mine it features riot police and people showing the victory sign. Also reported on the voting. Not sure who Mayer is or what his political orientation is. ok.
So something about the filibuster: FilibusterFrist.com hails the compromise as a victory. When discussing the vote, an anchor at FOX was caught referring to the Republican Party as "we" (see the FOX Freudian slip in a Movie!) James Dobson calls down hellfire.
Random blog: Security Awareness, angry about something in OS X.
Local Music: A friend of mine named Dave is starting up a record label called The Firm Records. He's working with his friend Jared to get an album released under the name "The Beckoning." You can hear some cuts on their site.
Media makes me cry: A Pie Fight that you can edit yourself on a site promoting "The Real Gilligan's Island." I don't understand what the hell this is.
Piss-Off-Nixon Dept. Deep Throat is out and about in his walker. It is marvelous to hear G Gordon Liddy and Patty Pat Buchanan tell us about what a bad deed it was to harm that paragon of virtue Richard Nixon. On a somewhat related topic, the intelligence analysts responsible for the aluminum tube nonsense got rewarded! Of course, people made fun of this. Who will be the deep throat for this Pentagon? Does Karen Kwiatkowski have to do everything around here?
Misc: A Republican congressman attacks Bill Maher. Shocking. "What a social security deal might look like." The left's fear of money?
Stand at the Apocalypse: Who knows what's happening with Bolton? Steve Clemons at TheWashingtonNote.com. Sen. Reid comments on it. But of course, we still got Jesse Helms: ""John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."
Peak oil: There's a lot about the Peak Oil problem from Kevin Drum at WashingtonMonthly.com. This Matthew Simmons character is some sort of expert as featured in this Agonist post (or this one).
GWOT Part III... Oh great, the lens of the War On Terror is going to be widened, because, believe-it-or-not, Al Qaeda is not really a concrete organization and there are many other people the government would like to kill. Apparently Bush's top terrorism advisor is named Frances Fragos Townsend. Sounds like an alias. Thomas Friedman says "Just Shut it Down" as Guantanamo is rapidly corroding America's values and generating legions of people who hate us even more for our crazy policies.
...but Part II isn't over! The vaunted "Operation Lightning" that coincided with Memorial Day is not getting a lot done. Raimondo has a funny column about his confrontation with Nancy Pelosi, the winged goddess of victory. Of course she is caught up in trying to appear mega-Super Tough in the War Against Evil, and this is leading to a certain moral erosion... And don't forget her exciting speech to AIPAC!
We need whistle-blowers: It is said that Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who performed some painful whistleblowing upon the FBI, may run for Congress in Minnesota against the rightwinger John Kline, most well known for being trustworthy enough to carry the nuclear launch codes at some point in his military career. Sibel Edmonds has a strange case, the translator who tried to stop craziness inside the Department of Justice at least has herself a website.
Star Wars projects into the Real World: A whole freakin lot of people commented on how Star Wars fits into the national debate. Orson Scott Card of the "Ender's Game" sci-fi series commented that Jedi-ism is not a very good religion: "in the new movie, the knights are elitist, dictatorial, and unconvinced that good is an absolute." (although he is surprisingly anti-media as well) I don't really feel like writing more on this subject now, even though I went to go see the movie a second time with Cheng Diggity last night.
Rat Race Status: This NY Times article about how people chase elusive class status symbols in America today really hit home for me. Alison sent it to me, noting its connection to what we learned about Marcuse's theories of the one-dimensional man, propelled by the false needs of a society designed to appear as if it catered to his every desire, while actually trapping him. A related very interesting "info Marxist" column by the generally senile Mr. Brooks. At the least, this proves that neo-cons are still old leftists.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.
The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system.
[.....]
The information society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left.
Periodically members of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The Yale-educated scion of the Bush family may face the Yale-educated scion of the Winthrop family. They divide into Republicans and Democrats and argue over everything except the source of their power: the intellectual stratification of society achieved through the means of education.
More than the Roman emperors, more than the industrial robber barons, the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down.
I'm don't have the details about this, but it sounds like an amazing movie: "The Fourth World War" is a documentary out of the various movements against wars all over the world, or rather, the 'thousand civil wars' the trailer speaks of. Suheir Hammad is narrating, and she was really impressive when she spoke at Macalester last year.
The movie is touring the U.S., and playing at the Campus Center Sunday night at 7:30. It will be screened in Minneapolis later tomorrow night, at the Soap Factory at 10 PM (2nd St. SE and 5th Ave.).
Additionally, this is an example of how our Macalester internet setups aren't working. There is nothing about a MOVIE in the CAMPUS CENTER on Macalester's event calendar website. What is the point of having a site like that? If we started doing more dynamic things online at Mac, then such events could be better publicized, as I argued in a Mac Weekly editorial a couple weeks ago.
'The Corporation' also screened on campus recently, and I'm sad I missed that, although I saw it at Lagoon a while ago.
I got the documentary "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire" a couple weeks ago, and I've watched it several times over with various people. Here's a review from the SF Gate and Variety. This short documentary might be the "Fahrenheit 9/11 for the rational mind" that we've been missing. It's a direct, stripped down kind of documentary, outlining the Wolfowitz doctrine of global domination by force from its origins in the 1993 Defense Planning Guidance document, through to the Project for a New American Century's work and the famous "catalyzing event...like a new Pearl Harbor" license for action. Noam Chomsky makes a few brief, very down-to-earth statements, Norman Mailer makes a few cracks, Chalmers Johnson illustrates the Sorrows of Empire, and such characters as Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkoski, Stan Goff and weapons inspector Scott Ritter each have fascinating 30 minute interviews available on the DVD. (Pentagon Papers star Daniel Ellsberg and Canadian neocon attacker Shadia Drury have DVD interviews too). Medea Benjamin, Tariq Ali, Normon Solomon and William Hartungg from the World Policy Institute all get some time that's been so carefully denied them by the mainstream media.
Narrated by NAACP honcho Julian Bond, this documentary even covers the origins of the "Shock and Awe" doctrine as the Wolfowitz doctrine of domination operationalized. The quotes from Harman Ullmann's original Shock and Awe study are juxtaposed with war casualty photos. In its "Sorrows of Empire" section, the documentary masterfully outlines the true fiscal cost of the new imperial project. As Chalmers Johnson says, (paraphrasing), "The first and sixth amendments of the Constitution are dead letters, habeas corpus has been suspended, etc. but these are political problems. They don't spell the end of the United States. Financial bankruptcy does." An incredible pivot.
I would criticize this movie for not linking the neocons more closely with Israel, particularly since in their interviews, Goff, Ellsberg, and Kwiatkowski all articulate information about ties to the Israeli right, and Kwiatkowski's digestion of the Clean Break is probably the best I've seen on video. Too bad it wasn't in the final documentary. Dicey territory that Moore bailed from altogether.
This documentary articulates the connections that remain sadly unaddressed in Fahrenheit 9/11. If you see Moore's flick, this documentary and Control Room, that visual triangle should be enough to put anyone on a firmly informed, critical footing. Everyone who's seen this has really enjoyed it, and I strongly recommend that y'all check it out.
I found this film a very cathartic visual explanation of the many accumulated facts and horrors that I've read about for so long, and finally the video appearance of central people like Kwiatkowski makes a huge impact. Thank you Media Education Foundation!!!
A hearty congratulations to Mr. Edwards for landing the job he's been gunning for all along... he's a natural choice for a folksy veepster and clearly has a great deal of support across the country, while perhaps more importantly, he looks just fantastic next to Cheney. I took this photograph, tilted like crazy, when he came to town before the caucuses. There's a whole Edwards photo gallery on the site, check it out.
Ok, ok, some substantial post is actually going to get on this site Wednesday. I have been off to evaluate where I stand in the world, what I ought to believe in (less than ever) and take these summer classes. I have a midterm exam on Thursday, AUUGH!!!! Yet I will deal with it. Much to note, but unpredictability increases as the situation complexifies.
On the Fourth, I peeked into the movie theater next door and took the following glorious pic. The theater was mostly full:
This weekend I decided to see if Fahrenheit 9/11 is downloadable from the Internet. I got it off BitTorrent in about 36 hours, and I did indeed leave my connection open for a while to 'give back' the file seed to the swarm. This essentially proves the film is available to anyone in the world with a sufficient Internet pipe, in Baghdad or otherwise....
Upon downloading (try this link via Suprnova.org if you want it) I found that there are three video files. On a Mac these all play very nicely using the great video program VLC. The main video file is suitable for burning onto a VCD that can play in most modern DVD players, using something like Roxio Toast.
The first video is a statement from Moore at a press conference describing his position on sharing the movie. He said that he was all right with it as long as no one was making profit off his labor. The second video is a short sample showing the recording's quality, a standard feature of these pirated Internet movies. There was also a text file with all the usual movie piracy ring jibba jabba ("POT" is their handle), and of course the film itself, at about 650 MB.
It was somewhat different than the theatrical release, but at least 90% of the final images are intact. (Maybe a little less: the film's edges are rather cropped but the top subtitles are generally visible, and during the wrenching scene with the bereaved Iraqi mother calling God's wrath down on the houses of America, the camera tilts down for the captions)
The section about Ashcroft and the Patriot Act, including his reading of it from the ice cream truck, was gone. The controversially 'slanted' montage of Iraqi children flying kites and other happy stuff isn't there. Instead it cuts roughly from the mechanic dude who says that ya can't trust your friends, right to the exploding government buildings in Baghdad. I was most disappointed that much of the excellent music was gone ("Roof on Fire"), or at a very low level ("Shiny Happy People"). Sadly it's missing such bits as the tense post-airport shutdown music and, in particular, the haunting back-and-forth piano line in the Florida classroom. Instead the sound levels of those clips are higher, which makes some of the Iraq scenes even more jarring. The film's credits are entirely missing after the dedication screen.
If you want the proper, immersive cinematic experience, frequent a real theater like my neighbor the St. Paul Grandview. If you resent giving Mr Moore money, have no theater within 40 miles, want to back up claims for or against the movie, or are planning to write the next great grad student paper on it, live under some repressive or un-Hollywoodified regime overseas, you should probably download this to check out what's going on. You basically have Moore's explicit permission. However, it is not authoritative and not nearly as funny without much of its music.
Well well, it's the holiday weekend and things are crackin around here. I can't find a damn place to park now because Michael Moore's movie opened at the Grandview on Wednesday, and it has been really busy day after day (although I don't think it's been selling out). Most people coming out seem to have enjoyed it, which you've got to expect in a neighborhood like this.
Here is a night shot from the front of the light rail, speeding around past the Metrodome.
I will say more and I'm sorry there haven't been a hell of a lot of postings. It's been a very busy week and I am trying to keep my life on track between a couple classes and a new advertising project. Yummay!
Well, it was difficult to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. We were in the first screening at the Mall of America theatre, which is an unreal enough place to begin with. On the whole, the movie was very upsetting, but that's the intent. It didn't play quite as fast and loose as Bowling for Columbine with the facts, and on the whole I think it works very well and will make buckets and buckets of money. I will get into more detail later.....
Because right now I am going to hop the bus down to Lake street and ride the new trains and take pictures. Excitement!!!! I will post them and put together a nice special feature page later.
The almighty seven-minute silence.
A centerpiece of Fahrenheit 9/11 will be the seven minutes, all of them, that Bush sat in the Florida classroom while the WTC burned. Psychological minutes. Minutes of very low credibility, shall we say. Roger Ebert reviews the movie.
There are goonies posing as a "grassroots" group trying to intimidate theaters into not showing Fahrenheit 9/11. The group, Move America Forward, is hosting its website from the same IP number as Russo Marsh & Rogers, a PR firm in San Francisco that among other things had people involved in the Gray Davis recall, as Cosmic Iguana dug up. They were also the same characters that got "The Reagans" bumped off network television so I couldn't see it.
The report of the 9/11 panel may wound Bush, duhh, but it is nice to see the Washington Post understanding that.
On the Fourth of July, a new book by an anonymous CIA official, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror," is going to be published. This article is fascinating but I'm not getting into the juicy bits right now.
A huge examination of 9/11 tapes by Gail Sheehy.
The families heard a tape that has just now surfaced. Recorded by American Airlines at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex., even as the first hijacked airliner, Flight 11, was being taken over, the tape shows the airline’s top management was made aware beginning at about 8:21 a.m.—25 minutes before the impact of the first plane into the World Trade Center’s north tower—that a group of men described as Middle Eastern had stabbed two flight attendants, clouded the forward cabin with pepper spray or Mace, menaced crew and passengers with what looked like a bomb, and stormed the cockpit in a violent takeover of the gigantic bird.Despite all the high secrecy surrounding the briefing, a half-dozen different family members were so horrified by voice evidence of the airlines’ disregard for the fate of their pilots, crew and passengers that they found ways to reveal some of what they heard on those tapes, and also what they felt. To them, the tapes appeared to show that the first instinct of American and United Airlines, as management learned of the gathering horror aboard their passenger planes on Sept. 11, was to cover up.
The response of American’s management on duty, as revealed on the tape produced at the meeting, was recalled by persons in attendance:
"Don’t spread this around. Keep it close."
"Keep it quiet."
"Let’s keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own sources about what’s going on?"
"It was disgusting," said the parent of one of the victims, herself a veteran flight attendant for United Airlines. "The very first response was cover-up, when they should have been broadcasting this information all over the place."
That instinct to hold back information, some of the families believe, may have helped to allow the third hijacked plane to crash into the Pentagon and contributed to the doom of a fourth flight, United Flight 93. The United dispatcher was told by his superiors: Don’t tell pilots why we want them to land. The F.B.I. and the F.A.A. have also held back or, in one case, destroyed evidence in the government’s possession that would tell a very different story of how the nation’s guardians failed to prepare or protect Americans from the most devastating of terrorist attacks on the homeland.
[.....]
"This has been the attitude all the way along," Ms. Dillard observed. "Everybody was keeping it hush-hush."The failure to trumpet vital news from calls placed from the first hijacked flight throughout the system and into the highest circles of government leaves families wondering whether military jets could have intercepted American Airlines Flight 77 in time to keep it from diving into the Pentagon and killing 184 more people. That suicide mission ended in triumph for the terrorists more than 50 minutes after the first American jetliner hit the World Trade Center. Suppose American Airlines had warned all its pilots and crew of what their families were able to see and hear from the media?
The information hold-back may have arisen from lack of experience, or from the inability to register the enormity of the terrorists’ destructive plans, or it may have been a visceral desire to protect the airlines from liability. The airlines make much of the fact that the "common strategy" for civil aircraft crews before 9/11 was to react passively to hijackings—"to refrain from trying to overpower or negotiate with hijackers, to land the aircraft as soon as possible, to communicate with authorities, and to try delaying tactics."
This strategy was based on the assumption that the hijackers would want to be flown safely to an airport of their choice to make their demands.
But that defense of the airlines’ actions is belied by the fact that the F.A.A., which was in contact with American Airlines and other traffic-control centers, heard the tip-off from terrorists in Flight 11’s cockpit—"We have planes, more planes"—and thus knew before the first crash of a possible multiple hijacking and the use of planes as weapons.
[.....]
So many unconnected dots, contradictions and implausible coincidences. Like the fact that NORAD was running an imaginary terrorist-attack drill called "Vigilant Guardian" on the same morning as the real-world attacks. At 8:40 a.m., when a sergeant at NORAD’s center in Rome, N.Y., notified his northeastern commander, Col. Robert Marr, of a possible hijacked airliner—American Flight 11—the colonel wondered aloud if it was part of the exercise. This same confusion was played out at the lower levels of the NORAD network.What’s more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation’s air defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD’s military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets, approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr. Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11. He isn’t on the record as having given any orders that morning. In fact, he didn’t even go to the White House situation room; he had to walk to the window of his office in the Pentagon to see that the country’s military headquarters was in flames.
Mr. Rumsfeld claimed at a previous commission hearing that protection against attack inside the homeland was not his responsibility. It was, he said, "a law-enforcement issue."
Why, in that case, did he take onto himself the responsibility of approving NORAD’s deployment of fighter planes?
In minor media matters, CBS is waffling about airing an anti-Clinton ad.
Lately I have enjoyed looking at the blogs node707 "Just a Bump in the Beltway" , "WarAndPiece" and Spacerook. As always I recommend Mr Juan Cole and in particular this rich and huge interview he did with the somewhat maverick Pepe Escobar in Asia Times online.
Right now, Fox News is advertising:
I am not going to make any Iran-Contra jokes this evening, except one.
"If you helped Reagan sell missiles to the Ayatollah so that coke mobsters in Latin America would get more weapons, what does that make you?"
"A trusted member of Fox News... if you ran the show, you get a show!!"
Only funny because it's true. Not because it's funny. Ollie also wrote a couple books such as The Jericho Sanction, with such chapter titles as Legacy of Death, The Letter, Intrigue, Traitors & Hostages, Blown Cover, The Wolf, Making Plans While Marking Time, and other highly original contributions. Then there is "Mission Compromised," something Ollie Poo would Never Do!
Reagan and God, from the link above:
But it was in his lifelong battle against communism – first in Hollywood, then on the political stage – that Reagan's Christian beliefs had their most profound effect. Appalled by the religious repression and state-mandated atheism of Bolshevik Marxism, Reagan felt called by a sense of personal mission to confront the USSR. Inspired by influences as diverse as C.S. Lewis, Whittaker Chambers, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he waged an openly spiritual campaign against communism, insisting that religious freedom was the bedrock of personal liberty. "The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual," he said in his Evil Empire address. "And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man."Well, you have to admit it's better than "Bring Em On!" Billmon memorializes the great actor who filled up a suit 40% more effectively than W.
In some ways, Reagan's biggest triumph was the creation an atmosphere of existential crisis, in he could play the stereotypical role of the man on a white horse. He had a brilliant script, written by a new type of PR consultant (Michael Deaver generally gets the top credit) ready to exploit the synergies of the merger between politics and show business. And, like all great myths, it had enough correspondance with the reality of the times to be believable.Billmon follows again with a look at the Legacy:But there was always a kind of stage set quality to it - the sense that if you looked behind the facade all you'd find would be plywood and paper mache.
The legacy of Reagan's policies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are still being paid for - in blood. The cynical promotion of Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein against Iran, the forging of a new "strategic relationship" with Israel, the corrupt dealings with the House of Saud, and (perhaps most ironic, given Reagan's tough guy image) the weakeness and indecision of his disastrous intervention in Beruit - all of these helped set the stage for what the neocons now like to call World War IV, and badly weakened the geopolitical ability of the United States to wage that war.There's a whole slate of good films coming out. Check out "The Hunting of the President," telling the story of Clinton's sleazy tormenters. My favorite part of the trailer might be where one journalist says "We were following these stories simply because Scaife was paying us to do it," presumably referring to the evil Republican billionaire industrialist Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife indeed dropped a fat $2,400,000 on the American Spectator magazine to go after Clinton, along with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation... on and on and on... more about the foundations.But all this pales in comparison to Reagan's war crimes in Central America....
The second movie is of course Fahrenheit 9/11 (Quicktime trailer). I am not a uniform supporter of Michael Moore, particularly with glaring inaccuracies that pop up all over some of his stuff. Regardless, the man is a pressure release valve on the hypocrisy and contradictions in what they're trying to sell us. He is shrill and unpleasant a great amount of the time, but that's tempered by a real quest to bring us something significant, at odds with the mainstream narrative.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.In other news, a splendid review of media bias by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.
The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
...
....saying that while terrorists must be confronted, the bigger problem is the extremist Islamic ideology that produces them.''What you have is a civil war in that religion where a small minority are trying to hijack it,'' he said.
This is just so damn goofy: an RNC promotional website for Hispanics that offers them four job choices: war veterans, teachers, senior citizens, or farmers and ranchers. Yes, that is where they fit in. (via WaPo)
Religious crusaders attacking the separation of church and state, while bringing political campaign pressure straight into churches. Safety for atheists not assured.
Emmerich's disaster movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' has opened today at the Grandview next door. There are people, I think from MoveOn.org, hanging around talking with people.
Sometimes I ask people coming out of the movies what they think. And sometimes as we chillin on the front porch we overhear their opinions anyway. This one may be interesting.
In news of the server, Jess gave me some old floppy disks and I am making the boot disk necessary right now. The Linux box may be ready to roll tomorrow. Unfortunately, I have to erase the whole HD in order to get the stupid Compaq diagnostic partition on there. Ugh. Stay tuned on that.