Category: Best

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PBS’ Soundstage

When I was in college back in the 1970’s, the only decent music program on TV was Soundstage (earlier known as “Made in Chicago”), which presented relatively current, relatively serious artists like Harry Chapin, Arlo Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Emmy-Lou Harris, in a one-hour format, no commercial breaks, no light shows, no lip-synching.

Okay– so they also presented– geez!– Burt Bacharach and the Bee Gees. It absolutely blows my mind that the same minds that would put together a program like this for Emmy-Lou Harris would think it was a great idea to give the Bee Gees an hour of rapt attention. The Bee Gees were worse than mediocre. They were aggressively mediocre. Their mediocrity pounded you on the face and stuck it’s waxy fingers into your ears and wobbled your head from side-to-side to scream at you that there is not a single interesting thing musically or intellectually in any of this noise you are hearing.

But then again, in 1976 Lightfoot appeared on Hee-Haw to lip-synch “Sundown”.

Anyway, two or three of my favorite shows are on PBS: the News Hour which is about the only television news program that I watch without getting nauseous nowadays (I know I’m mean but even Peter Mansbridge looks and sounds like a pharmaceutical salesman– think about it– doesn’t he always seem about to ask, “and how often should the patient take this dosage, Mary?”) and “Frontline” (documentaries) and “Inside Washington”. And “Nova” can be pretty cool thought it can also get annoyingly breathless at times. And cheesy.

But mostly, when they need money, they present John Sebastian presenting endlessly recycled clips of “Do You Believe in Magic” or the Mamas and the Papas singing “California Dreaming” on Hullabaloo, in bathtubs, or Peter, Paul, and Mary doing their farewell concert to end all farewell concerts at Carnegie Hall. Over and over and over again. And over and over and over again. And over and over and over and over again. I don’t think they have done pledge week once in the last 20 years without showing Peter, Paul & Mary singing “Lemon Tree” or Pete Seeger doing “Turn, Turn, Turn” and John Sebastian strumming his autoharp and creeping me out with that harmless, aimless expression, grinning and looking folksy and trying to make you believe that the 1960’s was a happy place of delightful experimentation and joyful frolics in psychedelic meadows of unicorns and marshmallows.

When it’s not John Sebastian and the 1960’s, it’s Victor Borge, Perry Como, or Harry Belafonte. Who runs this network?

It doesn’t make sense to me. The average age of the PBS viewer must surely be sliding ever closer to the grave– they will, sooner or later, require younger viewers to survive the next round of Republican attacks. To attract younger viewers, they have to start bringing in musical artists like Leslie Feist, Arcade Fire, Royal Wood, Bon Ivor, Conor Orbest, Wilco, please, anybody from the last ten or fifteen years!

I am never not astounded that Lawrence Welk is actually still shown on TV, on Sunday, PBS.  Really?  Seriously?  Who is running this network?

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“Game Change”: Sarah Palin and McCain

Just watched HBO’s “Game Change”, about Sarah Palin’s exciting tenure as John McCain’s running mate. Not bad. Not great, but not terrible. I can’t even really tell the politics of the makers– one tends to assume that a Hollywood film is made by liberals. In general, Palin is made to look like an idiot, but then, Palin really is an idiot and even some conservatives will admit that.

A competing conservative biopic, “Undefeated”, has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and has been described as “Stalinesque”.

Someone on a message board on IMDB wrote– poorly– about the idea that in order to make a good film (or tv), you have to be able to empathize with people who are different from you.

The problem for conservatives is that the minute you do that, you become a liberal

“Game Change” paints a rather flattering portrait of John McCain in one respect: McCain (Ed Harris) is depicted as running a principled, honest campaign. He is clueless about just how incompetent Sarah Palin is, but he is “ethical”. So he rejects bringing up Jeremiah Wright. He remembers being smeared by George Bush in 2000 with a scurrilous claim that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a black woman. (The photo used to “substantiate” this claim was of McCain’s adopted Asian daughter.)

That is a very, very relative statement, but yes, compared to the current Republican primaries, he was Florence Nightingale. He was also bitter after the election– in a way that Al Gore and John Kerry clearly were not– and I suspect he was somewhat delusional about just how much damage Palin did. The idea of blaming the media for denigrating the most incompetent personnel decision in modern presidential political history must have occurred to him in his sleep.

Did you know: a committee of the Texas Legislature rejected an amendment to a bill that would have required that public school sex education classes be “medically accurate”.

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A Conspiracy of One

There is a practical advantage to bringing the case in New York State court: state prosecutors said they were allowed to charge Mr. Pimentel with a conspiracy, even if he were acting with just the informant; federal law does not permit charging such a conspiracy. NyTimes, November 21, 2011

!!!

So federal law takes the view that if a police informant makes a plot with an individual– and no one else– the individual should not be charged with conspiracy.

That makes sense to me. I had always thought a basic principle of common law was that a person could not be charged with a crime if he would not have committed it but for the help of a police informant.  Do you see the problem?  If police informants are going to choose a “suspect” and then assist and encourage them to take part in a criminal conspiracy, then the police are choosing individuals to make them criminals.  Then you would have to apply this approach to everyone equally.   It’s entrapment.

If that isn’t a real principle of common law, it should be. It absolutely should be. Would a crime have been committed if not for the actions of the police informant?

The FBI declined to participate in the laying of “conspiracy” charges against Jose Pimentel, for various interesting reasons. One reason was the conspiracy bit. Another reason was the fact that the police informant and Mr. Pimentel liked to smoke a little weed together while they bounced around suggestions for terrorist conspiracies.

I haven’t heard this but I’ll bet another reason is that Mr. Pimentel, like many of the other so-called terrorists arrested, charged, and convicted, couldn’t conspire his way out of a paper bag without the help of his trusty police informant.

That’s was passes for heroic law enforcement these days.

It should tell you a lot that Mr. Pimentel has become representative of the war on terror, in my view: we can’t catch the real terrorists in spite of the billions and billions and billions of dollars we are spending, so we damn well better catch somebody, and damn well better make it look good.

Try to tell your friends that a man was charged with conspiracy even though his only co-conspirator was a police informant. They’ll think you’re exaggerating.

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Household Debt

The average Canadian household debt, excluding mortgages, is about $40,000. Yes, read it twice.

As everyone points fingers at those irresponsible Greeks– rumour has it they don’t work at all– consider the Canadian consumer, also living high on future earnings.

Now, if one in ten Canadians were in debt to the tune of $40K, you might begin to think that one in 10 Canadians is irresponsible, selfish, and/or inept. You might look at yourself: I’m pretty smart and wise and self-controlled. I have no debt.

But you can’t. You also have $40K in outstanding debt. So you are irresponsible, lazy, and inept.

Good news for you– you’re probably actually pretty average. In fact, you are average. In fact, you are everyone.

So if the average person owes $40K to credit card companies and banks, what does that say about our society? It says that the creditors in our world have found a way to transfer the hard-earned wealth you have earned from honest labour into their own pockets by simple virtue of the fact that they have capital to lend out. If this state of things were the result of a character flaw, there’s no way everyone would be doing it.

The banks act as if everyone has a choice of running up personal debt or not. But the results of their policies and practices reveal the truth: the system is rigged to their favor. The system is rigged to entice you into spending more than you have in order to “enslave” you: fixed monthly payments for most of your adult life is not “credit”. It’s indentured servitude. Twenty-eight percent interest on credit card debt is not there to provide a fair incentive to banks to lend– it’s there to keep you in servitude by making it increasingly difficult to pay off the principle.

The financial crisis in the U.S. was largely triggered by the attempts of the banks in the U.S. to apply the lessons they learned about credit cards to mortgages, with balloon payments, floating rates, back-loaded payment schedules, and so on. All of this requires a very large crew of lobbyists’ and lots of political donations, because for it to work, the government must be complicit. The government provides the legal system that is rigged to enforce the banks’ rules and the banks’ views of what is “fair” and “honest”. If the banks tried to enforce their own rules themselves, that would be called organized crime. Extortion. Loan-sharking. When the government does it, it’s called “free enterprise”.

It may occasionally be necessary for some of you debtors to go over to a hot, dusty, godforsaken foreign country and kill people to maintain our glorious liberties and freedoms. Thank you very much. We’ll get you to stand up at our baseball and football games and accept a salute. No no no– not you homeless or paralyzed veterans! The ones who can stand.

Only about half of all Canadian homeowners, according to the same website (right) have a mortgage on their home. That’s amazing. But then, they probably bought a boat, or a cottage.

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How Mitt Romney Got Rich

How Romney Did it:

Romney ran a company called Bain Capital. Under Romney’s ineffable leadership it bought an Illinois company called Dade. After some manipulations, streamlining, slashing benefits, and more aggressive marketing, Dade got bigger. Then Bain Capital wanted to cash out. But nobody would offer the kind of money for Dade that Bain Capital felt it deserved. No problem.

Dade borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to… buy itself! From Bain! At the direction of Bain! What kind of price did they pay? Ask yourself: how much do you think you should get for you? You betcha!

The story has a tragic end. Dade, now burdened with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt could no longer afford to innovate and soon went bankrupt.

That’s how Romney “creates jobs”: he buys you. Then he borrows your money to buy yourself back from him at a very good price. He ends up with a pile of money and you end with a pile of debt. To top it off, he pays less tax on the capital gains profits he made than you did on the salary you no longer receive because you went bankrupt.

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What is “Tough” on Crime

What is a “tough” criminal sentence? How do you measure “tough”?

Of course, it’s easy to know what “tougher” is– that’s more than we have now. But how do you measure the toughness of now? What factors go into it? How do you calculate it?

It’s all just feeling, isn’t it?

Even judges — who should be experts on what “tough” is– admit that they simply sentence convicted criminals to a time that is longer or shorter than something else. But I doubt they could make a case for any particular time being “fair” or “just”.

Why not? Why is there no work being done in this area? Have you ever seen a study, based on real research, of what an optimal sentence is for a convicted criminal?

How things have changed: General Eisenhower, according to Andy Rooney, refused to censor the official magazine of the armed forces, “Stars and Stripes”.

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The Ethical Culture Fieldston School of Hysterical Over-Reaction

Barry Sirmon was a history teacher at Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

On the third day of school this fall, he joked about two black students, “I hope I will be able to tell you apart.” Mr. Sirmon, reasonably, insists that he was not making a racist joke– he was making a joke about racism.

Damian Fernandez, head of the school, panicked. Obviously, a terrible, terrible blow to the school’s reputation had been inflicted by Mr. Sirmon’s cruel remark. He had to be fired, immediately!

Damian Fernandez is Latino, and openly gay. He is obviously very sensitive to the potentially oppressive culture of abuse in Mr. Sirmon’s classroom.

All right — sarcasm doesn’t work here. Sirmon had worked at the school for ten years. Not everyone liked him because he tended to speak his mind and he was often sarcastic. The truth is, Fernandez was afraid of him and used the incident as an excuse to get rid of him and to intimidate the rest of the staff. In my opinion.

When he was fired, one parent said, “it wasn’t just one thing– it was a pattern of behavior“.  That is the last refuge of accusatory scoundrel’s:  a “pattern” of behavior.

What absolute horseshit! Either he was fired for the other things or he wasn’t. A “pattern of behavior” is the pathetic excuse you offer when you have failed to make your case and you don’t have any actual facts or information to support your view. It is a contemptible comment unworthy of an institution with a name that becomes more ridiculous by the second: Ethical Culture Fieldston School.

If Fernandez had a real case, he would have documented every incident and his response to the incident and his directions to Mr. Sirmon to alter his behavior to be in compliance with school policies and directives. He didn’t do that. He was new to the job and he wanted to show his balls.

I feel like I know this head, this Fernandez. I’ll bet he’s had leadership training. I’ll bet he has absolutely no clue about anything to do with the issues he is judging. He’s making an appearance about an appearance and instead of dealing rationally with a behavior he wants to change, he chose to bray and screech to demonstrate his authority. A lot of newly hired managers do that– seize the first opportunity to prove that he or she is tough enough for the job, and throw a little fear out there. They don’t bring anyone else into the process. They don’t follow a refined process or carefully consider all sides.

I’ll bet Mr. Fernandez is an asshole or a whiney, timid little wuss. He has no real understanding of what Mr. Sirmon said, what it means, how much it weighs, whether it is insulting or not, whether it is racist or not, or whether it was a joke. Or not.

It’s this kind of crap that gives cover to the hysterics on the right who decry political correctness. The only thing we can trust them to do is to avoid any actual facts and information.

The world is full of people with small minds blindly stumbling around trying very hard to look tough and inflicting damage wherever they go.

The New York Times reported that a teacher at one of the public schools in the city was still on the job even though he had told a student, while handing back an assignment, that she did such a good job he could kiss her.

He didn’t actually kiss her.

Nevertheless, three men in long scarlet robes appeared and shrieked and lamented and, at last report, the teacher was still hanging from his thumbs and the student was being medicated and the rest of the class were having their brains scoured with steel wool.

They will all shortly return home to play video games in which they dismember each other.

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The Un-War

I have said before that there is no “war” on terror. It’s not a war. It’s a series of random skirmishes. But, as I have also observed before, the Republicans would prefer to keep America in a perpetual state of war and they have now succeeded. The Republicans love to say, “sure, in normal times we could respect the constitution, but this is a time of war” or “sure, normally we don’t torture, but this is a time of war…” or ” sure, normally we try to have a fair tax system, but in a time of war, the rich should not have to pay taxes”.  Or how about, normally we don’t steal a nation’s oil reserves, but Iraq wasn’t using them for anything anyway.

There’s a brilliant mind at work here. If you can justify otherwise outrageous policies on the basis of war, why not have a perpetual war. But wouldn’t that be a bad thing? Only if it was a real war. But then how do you get people to believe we are war when we’re not? Simple. There are always terrorists and always criminals. Simply redefine “war” so it looks like something that is always going on. Bingo.

How does it serve their interests? Fear is the Republicans’ best friend. It is through fear that they can abrogate your civil rights, examine your book-borrowing records, scan you naked at airports. It is through fear that they can channel billions of dollars to their friends in the military and the defense industries. It is through fear that they can hide: our enemies cannot be permitted to know how much we spend on security– as if it would make any difference to them– and so, neither can you.

This “war” is not going to end. Obama can’t end it because the Republicans will roast him for being “soft” on terror if he does, and he doesn’t have the guts to take a chance on that. It will not end because there has never not been terrorists and there probably will never not be terrorists, and the Republicans know that perfectly well. They have their dream position. They know that they are sonsofbitches and as long as they can keep America afraid they are confident that Americans will trust them to wield the big stick and do to our enemies what we consider monstrous when they do it to us.

This war is forever. Patriotism, flag-waving, bigotry prevails for now. Trillions will be spent on fighting the phantom menace, ineffectually in the end, because the very definition of terrorism is random violence.

I don’t when or if Americans will ever realize how they have been conned.

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Extraordinarily Lavish Survivor Benefits: Why?

The average family of a victim of the 9/11 terrorist attacks received about $3 million from insurance companies and the federal government of the United States. Altogether, the governments kicked in about $16 billion in compensation. (Insurance Companies kicked in about the same amount.) The government enacted legislation limiting the liability of governments, airports, airlines, and other agencies or companies, in exchange for the settlements produced by the 9/11 fund.

[2011-09-26 I just reread that and I couldn’t believe it. So I double-checked. Yes, $16 billion. And I’m sure lots of people watching it all unfold on TV thought to themselves, boy, they can’t pay them enough.

Yes they can.

You just want the theatrical moment in your mind when you well up with tears and awesomeness at how

As the Rand Corporation pointed out, the government’s actions here establish some precedents for compensation for the victims of a terrorist attack. Politically, it was impossible to stand up to the families of the victims of 9/11: all they had to do was go on TV and complain about “unfair” treatment and politicians of all stripes would fall over themselves to grant their every wish. They even demanded the right to censor any entertainments eventually provided in facilities at the new World Trade Center.

There were concerns that litigation would go on forever, would cost far more than the roughly $30 billion offered by the government, and make everybody feel really, really bad.

The lawsuits would have been a grave thing– what jury could resist giving a huge award to someone who lost a loved one because the airlines and the airports didn’t check for box-cutters? But no one, of course, was going to be able to sue the people actually responsible for the disaster: Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.. Instead, you sue whoever happens to be nearby, with large wallets. The government is always handy, even if we say we don’t want them intruding on our lives. Then, when the Bush Administration couldn’t get Bin Laden, they followed a similar strategy of diffusion: let’s kill Saddam. You sue or kill the most convenient target or the target with deep pockets.

The victims of Hurricane Katrina, of course, were not so lavishly compensated for their losses. Of course, you couldn’t sue Katrina herself either. And for some reason, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and the remarkably inept government response, didn’t have nearly the political sway the victims of 9/11 had.

Does that have anything to with the economic status or colour of the victims?  You decide.

There was something about the hatred and bitterness and vindictiveness of the 9/11 Families that seemed to have nothing or little to do with perceived or real injustice. It was not pleasant to watch. It caused me personally to begin to lose sympathy for them thought they had suffered real losses.

It’s a lot of money. I think you should only be able to sue for that kind of money if you could clearly demonstrate that there was reckless disregard for the safety of the individuals working in the towers. How reckless were they, compared to all the other towers in Manhattan, most of which are equally vulnerable to this kind of attack?

Not the Empire State Building: it was designed differently. A plane did crash into it once — it met an immovable object. The Empire State Building is far, far safer than the World Trade Center because the builders spent enough money to make sure it was safe. That’s all there is to it.

It is a known fact that no fire above the 37th floor of building in New York City can be fought by fire-fighters.  Nobody cares– not when a billion dollars of office space is just sitting there to be cashed in on.  Buildings are required to have a water tank on the top floor: the World Trade Centre safety equipment did not work.  The door to the roof was locked and could not be opened.

It probably would have cost a lot less than $30 billion to have built the World Trace Center to the standards.

On the 9/11 compensation fund.

9/11 was a genuine act of savagery and a genuine tragedy. One is tempted to forget that, in the face of the relentless, incessant, over-bearing monumentalism going on in the U.S. right now.

U.S. payback was overwhelming, disproportionate, and wildly misguided. And it was payback. Will there be a moment at which the U.S. finally announces that they are even?

On 3/20 will the Iraqis hold a memorial to the 100,000 innocent people who died in the American invasion? (We’re talking about women and children and non-combatants here). Will they solemnly read off the names of the 100,000 at the site of the one of the bombed out neighborhoods? Will the families of the 100,000 sue whoever is nearby with a fat wallet for “compensation”?

We know they won’t get a penny. They just happened to be in the way.

About $3 billion was given to the 9/11 fund from charities.

 

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The Three Days of the Tea Party

In the uncannily prescient 1975 movie “Three Days of the Condor”, Turner (Robert Redford) gradually unravels a rogue CIA plot to destabilize the Middle East in order to secure vast supplies of oil for the U.S. We are, wisely, not given too much detail– it’s more believable that way.

A hired killer named Joubert played suavely by Max Von Sydow, has been trying to murder Turner since he stumbled into the plot. He seems to have finally tracked him down just as Redford has uncovered the mastermind behind the oil plot, a middling CIA manager named Leonard Atwood. But instead of shooting Turner, Joubert suddenly turns and kills Atwood. Turner is shocked, and puzzled– why did you kill Atwood? Joubert doesn’t know, and doesn’t care. I suspect, he says, that he was about to become an embarrassment. Then he offers Turner a ride back into town. He sees that Turner is still afraid of him. Joubert smiles– my contract to kill you, he says, was with Atwood. As you can see…

It’s an elegant, profound moment. Joubert is one of the more intelligent creations of the genre– a professional, passionless, rational killer. There is baggage with the term “hired killer”, but how different, really, is he from a soldier? I liked him. He advises Turner to go into hiding. There is no future for you in New York (his home). Turner insists he wants to keep fighting the corruption he has uncovered. Doesn’t Joubert care? How do you not care?

Joubert tells him, life is easier if you don’t believe in either side.

Later, Turner meets with another CIA manager, Higgins. Higgins is probably not part of the corruption, but he must protect the agency from the threat Turner represents. He argues with Turner: Americans want us to make those difficult, morally ambiguous decisions, without telling them, so they can preserve the illusion that they live moral lives while enjoying their big cars and heated homes.

Cut to 1992 and “A Few Good Men”, far inferior film even if it was written by Aaron Sorkin. (After all, it was directed by Rob Reiner, not Sydney Pollack.) We all know the line spoken by Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson): “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” In this case, a pair of marines have caused the death of a fellow marine who brought discredit upon their brand by complaining about his treatment. The viewer perhaps needs to be reminded that in most other dramatizations, the two marines would be the villains. Here they are the heroes: stalwart, proud, professional. Oops– we killed a fellow marine. Jessup is the villain because he ordered them to do it, and then strung them out to dry, dishonored.

Higgins might well have said to Turner: “You can’t handle the truth”. “It’s easier if you don’t believe in either side”. Jessup believes he is so right that he must make life and death decisions for us. He passionately argues that our society can’t stomach the kind of moral decisions he has to make all the time, but, by God, we want killers like Jessup out there on the walls protecting us from …. well, the truth is, from the other Jessups out there, on the other side. He and Atwood and Higgins are all of a piece: we make the unpleasant decisions so that you can enjoy your Hummers, your air conditioning, your jobs.

Cut to Norway, 2011. Anders Behring Breivik. Europe is being overwhelmed by Moslem immigrants who threaten the foundations of Western Culture and religion. And Norway’s political leaders do nothing, except welcome them with open arms, and allow them to build their mosques and cover their faces.

What’s an earnest little fascist to do? His lawyer says, “he hates all the Western ideas and the values of democracy.”

Cut to the Tea Party: at a recent debate, the Republican presidential candidates were asked if they would accept a deal with the Democrats that made $10 of cuts for every $1 of increased revenue, if it meant raising taxes. Not a single one was willing to compromise. That is the definition of fanaticism: they are so right they need to defy all common sense and reasonableness.

There is not much of a future in Washington for a reasonable man.

You can’t handle the truth.

Aaron Sorkin is a brilliant writer but, like the Editorialists at the New York Times and 60 Minutes, he has an odd, fetishistic reverence for the military, because he really believes in the myths of honor and integrity, and that there really are enemies out there trying to kill us.  He’s right about the enemies, but that doesn’t mitigate the creepy allure military men posses in Sorkin dramas, especially since Sorkin himself, of course, of course, never served in the military.