Categorical Aperitif

With this, for better or worse, I am at long last caught up with Daily Random Flickr Blogging for 2007. Happy New Year and see y'all in 2008,

--nash

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Ah, what the heck. Let's continue in that vein:

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// posted by nash @ 11:26 AM 0 comments

With apologies to all non-Trekkie/er/as out there.

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OK, let's see how caught up with 2007 Daily Random Flickr Blogging I can get before 2007 ends.

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OK. Let's see if I can catch up some more on some DRFBing during this, the last weekend of 2007.

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Via the Undernews, we find that some British folks do NOT like speedcams. (Warning: very large file, many photos; beware on dial-up.) There's an odd kind of poetry in sentences like these:

This Gatso on Wessex Way in Bournemouth has been burnt to death with part of the yellow paint melted away.

This Gatso in Barnsley has been well and truly baked.

UPDATE - Like all vandalised Gatsos in the area it was replaced shortly afterwards but the new camera has since been blown up using dynamite, see below.

// posted by nash @ 7:48 AM 0 comments

Those in search of inspiring holiday reading need look no further than Greg Palast's site.

I hope the day is a happy one for all.

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I'm catching up on these, slowly but surely.

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// posted by nash @ 4:10 PM 0 comments

Anyone checking in with Today's Papers this morning will get a nice object lesson in scripting—the mainstream media's obliging adherence to convenient narratives that hide inconvenient facts. First, there's this tidbit:

Rounding out the Campaign '08 analysis-dominated lineup, the Los Angeles Times breaks down the Republican candidates' relationship with President Bush's foreign policy legacy. All four major candidates are edging away from administration's democracy-promotion agenda, but have hesitated to strongly criticize specific policies for fear of antagonizing Bush loyalists.

Second, Today's Papers points us toward a WaPo story about a guy who holds both U.S. and Venezuelan passports and who was stopped at an airport in Argentina a few months back with a suitcase holding $800,000 in undeclared cash. The U.S. claims that he was working for Hugo Chavez and that Chavez was trying to influence Argentine elections; others suspect that he was working for the U.S. and that the U.S. is trying to "meddle in the affairs of the region." Ya gotta love the last sentence here:

The United States "encouraged a nefarious intelligence operation which had the direct consequence of denigrating the presidency of our nation," stated a resolution passed by Argentina's Congress last week.

The idea of a U.S.-backed plot to influence regional politics plays well in a region where some conspiracy theories -- such as U.S. support of military dictatorships in the 1970s -- have proved true over time.

I know that wingnut types often think that when people like me complain about things like this, it's because we think the worst of America—and we want the media to reflect that. But that's not it at all. (But then a lot of wingnut thinking seems to be driven by the following false dichotomy: Either you say only nice things about the United States or you HATE AMERICA. The massive wrongness of this assumption ought to be apparent to anyone who has the ability and the inclination to think critically for two seconds.) I remember back in the 80s; I had a right-wing college friend who routinely referred to the Washington Post as the Washington Pravda. This was his clever way (probably borrowed from Brent Bozell or somesuch rube-runner) of suggesting that the WaPo was part of the disreputable "liberal media" and was anti-American, working for the other side—Pravda, of course, was the house organ of the Soviet Communist Party in those days. A house organ, of course, specializes in telling the people what The Party wants them to hear—and hiding inconvenient facts that get in the way of the ruling elite's version of the truth. It was only years later that I came to see that there was more truth in my friend's nasty little troglodyte joke than either of us realized. The anti-American part was always stupid—the WaPo occasionally published critical information about Republicans and the Reagan Administration; that's really what made him mad—but the house organ part was spot-on. Decades later, this supposedly anti-American paper can scarcely bring itself to acknowledge that the U.S. has, at times, actively undermined democratic governments and championed repressive dictatorships. The reason people like me complain about the mainstream media is that we don't want our news outlets to be Pravdas: we don't want them to just obligingly pass along ridiculous spin like "democracy-promotion agenda" and to hide inconvenient facts about past U.S. actions inside tortured sentences designed to preserve some childish myth of American purity. We don't hate America; far from it. (If America isn't perfect, it has imperfection in common with, oh, everything else made by human hands.) We hate the fact that in this, the world's richest, most powerful democracy, the media still often functions like the propaganda arm of a corrupt, dishonest elite.

I guess that the Sunday before Christmas is as good a time as any to be reminded of some unpleasant truths about the world we've made, huh?

// posted by nash @ 7:40 AM 0 comments

In yesterday's column, the Krugmeister briefly reviews the connection of free-market ideolatry to "Big Shitpile" and closes with some thoughts to which I dearly, dearly, dearly wish the Democrats would pay attention:

Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs.

David Brooks is off today.

For more from the Krugman, check out last Sunday's Media Matters with Bob McChesney (Real Audio/MP3 download). The first few minutes of the "conversation" (after the Media Minutes segment) are kind of funny—there's some sort of audio mix-up, and we're treated to several minutes of aural confusion, amidst which an increasingly annoyed Krugman can periodically be heard asking "Hello?...Hello?...Is anybody there?" until the connections get sorted out (there's a profound political metaphor in here somewhere, I know)—but then the rest of the program is both enlightening and enjoyable. Nash Bob says check it out.

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In need of some holiday cheer? Then watch Norman Solomon take Glenn Beck to school.

Oh, it is a thing of beauty. Watch as the odious baby-faced, baby-brained Beck anticipates scoring some cheap points against MS/NBC with the help of invited egghead Solomon. Watch as Solomon agrees but then deftly widens the scope of discussion to include other networks and the corporations they're owned by or commercially in bed with—including Beck's own employer, CNN. Watch as Beck unsuccessfully tries to cut Solomon off but Solomon skillfully makes his points anyway. Watch as Beck is reduced to incoherent spluttering and lame attempts to suggest that the calm, eloquent Solomon is somehow crazy or disreputable. Watch as Beck desperately ends the segment before Solomon can score any more points. Wonder who on Beck's staff is going to be fired for allowing a demagogic dimwit like Beck to be matched up against a real media critic like Solomon.

Transcript here. Happy holidays!

// posted by nash @ 4:55 PM 0 comments

I was catching up with my Undernews RSS and ran across this:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

Injun revolt! And they're talking to some o' them South American socialists! This is even worse than that Aztlan thing! They're trying to steal our land! Back, but you know what I mean.

Can desperate warnings about the aboriginofascist menace be far behind? I mean, think about it: if you take John Wayne's character in The Searchers, subtract the ruggedness, the personal courage, and the psychological depth but leave in the racism, the paranoia, and the bloodthirstiness, wouldn't you basically have a right-wing blogger?

Discuss.

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Okay, let's see if I can get back into the spirit.

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Help me out here. Mikhaela Reid (who knows a thing or two about Mitt Romney's being-rewritten-as-we-speak history) has up a neat little post where she asks for input about a pair of Romney-related cartoons—sort of a first version, second version thing. The post itself is enlightening—oh, please let there be pictures of chiseled Mitt pressing the flesh in gay bars—but I'm more interested in the question she asks about the two cartoons. I honestly think that the second one is superior to the first, but most of her commenters take the opposite view. I think that the first version, while good, is a little too obvious—I think the ending is kind of flat, and I think it pretty much just hits the reader over the head with the Mitt-is-a-history-rewriting-hypocrite message, which was already made nicely earlier in the cartoon. The second, though, takes the ending in a more interesting, more adventurous direction that adds a nice layer of extra thoughtfulness and complexity—and makes the whole thing more comically effective. Or so it seems to me, anyway. The handful of you who read this blog have well-developed senses of humor; I'm curious what y'all think. Am I just way off in weird field for finding the second one clearly superior to the first? Check 'em out if you have a few moments.

And check out this one and this one and this one too, while you're at it. Ooomph!

Labels: editorial cartoons

// posted by nash @ 8:27 AM 2 comments

Got a few minutes? Why not pop over and wish Sir Arthur C. Clarke a happy 90th birthday? And thank him for coming up with the idea of geosynchronous communications satellites while you're at it.

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Spider Appears on NASA TV.

Meanwhile, the Shuttle may be scrubbed 'til January, but there's a big secret launch tomorrow. Shhhhh.

// posted by nash @ 2:45 PM 2 comments

Steve Fraser argues that the Iraq debacle, worsening economic troubles, spreading insecurity, dissatisfaction with terror-state Republicanism, etc. will create a "perfect storm" of change in 2008 that even Democratic ineptitude won't be able to stop. His optimism is almost enough to cheer me up.

This perfect storm will be upon us just as the election season heats up. It will inevitably hasten the already well-advanced implosion of the Republican Party, which is the definitive reason 2008 will indeed qualify as a turning-point election. Reports of defections from the conservative ascendancy have been emerging from all points on the political compass. The Congressional elections of 2006 registered the first seismic shock of this change. Since then, independents and moderate Republicans continue to indicate, in growing numbers in the polls, that they are leaving the Grand Old Party. The Wall Street Journal reports on a growing loss of faith among important circles of business and finance. Hard core religious right-wingers are airing their doubts in public. Libertarians delight in the apostate candidacy of Ron Paul. Conservative populist resentment of immigration runs head on into corporate elite determination to enlarge a sizeable pool of cheap labor, while Hispanics head back to the Democratic Party in droves. Even the Republican Party's own elected officials are engaged in a mass movement to retire.

All signs are ominous. The credibility and legitimacy of the old order operate now at a steep discount. Most telling and fatal perhaps is the paralysis spreading into the inner councils at the top. Faced with dire predicaments both at home and abroad, they essentially do nothing except rattle those sabers, captives of their own now-bankrupt ideology. Anything, many will decide, is better than this.

Or will they? What if the opposition is vacillating, incoherent, and weak-willed -- labels critics have reasonably pinned on the Democrats? Bad as that undoubtedly is, I don't think it will matter, not in the short run at least.

Take the presidential campaign of 1932 as an instructive example. The crisis of the Great Depression was systemic, but the response of the Democratic Party and its candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- though few remember this now -- was hardly daring. In many ways, it was not very different from that of Republican President Herbert Hoover; nor was there a great deal of militant opposition in the streets, not in 1932 anyway, hardly more than the woeful degree of organized mass resistance we see today despite all the Bush administration's provocations.

Yet the New Deal followed. And not only the New Deal, but an era of social protest, including labor, racial, and farmer insurgencies, without which there would have been no New Deal or Great Society. May something analogous happen in the years ahead? No one can know. But a door is about to open.

// posted by nash @ 12:17 PM 1 comments

I apologize for being absent; I've been really tired and depressed. I don't know if it's holiday depression or what, but it's been draining away most of my sense of humor and my desire to communicate. Hopefully I'll be able to pick up with Flickr blogging, at least, before long. I hereby emerge from my funk long enough, though, to wish my good friend jules a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

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