You're Dutiful

James Blunt explains how he prevented World War III:

Blunt was ordered to seize an airfield - but the Russians had got there first.

In an interview with BBC Radio 5Live, to be broadcast later on Sunday, he said: "I was given the direct command to overpower the 200 or so Russians who were there...."

....Asked if following the order would have risked starting World War 3, Blunt, who was a 25-year-old cavalry officer at the time, replied: "Absolutely. And that's why we were querying our instruction from an American general".

"Fortunately, up on the radio came General Mike Jackson, whose exact words at the time were, 'I'm not going to have my soldiers be responsible for starting World War 3', and told us why don't we sugar off down the road, you know, encircle the airfield instead.

One suspects Blunt saved the world so his bland soft rock could conquer it instead.



h/t Jesse

God Smack

Gene Weingarten snark attacks the findings on the relatively ignorant religious, as well as the notion of atheist smugness:

Q: Why are you so down on creationism?

A: Because it is an anagram for "I note racism."

Q: Do you think evolution is inconsistent with the possible existence of God?

A: Theoretically, no. An all-powerful God could, of course, set evolution in motion. But it would mean a God who then completely washed his hands of us.

Q: Do you deduce that because of all the suffering in the world?

A: No. I deduce that because "evolution" is an anagram for "I love u not."

Notes From Onstage

Earlier this year I conceived of and aborted the idea of a contemporary, theatrical update of Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground. What ultimately doomed the concept--along with fatigue and disgust--was the problem of the "Notes" themselves. How does one translate and recontextualize the Underground Man's first-person narrative to an audience-oriented medium like the stage?

Like this.

The Yale Repertory Theater’s production of “Notes From Underground,” adapted by Bill Camp and Robert Woodruff, is true to the outline, and often to the letter, of the bombshell of a book that inspired it: Dostoyevsky’s short, relentless novel of self-laceration from 1864. But this production, directed by Mr. Woodruff and starring Mr. Camp, never seems closer to its source’s spirit than in its use of an anachronism: the little camera with which the Underground Man records his sorry confessions.

Consider the show’s very first scene, in which Mr. Camp recites the litany of degradation that begins Dostoyevsky’s novel: “I am a sick man. I am a wicked man. I am an unattractive man.” As Mr. Camp says these words, the projected image of his smiling, snarling face looms large and scary on the back of the stage of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where “Notes,” presented here by Theater for a New Audience, runs through Nov. 28.

You look at that outsize, contemptuous, phantasmal face, and you see a charismatic specter in control, speaking words that unsettle you. But shift your gaze to stage left, to Mr. Camp in the flesh, hunched over his trinket-sized camera, which sits on a decrepit desk in a derelict room. In three dimensions, in a broader context, Mr. Camp seems small and pathetic. It’s like seeing both faces of the Wizard of Oz at the same time: a gigantic, bodiless head and that insignificant little man behind the curtain.

Heter-Row

Via Fark, some considerate whelps thought it would be a good idea to wear Straight Pride shirts to school during the gay-friendly, anti-bullying Ally Week:

Several students complained to high school administrators Monday -- the first day of an anti-bullying "Ally Week" -- when three students wore the T-shirts, which also quoted a Biblical passage advocating death as a punishment for homosexual activity.

The administration stepped in and asked them to cover up the offending messages, and they obliged.

Time was when I probably would have been in favor of the administration's position. High school is a miserable time, goes the reasoning, and this doesn't help.

But look at the context: this was happening amid an anti-bullying event organized by the campus Gay-Straight Alliance. The gay students are not isolated. If anything, the people advocating death for homosexuals are the marginal actors here. They want students to "learn about people who might have a different opinion than theirs," but if anything these clowns should have been the ones getting an education. The GSA should have allowed them to wear their hateful attire and then singled them out for being the heartless little assholes they are, mocked their backwards, iron-age beliefs, and shamed the bigots into covering their messages up.

That's the real free speech lesson. People have differing opinions that should be aired. But if you're going to say something controversial, then you're going to have to take responsibility for it and face the ensuing shitstorm. I would hope that we and our high schools have progressed enough that such a point could be made.

Kenyan Anti-Colonialism

Addressing University of Indonesia students and staff while in Jakarta, President Obama praised Indonesia for the progress it's made since gaining independence:

Like other countries that emerged from colonial rule in the last century, Indonesia struggled and sacrificed for the right to determine your destiny. That is what Heroes Day is all about -- an Indonesia that belongs to Indonesians. But you also ultimately decided that freedom cannot mean replacing the strong hand of a colonizer with a strongman of your own.

Somebody call Dinesh D'souza!



h/t Jim Fallows

The Deficit Commission

Everybody knows that any serious proposal to reduce the debt is going to involve a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, right? Right?

Why then does President Obama's Deficit Commission test balloon expect to "Broaden base, lower rates, and bring down the deficit" by bringing taxes well below their already historic lows?

For some perspective, the government could bring in almost $700 billion in revenue by allowing the Bush tax cuts on the rich to expire. Keeping the tax cuts on the books would cost that and more besides:

The cost of those tax cuts is going to go straight onto our national credit card unless we raise taxes from everyone else to pay for the $690 billion in tax breaks for the rich or we find $690 billion in spending cuts. And that means increased interest payments on the debt. When we add in the costs of additional debt service, the true price of maintaining the tax cuts for the wealthy jumps by almost $140 billion.** In total, keeping those cuts for the rich will cost almost $830 billion over the next 10 years.

To put that figure in perspective, $830 billion is enough to pay for all veterans’ hospitals, doctors, and the rest of the Veteran’s Affairs health system, plus the United States Coast Guard, plus the Food and Drug Administration, plus the operation and maintenance of every single national park for the entire 10-year period—with more than $100 billion left over.

Among the proposed spending cuts are $4.6 billion of growing foreign aid growth (even though foreign aid is and historically has made up a little less than one percent of our total budget), and plans to end in-school interest subsidies. Also:

[T]hey’re talking about raising the retirement age, because people live longer — except that the people who really depend on Social Security, those in the bottom half of the distribution, aren’t living much longer. So you’re going to tell janitors to work until they’re 70 because lawyers are living longer than ever.

Taxes in themselves should not be controversial. But they are. That's a problem, and it makes for deeply problematic proposals on tackling the budget.

What You Think You Saw You Did Not See

There's a famous experiment, carried out in the 1910s and 20s, which helped establish some of the ideas that underlay film editing. Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov took footage of a man and juxtaposed it with a soup bowl, a girl, and a little girl in a casket. The audiences raved about the quality of the acting, even though it was actually the same shot, repeated each time. The way their minds processed the sequence of images linked them intuitively. This unconscious act of linking unrelated but sequential images is known as the Kuleshov Effect.

The posters of this video claim it to be the original footage. I've no idea if it is (probably not), but it does a good job of illustrating the effect:



I tell you all this in order that you may understand why Swampland's front page--for the moment--is so funny. Scroll slowly and look at the pictures:



The plane(!) was in California, Obama and Grand Imam Ali Mustafa Yaqub were in Indonesia.

30 Airports in 30 Days

It's a strange testament to the affluence of this country that a person can be unemployed and be able to embark on the masochistic enterprise of running around in continent-spanning circles at 32,000 feet.



It makes for entertaining copy, though. I'm eager to see if it took some half-unexpected calamitous toll on author Chadwick Matlin's mind and body the way Morgan Spurlock's McDonald's diet did. In fact a documentary of this would be even more fascinating for the extra dimension added by additional personnel. One person can survive this undertaking, but several all together? That's an invitation to air cabin fever.

I'm looking forward to the certain madness of O'Hare.

Prince is a National Treasure.

Jay Leno, not so much.



Just sayin'.

Trutherness

Having been punched at the Rally to Restore Sanity myself, I had a flash of excitment when I saw the YouTube video title, "Rally to Restore Sanity Organizer Punches Activist." Not out of malice toward the Daily Show crew, but out of solidarity with another punchee. I was brutally disappointed, then, to learn it was a Truther.



I'm not for assaulting people with whom one has disagreements, I don't think many are, but the brazen assholicism of the Truthers practically invites it (as Dave Weigel mentions, concern trolling public figures is nothing new to them). They take the Mormonesque self-righteous earnestness of wanting to get at "the truth," which is merely annoying, and inject it with the (ob)noxious notion that the trauma and sorrow of a terrorist attack isn't genuine enough. It's like learning you have cancer and then having a dog poop on your shoes afterward.

I guess sanity has its limits.

Hunter's Prey

Lately I've been digging back into Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Part of its appeal, speaking as someone who would not born for another thirteen years after its writing, is seeing contemporary figures, or their forebearers, as they were in their heyday, and often in a very unflattering light.

Here's Thompson on recently deceased racist-as-loveable-curmudgeon James J. Kilpatrick:

The only other person barred from the dining room that night was Tim Crouse, from the Rolling Stone bureau in Boston. Neither one of us was acceptably dressed, they said--no ties, no three-button herringbone jackets--so we had to wait in the bar with James J. Kilpatrick, the famous crypto-nazi newspaper columnist. He made no attempt to sit with us, but he made sure that everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. He kept calling the bartender "Jim," which was not his name, and the bartender, becoming more & more nervous, began addressing Kilpatrick as "Mr. Reynolds."

Finally Kilpatrick lost his temper. "My name's not Reynolds, goddamnit! I'm James J. Kilpatrick of the Washington Evening Star." Then he hauled his paunch off the chair and reeled out to the lobby.

The maker of Mitt:

I went to Nixon's Inauguration. Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandant of the Marine Corps... and as one-time Presidential candidate George Romney passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting "Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!"

George tried to ignore it. He knew the TV cameras were on him so he curled his mouth up in a hideous smile and kept waving at the crowd--even as they continued to chant "Romney eats shit!"

Gonzo style being what it was, these must be taken with large grains of salt. But these are amusing sketches all the same.

Scam Old Song and Dance

The Craigslist phishing saga continues:

Regarding your response to our ad in about a job with(MDS)
Consumer Reporting-Market Research/Review writing:

Before we begin, we need you to CLICK THE LINK BELOW to confirm that
we have your permission to send you this info.
We want to send details along with your first assignment right away.

Thank You,
MDS Hiring


-----------------------------------------------------------
CONFIRM BY VISITING THE LINK BELOW:

http://www.aweber.com/z/c/?jz7ysny03amdlatp2d6ms7vb2gmtoan9rbctytg4=6340

Click the link above to give us permission to send you
information. It's fast and easy! If you cannot click the
full URL above, please copy and paste it into your web
browser.

-----------------------------------------------------------
If you do not want to confirm, simply ignore this message.

Thank You,
AWeber Support

52 W Church st, orlando, FL 32801, USA

The only reason I'm still posting these is to get them in the public sphere and hopefully save someone from getting caught up in their stratagems.

The Gathering Storm

The New York Times' headline story from this morning is ominous. Perhaps most dispiriting:

Meanwhile, opponents of the Obama administration’s health care law, business leaders and conservative groups have begun making plans, too, for what they expect will be a series of welcome openings. Among the possibilities: a new flurry of proposed state prohibitions on abortion, same-sex marriage and illegal immigration.

“I feel like a little boy on Christmas morning — which package do you open up first?” said Troy Newman, the leader of Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group. Already, abortion opponents were considering pressing for new regulations in New Mexico, Iowa and Kansas, where Sam Brownback, the Republican governor-elect, follows Democratic governors who vetoed some abortion limits approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature.

To refer to Operation Rescue as just "an anti-abortion group" is gross understatement. Lest we forget, Operation Rescue is the far right anti-choice group that harassed late-term abortion provider George Tiller for two decades before he was assassinated by Scott Roeder, who claims to have been a member and posted on their website. Newman denies having ever met Roeder, who denies the denial and then some (emphasis mine):

Also that year, Roeder says he went to lunch with Newman and asked him about using violence to stop abortion.

Robb: What did you say to him?
Roeder: Oh, something like if an abortionist—I don’t even know if it was specifically Tiller…was shot, would it be justified? … And [Newman] said, “If it were, it wouldn’t upset me.”

Troy Newman is exuberant for the future. That should tell you all you need to know.

The Final Craigslist Scam

At least it better be. I only applied to three, although who knows who they shared my info with.

This is really pathetic, though, like they're not even trying anymore:

Regarding your response to our ad in about a job in Administrative Research & Reporting

Before we begin, we need you to CLICK THE LINK BELOW to confirm that
we have your permission to send you this info.
We want to send details along with your first assignment right away.


-----------------------------------------------------------
CONFIRM BY VISITING THE LINK BELOW:

http://www.aweber.com/z/c/?jynzny03amdlatp2d6ms7vb2gmtoan9rbctytg4=9304

Click the link above to give us permission to send you
information. It's fast and easy! If you cannot click the
full URL above, please copy and paste it into your web
browser.

-----------------------------------------------------------
If you do not want to confirm, simply ignore this message.

Thank you,
Erik Wickham
Orchid Interactive Media
http://www.orchidinteractive.net

1740 LAKE TAHOE BLVD, SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, ca 96151, USA

Request generated by:
IP: 76.202.16.247
Date: November 8, 2010 11:53 EST

This is old hat.

Break on Through to the Other Side (of the Aisle)

Charlie Crist, after breaking from the Republicans and losing his Senate bid, is considering a posthumous pardon for Jim Morrison's indecency charge before he leaves the Florida governorship.

This is the end of his elaborate plans, after all.

h/t TPM