The US is moving to the left and the UK to the right. In the US, a Republican PR spokesman has shopped the Bush administration and the owner of Fox News and the Wall Street journal is praising Obama. In the UK someone who went to the same school as Prince William has replaced a Trotskyist as London Mayor and a Bishop makes today’s headlines with a supreme piece of irrational thinking, blaming the culture of the civil rights movement for social decay and secularism for the rise of Islam.

With Scott McLellan shopping the Bush administration, people are wondering why? The answer is to be like his Dad, how ironic that family conservatism should undermine the Republicans:

“McClellan’s father, Barr McClellan, was an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board and then for the Federal Power Commission under Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. Barr McClellan also wrote a book about power and Washington: “Blood, Money & Power: How LBJ Killed JFK.” Published in 2003, the book claims that Texas attorney — and McClellan’s former boss — Ed Clark masterminded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” Link

If Murdoch switches from Republican to Democrat he will be doing what he did before in the UK, with a switch from Conservative to Labour. People who actually believe what they preach at the Wall Street Journal and Fox News may be in for a rude awakening. Link

In England, where I am at the moment, there is a palpable shift to the right, not to fiscal conservatism but to anachronistic social conservatism. A scatter-brained Church of England Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali makes headlines in the papers today saying that all the UK’s social problems are a fault of the progressive secular culture and that this creates a moral vacuum that allows for Fundamentalist Islam. In other words secular culture is responsible for bad religion, which is defined as the religion that is not his, and that the moral decay in society is due to what gave us the civil rights movement. Link

From today’s Guardian review of a book about letters between the upper class Mitford sisters whose contacts with everyone from Kennedy to Hitler are documented.

If ever Hannah Arendt was right about the banality of evil it is here, in black and white:

“The Führer was heavenly, in his best mood, & very gay,” she [Unity Mitford] wrote to Diana [Mitford] in 1935. “He talked a lot about Jews, which was lovely.” She signs off “With best love and Heil Hitler! Bobo”

There is a surreal moment where there article talks about Hitler arriving (while head of state) at Diana’s apartment in London and ringing the doorbell and nobody answering it.

Link

Today a globeandmail.com: Suicide bomber killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. this is a very important story following on from the Red Mosque siege, but it has had very little coverage in the US.

Financial news in newspapers and television in the US is far superior to Europe, but international news is either nonexistent or terrible.

I would suggest that keeping the public informed of what is happening in Pakistan at the moment, would be an investment better spend than a significant portion of the defense budget.

Someone on CNN called me a ‘Dirty Jew’

Imagine that Iran decided to invade Mexico in the face of near universal international condemnation, because it claimed Mexico had weapons that it turned out it didn’t. And that it then waged war for several years, de-stabilising the American continent and causing Mexicans to stream across the border into America.

Imagine that Iran had the audacity to setup a Pensicola prison, actually in America but controlled by Iran. Here they could put people that they captured and not have them subject to the Geneva Convention or domestic law. Then imagine that Iran had its navy patrolling the area and inspecting fishing boats, just off the coast of Texas.

Imagine the Americans decided the Iranians were messing too near their border, like with the Russians and Cuba, and captured several Iranian seamen and showed them on TV looking unharmed physically and possibly much better off than the Pensacola detainees, who didn’t get many TV crew visits.

Would there be justifiable public outrage at the actions of America, or would the actions of Iran help mitigate it?

CONTINUE READING…

(more…)

Its pretty amazing when you come accross something you actually know a little about, how you discover how naive a supposedly slick PR machine is.

Today Bush cited ‘Iraq the Model’ as an example of success in Iraq - because there are bloggers you see.

Some time ago I added 20 or so Iraqi Bloggers to my RSS reader. About a third of them have since fled the country, a third have disappeared and the remainder are a woeful tale of human misery and sufffering, leaving a sample of 1 - Iraq the Model.

In fact Iraq the Model is the potential online equivalent of ‘Mission Accomplished’, something championed too soon that could go the other way. Carl Rove is not so much a genius (an incumbant Republican sock puppet would have won after 911) but a rather out of touch ’spinster’.

Bush Cites Upbeat Bloggers From Baghdad

Which one of these two buildings was built by slaves?

The one built 4000 years later.

Protester disrupts Westminster Abbey service marking 200 years since slave trade abolished - International Herald Tribune

Chris Jordan does some fantastic art pieces that represent quantitative information visually.

Amount of money spent per hour in Iraq as a giant picture of Benjamin Franklin made out of dollar bills.

Number of people admitted to hospital for painkiller abuse as an abstract shape made from the same number of Vicodin pills etc.

Thanks Cori.

current work

Oh My God, Please Stop This Fucking War

Ty and Renee Ziegel’s Wedding
Ty and Renee before Ty’s accident. via Kottke

There are currently 34,000 news articles in Google News warning of Global Warming, but Matt Drudge has found the one that doesn’t.

“Climatologist Calls Global Warming Fears ‘Greatest Deception in the History of Science’…”

That’s all fair enough, except that the article doesn’t seem to warrant the front page of one of the most widely read news sources in the US. It is written by Tim Ball, a former Geography professor who works for an anti-global warming consultancy that refuses to deny that it is funded by energy companies.

I have no problem with people denying Global Warming - I don’t believe in censorship and think that freedom of speech gives a greater chance of the truth. However, Tim Ball does believe in censorship, or he would reveal the source of his backers.

My main problem, however, is Drudge, who through ultra selective reporting also believes in censorship. Reporters in the US have to be very professional and fact check almost everything they write. Aggregators like Drudge don’t have such restrictions, if Drudge were a real journalist, he would be out of a job.

The Boston Tee-Hee Party

The Mooninite bombscare gets more and more surreal by the minute. It’s rather like someone had decided that traffic lights look like bombs, in the manner that one of Oliver Sacks patients famously mistook his wife for a hat, but because bombs are more serious than hats we have to take it all seriously.

Yes all bomb scares have to be taken seriously, but everything does not seriously constitute a bomb scare, or we would have no resourses to deal with bomb scares. Mad people are always warning about bombs and the end of the world and imaginary demons, part of the role of authorities is to filter out mad people that think everything is suspicious.

Things that do not constitute suspicious devices, include traffic lights, lamp posts, blinking movie signs and the same blinking street art that has been in NYC for more than a month before someone in the Boston mistook his wife for a hat.

Equally weird is the way the ‘must treat anything that has invoked the word terrorism seriously, however spuriously’ meme spreads into other aspects of the story, such as the po-facedness of the reaction to the bird flip, which is blurred out on TV coverage, lest it offend the people who couldn’t be exposed to Elvis’ pelvic wiggle.

To illustrate this stupidity, I’ve created a side by side comparison of the Mooninite figure as compared to a religious icon holding up a cross. If anything the Mooninite is a much more convincing cross bearer than bird flipper. I doubt we would censor the cross, even although it ironically represents a genuine instrument of Roman terrorism, rather than a naughty gesture.