It Could Be Tranference

I've been wondering about the blow-up over Brian Williams.  And about why everybody and his uncle are jumping on this guy for having botched one story - yeah, OK, it was kind of a doozy, but c'mon.  He fell into the "Acquired Memory" trap, and we're compelled to a public lynching?

And here's an interesting little wrinkle - he admitted it, and tried to correct the record long after everybody'd forgotten about it.  When was the last time anybody - ANY-FUCKING-BODY - in the media decided to come clean like that?

We need to hold people accountable, but Coin-Operated Politicians and The Banksters (eg), and a pile of others who've screwed things up way bigger than anything a news reader ever did (DumFux News being the exception of course) - those guys are practically bulletproof, and we get pretty fucking frustrated about how it seems like they never get spanked or even yelled at.  Then along comes a Dan Rather or a Brian Williams, and we lose our shit over it - because we're so pissed at the people we can't touch, we take it all out on the ones we can. 

Press Poodles in general have a lot of shit to answer for - I just wanna make sure I'm mad at the right people for the right reasons.

Happy VD

That's Valentine's Day for those of you who're not all that cynical, and/or who can think at least slightly above gutter level - which kinda lets me out so why the fuck am I still typing?

If It's Friday

...this must be The Professional Left.

d r i f t g l a s s

Blue Gal

Donate the cost of one lousy latté

Today's Unsociable Media

So I had a brief encounter with a coupla Facebook friends today.

It starts out OK - the guy posting it was trying (I tho't) to call attention to the fact that here in USAmerica Inc, the government (meaning us) shouldn't be trying to dictate what a woman has to wear in order to be in line with some bullshit arbitrary standard according to some bullshit arbitrary theocrat's taste or style sensibilities, or whatever it is he deems appropriate as far as them gals bein' seen in public.

But then it degenerates into this shitty little Mean-Girls-High-School-Fuck-Around-Festival-Of-Shaming, followed closely by a doubling down of rationalizations that seem to indicate an almost total lack of self-awareness (maybe even deliberately so), and I'm left to cogitate over how easy it is to get carried along with doing exactly the opposite of what it seems you were trying to do in the first place(?)

It is a wonderment - even tho' I've been guilty of riding that donkey too.  But y'know what?  Fuck that.  You're supposed to have learned a few things by the time you hit - oh, I dunno - sixty-fucking-years-old!

Here's the thing, kids:  Shaming somebody for anything having to do with their condition as a human being is not OK.  Do you really hold yourself in such high regard? Or is it that your own self-worth is so lousy you have to go out of your way to shit on somebody else to make yourself feel - what - funny, clever, hip, or just better somehow?  Any way you cut it, Skeezix, those are your problems - and while I'm happy to do what I can to help you deal with 'em, don't expect me to carry 'em around for you, while you look for a convenient victim to stomp on.

In the end - you pull that shit - you're just a fuckin' bully.

Well said, Girl In Yoga Pants.  Well said indeed.

Today's Artsy Thingie

Al Farrow

Sculptor Al Farrow has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1970, and is currently represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. His work has been in group shows at the Oakland Art Gallery, the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Falkirk Cultural Center in Marin, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, among many others. He has over 20 years of bronze casting experience. His work is in many important public and private collections around the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the di Rosa Preserve in Napa, and other collections in New York, Germany, Italy, and Hong Kong.

Thursday Tunes

Shine --Donavon Frankenreiter

One / Let It Be (cover mash up) --Boyce Avenue

Let's Stay Together (cover) --Obadiah Parker

12:34 --Calum Graham & Don Ross

Seen It All Before --Amos Lee

Two Coins --Dispatch

Diamonds On The Inside --Ben Harper

Happy Birthday, Charles

 

The Other Awards Season

It's time once again to begin the celebration of all that isn't DumFux News.

Columbia University's DuPont Awards featured PBS and WGBH-Boston and The Seattle Times and several other joints where they look for stuff that matters and try to tell us what's going on.  Pretty much what you'd expect, because in spite of people like me who sit here and bitch about Press Poodles most of the day, it appears there may still be some journalisming going on up in here.

Conspicuous among the winners is Netflix - they put out a feature length documentary about Virunga National Park in Congo and the fight to protect a World Heritage Site from the various assholes who want nothing but power and money.

And of course, conspicuously absent (again) is DumFux News - for the 19th year in a row - which means their record remains unblemished at Oh-fer-19.  Zero. Zip. Zilch.  Nuthin'.  For their entire existence, starting in 1996, they just haven't been able to get over the hump on that whole journalism thing at all.

Things could change of course.  The year is young and filled with possiblities.  But really - what're the odds?

And it's not like there aren't opportunities.

James Beard Foundation (the writer, not the chef)
Anthony Shadid
Polk
Peabody
IWMF (fat chance, Roger)
SPJ
Gannett Foundation
Pulitzer
Pulliam
ASME
Hearst Foundation
(seems like that one oughta be right up Fox's alley seeing as how they share such a rich and proud tradition of war pimping - but anyhoo)

It's a much longer list than that.  I only put up the ones I've heard anything about. And when you add in all the regional outfits - eg: Ancil Payne, Keystone Press; plus all the niche subject stuff like Science and Economics and Foreign Policy, etc - it ain't long before you get a list of awards that makes it seem like the pizza party at the end of your kid's 3rd grade soccer season when everybody gets a trophy no matter what.  

But there's DumFux News - No trophy.  No Certificate of Participation.  No Honorable Mention.  Just some cardboard franchise pizza that's high on calories and low on actual food.  Seems fitting somehow.

I get the feeling they're not really trying.

Some Tuneroonies

World Of Wonders --Bruce Cockburn

Hills Of Morning --Bruce Cockburn

No Short Cuts --Heather Maloney

Oh Hope My Tired Friend --Heather Maloney

eTown Channel on YouTube

eTown Radio on the web

AudioTree on YouTube

AudiotreeTV on the web

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Today's Cultural Critique

Jim Jefferies talking guns:

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Today In Stoopid

Let's take a quick look at one of the Libertarians' favorite phony notions:  "Spontaneous Order".

Here's John Stossel conducting a small group fap with Tucker Carlson (via David Edwards at Raw Story):

Fox Business host John Stossel on Sunday asserted that most government was unnecessary because companies like Walmart would spontaneously provide assistance to disaster victims “in many more ways” than the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could.

“Ever feel like government makes too many plans that come to naught?” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told Stossel during a segment on Fox & Friends. “It’s kind of a bold idea. You’re saying that not every human activity needs to be planned from above. Some things spontaneously work themselves out pretty well.”

According to Stossel, Americans would be better off with less government and more “spontaneous order,” a term coined by economist Friedrich Hayek which states that order will naturally emerge from chaos.

Edwards goes on to point out that "Spontaneous Order" didn't work out so well in Iraq and Libya (and I'll add Afghanistan and Syria and Crimea and Chile and Argentina and Somalia and Chechnya and and and).

Anyway, it'd be nice if the Dumbass Dems could kinda latch onto some of the old GOP-style rhetoric and just once in a while flip the script by refering to things like Spontaneous Order or Supply Side as "the failed policies of a bygone era..."

And also too - can anybody come up with a better example of the Epitome of Central Planning than God's Will?  How 'bout "The 4-Year Revenue Plan of [insert name of mega-corp here]"?

And also too too - just in case ya missed it, Stossel and Carlson are preaching more of the bullshit Gospel of Privatization.

Today's Quote

"What stuns me the most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money.  It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the Bozos do in Washington and our state capitols...Politics is not a picture on the wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for." --Molly Ivins

Today's Pix

What She Said

Actually, what she didn't say.  

The Rev. Lindsay Hardin Freeman began scouring the Bible three years ago to do something that apparently had never been done: the cataloging of every word uttered by every woman in the more than 2,000-year-old holy book.

Meeting in a church library, Freeman and an unlikely research team systematically pored over every Bible chapter, documenting the words on spreadsheets and inserting context and highlights. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year.

The results give surprise insights into the lives of women ranging from Abigail to Zipporah. Eve, for example, may be the Bible’s most well-known woman, but she utters only 74 words. Yet an unnamed “Shulamite woman” in the Song of Solomon holds forth with 1,425.

Here's a brief recap of the scorecard for ya:

Fewer than 100 woman say anything at all in the bible.  We get to know the names of fewer than 50 of those women.  And while there're about one-million-one-hundred-thousand words total in the bible, those very few women speak fewer than fourteen-thousand of those 1.1 million words.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but how is it that roughly 50% of the human beings on the planet account for less than 1.3% of the words in the "most important book in the entire history of the fucking world"?

Please explain to me how the bible isn't mostly horseshit.

hat tip = HuffPo

Today's Toon

A rather simple and elegant lesson about the Law of Unintended Consequences: