it is the end of the century....

Oh, this sucks! Johnny Ramone is dead? What the fuck? That's the three principals, one a year it seems... that sucks so bad.

Rather Excessive

For amusement, read the blather collected at No More Mr. Nice Blog about the blogorific debunking of the Killian National Guard memos. This kind of thing seems to happen about twice a week -some media outlet does something stupid - a blogger discovers it - everyone piles on - and the New York Times or Washington Post or Boston Globe provide the evidence. And then, from Andrew Sullivan down, every blogger in America (who was part of the piling on) posts that they - the blogosphere - have begun the revolution that will destroy old (Liberal? or so-called liberal?) media and, blah blah blah.

And even I can draw lessons from this fiasco. Lesson #1: even a stopped clock is right twice a day! the right wing bloggers were right for once! They even have facts and truth on their side. If only they had applied their investigative talents to the Swift Boat Liars' stories, which were about as quickly and easily debunked without the assistance of all those internet revolutionaries. Lesson #2: This shouldn't require a huge leap of faith, but who thinks television is a reliable source of news? All the bad things people say about the "media" probably do apply to TV -television is almost inevitably a means of presenting an argument, a story - a conclusion. It is not a place for evaluating evidence - what you see or hear on TV should be supported by evidence from somewhere else. TV is close to useless, yes, it is. Lesson #3: As with the Swift Boat Liars story, the real work was done by the newspapers. If these two stories have shown anything significant about the media, it's the role of newspapers, and reporting, at getting at the truth. TV comes off as pathetic, in both cases - the bloggers come off, really, as down the line partisans, a bunch of people who know very little about the issues under discussion, but have strong opinions which they post with all the confidence of a Counter-Reformation Pope - and the newspapers come off as the places where you can, if you're lucky, maybe find out what's really going on. The bloggers like to claim they make great fact checkers - they don't. What they might do is make enough noise about issues that reporters stay engaged, rather than letting the story slide. Maybe. I don't know for sure. Neither of these stories had much going for them, I guess - it didn't take long to take them apart... So we may not have needed Glen Reynolds on this one....

Now, two broader points. First - it doesn't seem to me that bloggers aer all that likely to do any fact checking. Digby commented on Andrew Sllivan's self-congratulatory bit about how bloggers' advantage is their ability to quickly correct themselves. He says it so I don't have to:

Here on planet earth even if writers correct their errors, readers pick and choose which versions to believe and continue to battle the arcane details long after everyone else has lost interest, clinging to their own version of reality as if it is a life raft. The "transparency" of the blogosphere is as clear as orange juice with pulp. Nobody gets stuff "right." They just get stuff. Errors are sustained forever. The "collective mind" is schizophrenic. The blogosphere demystifies the craft of journalism all right and turns it into an endless self-referential loop of The Osbornes.

They take their credit when they are right, they don't take their lumps when they are wrong. And they make no, real effort, to get past the position they take when they start.

The second point, which may seem to contradict my general mockery of the blogoboosters, is that they might very well be right - there might indeed be a shift in media paradigms. But Sullivan and the people quoted at No More Mr. Nice Blog are claiming that blogs, and the internet, will somehow take the place of the mainstream media we have today. They will do what TV and newspapers do (or are supposed to do.) That is not likely. If they do indeed take the place of other media forms, they will do so not by reporting better than newspapers, but by making what they do - pamphleteering, essentially - replace what newspapers do. I suspect this is a difficult and tangled subject, so I will get out of it as quick as I can. But just the fact that they lump TV and newspapers together is a sign - they are thinking they do what TV and newspapers do - but TV and newspapers already are so different as to be almost impossible to link. So....

UPDATE: Heh heh, just like the real bloggers, I'll "update" this, rather than just repost it, secure in the knowledge that no one but me will ever read it. Um... okay.

There is a third point, probably the most important one. It is this: the Killian memos made no difference whatsoever. They offered the possibility of pretty clear proof that George Bush went AWOL in 1973 and got away with it because his daddy pulled strings. But this case was pretty strong before the memos appeared, and remains just as strong now. Just that, having introduced those fakes into the debate, the right will be able to attack anything that appears against Bush as fake. This is why people form Karl Rove conspiracy theories about these memos - because it inoculates Bush against other documents, and other evidence and stories. For example - and is the timing just a coincidence? - the Kitty Kelley book.

Worse than Hopeless

Adding a bit to the last note, here's an excerpt from Matthew Yglesias' column in The American Prospect, reminding us that there may be worse things than Bush's policy toward North Korea:

The last of the unstated reasons, however, is by far the worst. Apparently, the governments of Israel and Pakistan weren't big on making an enforceable treaty because they want to expand their arsenals and Bush wasn't too hot on putting capital into overriding their objections. Ah, Pakistan. The land of the pure. Also the land of egregious violations of non-proliferation norms, the land where the military sponsors terrorist organizations, the land that helped organize and sponsor the Taliban, the land that helped set Osama bin Laden up in Afghanistan, and the land whose intelligence services are shot through with al-Qaeda sympathizers. Just the sort of place you'd think we should be helping to get some more nuclear weapons.

There's a good deal more of the same in there. As he puts it on his blog: "Now in a rational world the Bush non-proliferation record would be all she wrote as far as national security concerns." There you go.

Hopeless

What is so depressing about stories like this is how completely fake George Bush is. (Digby's Blog provides the link... )

"Bush has his flaws," says Ted Stout, 39, who runs a bus company in Scranton, Pa., where Bush and Kerry made stops after their respective conventions. "But there's no question that when he says he's going to do something, he does it. That's what I like about him." Stout, waiting to bowl on league night at Scranton's Southside Bowl, adds: "He might seem a little dull-witted, but he's an average person. He makes the right decisions when he needs to."

Sporty. "We can't be girlie men" about the war on terror, says Michael Bidwell, a 38-year-old Republican dining at Scranton's Stadium Club with three male coworkers. "We need to go after terrorism. Terrorism isn't going to go away, and we can't put a blanket over it." Bidwell says he has a son and a daughter serving in the Middle East and adds: "I don't want to see them over there on a mission that's not finished." Steve Pasternak, a retired utility worker standing among "Sportsmen for Bush" signs at a pro-Bush rally in Johnstown, Pa., says he will vote for the president "because he thinks like sportsmen do. He's a hunter going after the people who need to be hunted."

It's terrible. It's sad. These guys look at Bush and see what they want to see, what Bush tells them to see - not what's there. Bush, a regular guy? George Bush? Of the Kennebunkport Bushes? With his toy ranch and his powerboats and his Segway? That George Bush? And Bush is decisive? George Bush is not decisive - he has never been, except deciding to invade Iraq, without provocation, reason, and in spite of the (purported) urgency of the "War on Terror." Maybe nothing he has done has been as weak and indecisive as his behavior toward North Korea - which is disgraceful in the extreme - but what has he done that showed any guts? Even Iraq, he didn't have the guts to rick losing the argument for the war - he lied about it, bullied the press into ignoring the fact that he was lying until we were neck deep in the shifting sand...

This stuff drives me crazy. All this bluster about Bush's "manliness" - "strength" - "decisiveness" - if decisive means, choosing based ont he polls and pandering to the Religious Right, then he's decisive. This was going around the blogs a few weeks ago - MAtthew Yglesias had an article in The American Prospect about the effect of Bush's being - well, our friend the white guy put it best - "a little dull-witted" - on his ability to make a decision (or get anyone around him to make a decision.) Stupidity, incuriosity, mixed with that sense of entitlement, the pure love of power, and the desperate need to constantly look tough - god, what a disaster....

But somehow this comes off as decisive. A man unable to think of anything to do for 7 minutes after learning that someone had blown up 2 buildings in New York City - who sits there looking like a little kid watching his parents have a fight - is somehow considered decisive. Tough. Tougher than the actual war hero. And people buy this bullshit.

I feel lost.

End of the Century

The release of End of the Century, a documentary devoted to America's greatest rock and roll band, The Ramones provides an excuse to write about music.

Hard to say what I have to add. I am listening to the Talking Heads right now - The Name of this band is the Talking Heads. Adrian Belew making strange noises on guitar. The rest of the band banging away that white boy funk they did in the early 80s. They are a band I am not sure what I think of. Moments of glory, lots of stuff that's just witty drab new wave, a few songs in the middle, when they sound like a watered down version of Pere Ubu or the Gang of Four.

Punk: I heard it late, and probably didn't really hear punk for a while - what I heard first were bands like the Talking Heads, Elvis Costello - The Cars, if that counts (and probably it does, in some sense.) I don't know what the first punk song I ever heard was. Probably "Train in Vain" - I knew the Clash was a punk band, heard that - thought, this is not so strange - this is just a bit rougher version of Tom Petty or Neil Young - this is pretty good! And then I heard "Lost in a Supermarket" and thought this is even more so than the last... And then I heard "London Calling" - that's when I realized what people were talking about with punk.

The Ramones I didn't hear until End of the Century came out - "Rock and Roll Radio". I found it to be just about exactly what it was meant to be - those big melodies, the big sound - I loved it, without thinking it was anything but just a great little updating of all those old pop classics you heard on oldies stations. When I was youngr than that, I rather liked bands like The Bay City Rollers, Shawn Cassidy - those cheesy pseudo Rock 'n' Roll teeny bopper bands... The Ramones struck me as making music like that that was, unlike theirs, original (in both the sense that they wrote it and the sense that, even playing this old fashioned sound, they sounded brand new, and completely real), and absolutely legit. None of the calculated crowd -pleasing - the feeling I got from the Ramones was of a bunch of guys who absolutely worshipped the music they were playing and were trying to express pure glee with it.

It is strange - it is hard to believe, thinking about it - the poor Ramones, never had a real hit - nothing huge. Nothing like, oh - "We Will Rock You". They never sold the records - but within a year or so, that song - "Rock and Roll Radio" was as inescapably part of the universal pop culture as "We Will Rock You" - just, somehow, divorced from the Ramones themselves... And while maybe nothing else from the Ramones has reached that level of popular penetration, their music has permeated pop culture. Everyone knows them, loves them, takes them - took them - for granted...

Sometime in 1980, the radio stations where I lived got cool. I don't know when or why or how, but that year, I heard everything - I heard the Ramones, the Clash, the Talking Heads and Blondie and The Cars and Elvis Costello and The Police, I heard the B-52s, Split Enz, The Vapors, Sniff and the Tears, The Greg Kinh Band, U2 - all of this alongiside, on the same station, I think, as all the AOR stuff around. Zep and the Doors and Stone and Hendrix - and a good dose of Bruce and Lou Reed... not to neglect Southern Rock - crappy metal (Ozzie, Ronnie James Dio, Def Leppard, The Priest) - party rock (George Thorogood) - art rock (Steely Dan to ELP)... This did not last that long. Radio in Boston, in 1981 or so, was similar - less classic rock, more punk, new wave, and edgier punk and new wave (you could hear Soft Cell and the Damned in those days... the FCC was not so curious - you could hear "Jet Boy, Jet Girl" on the radio...) All this stuff layered on top of my fairly well established AOR music tastes - I liked a lot of the newer stuff, though I still separated it from the old stuff. That started to change as U2, REM, and eventually groups like the Replacements and Husker Du entered my consciousness....

But the Ramones - yes, the Ramones. Somewhere in here (80 or so) the radio started playing older stuff - "I Wanna Be Sedated" - sometimes "Sheena is a Punk Rocker", covers - "Do You Wanna Dance", "Needles and Pins" - very rarely, though, anything deeper, harder than that. Much later I heard those songs - and then a buddy of mine got Ramones Mania, and we wore the tape out, driving around listening to it over and over. And so... years after that, on a drive to New Jersey with some people, we had only 2 CDs in the car, and listened to Rocket to Russia through 3 or 4 times - that was a very good thing. It does not wear out its welcome. Every time "Cretin Hop" kicks in, you think - should I tell them to turn it off? Why should I? who's going to regret hearing this again? And so - again....

This has been a rambling, pointless post. I will end it with some comments on the movie. It is, of course, a blast - hearing the stories, the songs, seeing the boys playing... And as always, seeing and hearing them play is a revelation. Someone in the movie said, they got so they could play their songs as tight as if they'd lived in New Orleans all their lives. That is true. They are so sharp, so tight, so dead on, all the time, they are amazing. I am not generally a minimalist, in anything - I like long, complicated, weird stuff - that goes for music as much as anything. And I am not all that impressed by purity - impure things are almost always more interesting than pure things. Perfection is usually not as interesting as a mess. But the Ramones were perfect - they figured out something that had to be done, and did it perfectly for 20 years. In the process - in terms of accomplishment - in terms of the quality of their work, their influence on music and the world, their personal integrity as musicians (though they may have been bastards as people - Johnny at least - holy crp, the pooor man comes off bad in this film - but in a way that you almost respect him for - for knowing what he had, for knowing how to make it work, and he himself seemed to understand, everything else is secondary) - they came out as one of the very short list of great American musical acts. Johnny Cash might be their only better...

WWJD?

Vote for Kerry?

One more reason the poor will always be with us

Slacktivist with a story here about a Texas utility company planning tro charge higher rates for people with bad credit history. I don't know. Credit ratinghs are one thing for credit, but using them to determine how much goods and services cost? which this is? Lord. It'll make you think happy thoughts about nationalization - or would, if there was any sign the government was less corrupt than businesses like this.

What now?

haven't been posting much lately have I? What can I say? I have nothing really to say about the RNC - a ghastly affair, I imagine - not that I watched any of it. Zell Miller was a big hit I guess. Michael Berube, fortunately, kept us all informed though. Lots of posturing and ranting and the GOP's patented vexed relationship with the truth. Take this representative note from TAPPED:

UP IS DOWN. Two parts of the president's speech last night struck me as emblematic of the his administration's pervasive up-is-downism. The first was where Bush, quite baldly, tried to position himself as the guy who respected our allies, and John Kerry as the guy who was nasty to them. "In the midst of war, he has called America's allies, quote, a 'coalition of the coerced and the bribed.' That would be nations like Great Britain, Poland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, El Salvador, Australia, and others allies that deserve the respect of all Americans, not the scorn of a politician." (Of course, as this Associated Press article pointed out, none of them except for Great Britain is actually putting significant numbers of men on the ground.) The other was when Bush -- who deployed thousands of troops to Iraq without up-to-date body armor or plating for their Humvees -- accused Kerry of being against those same disbursements.

These kinds of deceptions are, of course, nothing compared to the "make shit up" strategy employed by Zell Miller, Mitt Romney, George Pataki, and Rudy Giuliani. Beware any sentence beginning "John Kerry says..."

So what does it mean? I can't tell you - I can't understand how politics work. The Swift Boat Vets came out of nowhere, lied throught heir teeth, were more or less completely debunked by all the major papers - but stiill seem to have raised doubts about Kerry. What doubts? It is stunning to me that tghey can have any effect - nothing they said passed the smell test up front - this isn't Tim Johnson making up stories about fighting in Vietnam. Kerry's record has been well documented, from the beginning - he has been a public figure for 30 plus years, and this stuff never got past the smear level in all that time. How do you contradict the public record and have people believe you? and then have your story come apart - the guys who weren't there, the guy who contradict their own medals, the ties to Nixon and then Bush... I don't know. You have to wonder.

Crossing His Fingers

Bob Dole, Bob Dole - this is an interesting screw up. Dole, on CNN to help prop up the collapsing scaffold of Swift Boat lying liars, added a bit of off-mic commentary: when the camera's cut to show Kerry's "Old Tricks" ad (the one with McCain telling George Bush he should be ashamed), Bob Dole said - on camera, but not being aired - "he was right". Slate has the video, and some commentary....

Musical Jokes Welcome, though Superfluous

I can't seem to get serious. Well - this is serious news:

Dave Matthews sued for dumping 800 pounds of "liquid human waste" into the Chicago River - directly onto a boat carrying "100 people on an architecture sightseeing cruise".

How to Draw a Three Headed Cowgirl

Here's a bit of whimsy for your morning enjoyment: Presidential doodles. Link courtesy of Belle Waring.

Swift Boat Vets for - never mind...

Not much left to it I guess - The New York Times takes a closer look and doesn't leave much standing. (Via Crooked Timber, who include excerpts.)

Meanwhile - oops! - guess whose campaign got caught handing out flyers for the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth"? What's more surprising - today, they actually have a picture of their candidate up - the last couple days, all the images - at least the ones at the top of the page, were of Kerry - negative, obviously - but still. They're pushing Party for the President Day - so they actually have Georgie up there.

I'm afraid I can't participate. That's the anniversary of my friend's death in Iraq.

5 more months, and we'll be shed of this lying bastard, I dearly hope and pray.

What they said

Via Crooked Timber comes this link to a discussion of gender neutrality in Canada. (More or less. Let's call it that.) Is "he" sex-neutral? It is not - can we say, per Pullum, "Was it your father or your mother who broke his leg on a ski trip?"? No we cannot. Then (parenthetically) he adds (and I bless him for it):

The commonest way to get around the gender problem here is to use singular they: Was it your father or your mother who broke their leg on a ski trip?; Either the husband or the wife has perjured themself. Shakespeare used it; Jane Austen used it; loads of fine authors use it. Get used to it. And if you have a usage book like Strunk and White that declares singular they to be an error, throw that book away.

This is a practice long overdue in English writing, my friends. When I read books that, in referring to generic individuals, switch randomly back and forth between he and she, I think - they - use they! Stop annoying me! If a writer does not mean to refer to a man or a woman, they should just use "they"! Let us hope this practice spreads.

Quick Hits (On the Cultural Tip)

Comics in Libraries:
Steve Leiber starts a meme - collecting lists of the 11 comic books that your local library should stock.

Link found on Long Story, Short Pier)

Spelling
Fistful of Euros has a great story about German (and other languages) spelling standardization. Key line: "Thanks to the effectively universal use of a single word processing suite, English spelling is what Bill Gates says that it is."

Thank you, Belle Waring
The Top Ten Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics of All Time - thank you. Complete with wrestling-theme Easter Eggs! It's too wonderful for words.

Naked political grandstanding? Us?

Bob Harris has a post on Tom Tomorrow's blog about "National Preparedness Month" - September, you'll be surprised to hear. Though perhaps not all of September, as the announcement will be made September 9th. To get into the Friday papers before the 9/11 memorials, Harris suspects. He is not impressed:

This is transparently a continuation of the Bush campaign by other means, financed with everyone's tax dollars, out of funds that could be used, say, to hire more actual first-responders, Pushtun translators, or troops to replace the exhausted guardsmen.

That sounds about right.

Krugman

I just want to post this: Paul Krugman's latest column deals with the way the handover in Iraq has caused Americans to stop paying attention, even though things have continued to get worse there.

The trouble with this shift of attention is that if we don't have a clear picture of what's actually happening in Iraq, we can't have a serious discussion of the options that remain for making the best of a very bad situation.

The military reality in Iraq is that there has been no letup in the insurgency, and large parts of the country seem to be effectively under the control of groups hostile to the U.S.-supported government.

There it is. This war is or biggest problem right now, and we have to take it seriously.

Rock politics

Well, now - here's The Bruce - in the New York Times. Boilerplate liberal-speak (don't get the impression Bruce did any of the writing there), but hey! Fight the good fight, and do it on the right side, and who can complain?

Eric Alterman, of course, is in a tizzy. He has a book to flog - not that he needs much excuse to go Bruce crazy. Another link here, to an interview with The Man atBackstreets, which comes off a lot more natural sounding than the op-ed.

Meanwhile, related only in featuring a very cool musician with left wing politics - it's Mike Watt's page - useful!

Speaking Truth to Power

Our president:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

Yeah, yeah, maybe that's a cheap shot - but look at the rest of the speech - "We must never stop thinking about how best to defend our country when we all must always be forward-thinking." - is that much better? lord.

Politics and Terrorism

From The New York Times:

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

The Bush administration has established a clear pattern of deceit through the years, to the point where I, at least, cannot take a word they say at face value. So when I heard about this terrorism alert, my first thought was of Fahrenheit 9/11 - there they go again, inventing fear. (It didn't help that I saw a clip on CNN with a reporter acting all jumpy when an ice cream truck went by. Could Michael Moore invent a better illustration of his point?) Later, I saw the news about the information found after the recent arrests - maybe they had something, I thought. But even if they do, why do they think this is going to happen this week?

So today the reports come in that the information they are using pre-dates 9/11. I wonder, then, what the odds are that this was done to counter the DNC's impact, and to support Bush's announcements about implementing the 9/11 Commission's recommendations.

Oh yeah, on that subject - read Josh Marshall today. He says that while Bush claims to be implementing the commission's recommendations, in fact, he is changing them in significant ways - primarily, by gutting their recommendation that there be an centralized intelligence overseer, with budgetary powers and powers to hire and fire. It's all there.

Combined with the terrorism alert - doesn't this add up to nothing but another piece of theater? The President claims to be implementing the commission's recommendations - he does it in the context of a high alert, with armed soldiers walking the streets and subways of New York - hoping (knowing) people will read the headlines, see the clips on the news, and say, "gosh, he is taking this seriously!" But in fact he is watering down the commission's recommendations to near irrelevance (creating another bureaucratic post that duplicates at least one post (the Director of Central Intelligence) and possibly a couple others (what is this position supposed to do that the Department of Homeland Security shouldn't be doing? for instance), while allowing a major disruption of the country based on old information, timed, well, you get the drift.

The more paranoid among us will perhaps speculate that they are working on getting the public used to seeing armed guards on the subways, and making high profile terrorist alerts common enough to erode resistance and skepticism to them. It may not work that way of course - getting used to them might lead people to never trust anything Bush says or does (and by extension, nothing the government says or does). Who knows. That is the obvious risk, though - that their overt manipulation of terrorist warnings and the like for political ends will undermine real efforts to prevent real terrorism. Again - one of the themes of Fahrenheit 9/11, though not the one people tend to talk about. (Because talking about it would imply the critics were paying attention and not playing stupid, pretending not to understand Moore's arguments.)

Infinite Denseness

I've been away, letting the blog go to pot. Too bad. I suppose I could come back with something profound about the Democratic Convention, or prices in Old Port Portland, or Nomah, but that will have to wait, I fear. What I can offer is a bit of Gregg Easterbook bashing, courtesy of Brad DeLong.

Seems Easterbrook is making fun of Stephen Hawking this time. (Linik is here - it's subscriber only, though...) Here's the first paragraph:

So Stephen Hawking now says he was completely wrong about black holes--they don't crush reality out of existence, and they aren't doorways to alternate universes. Bear in mind that Hawking also once argued that time may someday run in reverse, with the cosmos getting younger and people able to remember the future but having no knowledge of the past. Later Hawking withdrew that idea, too. Do the hundreds of thousands of people who bought his bestseller A Brief History of Time--which was "sexed up" with speculation that black holes destroy reality and the entire universe may someday operate in reverse-time--now get their money back?

That's quality stuff. Pure snark, and idiotic snark, too. Easterbrook adds: "It would be tempting to say that Hawking was able to become internationally famous while saying kooky things because today physicists have the status once held by medieval priests: People don't challenge their mumbo-jumbo." Something is missing here - perhaps it is the fact that Hawking himself corrected himself. (And, of course, people were arguing with him all along - he lost a bet for example, with another physicist, John Preskill, over this question.) Isn't this how science usually works? People take the data available - they analyze it and try to come up with a theory that explains it - they test the theory, argue about the theory, and if new data comes in that contradicts the theory, they correct it. Thus Hawking. How this incident is supposed to discredit Hawking is a mystery.

I used to like Easterbrook's football articles (though they got boring after awhile, with the cheerleader obsession and gratuitous political swipes overpowering the content), but I have yet to come across anything else by him that isn't silly. Even before he became something of a blogosphere whipping boy - I'd seen some of his writing on religion and science and found it very lacking. "Intelligent Design" - barely - since he is so dismissive of science (as in this article) he never gets any traction. And even here - DeLong also quotes Easterbrook mocking the Big Bang theory - "What came before the Big Bang? Cosmologists hate this question, but it's haunting nonetheless." This is a question - a rhetorical question, I mean, used to undermine the Big Bang theory - that leads, inevitably, to God, to Intelligent Design, and etc. from there. And that's all Easterbrook is after there - he's playing gotcha, and is about to pull out Genesis...

Anyway - check out DeLong's site - read the comments. Well worth it.