WTF? No Raccoon Suit?

Everybody's Skinny Dippin' da Da duh...

Last Time I went to Church...

I felt as if I'd landed on an Alien planet, had established rapport with the local indigenous fauna, and then, having been invited to their weekly gathering, had been completely shocked from the ridiculousness and utter lack of reason inherent in their kooky, and otherwise meaningless rituals and sermons:













from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot:

Consider again that pale blue dot. Take a good long look at it. ["That's us. That's Earth."] Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn't strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?

Do some "Big Think", and doesn't every resulting religion or ideology resemble or become a self parody of this?

Bill Moyers was right, and still is right

UPDATE:

More recently, this week:

Don't watch this anywhere near a desk...

Because 2 minutes in, you will find your head repeatedly bouncing off of it.

My first YouTube upload

Meddling with the Primal Forces of Nature

I’m currently listening to a book on tape version of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. It’s not enjoyable at all, but it is one of the most informative and striking books I’ve ever read. Disaster Capitalists and a certain school of economists envisioned a free-market utopia based on computer models under the belief that a human-created monetary system could be considered a hard science like physics or chemistry, and they were given an opportunity time and time again to test their theory with ruinous results. The only reason it repeats is that when these economies collapse, oligarchs and vulture investors swoop in buying everything up for pennies on the dollar, and then sell to other foreign investors for billions.

Say what you want about the supposed amorality of the free market principles they advocate. This has been used to scavenge billions from Chile and Argentina in the 70s and 80s, Post-cold war Russia in the 90s, and then Iraq. The wisdom of such destructive economic policy must immediately be questioned when in the last decade with Enron, Post-Katrina NOLA, and the Housing Bubble leading to the Wall St. Crisis, these homegrown tactics are now being used on our own soil.

An example of the style of globalization-minded free market corporate cosmology can be demonstrated writ small in Klein's 2004 documentary The Take:



Even with Obama at the helm, I’m beginning to think we’re fucked.



The investor class of this nation has been devouring the seed corn.



Also, Go Huskers!

RIP Don Hewitt

from Bloomberg:

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Don Hewitt, who created the enduring CBS television newsmagazine “60 Minutes” and was its sole executive producer for 35 years, has died. He was 86.

He died today, CBS News reported on its Web site. A spokesman for “60 Minutes” said he was diagnosed earlier this year with a tumor, according to CBS News.

Although he often said he wanted to die at his desk, Hewitt relinquished his “60 Minutes” post in June 2004 in exchange for a 10-year contract to serve as a producer-at-large for CBS News, giving him a say in the network’s news programming.

“I’m going to be the resident pain in the ass,” he told Broadcasting & Cable magazine when the deal was announced.

Hewitt joined CBS’s fledgling news operation in 1948 before he owned his first television set. He oversaw the 15-minute newscast by Douglas Edwards until it was replaced by Walter Cronkite’s half-hour program in 1963. Hewitt also produced the first television debates between presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1960.

Hewitt claimed credit for many innovations -- superimposing names on TV images and coining the term “anchorman,” to name two -- but he was most proud of “60 Minutes.” By his estimate, the program generated at least $2 billion in profits in its long run, which began when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House and has continued through eight other presidencies.

Hewitt’s greatest talent was spotting and shaping a compelling story. At “60 Minutes,” he approved story ideas, oversaw the editing and wrote the on-air promotions and teases at the beginning of the broadcast.

“Basically, Don is an editor with cold, hard judgment about what works and what will appeal to people,” veteran “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “I’m always surprised at how he can look at a piece once and remember every element of it.”

[...]

Hewitt’s most public hour came in 1995, when he bowed to a CBS lawyer’s decision to kill a Wallace interview with a tobacco industry whistleblower named Jeffrey Wigand because of a possible threat of litigation.

As a substitute for the interview, Hewitt permitted Wallace to reveal on “60 Minutes” the management decision to pull the story. “That was a first -- a network-news broadcast holding its own management’s feet to the fire,” Hewitt declared in his 2001 memoir.

Hewitt later bristled over Hollywood’s unflattering portrayal of Wallace and himself in “The Insider,” a 1999 movie that essentially accused them of selling out.

Hewitt had two sons, Jeffrey and Steven, from his first marriage and a daughter, Lisa, from his second.

Played in the film by Philip Baker Hall, a chapter of Hewitt's memoir is spent dealing with the fallout the movie caused. In the end, the decisions shown in the film were the ones Hewitt went with. However, a glaringly bad call shouldn't outweigh a lifetime of talent and journalistic contribution. Full Disclosure, The Insider is one of my favortie films.




As far as what Lowell Bergman (Pacino's character) has been up to IRL, this particular episode of Frontline is a must-see.

Evil people pass away...

Via Radley Balko:

The remaining half of America’s great freedom-loving couple has passed away.

Yeah not so much.

Again, between the stark dichotomy of free markets vs. free people, you need to define "freedom" for clarity's sake...

After right-wing “free market” economist and longtime University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman dropped dead in 2006, it did not take long for the U of C administration to spark a minor firestorm on campus by proposing to name an economic research institute in his honor. In the 1970s Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” notoriously served as economic advisers to the bloody CIA-backed Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that massacred 30,000 workers, peasants and leftists and imprisoned and tortured thousands more. Last year, in response to the U of C proposal to launch a Milton Friedman Institute, faculty formed the Committee for Open Research on Economy and Society (CORES), which initiated an online petition against the Institute and held a number of well-attended campus events. Over 100 professors signed a letter of protest to the administration, and the full Faculty Senate convened for the first time in a decade to debate the proposal.

It is truly an affront to working people and the oppressed around the planet that the University would attempt to honor the legacy of this man. It would be utopian to think that bourgeois universities would not name buildings in honor of sundry capitalist moguls and their academic mouthpieces. But Friedman was not simply a reactionary ideologue; his hands were drenched in the blood of the Chilean masses. In 1975, the New York Times accurately labeled him “the guiding light of the junta’s economic policy” (21 September 1975). The CIA funded a 300-page Friedmanite blueprint given to the leaders of the junta in preparation for the coup. In March 1975 Friedman himself, accompanied by his U of C cohort Arnold Harberger, flew to Chile for high-level talks with the regime to outline the economic “shock treatment” that led to the mass starvation of those who had survived the initial phase of bloodletting.

If there's an afterlife, and any justice in the Universe, Rose Friedman now joins her husband in Hell where they are eternally drowning in fire ants, 1 for every victim of the dictatorships they supported and whose life they otherwise destroyed.