Apparently, I’ve been folding my T-shirts wrong all these years.
Twenty-One 2007 Predictions
- The Red Sox will not win the World Series. This may not be a startling prediction, but it does serve a function: to prevent me from getting my hopes up.
- The Patriots will not win the Super Bowl. See No. 1.
- The situation in Iraq — particularly the U.S. troop levels will remain more or less the same, unless it doesn’t. We’ll see a lot of news about involving "temporary" increases and decreases in deployment of troops, but it will more-or-less be the same.
- The Bush Administration will do an about face on global warming. Many, however, will wonder if it is just talk or if they are actually prepared to do something about it.
- Dick Cheney will have a heart attack, and resign from office. Elizabeth Dole will be replaced as Vice President.
- Second Life will surge in popularity, eclipsing even MySpace. Blogging, by the way, will have peaked as a fad. [Sidenote: Billmon, a pioneer and staple of political blogs, apparently signed off for good last night]
- The "silly season" that will eventually become the 2008 Presidential Election will unofficially kickoff in December 2007. (The Iowa Caucus actually is in January 2008).
- Joe Biden will announce his run for the presidency, but give up before the end of the year when he doesn’t raise enough money. Nobody will notice, or even care.
- Rudy Guiliani will announce and drop out as well, due to his inability to get past questions regarding his personal life.
- Despite far more important news, the entire nation/media will become obsessed with some Terri Schiavo-like story during the summer. It will not be a missing blonde white girl, nor will it involve a celebrity. But it will involve a single person and will spark a national debate. Like — I’ll go on a limb here — the kidnapping of an abortion doctor.
- We’ll also put up with a couple of weeks in May/June where there will seem to be a rash of school shootings a la Columbine.
- No terrorist attacks in the United States (thank God), although our embassies will be bombed in places not in the Middle East. (I’m thinking Phillipines).
- A major plane crash in some Midwest city. This will not be one of your run-of the-mill crashes at an airport, but something right in the heart of a major city.
- Corporate scandals on the upsurge again, starting with Apple Computer. The Dow’s surge upward is anemic at best.
- Although cloned food has been deemed to be perfectly healthy and safe, many will still be nervous about it, and demand that cloned meats and veggies be labeled as such.
- Unexpected celebrity deaths: Abe Vigoda (okay, it’s not that unexpected), Carol Burnett (car accident), Macauley Culkin (drug overdose), Paul Simon, Roslynn Carter (complications from stroke), James Garner (heart attack) and several drummers from various 1990’s bands. One of the cast members of Friends will be shot in a restaurant by a deranged fan, starting a national discussion (again) on celebrity stalking. Reese Witherspoon will get in a near-fatal car accident and have a leg or arm amputated.
- The next winner on American Idol will be a Spanish/Mexican woman from the West Coast, probably Washington.
- "You’re The One That I Want" will start off well in the ratings, and then tank. I’ll still be watching. By the way, the Broadway show revival of Grease (the grand prize) will suck at levels of suckitude heretofore unknown in theatrical history.
- The Academy Award for Best Picture of 2007 (which will be handed out in 2008) will have the name of an animal in the title.
- "24" and "Lost" will be cancelled when ratings fall off, as people get bored of the concept. Science fiction/space shows will make a comeback.
- Bell bottoms make (yet another) comeback, although this time their renaissance isn’t confined to jeans.
LaRue’s Slippery Slope
Jan LaRue of the right-wing Concerned Women For America writes an article with the inquisitive headline: When Will Bisexuals Drag Homosexuals out of Polygamy Closet?
I had to read that headline several times in order to get my head around it. I get the homosexual/closet reference — that’s obvious. But where does the polygamy thing come in? Is Ms. LaRue suggesting that homosexuals are for polygamy, or against it? And regardless of their position, why are they in the closet over it?
And why will bisexuals (who, apparently are not in the LaRue’s metaphorical closet) drag those homosexuals out?
I tried wading through the article and — as far as I can tell — Ms. LaRue is making a slippery slope argument. It goes something like this: if gays are allowed to marry, then the bisexuals will be jealous and they’ll want to marry, too. But, being bisexual, the bisexuals will want to marry one of each gender, creating legalized polygamy. Or as Ms. LaRue puts it:
If polygamy isn’t legalized, how will a bisexual marry just one person without denying his or her "bisexual orientation"? Otherwise, in order to marry, won’t bisexuals have to make a gender choice in a spouse and then engage in adultery in order to fulfill who they are as bisexuals?
***
How long will bisexuals accept less than "equal treatment" while homosexuals continue to diss civil unions and push for the right to "marry" in other states? Who thinks bisexuals don’t want the same "legitimacy," "acceptance" and "affirmation" for bisexual behavior that legalized polygamy will provide? How long will they wait for their homosexual "allies" to help them achieve the equal right to "marry" the persons of their choice?
I worry about the person who worries about such things.
But mostly, I have to laugh at the idea of Jan LaRue penning an article saying that gay marriage is bad because it discriminates against those poor, poor bisexuals. Like she cares.
The Truth Shall [Redacted] Set You Free
This is astounding.
The White House censored an New York Times editorial, telling the Times to redact certain portions. The censored portions do not contain classified information. The White House, it seemed, just didn’t like it. (The redacted version of the op-ed is here.)
It should be noted that the CIA normally does these type of things, not the White House. And the information redacted by the White House was cleared by the CIA when the author published it elsewhere:
The op-ed is based on the longer paper I just published with The Century Foundation — which was cleared by the CIA without modifying a single word of the draft. Officials with the CIA’s Publication Review Board have told me that, in their judgment, the draft op-ed does not contain classified material, but that they must bow to the preferences of the White House.
The White House is demanding, before it will consider clearing the op-ed for publication, that I excise entire paragraphs dealing with matters that I have written about (and received clearance from the CIA to do so) in several other pieces, that have been publicly acknowledged by Secretary Rice, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and that have been extensively covered in the media.
These matters include Iran’s dialogue and cooperation with the United States concerning Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and Iran’s offer to negotiate a comprehensive "grand bargain" with the United States in the spring of 2003.
Emptywheel looks into this deeper, but I find the notion of censuring things already in the public domain to be troubling.
Bird Flu Update
"Whatever happened to the bird flu?" my mother asked me when I was up for Christmas. "Wasn’t that supposed to be the next big thing to kill us all?"
I pondered the question and bluffed an answer, laced with cynicism: "Oh, it’s still around. In fact, it’s worse. You don’t hear about it on the news because it’s not as much of a ‘grabber’ when compared to some missing blond teenager, or the latest antics of Tom Cruise."
Turns out I was right:
Bird flu killed three members of a family in Egypt, pushing the number of fatalities worldwide this year to 79, more than reported in the previous three years combined.
***
The H5N1 virus is known to have infected 261 people in 10 countries in the past three years, killing 157 of them, WHO said yesterday. Last year, 42 fatalities were confirmed, after 32 in 2004 and four in 2003. Six of every 10 reported cases have been fatal and a majority of cases has occurred among children and young adults.
The article goes on to explain that while fatalities have gone up, actual infections have gone down recently:
Since July, 26 human cases have been reported in four countries, compared with 88 infections in eight countries in the first half of the year.
But this dropoff in the last half of 2006 is not necessarily something to celebrate. There were also similar dropoffs in the last halves of 2005 and 2004:
A few slow months in cases doesn’t mean that the threat of pandemic is at an end, said Peter Sandman, a risk communication specialist in Princeton, New Jersey.
"When you install a smoke alarm in your house and then go a year without a fire, that doesn’t mean you were foolish to install a smoke alarm,” said Sandman, who consults to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on pandemic communication. "It means it’s time to change the batteries.”
Now, some may wonder: "Wait a second…. we’re only talking about 261 infections in the past three years? This isn’t an epidemic that I sholud worry about!"
Well, perhaps. But just because we didn’t have a category 5 hurricane this year doesn’t mean we’re never going to see another Katrina. And, as DemFromCT explains, even the pandemic influenza of 1918 started off as a few fatalities per year.
An ounce of prevention and all that….
On Polar Bears
Well, I guess it’s good news that the Bush Administration now acknowledges global warming. But that’s the only bright side of the sad news that the polar bear, the world’s largest land predator, is facing extinction.
The War On Christmas: 1947
Below is an actual excerpt from an FBI memo in 1947 (since declassified) which alerts the reader to the commie propaganda contained in — wait for it — It’s A Wonderful Life:
To: The Director
D.M. Ladd
COMMUNIST INFILTRATION OF THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY
(RUNNING MEMORANDUM)
There is submitted herewith the running memorandum concerning Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry which has been brought up to date as of May 26, 1947….
With regard to the picture "It’s a Wonderful Life", [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a "scrooge-type" so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.
In addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. [redacted] related that if he made this picture portraying the banker, he would have shown this individual to have been following the rules as laid down by the State Bank Examiner in connection with making loans. Further, [redacted] stated that the scene wouldn’t have "suffered at all" in portraying the banker as a man who was protecting funds put in his care by private individuals and adhering to the rules governing the loan of that money rather than portraying the part as it was shown. In summary, [redacted] stated that it was not necessary to make the banker such a mean character and "I would never have done it that way."
[Source]
Best Movies Of 2006
You want lists? I got lists.
Salon’s Best Films Of 2006 (in no particular order, with descriptions):
"Army of Shadows" — Made in 1969 but never released in the States until this year, Jean-Pierre Melville’s drama about a group of men and one woman fighting in the French Resistance isn’t just one of the great films of the ’60s; it’s one of the great films, period.
"Days of Glory (Indigènes)" — Rachid Bouchareb has made an astonishing film about Algerian soldiers fighting to defend France, the country they consider their motherland, from the Nazis. A beautiful, devastating picture about what it means to love your country when it doesn’t love you back. (The Weinstein Co. has released this picture in New York and Los Angeles for a brief Oscar-qualification run; look for wider release in other cities early next year.)
"Casino Royale" — James Bond movies, beloved, junky pop-culture pleasures, aren’t supposed to make best-10 lists. But this imaginative, superbly acted adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel works on multiple levels: As a Bond movie, as a thriller and as a marvel of craftsmanship. It’s even better on the second viewing.
"Pan’s Labyrinth" — Guillermo del Toro’s dazzling adult fairy tale about the end of childhood, and the dangers of blind ideology, is one of the finest fantasy pictures ever made. Watching it is a glorious, harrowing experience.
"The Queen" and "Marie Antoinette" — Fraternal-twin pictures that present maligned royals as human beings. Stephen Frears, knowing tragedy is only a flea bite away from comedy, uses our laughter, and even our derision, to lure us into a place where we can feel only sympathy for Elizabeth II (played, brilliantly, by Helen Mirren), a woman locked in a gilded cage of tradition and duty. Many critics sentenced Sofia Coppola to the cultural guillotine for a) having a famous father and b) not featuring enough peasants. Few seemed to have watched her movie, a fantasy portrait of a teenage queen that connects with universal adolescent feelings of belonging nowhere.
"Dave Chappelle’s Block Party" and "Shut Up & Sing" — Two beautifully made pop-music documentaries whose spirit of inclusiveness suggests, daringly, that the United States might be one country instead of a carved-up mess.
"Idlewild" — Messy and extraordinary, Bryan Barber’s Prohibition-era musical, starring OutKast’s Andre 3000 and Big Boi, is a dream history of black pop culture, and a testament — to paraphrase a line from Stanley Crouch — to the ways that inventing, borrowing and refining can bring us closer to the lives we want to lead. One of the most beautiful-looking pictures of the year (the cinematography is by Pascal Rabaud), "Idlewild" slipped out of theaters before most people could see it on the big screen. It deserves an immediate rep-house revival.
"The Painted Veil" — John Curran’s adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s novel about a spoiled Englishwoman (Naomi Watts) whose life is changed when she begins helping her doctor-husband (Edward Norton) fight cholera in the Far East avoids Merchant-Ivoryitis at every turn. A superb example of modern melodramatic filmmaking that respects, but doesn’t fetishize, the past.
"The Notorious Bettie Page" — Mary Harron’s affectionate and intelligent portrait of the famous ’50s pinup queen asks, and answers, the question of what the camera can tell us about a life. Gretchen Mol’s performance is as fearless as it is lovely.
"A Prairie Home Companion" — Robert Altman’s final picture is a shaggy-dog story that turned out to be a swan song, and its spirit and sense of community are pure Altman: The picture gives the feel of life unfolding before our eyes. And, in true Altman fashion, it’s filled with half-finished conversations that, even in their truncated state, manage to say it all. Altman’s movies — even the bad ones — have always been the sort that foster vivid discussion and fierce arguments. There will be no more Altman movies. But we can honor him by keeping the conversation going.
AFI’s Best Films Of 2006 (in alphabetical order)
Babel
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
The Devil Wears Prada
Dreamgirls
Half Nelson
Happy Feet
Inside Man
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
United 93
Rolling Stone’s Ten Best Movies of 2006
The Departed
Dreamgirls
Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of Our Fathers
Volver
Babel
United 93
The Queen
Borat
Little Miss Sunshine
A Prarie Home Companion
Time Magazine’s 10 Best Movies of 2006
Letters From Iwo Jima
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
The Departed
United 93
The Queen
Pan’s Labyrinth
The Good Shephard
Cars
District B13
Curse of the Golden Flower
MSNBC’S Best Films of 2006 (in alphabetical order)
Army of Shadows
Children of Men
Deliver Us From Evil
The Departed
Flags of Our Fathers
Letters From Iwo Jima
Little Children
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen
United 93
For the record, I haven’t seen any of these movies.
Back Again
Well, back to regular life, more or less, such as it is. What did I miss?
Ford dying. Well, that was predictable. Wasn’t a fan of the Bush War — again, not surprising. Ford may have been lackluster (I love how the media is trying to hype the most unhype-able of ex-presidents), but he was no dummy.
Edwards throws his hat into the 2008 presidential ring. No surprise there. I think it’ll be harder for him this time around, but he never stops surprising me. Nice touch announcing it from NOLA.
The pundits over at the Corner are still trying to convince everyone that the War in iraq is going swimmingly, going so far as to post news from Iraq – consisting of an email from a soldier over there saying how morale is great. The problem? It’s an email that is over one year old and of questionable origin.
"Washington D.C. is the new North Carolina". That’s the global warming quote of the day from a government botanist. Yup, they had to reclassify certain "zones" of the country (the zones describe what grows best where).
Guess I didn’t miss much.
Assassination Vacation
Cool. Free computer access at the Hampton Inn. Get rid of those double posts.
Contrary to my initial intention to listen to John Hodgman’s "The Area Of My Expertise", I ended up listening to the audiobook of Sarah Vowell’s "Assassination Vacation". A very interesting book. Vowell admits to a lifelong fascination with things related to presidential assassinations and, spurred on by attending a performance of Sondheim’s "Assassins", she decides to embark on a tour of all historical places and landmarks relating to presidential assassinations, dragging somewhat reluctant friends and family to graveyards and museums containing bloody clothes and pieces of presidents’ skulls.
Vowell’s enthusiasm for all things assassination-related is infectious, but she never loses her irreverant and witty style. For example, she takes a trip to Oneida, New York. Oneida, she explains, is now known for its dinnerware, but it was originally founded in the 1800’s as a sex cult, where members of a commune engaged in free love. In fact, having a "special love" for just one person was discouraged in this community. Charles Guiteau (enigmatic and certainly insane assassin of the very bland President Garfield) was an occasional member of this cult, and was, according to Vowell, probably "the one guy in a free love commune who could not get laid" — a fact which may have contributed in some small way to his lunacy and resultant rise to fame as a presidential assassin.
She also confesses a bit of a crush on John Wilkes Booth, and especially his more famous actor-brother, Edwin Booth who — in one of those strange coincidences of history — once saved a man who fell on the train tracks (that man was Robert Lincoln, son of the President slain by Edwin’s younger brother).
Vowell also draws frequent connections between past events and the present, noting similarities between McKinley’s preemptive war against Cuba and the Philippines and the current war in Iraq. It’s too bad they don’t teach this stuff in history in public schools. I think a lot of people would warm up to it more.
Charles Guiteau shoots President James Garfield in the back on July 2, 1881 at the Sixth Street Station in D.C.. Garfield would die from his wounds on Spetember 19, 1881.
Battle Fatigue And Xmas Photomoblogging
It seems like this is National Let’s-Tell-Ken-What’s-Wrong-With-Him Week. Everywhere I turn –at work and outside — people seem quite content to spread holiday cheer by inserting probes into me and giving me their amateurish psychological assessments, and acting contrarian simply for (it seems) the sake of contrarianism.
It’s beyond annoying, and I’m not sure why this is happening. I see nothing mentioning this on any of my calendars; perhaps a memo was sent out.
But it’s a pretty bad situation when the greatest support and positive reinforcement I receive comes from the editors of Time magazine. Hmmmm. Maybe other people are just jealous.
In any event, whatever the reason for this phenomenon, it’s clearly time for me to get out of Dodge. And as luck would have it, Christmas is here. That means I get to throw some clothes in a bag and drive to New Hampshire.
I’m excited about my selection of audiobooks to listen to on the 13 hour trip — most particularly John Hodgman’s "The Area Of My Expertise". John Hodgman, for those who don’t know, is a very funny essayist, but most recognize him as the nebbishy "PC" in those PC/Mac ads. His entire audiobook — all six hours — was available for free on iTunes last night (and it may still be free as I write this), so that was fortuituous. His deadpan whimsy cracks me up, although I may skip past the part where he reads 700 hobo names, since I’ve heard that before.
I’ve also got me some David Sedaris and various radio plays. Then, of course, I have lots of music in case the spoken word gets on my increasingly-frazzled nerves.
The point being: Blogging will be light and/or uninteresting* for the next week or so. I’ll be photo-moblogging my trip home Thursday and Friday** — a venture of little interest to anyone except my mother, who likes to know that I’m fine and going 20 miles per hour on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Merry Christmas everyone!!***
* should read "more uninteresting than usual"
** technical problems notwithstanding
*** and a Happy New Year!!
My December Horoscope
Stunning breakthroughs are rare enough events in your life. You tend to prefer putting one foot in front of the other to the flying karate kick. Looking back, you’ve done a lot of that this year, that is, the moving forward one step at a time, thankfully, without looking back. But the real journey has been an extremely careful assessment of how you feel about yourself. Reaching a peak over the past two months, you seem to have come further in developing your self-respect this year than perhaps any other in your life. If nothing else, you have recognized your own right to survival, ending a long debate that has too often become mingled in the emotional survival trip of your relationships. How you have managed to break free of this can be summed up in one word: awareness. That skill has, in turn, summoned your most practical ideas about money, resources and how you use them. Now, get ready for something perhaps less than absolutely practical, but undeniably brilliant.
Kewl.
Short Takes
(1) Lots of video of incredible home Christmas light displays here.
(2) A primer on how to fake your own death.
What Matters
Yesterday’s White House press conference:
22: Number of questions on Laura Bush’s skin cancer.
18: Number of questions on Iraq.
3: Number of questions on Iran.
1: Number of questions on North Korea.
Oy.
Behind The Curve
As Carpetbagger says:
It strikes me as rather unfortunate that we’ve reached a point in which it’s literally front-page news when the president is willing to acknowledge that we are not winning the war in Iraq. Talk about your soft bigotry of low expectations.
It bears repeating that just before the elections one month ago, Bush took the position that we are "absolutely winning" in Iraq.
Now clearly, nothing has changed dramatically in Iraq from one month ago. It’s just as shitty now as it was then. So what’s changed?
Only one thing prompted this change, and that is Bush’s desire to remain relevant. He is now saying what everybody knows only because if he wants to avoid appearing out of touch. Does Bush really think we’re losing in Iraq? Did he really think we were winning one month ago? Who knows? He’s playing politics, not speaking the truth.
The solution, Bush says, is to add 70,000 troops — something that Kerry proposed in 2004, and was scoffed at by Bush. Now, he tacitly admits Kerry was right. Unfortunately, it’s probably too late now for them to make any difference (as opposed to 2004).
Ygliesius has some cogent thoughts.