In a November 6th interview, Sky News Australia's David Speers spent about 35 minutes with the CEO of NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch; the conversation covering topics as diverse as software piracy, world economics, the role of Fox News (and Fox NewsPinion©) in American politics, a strange defense of Glenn Beck, and, not very long afterwards, an even stranger defense of immigration.

We have heard a lot about the...how can I put this politely...challenges Murdoch seems to face associating factual reality with his reality, and we could have lots of fun going through his factual misstatements-but instead, I want to take on one specific issue today:

Rupert Murdoch says he hates it when people steal his content from the Internet to draw readers to their sites...which is funny, if you think about it, because he has no problem at all stealing my content (and lots of yours, as well) for his sites.

Reich says he still has hope.

But he's paid to have hope. He's at LEAST gotta pretend.

Not me.

That slimy, slippery Obama as much as told 'em, right from th start, that all he wanted was a bill he could claim/spin was 'reform.' It didn't actually have to do anything.

And that's all that we're gonna get: What we'll settle for...

It's all spectacle. Will he sign it at half-time at the Superbowl?

You may have seen this fellow on TV, explaining his firm's bonus policy; maybe even its new charity fund. If so, you may have had a sense of déja vu .....

SEPARATED at BIRTH - Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman-Sachs CEO) and Austin Powers' nemesis Dr. Evil.
                   

... well, in the words of Judy Tenuta, "It could happen". Even if not - why not stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....  

Lucky me! Just a few close calls, on the jump...

I knew the moment her name was announced to accompany McStain's on the Puke ticket that they had decided to throw the election to the Dims.

Why?

Innit obvious? To escape and displace their responsibility for --and public anger over-- the fantastical array of spectacular Bushevik clusterfux: the climate, the economy, the wars, health care, environmental degradation, and increasing fascist proclivities of the electorate, etc, etc, etc.

So the Pukes arranged it so that the Dims would (gleefully) take control of, and absorb the national vitriol for, the worst collection of effectively insoluble crises, castrophes and the aforesaid clusterfux ever to be assembled under one Government in the history of the WORLD.

By the end, Bush/Cheney was hated. Nobody claims they weren't almost universally loathed. Bush claimed the lowest approval rating on record. Even WHITE people hated them.

So the idea, of course, of giving the angry white people somebody other than another white guy to hate (if only for a while) was brilliant!

Obligingly, the Dims complied, by making the contest about "novelty": the first woman nominee or the first PoC nominee. Either Hillary or Obama would have sufficed. Hillary wouldn't have had it any easier. Instead of racism, misogyny would have been the dominant meme, is all...

But in Murka, it's just easier to gin up racial hatred than gender resentment.

Mission: Obama'd...

Dear Bishops –

In our struggle to get health care for all, you saw an opportunity to make sure that American women can’t afford abortions, a way to be the deciders for all of us.  You look at someone like me who has had an abortion, and you see a sin.  Perhaps you think that those of us who terminate pregnancies haven’t thought these things through from a moral standpoint.  Or maybe we are simply less moral than you are:  thoughtless, selfish, or promiscuous. 

On the other side of the equation, you believe you know the Divine will.  You claim a position of moral authority, confident that the God of love guides your judgment.  I don’t trust that this is true.   Time and again your predecessors made decisions in the name of God that in retrospect are shameful.

Noooooo!!!!

Do not do it.  Oh, for God's sake, just do not.  Why would you want to hurt people this way?  Why would you want to subject any honest, red-blooded American (such as me, for example) to this horrendous culinary monstrosity?  

Why???

{More gibberish below the fold.}

Programming Note: I recently received for review a copy of Waiting on a Train by James McCommons, published by Chelsea Green Publishing. I'll likely be talking about it next week, but til then, you can read James Kunstler's Intro online at AlterNet.

Back in early September, I discussed the Steel Interstate in the context of the Appalachian Hub. The concept of the Steel Interstate is electrifying main rail corridors and establishing 100mph Rapid Freight Rail paths.

The broadest application of this concept is the proposal to Electrify STRACNET, the STrategic RAil Corridor NETwork.

The Appalachian Hub, recall, is a hypothetical Emerging / Regional HSR passenger rail network, modeled on the Midwest Hub and Ohio Hub plans.

And it is hypothetical, of course, because the state governments of the Appalachian regiona have been laying down on the job. The High Speed Rail corridor planning framework established under the Clinton Administration in the 90's is a bottom-up system, with states establishing High Speed Rail commissions, advancing plans to the stage of gaining designation as a HSR corridor, sorting out the financing, and applying for Federal funding.

The {Obama} administration first sought to change FOIA in June, shortly after deciding to contest a ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that ordered the photos' release. The resulting bill, championed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), was specifically designed to nullify the effect of the appeals court's ruling. Since the court had ruled that the photos couldn't be withheld under an existing FOIA exemption, the Obama administration simply asked Congress to carve out a new exemption. Despite objections from liberal members of the House, Congress obliged.

The new exemption's requirements are stunningly lax. In order to withhold the photos, Gates simply had to certify, as he did in the court filing, that "public disclosure of these photographs would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States." In other words, their release had to endanger someone, somewhere. And in the unlikely event that Gates had to stretch the truth to make that certification, it wouldn't matter, since there's no provision in the law that allows any court to review Gates' determination or rule on whether it was truthful.

This isn't just a few photos. Gates' block could apply to a far larger group of images than the 44 that are at issue in the ACLU's lawsuit. "The photographs include but are not limited to the 44 photographs" in the suit, Gates wrote in his certification.

[snip]

Now it appears that Gates has blocked the release of a large number-perhaps all-of the extant photos depicting abuse during the period from September 11th until the end of the Bush administration.

-- Nick Baumann @ Mother Jones

But anyway, he's Obama, and this is change you can believe in. Is our children learning yet? And he's got three more years to go. Sigh. Were you surprised?

At any rate, this is going somewhere, I promise.  Follow the jump, if you dare.

Name: BUTTERCUP (here since 10/12/08)
DOB: approx. October 2005
Gender: female
Size: not too big and not too small
Other dogs: decent, but may need to be the only dog in the home.
Cats: to be determined
Kids: to be determined, but we think good.

Profile: Firstly don't shoot us for the name.  A Pit Bull named Buttercup?  But honestly she is one.  Talk about sweet and cute and cuddly.  Despite her ordeal surviving through yet another disaster in Louisiana, this little blue brindle cuddle bug is happy with life.  She would make a great play time buddy yet a great lay around the house dog. Click here to visit a page where there are photos and bios of Buttercup's kennel-mates.

This week's offerings will be slim, having been away for a long weekend away from a keyboard (not a bad thing once-in-a-while). But I'll bet each of you has had to stand before these doors in your life .... maybe too often for some?

Ahh, the torture never stops. But to ease the strain, why stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....    

So, when the White House Press Office says that Fox News is, oh, a propaganda arm of the Republican Party... THIS is what they fucking mean.

Heeeere's Joy! (crossposted from Docudharma)

Greetings to Maryscott and everyone here at My Left Wing! I am suffering browser issues that prevent posting, so Edger graciously volunteered to do it for me. Thanks for being you, and I hope you like it! -- Joy B.

The Lysistrata Movement, by Joy B.

Ah, Aristophanes! How well you understood the martial excesses of your times, and how delightfully did you sketch the true power that need only assert itself in the face of patriarchal ambitions to grasp its ultimate power in this world.

For twenty-five long years during the last of the fifth century b.c.e. the Athenian democracy fought the Spartan oligarchy over the shape and nature of the ancient world. The endless war sucked away the wealth and strength - and sons - of the city-states and territories and spread civil strife throughout the Aegean region. Originally staged in Athens in 411 b.c.e. - seven years before the end of the war - Aristophanes' brilliant and funny Lysistrata was so popular it still serves as a humorous reminder nearly 2500 years later that the ultimate power of life and continuance, the power men most fear above all things, belongs to women.

Most of us are familiar with the plot line of Lysistrata, how she rallied the women of Athens to seize the Acropolis and convinced the women of Sparta to join in a Sex Strike to bring an end to the conflict. The sex strike theme has been borrowed here and there, and the play recast in modern, more feminist terms many times during the 20th century, and staged every year since 2003 (beginning with an Iraq peace protest) in the 21st. Yet here we are all these centuries later, suffering a new patriarchal shove-down of women's rights and power by a fearful warrior class and the government that commands them into endless wars for the profit of soul-less oligarchs.

The Stupak amendment is the final insult for me. I have NO reason to believe the misshapen, grotesquely immoral oligarchs in D.C. when they claim they didn't 'mean' to strip us of a long-enshrined constitutional right to privacy for our own bodies and important health decisions when they voted this abomination into the HCR bill. Thus I have NO reason to believe their lying lips when they claim it will never make it to the final law. I would have to be a much bigger fool than I already am to play along with that sort of pure garbage at this point in time - Congress does nothing by accident.

No woman should trust or 'hope' that their newly diminished status is an accident, mistake or a temporary roadblock. They mean to keep us down, and our protests will forever fall on deaf ears. They are far more terrified of us than any random peasant or Talibani 'freedom fighter' in the Middle East or Central Asia. Or Central or South America, or anywhere else in the world they plan to send our children to die for their greed. It's time we made good on their worst fears.

When I was a child, the only thing that distinguished Veterans Day from every other day of the year, other than the cool date, 11/11, was that we didn't get any mail.  Even now, it's a bit of a forgotten holiday-not big enough to get Monday status, but still no mail and the banks are closed.  Schools around here are in session, and even the stock market is open on Veterans Day-making money is so patriotic.

I have since visited the Remembrance Day Memorial in Ottawa, the eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe, and the panoply of sites in and around Washington D.C. which honor our Veterans.  The depth of the servicemembers' commitment to each of their countries deserves to be honored.

Call me angry, call me sad, call me depressed.  Call me all those things, upon waking up Sunday and hearing what I already knew when I went to bed on Saturday:  that the Health Care Reform bill cleared the House on the narrowest of votes - but only because abortion access was sharply limited as part of the bill.  For that, call me not at all surprised about Stupak-Pitts not only being introduced, but passing by a higher margin than the ultimate health care reform bill itself.

Why wasn't I surprised?

I wasn't surprised because Stupak-Pitts is merely an extension of that age-old American value, "fuck the poor."  An extension to those very folks who threw poor women, largely of color, under the bus 32 years ago (with benign neglect each year the appropriations bill comes up ever since) by not fighting tooth and nail to defeat the Hyde Amendment.

Both of my readers will attest that Y'r Ob'd't S'v't has been predicting for close onto 10 years that the Owners--who had spent the previous 150 years, countless lives, and billions upon billions of dollars diligently consolidating their monopolistic command over ALL "means of production" and distribution of information--would eventually devise a way to commodify and take over the Web.

This effort to geld the Web is a long-term, multi-pronged effort, abetted by an 'officialdom' made extremely uneasy by citizens who have means and opportunity to reply to and interrogate their 'betters'--their congressional representatives, as well as to the Owners of the whole enterprise--in a quasi-public forum where the Owners-qua-'subjects' do NOT control either the conditions of participation or the vocabulary. "Pornography" was the first stalking horse for internet content regulation, and the allied concern  for "The Children," were the first wave. The attack on net neutrality was one front of the battle to silence dissent and democracy in communications. "Copyright" is yet another. And still in the wings is the prospect of requiring "libel" bonds, or other restrictive regulations on netizens, to interfere in the free exchange of ideas.  

No, you insufferable pinhead Karmafish, this isn't about health care.  Nor is it really about end of life, however I did visit my Mom this weekend in the nursing home (7 years now).  She was in pretty rugged shape.  I did arrange for some spiritual counseling for her.  She openly wonders all the time about what lesson she still has to learn that is keeping her here.  She now has tremors all the time, but not the Parkinsons.  I, being the sensitive type that I am, opined that it might be that she was imbued with the Holy Spirit, and if she started speaking in tongues, I'd have to hire some seminary student to take everything she said down, on the off chance it really was prophecy.

She laughed.  In fact, when she was there (she drifted a few times), I managed to crack her up a lot.  It appears I'm good at that.

But this question isn't really about that, I just thought I'd share.  Instead, you'll have to follow me below the fold (OW.  MSOC, quit hitting me with my Mighty Silver Banhammer!!!).....

Every once in awhile someone who got banned from Daily Kos wanders over to My Left Wing, as Campfire30 has recently done.  Our amiable host claims that:

This blog only bans people for being MASSIVE douchebags.

I disagree.

{More douchebaggery below the fold.}

Shockingly, Adam and I are still together. After all that divorce talk, after 5 months of separation this year... here we are.

Someone cue up Barry Manilow's "Looks Like We Made It."

... for now.

Oy, I'm such a cynic.

But ain't he handsome, my man?

He's promised to take some new pictures of me with my fabulous short haircut soon, so maybe you'll get to see them some time before the 2010 midterms...

A few weeks back, SubsidyScope, "launched by The Pew Charitable Trusts, aims to raise public awareness about the role of federal subsidies in the economy", pursued its mandate into transport subsidies, coming out with a study with the headline figure of $32 subsidy per passenger for Amtrak.

Why Amtrak? Why not provide a headline figure on federal subsidy per motorist or airplane passenger? Critics of the report suggest that the answer is simple - consider, for instance, Charleston WV mayor Danny Jones:

Jones admits Amtrak relies heavily on subsidies, but so do other modes of transportation, he said.

"I think it's just easier to see how much of it's subsidized with Amtrak," he said.

And there is a lot of merit in that. Further, SubsidyScope is not focusing on Government subsidy, but on Federal subsidy. Not only is it harder to analyze government subsidies to driving and flying, given how many direct and indirect subsidies there are to take into account - but many of the subsidies are at the state and local government level, so for SubsidyScope's purposes they "don't count".

But its worse that that. Even accepting SubsidyScope's twisted framing of the issue of government subsidies - the actual core part of the analysis that they themselves perform is hopelessly bad. The gory details, and then the numbers that pity forced me to rescue from the clutches of SubsidyScope, below the fold.

 
This weekend, I'm going to a meet-and-greet with the ladyfriend, meeting the faculty and staff of the department in which she is working for this year.  I will dress well (likely a brown corduroy sport coat with leather elbow patches, cause what's a doctorate for, if not for such articles of clothing?).  My conversation at the party will consist of polite and interesting questions, short and disarming answers, and no fart jokes whatsoever.  These aren't instructions given to me by the lady, but rather these are things I know well from my relatively civilized upbringing.  Now, in order to behave this well, I need to inhibit all kinds of things that in my field we call "pre-potent responses."  I will need to self-regulate, use all of my human-brain and neocortex to keep myself from saying and doing inappropriate things, because social situations make me kind of want to be inappropriate.

Follow below the fold for more flabbity-bloo about self-regulation.

There are reports today that some of the dead and wounded may have been shot by people--presumably soldiers--shooting at the shooter. If true, that would certainly attack the credibility of folks who claim an armed society is a safe society.

Via AlterNet:

The Victims At Fort Hood Are Casualties of War: Why Won't the Government Count Them Among the Dead?

By Aaron Glantz, New America Media. Posted November 6, 2009.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Thursday's shoot-out at Fort Hood is that none of the 12 (now 13--W) people who died in the melee will be counted as casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These soldiers - "brave Americans," President Obama called them - will join an unknown number of American soldiers, airmen, sailors and marines, who are not among the 5,267 the Defense Department counts as having died in our most recent wars, but who have perished nonetheless.

It will take days or weeks to learn what really happened at Fort Hood and why, but even at this early moment, we can make one statement for certain. The government's refusal to accurately count their sacrifice of these young men and women dishonors not only these soldiers' memories, but also obscures the public's understanding of the amount of sacrifice required to continue wars in two countries, simultaneously, overseas.

Go on the website, icasualties.org, which regularly publishes the names the Pentagon reports as having died in two wars, and a discerning eye will see a lot of other names are missing.

...Alaska pollock, as you may know, it's the biggest single species fisheries in the world, except for the Peruvian anchovy, of which more later. And Alaska pollock, the stock is declining now, rapidly. And there will be a problem with the large firms that produce this fish, to get white fish of - in sufficient amount or sufficient quality to maintain this consumption. Also, you must realize that only a few markets have this fish.

The U.S. imports 80 percent of the fish that is consumed in the U.S., so the European Union. In the European Union, the fish all - is all imported from elsewhere. An elsewhere is mainly Africa and the South Pacific and Antarctica. So, our local waters in Europe and in North America are not supplying the markets anymore.

Action Hour Diary Now Up: 4pm and 10pm Eastern, 1pm and 7pm Pacific

Two weeks ago, I speculated on applying the "Teaspoon Model" to the problem of protecting small, niche, video streaming markets faced:

• on the one hand with Copyright Protection laws focused on protecting the cash flows of large media distribution middlemen; and,
  
• on the other hand, with a plague of bloodsucking bootleg streaming sites, surviving on miniscule revenue flows because they leech off of everyone - not just the creators of the work themselves, but also fansub and video-rip groups that make the content availbale for download, and free stream hosting sites for the streaming itself
  

Refer to the lovely Shakespeare's Sister for the teaspoon concept itself - the idea of this application is:

So this is what I was thinking. Perhaps a small, struggling company that wanted to reduce the density of the cloud of bloodsucking flies draining the work of the artists who create this material of market value could gain leverage not by trying to find the Super-Teaspoon - but by recruiting a supporting group, each armed with ordinary teaspoons.

There'd have to be at least one person at the company actually sending out the letters to the sites streaming the bootlegs - but they would be far more effective if backed up by ten or twenty people contributing a couple of hours a week tracking down where the material is located. Indeed, the "white hats" could drop in info on where to get the material legally while at the bootleg bloodsucker streaming sites, including the proliferating opportunities for legal free streams.

The objection has already been raised, "but everybody does it". But the experiment reported here shows, no, everybody does not sit around passively waiting to get a legal order to Cease and Desist. There are companies that do check out tips and clean out the trash and even YouTube does a far better job than MySpaceCDN.

Note: most graphics are samples from extant Photobucket and Flikr albums, but the "Storm in the Teacup" is an entry from a Photoshop contest, and "You're Both Idiots" is by ~ZeKarmaMisama who can be found at Deviant Art, and the teaspoon is by Western Australia artist Pearl Rogers

Whatsoever either one of 'em says, their bottom-line is: they want to break up teachers' unions and turn the "education" of Murka's youth over to the CorpoRats and Militarists. There are too many reasons to count, for such a program to be resisted, but here is one good one. Via Susan Ohanian's vital (if you are a teacher, or teacher educator, or a concerned, crirical parent) blog:

(By Marion Brady, special guest on Valerie Strauss' NYTimes, "The Answer Sheet," 11/04/09)

When "Race to the Top" fails, as it will, the main reason won't be any of those currently being advanced by the corporate interests and politicians now running the education show.

It won't fail because of lack of academic rigor, poor teaching, weak administrators, too-short school year, union resistance, differing state standards, insufficient performance incentives, sorry teacher training, or lingering traces of the early-20th Century Progressive movement.

It will fail primarily for a reason not even being mentioned by leaders of today's reform effort: A curriculum adopted in 1893 that grows more dysfunctional with each passing year. Imagine a car being driven down a winding rural road with all the passengers, including the driver, peering intently out the back window.

(I will come back tomorrow today to add the little question mark and stuff, if no one beats me too it, but it's late and I have a meeting in the morning.  A meeting that always runs a couple of hours.  Sigh.  Argh.  Volunteering is hellish at times.)

YUK for today - though this is not on-line: the American Prospect magazine's print issue has a monthly feature called "The Question" - a humorous query asked of a few media, pundit and other scribes of note.

This month's (November) is a classic: "What is your best D.C. pick-up line?" Here are some responses:

Professor Larry Sabato - "How about you and me form a coalition of the willing?"

Blogger Ryan Avent - "Should we take this back to my place ... or would you prefer the 'public option'?"

Alas, they asked only men; would have been worthwhile to get a female perspective.

Meanwhile - why not stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....    

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage
Also available in Orange

Breaking the Silicon Cage is for breaking down those barriers that prevent us from leveraging the full potential of the netroots for progressive populist action - whether that involves using the internet for collaboration on works to be delivered live on the street, or breaking down barriers between different social networks on the internet itself.

The latter is what we have here. The progressive blogosphere, if people are to believe our words (though not always our actions) is an enemy of Rupert Murdoch and his Iraq-Invasion-supporting, Conservative-Politician-electing multinational media empire. We in the US know him primarily for the Faux News Channel, but in the UK and Australia they know him for his grossly biased newspaper oligopolies.

If Progressives were indeed intent on taking power (something Cassiodorus questions), we would be eager to take any shots at Rupert Murdch's Media Empire that we could.

Now, I'm game, and a few others have expressed their interest, but for the most part the reaction of the blogosphere is a big, "why should I become outraged by that in particular". If the thousands of US service members and hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted - hundreds of thousands of Iraqis kills and millions of Iraqi lives disrupted - is too big a reason to grasp for being outraged at Rupert Murdoch and his media empire ... then be outraged for the mother (above right) of Cpl. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, killed in action in a War of Choice that Rupert Murdoch loudly banged the drum in favor of choosing.

{A couple of weeks ago, Laurie and I were in Japantown and I dropped by this Japanese bookstore that also sells titles in English.  I noticed a table that was featuring books on Zombies and this diary is essentially swiped from my reading of the back cover of one those books.}

The big knock against high speed rail is, of course, that it does not run door to door. This is, of course, why the passenger air transport market is such a strategic target ... it is an existing fuel-inefficient mode of transport where everyone travels as a pedestrian. And a well designed high speed rail system will deliver the target market among pedestrian travellers from as close or closer to their origin, and drop them off as close or closer to their destination.

But those are not the only passengers that HSR will be catering to. A term I have heard railfans use for this type of activity is "recruiting" patronage, so, after the fold, I step through some of the important current, and potential, recruiters.