Big box stores collecting for charitable organizations

I don't like these big box stores that ask me if I want to contribute a $1 to some fund. You know they don't turn that money over instantly to wherever it's going, but they keep it in their vaults and make money off it until it's time to send the charitable donations in. And what annoys me even more is that I'd like to offer an explanation to the clueless checkout person giving me looks that seem on the judgmental side. "You know I give directly to X Y &Z charities every year, so this stinking dollar doesn't mean a thing to anyone other than your stinking overseers because it's more money for them in the long run."  But I never say that. I just say "No."

Kubrick vs. Burgess

Stanley Kubrick has been my all time favorite film director.  I've seen his complete but rather small output many times over.  I've lauded these films.  A Clockwork Orange of course is part of this oeuvre and I can't even count the number of times I've seen it and how often I have extolled its virtues as the complete film experience, my droogies.  And then I had to read the book. After the book I felt let down. . . by Stanley Kubrick.  Anthony Burgess, who wrote it, possessed a rare & remarkable genius for language which to the credit of Kubrick and to the gifted snarling Malcolm McDowell did a pretty good job with the language in the film. But the boy from the Bronx  missed the boat in terms of the entire novel. Most unfortunately the initial American version of the book had the last chapter excised. It was this version that Kubrick used for his script.  When he found out about the last chapter he claimed that it did not seem realistic. In the movie the rebellious and seemingly psychopathic, Alex De Large, after first being "cured" of violence via Skinnerian like methods, is eventually restored to health and violence and has a government minister literally spoon feeding him at the end as he goes back to his violent ways and the movie ends.  But the book does something different. It is opposed to excessive governmental abuse of criminal behavior and it's also opposed to "well-meaning" liberals who would use Alex's condition to cudgel the government while sacrificing him for the good of all.  The last chapter eventually has Alex growing up and internally feeling his life had to change in order to be a productive human being. In other words he came to this much the same way as many rebellious teens seem to do.  They grow up! . . . For Burgess's part he didn't think much of the book itself and dismissed it as a minor work.  It was just something he banged out in a few weeks. Yes it was this book that made him famous via Kubrick's version. But his masterworks are nothing like this book. The London Times a few years ago ranked Burgess as 17 out of a list of 50 of great writers since 1945.  I shall be reading more Burgess henceforth.  

Romney vs Obama

The Chief executive of a Fortune Five Hundred Corporation is the Chief Executive and is considered the leader of the corporation who more or less (to use religious terms) creates the corporation in his own image. He or she has the final word on the direction of said corporation. He or she takes responsibility for the outcome of a corporation's activities. He or she is the person to whom the rest of the corporation in the end answers to. And if anything the CEO takes the credit for all successes and is beaten up over all the failures.
The modern U.S. Presidency has been likened in some quarters to that of the Chief Executive of the Corporation known as the United States of America.  Yes, the president is the Chief Executive of the U.S. though I don't think when the constitution was written that the President was considered as a CEO of a Corporation known as The Unites States simply because no such thing existed. 

Mitt Romney though believes that the President is like the CEO of a Corporation. Why? Because he's been selling us this idea based on his experience as one. I'm too lazy to look up quotes and such but I'm sure they are all over the place.

The problem though as I see it, if in fact he believes he is the CEO of a corporation known as the Mitt Romney campaign and if  he believes he will one day be the CEO of the United States, is that Romney is not acting like the CEO in his own campaign.  He has cobbled together images of himself that he believes will be palatable to the average Republican and hopefully to the average voter. Rather than demonstrating who he really is, he comes off as wooden, out of touch, believing his own press releases, a typical country club old boy walking around with his hand in his jacket pocket. He has not lead the way. He has not taken responsibility and he acts as if he is not being beaten up over his failures and then denies that they have happened.

In short he offers us a leader who would "mail it in," like so many of his class who hang around the country club and don't get their hands dirty doing the work that they are supposed to be doing. Those are the people whose corporations fail. And if the U.S. is a "corporation" as he believes and many pundits say, then with Mitt Romney we can look forward to four years of failure.

Barack Obama offers a far different contrast as a man who is always on the job and always respects and follows through on what his job title as Chief Executive of the U.S. entails. Obama's problem is the problem Presidents have been handing down since Ronald Reagan, namely taking more control of the government instead of allowing for Congress (which is also a problematic matter but that's another story altogether) to do its job the way they should.

This attempt by recent Presidents to subvert the Constitution is an extremely serious policy & constitutional law issue though one that a lot Americans would probably not see the significance of. And obviously is not even thought of during a Presidential campaign. Certainly we don't hear about this from the pundits.  It seems to me that it's another version of "guns and butter." Lyndon Johnson tried to ameliorate the impact of Vietnam by creating the Great Society. Obama in some way has done something similar by attempting to provide better social programs while at the same time seeking the power to subvert parts of the constitution, namely the fourth and the first amendments in the name of "national security."  The fact is it seems that it doesn't affect anyone who thinks they are following the law, that is, until it happens and then it's too late.  

Fortunately a Circuit Court  judge recently denied legislation to the Obama Admin that would further eviscerate the constitution. That's a good thing for us. It also provides a more acceptable reason for me to be able to vote for Obama this year.  Perhaps it will also let the Obama Administration be a little more clear-eyed regarding the Constitution.       

Brilliantly written piece on why the Republican Party has become a pack of liars and if Romney and Ryan win they will destroy the US. 

http://kurteichenwald.com/2012/09/the-five-reasons-why-romneyryan-must-be-defeated-in-2012-and-why-conservatives-should-hope-they-are/


I particularly love this final paragraph:

the GOP has become a childish, self-centered party that is unfit to govern. You don’t need to look any further than in their immature refusal to call the Democratic Party by its real name – instead, they insist on the Democrat Party, the same way that the bully in some 1980s movie would call a character “slob” if his real name was “Bob.” What is the purpose of this? I don’t know. It demeans every Republican candidate when they say it. But it also is of a piece with the Republican inability to engage an elected president from the Democratic party. Republicans didn’t just go after Clinton’s policies – they called him a murderer, a drug dealer, a rapist. They didn’t just go after John Kerry’s policies – they accused him of faking his heroics, of lying his way to a Purple Heart and a Silver Star (in the process raising doubts about the integrity of those awards for every soldier who has won them), and of shooting a boy in the back. They don’t just go after Obama’s policies – they accuse him of being a Kenyan, a socialist, a communist, a euthanizer, and on and on.
Until the Republican party grows up, until they stop lying about economic realities, until they can finally start to behave like they believe in their ideas rather than just demonizing their opponents, then the party is at risk of becoming a minority party forever. Rage, delusions and lies are not the path to power.
I hope.

No discussion of Afghanistan during the 2012 Presidential campaign

During the lead up to and during the 2008 presidential campaign, the focus in foreign policy was on leaving Iraq and shifting resources to Afghanistan. And with Obama in office this occurred.  So now unfortunately it's Obama's war and those of us who voted for him obviously approved of this to some degree. So I cringe when I say this but it's also our war. 

After 9/11 it became clear that the war hawks that arrived with the Bush administration were going to reshape the mideast. However, the reshaping had been taking place since Bush Sr. made the push to rid Kuwait of Saddam. Thus, the move to attack Iraq after Clinton's containment for eight years was less than effective though Bush's assault eliminated Saddam. What ensued afterwards was chaos. 

Afghanistan has been a disaster for most of us much like Vietnam and Iraq had been disasters. We have lost much at home in blood and treasure and we have lost credibility around the world. Of course there are those who have made profit off these wars. We should be leaving Afghanistan sooner than later.  But for this not to be a topic of discussion during this campaign is worse than shameful & disgraceful. I suggest that if you still support the President remind him of this any way you can. He needs to hear that we do not approve of his actions and lack of actions regarding the continued presence of our troops in Afghanistan.

Right Wing Extremism

DHS unclassified

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/dhs/

Hail the Conquering Hero: Andrew Sarris profiled

Written by Kent Jones

Photo © Robin Holland

After the New York press screening of a revived Mickey One a few years back, a certain critic was heard to remark, "I guess that's what you'd call Strained Seriousness."

And I guess the remark is what you'd call an inside joke. Deep inside.

For those of you who don't get the joke, and I expect many of you will not, it is language learned from a sacred text, officially dated at 1968. Strained Seriousness is actually the name of a category, which appears between two other categories, Lightly Likable and Oddities, One-Shots and Newcomers, in much the same way that Corinthians appears between Romans and Ephesians. Every category contains a list of movie directors, and a corresponding sub-list of their films, the important ones are italicized, and the entire enterprise is appended by a series of hierarchical yearly lists, the top four or five films also bestowed with italics. This is an all-American affair. True, there is a smattering of foreigners (Fringe Benefits), and the one called Renoir was so great, it is said, that he made it into heaven (the Pantheon) with only five American films to his credit. But the particular spiritual discipline embodied in these revelatory lists and rankings is as deep dish-American as Emerson or Hawthorne. And just as Hawthorne saw original sin turning the tables on Young Goodman Brown or the minister under his black veil, so the Book sends Huston, Wyler, Zinnemann, and Wellman wandering the world with the legend Less Than Meets the Eye emblazoned on their foreheads.

"I can't get those fucking categories out of my head," a friend once complained, like the woman who hears the ticking bomb at the beginning of Touch of Evil. Small wonder. Consider the descending order, from the transcendentally whole to the prosaically piecemeal ("He has created more great moments and fewer great films than any director of his rank" rings a particularly alarming note), or the cursory texts that are not so much defenses as cryptic illuminations (for instance, "Cukor's cinema is a subjective cinema without an objective correlative"). The American Cinema has the monumentally timeless authority of an originary text - it does not appear to have been written as much as handed down from above and received by mankind. Of course, there is writing, very good writing, in the preface, the introductory essay, and, in recent editions, the afterword. But these feel like a scholar's explanatory notes, outside the transfiguring object that is the Book itself. An alternative history of American movies? Of course, given the fact that a multiple Oscar winner (Ben-Hur) sits sadly unitalicized at the bottom of 1959. But it's more than that. And it is quite different from the assorted pieces by Agee or Farber or Kael, in which readers found sympathetic voices that validated sentiments or intuitions theretofore unexpressed in the greater culture. If you received The American Cinema at the right moment in your life, and many people including myself did, it came with the force of a divination, a cinematic Great Awakening. I suppose that makes Andrew Sarris, its author, the Jonathan Edwards of film criticism.

It has been pointed out, often, that many English-language film critics before Sarris invoked the director in their reviews - it's been pointed out most often by Sarris himself. Yet the fact is that no one except Manny Farber had confronted the question of what direction actually was. They had done pretty much everything but - ontological observations, theoretical prescriptions occasionally illustrated by actual movies, or critical language such as the following: "He has come back from the war with a style of great purity, directness, and warmth, about as cleanly devoid of mannerism, haste, superfluous motion, aesthetic or emotional over-reaching, as any I know." That's James Agee on William Wyler, and while it's all very lovely, it doesn't address the central question of what exactly Wyler does for a living. For Farber, and for no one else, this question was part of the job, and he approached it from his own stubbornly particular viewpoint - so particular that no one noticed at the time.

It was Sarris who took it upon himself to overhaul American film criticism, by facing what everyone else had either avoided or backed into, with and without cultural alibis. And he accomplished it in a few rather simple, elegant moves. First of all, there was all that ranking, from most to least personal. Whether or not you agreed with his choices, it was clear that, somewhere in the world, priorities had been reversed from content to form, but also from outside to inside. Sarris took a postwar French idea - the Politique des auteurs - and translated it as the Auteur Theory, which he later (correctly) admitted was not a theory at all but "a collection of facts, a reminder of movies to be resurrected, of genres to be redeemed, of directors to be rediscovered." It's been said that he simply took a French notion and Americanized it, which isn't untrue, but this minimizes the daring. To embrace American movies and moviemakers in Paris was one thing. To embrace those same movies and moviemakers in the country that had made and marginalized them in the first place was a far riskier proposition. This was a systematic destruction and reconstruction of the standard view of American cinema and, by extension, all of cinema, an insistence that cinematic beauty did not come from without (the right subject, actors, set designer, cinematographer, etc.) but from within, and that it was a matter of simple logic that it was the director rather than the writer or the performers from whom the final result was generated. Putting it another way, to fix your sights on the actors or the cinematography or the dialogue was akin to staring at someone's mouth, knees, and navel, whereas contemplating a film through the framework of direction was akin to looking at the whole person. Bazin, the Cahiers and Positif critics and the Brits at Sight and Sound, Sequence and Movie were already there, but it was Sarris who shepherded it into American consciousness, the toughest job of all.

His smartest move was parachuting two French terms into the American critical language - Auteur and Mise-en-scène. Auteur was a brilliant choice, because it killed two birds with one stone: on the one hand, curbing the then-prevalent literary bias in criticism by finding an alternative to Author, on the other hand, solidifying the concept of personal creation in a way that went well beyond the term "director." Mise-en-scène was necessarily more mysterious, and neither Sarris nor Alexandre Astruc ever adequately defined it. "We might say that Mise-en-scène is the gap between what we see and feel on the screen and what we can express in words," Sarris wrote in response to a request for a definition from a doctor in Maryland. Fair enough, but a little too tricky. "Mise-en-scène is the shaping of an objective core. Take away the objective core, and you have pure personality without Mise-en-scène." Not bad, but perhaps an overly fancy way of saying that filmmakers manipulate their raw material the way sculptors mold their clay. "What Mise-en-scène means is perhaps less important than what it implies." I wonder if the doctor was satisfied with that one.

The point is that Mise-en-scène is, or was, a necessarily undefinable and eminently malleable term, which ultimately came to stand for a kind of magic, an alchemical process in the happy meeting between artist and material. This type of purely aesthetic thrill had remained in the shadows of film criticism - cinema had been pegged as either a modern, theoretically driven marvel in perfect sync with the ongoing ascendancy of the proletariat ("When Eisenstein demonstrated that anything goes as far as temporal distortion is concerned, the actor was completely forgotten as the intransigently counter-revolutionary agent operating against the smooth flow of dialectical montage," wrote Sarris, brilliantly), a purely sociological phenomenon ("As soon as we identify an entity called 'Marilyn Monroe' as an iconographical element of Niagara, we incorrectly limit a variable element with an invariable name"), a 20th-century entertainment machine or nothing more than the sum total of its various parts. Among many other things, Sarris was saying that magic in cinema was more a question of sensibility than visual, verbal or aural splendor, and Mise-en-scène came to denote the evidence that human intelligence, as opposed to efficiency or self-importance, had been applied from behind the camera. If you insisted on a strict translation, the term applied more to metier than magic, but it seemed ridiculous to describe the Mise-en-scène of Joseph Pevney or Delbert Mann. Ultimately, the term as Sarris put it to use is a kissing cousin to Farber's negative space, with Sarris's "personality" jibing with Farber's "experience." The difference is that where Farber's language and orientation as a critic were resolutely private, Sarris's were public and explicitly polemical. And they did the trick. The next time you browse through the Vincente Minnelli section at Kim's Video, or watch a TCM tribute to Raoul Walsh, or read an appreciation of Park Chan-wook in The New York Times, think of Andrew Sarris. There are still critics who think they're scoring points by insisting that film is a collaborative medium, only to return to the director as organizing principle without missing a breath.

"Americans can't resist a good revival meeting," Jean-Pierre Gorin said of Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sarris whipped up a remarkable amount of fervor in the Sixties and Seventies. Once he realized that he had fans - which came with the realization that he had enemies - he was quick to point out that fanaticism was always a two-way street. "I would be the first to concede that any critical theory carried to extremes is absurd," he wrote in 1970. "When you become too addicted to the politique, you wind up listening to visiting Frenchmen whispering into your ear that Edgar G. Ulmer has just directed a nudist film anonymously . . . The point is that in America we are always overcompensating for the extremisms, real and alleged, of others, thus becoming extremists ourselves." Those who attacked Sarris reacted with their own brand of extremism that, in retrospect, seems notable for both its venom and its underlying anxiety, not to mention its wholesale evasion of the subtlety and intricacy of his arguments. On the one hand, Dwight Macdonald and John Simon (immortalized by Sarris as "the greatest film critic of the 19th century") were taking Sarris to task for legitimizing the most vulgar impulses in cinema and thus betraying the original promise of the medium; on the other hand, a certain critic at The New Yorker was trying to have it both ways, tipping her hat to the aesthetic conservatism of Macdonald and Simon and then wheeling around to accuse Sarris of spoiling the party by turning the ecstatic rush of moviegoing into a slow, somber trek to the museum, punctuated by numerous genuflections and incense burning.

It's one of the odd quirks of history that, at least at this moment in time, the name of Pauline Kael has to come up if you're discussing Andrew Sarris. They go together like Petruchio and Kate, Zeus and Hera, Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. Despite the fact that they shared certain predilections and preferences (for Godard in the Sixties, Altman in the Seventies, and The Earrings of Madame de... now and forever), they never stopped battling after 1963, when Kael tossed a grenade into the auteurist cell with the lively but ridiculous "Circles and Squares," and right up to Sarris's deflating goodbye to his old nemesis in The Observer. "Not that I have any desire to continue playing good old Charlie Brown to Miss K's Lucy," wrote Sarris in 1970, "but I can't really discern any overriding moral issue involved in the conflicting tastes of two movie reviewers." Perhaps not, but just as Godard recognized the tracking shot as a moral affair, so one might say the same of a critic's stance toward the art form they're contemplating. And while Kael in death is just as popular as she was when alive, if not more so, I think it's Sarris who has had the more positive and lasting effect on the way we look at movies.

Sarris met every challenge head-on, and Kael sidestepped them all - Resnais, Malick, Fassbinder, late Bresson, late Dreyer, post-Dr. Strangelove Kubrick, post-Last Waltz Scorsese, Shoah, and, last but not least, the classical American cinema that was getting such a spirited revision from both sides of the Atlantic during her ascendancy. Moreover, she made a practice of encouraging her readers to sidestep right along with her, and provided them with a series of snappy alibis that jangled in the brain like hook-laden Top 40 tunes - Hiroshima, mon amour was "an elaborate masochistic fantasy for intellectuals"; Barry Lyndon "says that people are disgusting but things are lovely"; The Merchant of Four Seasons is "an art thing, all right, but perhaps not a work of art." Of course you can't "get drunk on" the aforementioned films and filmmakers. You can fall in love with them (believe it or not, some of us have fallen in love with Barry Lyndon and The Merchant of Four Seasons, and I'm pretty sure we weren't duped or intimidated into it), but it's a very different kind of love from what you might feel for The Godfather or Dressed to Kill. Where Sarris often shared Kael's ambivalence over art cinema, he almost always tried to come to terms with it - for him, the uncrossable line of viewer tolerance that Kael watched like a hawk was nonexistent. As long as filmmakers didn't lose their nerve or cop out, Sarris reckoned that the ideal, sympathetic viewer owed them their best. One could say that for Kael the artist is guilty until proven innocent, while for Sarris he/she is innocent until proven guilty.

"I suppose... I am a revisionist in the most restless sense of constantly revising myself," Sarris wrote in the introduction to Politics and Cinema. "Consequently, every movie I have ever seen keeps swirling and shifting in ever changing contexts." This openhearted stance before the wonder of cinema, the polar opposite of Kael's famous one-viewing/one-judgment credo, is crystallized for me in Sarris's return visits to Kubrick. "It's not that I have seen the light," he wrote in 1975, "but that I have come to appreciate Kubrick's particular form of darkness." But he had started with 2001, which prompted a little-remarked report on a second re-viewing of a film he had vilified in The American Cinema ("The ending·qualifies in its oblique obscurity as Instant Ingmar"). It was two years later when he took this "enhanced" look, resulting in one of the most charming passages in all of American film criticism. "I must report that I recently paid another visit to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 while under the influence of a smoked substance that I was assured by my contact was somewhat stronger and more authentic than oregano on a King Sano [cigarette brand] base. (For myself, I must confess that I soar infinitely higher on vermouth cassis, but enough of this generation gap.) Anyway, I prepared to watch 2001 under what I have always been assured were optimum conditions, and surprisingly (for me) I find myself reversing my original opinion. 2001 is indeed a major work by a major artist." I'm not sure what I love most about this passage - the fact that it's impossible to imagine anyone else writing it (in 1970! in The Village Voice!!), its complete lack of guile, or its corresponding lack of self-consciousness. And then, a few sentences later, a kind of peak is reached: "I don't think that 2001 is exclusively or even especially a head movie (and I now speak with the halting voice of authority)."

Sarris's disarming honesty and his complete lack of concern with being hip have always been his trump cards as a critic and his bête noires as a journalistic player. The old Voice probably could have tolerated an attention-getting firebrand like Stanley Crouch forever, no matter how reactionary, if he hadn't tried to smash up the joint; but its patience wore thin with this "instinctively" Christian centrist (whose political acumen could have given any of his fellow staff writers a run for their money) with an unapologetic love for old movies and a curiously formal prose style in the best belle lettrist tradition. And yet, despite the fact that his archenemy's dizzying virtuosity is often stood in opposition to the style of every other film critic before or since, it's Sarris, with his restless intelligence and his Proustian regard, who is finally the more modern writer. What is winning in Kael - moving, in fact - is the urgency of her need to communicate her emotional responses to films and, especially, actors who made an immediate impact, in a correspondingly immediate style so breathlessly intoxicating that it haunts film criticism to this day. Her best pieces shimmer and throb like a great Tommy James single. And that's always been the rub, for her and for her devotees. Anything that smacked of premeditation or intellectual mediation, anything that moved in any direction other than toward the immediate, was anathema. Unfortunately, a high percentage of art and a higher percentage of criticism smacks of both premeditation and intellectual mediation (out of necessity), which is why she more or less painted herself into an aesthetic corner by the time she retired. Such is the life of the Enthusiast/Debunker. Meanwhile, Sarris, in the best tradition of Bazin, Daney, and Farber, was always a critic-theorist - in other words, his immersion in the medium is so total that he generates theory through his practice. While he may not have a defining essay like "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" or "White Elephant vs. Termite Art" - or, God help us, the unfathomable "Fantasies of the Arthouse Audience" (reduced to ashes by Raymond Durgnat) - he does have 50 years' worth of remarkably trenchant and insightful criticism, in which the cinema itself always stands at the center, valiantly protected by Sarris as if it were his queen and he its knight. A river of personal expression indeed.

Flip to any given page from any one of his anthologies, long out of print and overdue for a fresh look (come to think of it, a few more anthologies of uncollected material are in order), and you will find a restlessly inquisitive and extraordinarily supple mind at work, always laboring to tie together an assortment of elements - historical antecedents, contemporary political realities, Proustian reminiscences. If his writing about the very best - Ophüls, Mizoguchi, Hitchcock, Ford - is less exciting than his writing about the flawed or failed, it's probably because sublimity tends to be a great equalizer, while imperfection comes in limitless variations. "On the whole, most movies tend to be more complex than profound," Sarris wrote in The Primal Screen, "but this makes them all the more difficult to pin down, describe, and categorize for all time." No one aside from Farber worked harder at pinning down, describing, and (always provisionally) categorizing. On occasion, Sarris hit a comic high note in the process: "Richard Benjamin is so ideally cast as Philip Roth that it is almost frightening to think of him ever playing anything else. And who wants to look at Philip Roth as a figure of fantasy?"

For me, Sarris was at his very best when confronted with an especially knotty problem, and the aesthetic and political convulsions of the Sixties and Seventies provided him with a bonanza of paradoxes, delusions, and hypocrisies to deflate and dissect. "I think Nixon can be beaten in 1972, but not by reluctant virgins and pure ideologues," Sarris wrote of The Candidate, seeing through the beguiling surface to the core of purest bullshit. "At the very end of the movie...all McKay can do is ask, 'What do we do now?' Well, for one thing, Senator-elect McKay can go to the Senate and vote against the confirmations of Renquist, Powell, Burger, and Blackmun." He performed a similarly invasive procedure on films that were even more extravagantly praised: "It is with the characterization of Michael Corleone that both...Coppola and...Puzo seem to drift away from the rigor of the crime genre into the lassitude of an intellectual's daydream about revenge without remorse and power without accountability," or "Cabiria is too much of a one-woman show, with Giulietta Masina's heroine achieving a sublime illumination while all the other characters linger in the darkness of deception and irresolution." One of his finest moments came when he took not Gillo Pontecorvo but the Lincoln Center audience to task for cheering the café bombing in The Battle of Algiers: "All right, you say you believe in indiscriminate violence. Then squeeze Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Peter Finch, George C. Scott, and Diana Rigg into a crowded café in Algiers. Then let the bomb go off five minutes after the picture starts, and show all our cameo stars as shattered corpses·Is it still an occasion for cheering? I think not." Sarris was not a bandwagon jumper - needless to say, he did not equate the first New York showing of Last Tango in Paris with the inaugural performance of "The Rite of Spring." Nor did he see anything so miraculously new about the New Hollywood: for him they were just a group of talented filmmakers operating under a different set of conditions than the ones under which their studio-contracted forefathers slaved. If Sarris tended to underrate Coppola and early Scorsese, he also did a far better job than anyone else of positioning them within the totality of film history, and then stuck by them once the heat of youth had cooled with the contemplative distance of age.

Sarris was always bracingly honest about his prejudices, and his greatest was for the avant-garde. "Live and let live has been my motto," he wrote of his reluctance to attack non-narrative films in print, "and since most American avant-garde film artists have tended to be as poor as church mice, it seemed unduly cruel to heap abuse atop neglect." I will never forget the hair-raising moment when he took fellow Voice writer Jim Hoberman to task in print for "freaking out on the arthouse acid below 14th Street." In retrospect, while I can't abide the notion that narrative is the only package in which moving images should be wrapped, I have to commend and even envy Sarris for his candor - most of his colleagues would have hidden behind layers of rationalization or obfuscation. And yet, Sarris is always surprising. He owned up to missing the boat on Cassavetes at the time of Shadows, and when he took a good, hard look at The Chelsea Girls, he admitted that he saw a work of great gravity and beauty. He always had a problem with youth culture, but he balanced his graybeard griping with passages that reflected the most generous and enlightened point of view since Bazin's. "We are simply too close to the popular cinema of today to read it correctly," he wrote in his Easy Rider review. "If American movies today seem too eclectic, too derivative, and too mannered, so did they seem back in the Twenties, the Thirties, the Forties and the Fifties·Out of all the mimicry of earlier times emerged very personal styles, and there is no reason to believe that the same thing will not happen again and again. Hence beware of all generalizations, including this one, perhaps especially this one, because it is just remotely possible that after all the false cries of doom, the cinema might actually be racing to the creative standstill so long predicted for it. But I doubt it. It is not the medium that is most likely to get old, tired, and cynical, but its aging and metaphysically confused critics. This particular critic has never felt younger in his life."

Sarris seems to have become a more becalmed and solitary presence in recent years, dropping the mantle of head "cultist" and regarding the games of moviemaking and movie critiquing from a benign distance. Younger readers complain that he is too content with covering the latest commercial releases, as if we should all aspire to write for an audience of all-region DVD player owners. I can't begrudge his failure to grapple with Apichatpong or Omirbaev - the distance from Three Comrades to Fassbinder is already far enough. And he remains one of the most penetrating voices in film criticism. I recently had the shock of my life when I opened The New York Observer, where he's had a berth for the last 16 years, to find his review of Godard's Notre musique. Midway, he segued into a reminiscence of his youth spent in a "casually anti-Semitic household." For him, the effects of his upbringing were only dispelled with the footage of the death camps. This bracing honesty was a prelude to lowering the boom on Godard's "evasive paradoxes," with this stinging sentence: "Mr. Godard hasn't earned the right to take the mantle of Jewishness upon himself as if it were some sort of Halloween mask." A few well-chosen words, and Notre musique hasn't been the same since for this reader.

"I never argue with people about movies," Andrew told me when I visited with him at the cozy Upper-East-Side apartment he shares with his wife, Molly Haskell. "We all see different movies. We all go to the movies and see our friends, our family, our loved ones. Brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers. Lost loves. Failed loves. People we hate. Movies are as old as psychoanalysis. So if I were to put you or anyone else on a couch and say, 'Tell me your favorite movies,' it would be a way of psychoanalyzing you." Our conversation ranged across a lot of territory in two hours - Billy Wilder ("When Sunset Boulevard played Radio City Music Hall, I saw it about 25 times. I was a great enthusiast. And then Truffaut talked me out of it"), the Pope's then-impending death ("I'm suspicious of how long he's taking"), showing Citizen Kane to students at SVA ("The lights came up and one of them raised his hand and said, 'They certainly wore strange clothes back in those days'"), the generosity of Fred Zinnemann ("You know, he had an affair with Grace Kelly on High Noon, and he once told me that he could never have gotten the performances out of her that Hitchcock did"), the political problem of landing on the right-to-die side of the Schiavo case ("You can't just stand up in the Senate and shout 'Pull the plug!' It wouldn't go down well with your constituents"), and Clint Eastwood ("I find people all the time now saying things like, 'I agree with you about Million Dollar Baby - I didn't like it either.' Their not liking it is a much more sweeping thing than anything I've said. They feel it's not big enough, important enough, overwhelming enough. And I suppose it isn't, but what is?"). But all the while, what we were really talking about was the practice of film criticism, on which Sarris has spent a lifetime of reflection. "I've always said to people that auteurism is nice, but it's hypothetical, and gradually you learn how much or how little influence different directors had. You can see that Hitchcock had more influence than someone like [John] Stahl. What it really is, is first you see something, and you like it, and then it's a mystery, and you go into the mystery - and that's what's interesting. And the test of criticism is: can you make a case for it."

"Do you think we've wasted our lives?" Andrew asked as he walked me to the door. It was a joke, of course, but it had a poignant ring. People are always implying that movies, and the hours spent watching them, are wastes of time. When you're young, it's "Why do you want to sit in the dark on such a beautiful day?" When you're older you feel it in the flip tone of movie journalism, the cultural credence afforded cinematic illiterates like Gore Vidal, and the strenuous efforts of apologetic film critics to connect cinema to the "real world" because they feel obliged to prove its "relevance" over and over and over again. You even feel it in such supposedly sympathetic terms as "cinephilia" or "movie love," which carry the ring of affliction. Andrew, with his honesty and his grace, has always made such notions seem utterly irrelevant.

As I walked through the park, I drifted into my own Proustian reveries. I remembered my previous visits to Andrew and Molly's place - the last time was almost 20 years ago, when Andrew's right-hand man and my mentor Tom Allen died of a heart attack at the age of 50. I remembered the weekend that Tom went away on retreat, the Voice almost went on strike and Andrew came down with what became a year-long, life-threatening illness. I remembered my mercifully brief stint in the early Eighties as Andrew's personal secretary, at which I was an unqualified disaster. And then, a few years before, sitting in my school library poring through old issues of the Voice. And further back, when I was 12, getting my first copy of The American Cinema from my mother's friend. It was a loan, and it got so much wear that she made me buy him a new one. 32 years later, I still can't get those fucking categories out of my head. Not that I've ever tried. That I like John Huston or William Wellman more than Andrew does, or did, is beside the point, and it always has been. He gave me, and many, many others, a framework, a way of seeing and understanding an art form that was and still is culturally disreputable. I owe him a lot, and so does anyone else writing about cinema.

Selma, Alabama March and my "incident"

Listening to Congressman John Lewis on a repeat of the Colbert Report one June morning in 2012, reminded me of an incident that I participated in.  Lewis has just written about the first march across the bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, AKA “Bloody Sunday.” ("Across that Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change").  I was home on weekend liberty from the Navy. I paid attention to the news and absorbed what had happened, but in those days I never knew how to argue anything or express myself very clearly.  However, I had paid attention to the civil rights movement from the days of the freedom riders. Though I held the standard view among ignorant, white suburban teenagers at the time, I think there was an element of curiosity that I harbored and a sense of courage that I may have perceived but couldn’t give voice to, certainly never to my Irish friends and hardly to my family.

But first just a note about my family:  Racial epithets were not something that was said very much at home. Maybe sometimes they were but there wasn’t a litany of racism.  My parents had friends who were not all white and Catholic. My Mother in particular had a black friend from work and she brought her home for dinner once to our white, suburban neighborhood. That was in the mid 1950's.  I was about 11 years old and very nervous about meeting her.  No doubt she must have been nervous and probably worse scared. My father, who generally kept silent about such things, actually about most things, had Jewish band mates that he traveled and hung around with. His hero beyond sports heroes was Benny Goodman and he also had an uncle who eloped with a black woman. His best friend growing up was a Cuban who I was named after even though the first born son should be named after his grandfather. Both parents were FDR, Kennedy type democrats and members of unions. My grandmother, my Mother’s Mother, who I was very close to and lived with us tended to be the one who uttered the most racist comments though she spoke fluent Yiddish and was friends with the Jewish elderly woman next door and they played bingo together.

We lived in a fairly liberal school district even though it was a Republican run town and most teachers expressed what we would call today “liberal” views. As working class people, though, my parents didn't exactly fit the mold of Ozzie and Harriet, the Cleavers or any other TV family. As a child I was probably fearful of the "otherness" of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Asians, Jews but I don't recall having ill will or hatred towards any others because they were different from me. In the 1950’s there were a lot of public service announcements. I recall animated cartoons about race and religion and how we should treat everyone as equals.  While sitting there watching TV and not really paying full attention it still sunk in. For example I still remember this ditty:

“Don’t be a schmo, Joe.
Be in the know, Joe.
Religion and race just don’t count in this place!
So don’t be a schmo, Joe.
Be in the know, Joe.
Remember that and you won’t fall on your face!”

Yet the first time I recall feeling simpatico for real (or some kind of human feeling of recognition) with a black person was when I was on a train trip returning from Hollywood, FL and going to NY in the summer of 1960. I encountered segregation the whole time we traveled south and back and especially I remember the segregated bathrooms and water fountains at a stopover in Jacksonville and recall feeling very odd about it at the time, that there was something really weird. That this was what I had seen on TV or had heard about in social studies, but here it was for real. I was 15. There were also all those small ramshackle buildings that I saw from the train as we passed. Barely fifteen feet or so from the passing train you could see dozens of small black children poorly dressed in rags playing or milling about in the dust though some would wave at the train. And there were the chain gangs just about everywhere working highways when my uncle drove us around south Florida. Most prisoners were black.

On one leg of the return trip from Florida, the only vacant seat that I could find for part of the trip was next to an elderly black woman. There didn't seem to be segregated seating areas on the train. I was extremely anxious about sitting next to a black person. Plus I was sure everyone else who was white was looking at me. My father just ushered me over to the seat.  The lady looked very old, older than my Sicilian grandparents who were pretty old at the time. But for the first time I could see the face of a black person who reminded me of my Sicilian grandmother, only darker. She had a lined, crinkly face and tired eyes that were more golden than brown, short knotted gray hair and she looked up at me without a smile or any kind of acknowledgement and seemed to sigh and then looked away out of the window. She wore an old washed out printed house dress and some kind of worn out looking shoes, and she hugged a small satchel to her breast. She was very small as her feet hardly touched the floor of the train. I'm not the type to talk to strangers even to this day and so I sat there quietly trying to read a magazine that I had though I couldn't concentrate and I was fascinated by this tiny woman and I kept stealing glances at her the whole time she was on the train. It probably was from that time on that I realized that there was just one human race and that everyone deserved to be treated as such.

Today I marvel at the thought of that woman. Why was she on the train? Was she traveling alone? Where was she going? Obviously she had lived through the worst excesses of Jim Crow and was probably a descendent of a slave once removed.  Did I frighten her as a white person, a hulking white pimply faced white teenager?  If only I could have had a conversation with her, would I have been automatically enlightened? Still whatever the facts are of my life these days and how it evolved to the world view that I possess, it all probably started to change at that encounter when I recognized that "the other" was exactly the same as me and mine.

So back to that weekend in March-- That Sunday evening's news that I watched in a Blarney Stone (or maybe it was "Smiths") or one of those types of bars at the time across the street from Port Authority was filled with TV reports from Selma and showed clips of the fighting and the police brutality.  And those clips were shown a few times. Every time they were shown the drunks at the bar, the white drunks would hoot and yell epithets not at the police but at the marchers. And since there were a couple of hours yet for me to get on the bus, I drank and drank by myself and I eventually got pretty drunk, but was still able to walk. I got on one of the buses that were reserved for servicemen, mainly sailors. I knew no one on the bus. Usually I traveled with sailors from my ship who lived in NY but this time I was solo. We left Port Authority and headed into the Lincoln tunnel. I guess the Selma story and what I saw on TV haunted me, and in my drunken state I got up and started making a speech.

What I said I don't really remember. Truth is I remember none of the events as they were told to me when I was finally sober, but it was purportedly a drunken rambling speech about how we are all brothers and whatnot. And as I looked around I saw a black sailor and I singled him out and cried to the heavens that he is just like us. The black sailor tried to shrink away, obviously not wanting the attention. There were shouts of anger at me but I didn't care. Right in the middle of the Lincoln tunnel, it was around midnight after all, the bus driver halted the bus, got out of his seat, grabbed hold of me and made the sailor sitting in the first seat get up and change seats with me. He told me to shut up and sleep it off which I guess I did. I awoke to daylight as we stopped at Little Creek, VA to let the bulk of us off. A sailor said to me as were getting off. "You know you almost caused a riot last night."  And then he proceeded to tell me what I did and what transpired as I didn't recall any of it.

Today as I reflect on his words; "You know you almost caused a riot last night," I wish I had. 

The demise of the Euro and whether it can be survived

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-johnson/euro-collapse_b_1549444.html

The End of the Euro: A Survivor's Guide

 by Simon Johnson and Peter Boone

In every economic crisis there comes a moment of clarity. In Europe soon, millions of people will wake up to realize that the euro-as-we-know-it is gone. Economic chaos awaits them.
To understand why, first strip away your illusions. Europe's crisis to date is a series of supposedly "decisive" turning points that each turned out to be just another step down a steep hill. Greece's upcoming election on June 17 is another such moment. While the so-called "pro-bailout" forces may prevail in terms of parliamentary seats, some form of new currency will soon flood the streets of Athens. It is already nearly impossible to save Greek membership in the euro area: depositors flee banks, taxpayers delay tax payments, and companies postpone paying their suppliers -- either because they can't pay or because they expect soon to be able to pay in cheap drachma.

The troika of the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) has proved unable to restore the prospect of recovery in Greece, and any new lending program would run into the same difficulties. In apparent frustration, the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, remarked last week, "As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time."

Ms. Lagarde's empathy is wearing thin and this is unfortunate -- particularly as the Greek failure mostly demonstrates how wrong a single currency is for Europe. The Greek backlash reflects the enormous pain and difficulty that comes with trying to arrange "internal devaluations" (a euphemism for big wage and spending cuts) in order to restore competitiveness and repay an excessive debt level.

Faced with five years of recession, more than 20 percent unemployment, further cuts to come, and a stream of failed promises from politicians inside and outside the country, a political backlash seems only natural. With IMF leaders, EC officials, and financial journalists floating the idea of a "Greek exit" from the euro, who can now invest in or sign long-term contracts in Greece? Greece's economy can only get worse.

Some European politicians are now telling us that an orderly exit for Greece is feasible under current conditions, and Greece will be the only nation that leaves. They are wrong. Greece's exit is simply another step in a chain of events that leads towards a chaotic dissolution of the euro zone.

During the next stage of the crisis, Europe's electorate will be rudely awakened to the large financial risks which have been foisted upon them in failed attempts to keep the single currency alive. When Greece quits the euro, its government will default on approximately 121 billion euros of debt to official creditors, and about 27 billion euros owed to the IMF.


More importantly and less known to German taxpayers, Greece will also default on 155 billion euros directly owed to the euro system (comprised of the ECB and the 17 national central banks in the euro zone). This includes 110 billion euros provided automatically to Greece through the Target2 payments system -- which handles settlements between central banks for countries using the euro. As depositors and lenders flee Greek banks, someone needs to finance that capital flight, otherwise Greek banks would fail. This role is taken on by other euro area central banks, which have quietly lent large funds, with the balances reported in the Target2 account. The vast bulk of this lending is, in practice, done by the Bundesbank since capital flight mostly goes to Germany, although all members of the euro system share the losses if there are defaults.

The ECB has always vehemently denied that it has taken an excessive amount of risk despite its increasingly relaxed lending policies. But between Target2 and direct bond purchases alone, the euro system claims on troubled periphery countries are now approximately 1.1 trillion euros (this is our estimate based on available official data). This amounts to over 200 percent of the (broadly defined) capital of the euro system. No responsible bank would claim these sums are minor risks to its capital or to taxpayers. These claims also amount to 43 percent of German Gross Domestic Product, which is now around 2.57 trillion euros. With Greece proving that all this financing is deeply risky, the euro system will appear far more fragile and dangerous to taxpayers and investors.

Jacek Rostowski, the Polish Finance Minister, recently warned that the calamity of a Greek default is likely to result in a flight from banks and sovereign debt across the periphery, and that -- to avoid a greater calamity -- all remaining member nations need to be provided with unlimited funding for at least 18 months. Mr. Rostowski expresses concern, however, that the ECB is not prepared to provide such a firewall, and no other entity has the capacity, legitimacy, or will to do so.

We agree: Once it dawns on people that the ECB already has a large amount of credit risk on its books, it seems very unlikely that the ECB would start providing limitless funds to all other governments that face pressure from the bond market. The Greek trajectory of austerity-backlash-default is likely to be repeated elsewhere -- so why would the Germans want the ECB to double- or quadruple-down by suddenly ratcheting up loans to everyone else?

The most likely scenario is that the ECB will reluctantly and haltingly provide funds to other nations -- an on-again, off-again pattern of support -- and that simply won't be enough to stabilize the situation. Having seen the destruction of a Greek exit, and knowing that both the ECB and German taxpayers will not tolerate unlimited additional losses, investors and depositors will respond by fleeing banks in other peripheral countries and holding off on investment and spending.

Capital flight could last for months, leaving banks in the periphery short of liquidity and forcing them to contract credit -- pushing their economies into deeper recessions and their voters towards anger. Even as the ECB refuses to provide large amounts of visible funding, the automatic mechanics of Europe's payment system will mean the capital flight from Spain and Italy to German banks is transformed into larger and larger de facto loans by the Bundesbank to Banca d'Italia and Banco de Espana -- essentially to the Italian and Spanish states. German taxpayers will begin to see through this scheme and become afraid of further losses.
The end of the euro system looks like this. The periphery suffers ever deeper recessions -- failing to meet targets set by the troika -- and their public debt burdens will become more obviously unaffordable. The euro falls significantly against other currencies, but not in a manner that makes Europe more attractive as a place for investment.

Instead, there will be recognition that the ECB has lost control of monetary policy, is being forced to create credits to finance capital flight and prop up troubled sovereigns -- and that those credits may not get repaid in full. The world will no longer think of the euro as a safe currency; rather investors will shun bonds from the whole region, and even Germany may have trouble issuing debt at reasonable interest rates. Finally, German taxpayers will be suffering unacceptable inflation and an apparently uncontrollable looming bill to bail out their euro partners.

The simplest solution will be for Germany itself to leave the euro, forcing other nations to scramble and follow suit. Germany's guilt over past conflicts and a fear of losing the benefits from 60 years of European integration will no doubt postpone the inevitable. But here's the problem with postponing the inevitable -- when the dam finally breaks, the consequences will be that much more devastating since the debts will be larger and the antagonism will be more intense.

A disorderly break-up of the euro area will be far more damaging to global financial markets than the crisis of 2008. In fall 2008 the decision was whether or how governments should provide a back-stop to big banks and the creditors to those banks. Now some European governments face insolvency themselves. The European economy accounts for almost 1/3 of world GDP. Total euro sovereign debt outstanding comprises about $11 trillion, of which at least $4 trillion must be regarded as a near term risk for restructuring.
Europe's rich capital markets and banking system, including the market for 185 trillion dollars in outstanding euro-denominated derivative contracts, will be in turmoil and there will be large scale capital flight out of Europe into the United States and Asia. Who can be confident that our global megabanks are truly ready to withstand the likely losses? It is almost certain that large numbers of pensioners and households will find their savings are wiped out directly or inflation erodes what they saved all their lives. The potential for political turmoil and human hardship is staggering.

For the last three years Europe's politicians have promised to "do whatever it takes" to save the euro. It is now clear that this promise is beyond their capacity to keep -- because it requires steps that are unacceptable to their electorates. No one knows for sure how long they can delay the complete collapse of the euro, perhaps months or even several more years, but we are moving steadily to an ugly end.

Whenever nations fail in a crisis, the blame game starts. Some in Europe and the IMF's leadership are already covering their tracks, implying that corruption and those "Greeks not paying taxes" caused it all to fail. This is wrong: the euro system is generating miserable unemployment and deep recessions in Ireland, Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain also. Despite Troika-sponsored adjustment programs, conditions continue to worsen in the periphery. We cannot blame corrupt Greek politicians for all that.

It is time for European and IMF officials, with support from the U.S. and others, to work on how to dismantle the euro area. While no dissolution will be truly orderly, there are means to reduce the chaos. Many technical, legal, and financial market issues could be worked out in advance. We need plans to deal with: the introduction of new currencies, multiple sovereign defaults, recapitalization of banks and insurance groups, and divvying up the assets and liabilities of the euro system. Some nations will soon need foreign reserves to backstop their new currencies. Most importantly, Europe needs to salvage its great achievements, including free trade and labor mobility across the continent, while extricating itself from this colossal error of a single currency.

Unfortunately for all of us, our politicians refuse to go there -- they hate to admit their mistakes and past incompetence, and in any case, the job of coordinating those seventeen discordant nations in the wind down of this currency regime is, perhaps, beyond reach.

Forget about a rescue in the form of the G20, the G8, the G7, a new European Union Treasury, the issue of Eurobonds, a large scale debt mutualization scheme, or any other bedtime story. We are each on our own.

Simon Johnson is the co-author of White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters To You, available from April 3rd. This post is cross-posted from The Baseline Scenario. Read more from the Fiscal Affairs series here. Peter Boone is chair of Effective Intervention, a UK-based charity, an associate at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, and a principal in Salute Capital Management Limited.

From the new data cap to the future

There are many data devices now on the market.  Hardware is relatively cheap. New apps that are used for software are being produced every day, probably even every hour, many at no cost at all. Combined hardware and software allows you to consume mounds of data. The hardware gets better & faster. The software gets smarter. Companies selling the hardware compete with each other by offering the lowest prices they can on hardware while crowing about how much data you can get, how fast, how convenient and how much fun. 

These companies also sell you the plans that allow you to consume all that data, except there's a snag, a catch, a catch-22.  Your data will now be capped. You will now be limited unless of course you pay more, Unless you pay a premium above and beyond. You were promised one thing and now that you're hooked, well, you have to pay just a little more.  You've gotten that taste and now it's coursing through your brain and you must have more and more and more but the ante keeps going up.  Now you're addicted so you pay. Sound familiar?

Interestingly enough, the futurists think that one day that access to the internet via a bot can be injected into a body and the protoplasm in the brain can act as a device and synapses can be programmed and the result of that will become part of the anatomy and another what is it 6th or 7th sense? will be available to be turned on. A switch in the brain will be turned on and off by internet providers. And if you want it turned on, you'll have to pay. And if you want it turned off, well, no that isn't going to happen. Once turned on we are hooked. Turned off we are of no use so we die.        

Non-White births now exceed white births in the U.S.

Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Published: May 17, 2012 

WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births-in-us.html?_r=1

 

My Comment:

Unfortunately I worry that "race" will always be a part of America.  "Race" however is an outmoded concept since DNA is what actually matters. What is meant when saying "race" is the color of one's skin and somehow that reflects on the whole being, the darker one is the less intelligent, capable & desirable has been the poisonous assumption and not just among "whites."  Since we humans are all a shade of brown, I just don't know how any of this will play out in the future. Our country has legislated against slavery and then discrimination and our culture has changed from hatred to integration then tolerance and now some form of acceptance. If we're all still only at the point of acceptance then there is a long, long distance to go before the concept of race can be entirely eradicated & forgotten.   

Religious Fanatics

Religion is protected under the First Amendment.  Completely protected.  You have the right to worship who or whatever and congress can not nor will they make laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion.  So why does it seem to me that religious communities feel they are always under attack and seemingly religious fanatics have become the norm not the exception? It's not as if they are challenging any laws forbidding their choice. 

E-Readers: Why would I want one?

So you've got an e-reader, an android tablet, or an iPad.  Or maybe you've got them all, not to mention phones with Kindle or Nook software or other e-reader software. Tsk tsk. What to do? Which device should I read "War and Peace" on?  

Glad I don't have to decide which electronic device I don't want to use. I just read a book. It's portable, arguably lightweight, never needs recharging. I can throw it down in anger or toss it across the room derisively, write in the margins, and when I decide, throw it away. Just by feel I can tell how far I am into a book and how much further I need to go.  I can lend a book out for as long as I want, give it away, resell it if I like and not break any laws. You can see all the books I've read on display on my bookshelves kept by genre and in alphabetical order by author. And I can find a book rapidly without scrolling through pages of titles.

Speaking of pages, if I tear a page or the cover comes off I have scotch tape. I have books that are more than 50 years old and I can still read them because the format hasn't changed, nor are there any upgrades that I've missed as there is no outmoded operating system and I'm pretty sure there is no battery that will suddenly go dead. What will e-readers look like in 50 years? Will you be able to reread that book you read so long ago? Or will you have to BUY another copy to match that new software or device you were forced to upgrade to?  Or maybe they will be loading books and other written material into the chip they placed in your body to control everything you do so that you can read when your eyes are shut. I can envision now: "The iShut reader from Apple! Download it to your brain now. $999.99" 

Of course there are those who will say I am not green that I am environmentally retrograde, a dinosaur, not with the program, a killer of trees. (Perhaps, though I can't recall ever personally killing a tree.)  But I am not using electric which is supplied by the electric companies burning coal, a fossil fuel. I am not dumping my broken, unused or outmoded devices in landfills with batteries that may or may not contain mercury but are devices that definitely contain metals that are poisonous to the environment.  And I am not making Apple any more richer than they already are. OK so occasionally I use iTunes. But most are free podcasts and the digital music I sometimes have to BUY to replace the records I can no longer play (sigh) . . .  Happy reading!

The Supremes v. The Affordable Care Act (ACA)

It's anyone's guess right now what the ruling will be. But it's not out of the question that the Tax anti-injunction act argument will hold sway and the court will uphold the law by declaring the petition out of their jurisdiction. But there are ramifications and problems to follow if that's the way the court goes.

Consider Marbury v. Madison and the Tax anti-injunction act of 1867 then again in 1954..  (Putting aside the commerce clause argument for the time being) The President claimed earlier that in 2014 anyone not buying insurance will be in effect "taxed" via the IRS. (It's a tax if the IRS is collecting it, right?.) Since that "tax" hasn't occurred yet the lawsuits are sort of moot for now. . . The admin has dropped that argument with the declining numbers of the ACA. 

However, the Chief Justice is nobody's fool when it comes to politics.  Roberts has ordered the argument to be renewed thereby providing the court with the ability to rule that the case is not in their jurisdiction as was decided in Marbury. The argument is that the Tax Anti-injunction Act prevents the court's jurisdiction over the case if the healthcare law is perceived as a tax.

So Roberts will be able to pass the buck by actually upholding the health care law for now so that it can play out in the political theater this fall and that could be a greater advantage to the Republicans for this election.  But there might be a price to pay for that strategy for anti-tax activists in the long term if the Supremes avoid the issue. The declining numbers of the ACA may reverse given the sanction by the Supreme Court. (Grover Norquist doesn't hold sway here.) And taxes may not be perceived as something "evil." If the court rules this way then the first possibility for it come back to the federal courts and/or the Supremes would not be until 2015.

On the other hand if the court declares the ACA unconstitutional  via the Commerce Clause it will put another weapon in the Democrats' arsenal this fall, claiming that this was just another Republican/Conservative trick to subvert democracy and to slight the middle class and avoid healthcare issues or something like that. 

Sounds like yet again another HBO movie in the making.

Goldman Sachs exec calls it quits and berates his organization

Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

By GREG SMITH

Published: March 14, 2012

 TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for. 
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?_r=1&hp

The Hypocrite in Everyone Else --NY Times Op Ed

The Hypocrite in Everyone Else

By ROBERT KURZBAN

The continuous stream of reports detailing inconsistencies on the part of politicians makes it hard to believe that the rest of us might be as bad as they are.
Rick Santorum’s endorsement, when he was a senator, of the idea of trying to ensure higher education for everyone in Pennsylvania sits uneasily next to his recent condemnation of President Obama’s remarks along the same lines.
Mitt Romney called Obama’s healthcare plan “an unconscionable abuse of power,” strong language given the degree to which the plan was modeled on Romney’s own.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/the-hypocrite-in-everyone-else/

Spring Training about to begin brings back memories

One's Own Experience

I was a baseball fanatic as a child. Most seasons, except for the dead of winter, I carried a mitt and always wore a baseball cap, even though wearing one wasn't as popular then as it is now. I collected baseball cards until I was at least thirteen, went to Yankee Stadium whenever I could, and certainly watched enough baseball TV to last two lifetimes.  Personally for me spring training began when the snow lay still and untracked on the ground, and I made snowballs, pitching at telephone poles and stop signs.  An empty lot became an opportunity to rap rocks with any hefty stick I could find. I practiced on and off a field and even in the bathtub if I could.       

I joined little league with the hope of being the best.  At the age of nine I was star pitcher and hitter on my team.  The following year I was graduated to the next level and still was a star. By the time I was eleven, I was placed in the major leagues of little league. I got a full dress, pin-striped white uniform, a dark blue jersey underneath, real baseball stirrup socks, and spiked shoes. I was number 21.  The field we played on was a lush emerald, surrounding a cleanly raked brown diamond. We were fenced in and had a scoreboard, spectator stands and dugouts. There was even a small monument out in centerfield, where the American flag was raised before games, just like at Yankee Stadium.       

That first spring practice, they made me a catcher. It didn't matter that I wasn't going to pitch anymore. In practices, I rivaled the big hitter, no 20 of my new team, the FILS, which stood for Farmingdale International Laundry.  Number 20 was a great big kid, who to my eleven year old eyes looked more like a major leaguer than most guys playing big league baseball. I don't remember his name. He couldn't run fast, so the story went, so he hit homers.  When I was up at bat in practices, number 20, who was a whole year ahead of me, would cry out as I hit, "A homer for sure. Oh yeah!" But nobody really knew since there were no fences in practice.       

Truth is in the games I choked. I struck out most of the time. I couldn't see the ball because the pitches came in too fast and every one of them seemed aimed at my face. My knees used to buckle and the bat felt like a sledge hammer, and as I raised it to my shoulder, I thought I would topple over from the weight. I got on base by walks.  But they kept me on the team because they needed a catcher who would prevent runs from scoring.  All I had to do was stand in front of the plate and let the kids run full tilt at me as I waited for the ball to tag them out. I wasn't exactly super boy, and I got hurt enough times to be taken out of games. But we still practiced three times a week and every practice I drove the ball deep, causing number 20 to exclaim, "Homer for sure!"     

The memorable event of my first year, a year fraught with performance anxiety, bruises, sprains and cuts, along with constant self-ridicule, came when I got my first and only clean hit. It was an eyes shut swat that whizzed by the second baseman into the alley between center and right. The whole team leapt out of the dugout and cheered as though I'd just hit a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth and won a world series. I put my head down and tried to stretch it into a double and got nailed by a grinning second baseman that was just standing there waiting with the ball already in his mitt. I had totally misjudged the play. When I got back to the dugout, nobody, not even the coaches said a consoling word to me. I sat sulking in a corner of the dugout for the rest of the game, having been taken out for making a mistake.       

My team came in last place that year and the next.  And I always felt personally guilty for this failure to win. Yet, in my experience on the team no coach drew a distinction between a player's performance and winning or losing games.  By the time my second year was drawing to a close, I began to dread having to play another game, even though I was beginning to hit the ball some. But the fun was gone.  The competition had become the champion.  How much humiliation could one small boy, who thought he was very big, put up with? I finished that year and never went on to play organized baseball again. Still it took me a long time after to stop fantasizing about being the best. 

Actually I did play organized ball again in two softball leagues as pitcher and 1st baseman and always was good until my ankles couldn't take it anymore at the rather young age of 35 but that's another story.      

What to do about Religious Extremism: A fantasy

 Rioting in Afghanistan over Quran burning

THE US embassy in Kabul said today it was on lockdown as riots rocked the city during the second day of angry protests against NATO troops for burning copies of the Koran.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/us-embassy-in-kabul-on-lockdown-as-riots-rock-afghanistan-over-koran-burning/story-e6frfku0-1226278596864#ixzz1n760WJOA

 Rick’s Religious Fanaticism

Rick Santorum has been called a latter-day Savonarola.That’s far too grand. He’s more like a small-town mullah.

“Satan has his sights on the United States of America,” the conservative presidential candidate warned in 2008. “Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition
 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/opinion/dowd-ricks-religious-fanaticism.html?_r=1

Israel: Jewish Extremists Attack Woman

JERUSALEM — Israeli police say a group of ultra-Orthodox extremists have attacked a woman who was putting up posters in a troubled town near Jerusalem.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld says about a dozen ultra-Orthodox men in the town of Beit Shemesh surrounded the woman on Tuesday, pelted her with stones and slashed her car's tires. He says the woman suffered minor injuries.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/24/israel-jewish-extremists-woman_n_1227748.html


All these stories lead me to this fantasy:

Pick a spot in the world that is barren for many square miles. Build a fifty foot high enclosing fence. Put in a gate that can be bricked up after all the extreme religious fanatics are herded in with their Bibles and Qurans and no weapons and let the chips fall where they may.

Rick Santorum says that the Obama agenda is not based on the Bible

This is the United States of America. We are a constituti­onal Republic. We are not a theocracy. We have a founding document based on reason and logic. The Bible is an interestin­g series of books, a fantasy, beautiful poetry with some cogent advice but it lacks reason and defies logic. . . Live your religious life, Mr. Santorum. Become devout and celibate and leave your wife and family to pursue your religious beliefs, high-minde­dness and fantasies. Leave the others who are profane in your eyes to dabble in politics.

A short film review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex (streaming on NetFlix)

I remember the Baader-Meinhof "gang" only from the scant news reports at the time as they were presented in the U.S. press. Recently I was reading a John LeCarre novel, "Absolute Friends" and at the beginning one of the characters is involved with the democratic protests in Germany in the 60's and the names of Rudi Dutschke and Ulrike Meinhof were referred to. So having looked them up, I read a bit about them and then while reading about the RAF (Red Army Faction), I came across a reference to this film. So the film was quite arresting and engaging and provides a narrative to the events as reported over 10 years. All the events are supposedly factual.

According to the film we have a group of youthful activists whose parents lived through the Nazi era and opposed Nazism, quietly opposed Nazism, and these activists were concerned that the rise of fascism in Germany and especially the U.S. was taking place and they wanted to fight for a freer more democratic world. However, the group evolves or rather devolves into violent extremists whose plans for this better world goes completely haywire.

Still I found it impossible to completely dismiss their aims as "freedom fighters" though the film sort of does that, but at the same time it's impossible to embrace them as democratic political operatives who just went astray. They became murderers, unreasonable and no doubt totally crazed. Their message was clear but their means to achieve that message fit in with the insanity of the times which only allowed for either/or positions, no compromise nor clear-headed thinking and action. Their blows against the state inspired very few and certainly didn't cause the masses to rise up.

As I reflect upon this film, it becomes clear that the state was far more formidable then the RAF thought it might be, and if we pay attention to current events, today it should be clear that it is even more formidable. So what we have in this film is more a cautionary tale being told than just a thrilling entertainment or a historical narrative. Cinematically speaking excellent story, great action, terrific acting and direction. Some reviewers think less of this film because there are too many characters. Perhaps. But the best thing would be to read a bit about them before viewing.

Big Data

The Age of Big Data

By STEVE LOHR

Published: February 11, 2012

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. 

They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in-the-world.html?_r=1

I'm not troubled by the garishness of the Superbowl

I don't know if I'm troubled by any of the hoopla, the adverts, the laundry (as Jerry Seinfeld once put it. Uniformed professional sports is just laundry as the men in the uniforms constantly change though the uniforms stay the same. Whatever.). Seems to me that the Superbowl is just a loud, gaudy piece of Americana bordering on what passes for a holiday.  How different is it from the ridiculousness that a day like Halloween has become for adults or for that matter a holiday where people stuff themselves silly with a so-called traditional dinner or the white sales during  President's Week & (ironically) MLK Jr.s day or the exploding bombs on the fourth of July? and let's not forget the "religious" holidays. Symbolism you might think.  But symbolism representing what? The Superbowl is just the evolution of the hucksterism of a P.T. Barnum and all the boorishness, gratuitousness, vileness and expansiveness America has become heir to and has attached to all its holidays.  But hell if you love football you just go with the flow. . .

Why Neil Young Hates MP3 — And What You Can Do About It

From wired Magazine
By Michael Calore

Neil Young is right: Those songs on your iPhone do sound like crap, and it’s time we demand better-sounding alternatives for our digital music.
Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference Tuesday, the outspoken musician expressed his deep dissatisfaction with the MP3 format and called for an end-to-end reboot of the consumer digital audio ecosystem, from file formats to playback devices.
Young’s big beef: Digital music files download quickly, but suffer a significant loss in quality. Bitrates for most tracks on iTunes average 256kbps AAC audio encoding, which is drastically inferior to the quality of recorded source material in almost every case. By Young’s estimation, CDs offer only 15 percent of the recording information contained on the master tracks. Convert that CD-quality audio to MP3 or AAC, and you’ve lost a great deal of richness and complexity.
 Read the rest

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/02/why-neil-young-hates-mp3-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

My comment:

As a long time music listener (almost 60 Years) and one who appreciates quality I'll just say this: I can't tell the fucking difference. Maybe I'm deaf.  Maybe I'm stupid. But the only time I have any interest in any of this is when some shithead like Neil Young decides to go on a rant.  Pack it in asshole and be grateful for the money you've made off us playing a fucking guitar and singing stupid lyrics.

Will Obama Issue an Order Exposing Big Corporate Political Spenders in Citizens United Era?

by Stephen Rosenfeld Alternet.org

January 10, 2012  |  

 

 

 

A executive order requiring that federal contractors disclose their electoral spending—by top officers and as corporations—is being reconsidered by the White House despite stiff opposition from the business lobby after it was first proposed last spring, according to civil rights attorneys working on the issue.

http://www.alternet.org/story/153729/will_obama_issue_an_order_exposing_big_corporate_political_spenders_in_citizens_united_era?akid=8109.321227.E_oQau&rd=1&t=5

Peak Money epitaph

We've come to live in a semi-post war

Post Modern

Post Consumerist

Peak Money world

Now drifting, drifting down

Cast a cold eye

As W.B. Yeats wanted us to look

Oh America the lost.