Panglossian Notes

Being cynical about Obama's little African sojourn

It must be the humid, no sun, morning that's putting me in a skeptical mood about the Obama gig, aka sermon junket, to Africa.

It could also be how the CBCs hourly news is reporting the visit with their specific noting that the Ghana's president was "democratically" elected. I guess that's opposed to chief executives or heads-of-state, etc., etc. not "democratically" elected, like, say right now in Honduras (he's self-appointed) or Iran (maybe who really knows) or some recent hits from the past, say LBJ (in his 1948 Senate win), JFK (electoral college votes in Illinois maybe), George W Bush (in 2000 and 2004).

Small, unrelated, things piss me off when it's humid, particularly using crappy adverbs meant to convey some subliminal message to us the unwashed listeners of radio. Drop the modifiers CBC. Simply saying "Obama was greeted by the president of Ghana" would be perfectly fine and avoid implying that your listening audience maybe uninformed boobs or worse that you might have just figured out something about the "dark continent".

This brings me to a piece from the Winter 2005 edition Granta, written by Binyavanga Wainaina and titled "How to write about Africa":

"Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

How to write about Africa
Binyavanga Wainaina
Granta Winter 2005

(h/t Pulse)

Technorati Tags: CBC, Celebrity, Preaching

Creation on Command - at least the musical kind.

"Al Kooper didn’t know what to play. He’d told some half-truths to get into Bob Dylan’s recording session — the musicians were working on some song tentatively titled “Like A Rolling Stone” — and Kooper had been assigned the Hammond organ. There was only one problem: Kooper didn’t play the organ. He was a guitarist.

Jonah Lehrer
Creation on Command
SEED
May 6, 2009

and from NIH radio:

"A study showed that when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation, a large region of the brain involved in monitoring performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly active.

NIH Radio
July 2008

Technorati Tags: Curiosity, Interesting listening, eh

Good news, I hope

The book lives on even in the age of blogging. What, of course, has yet to be determined is whether it will survive in the age of Twitter.

From John Quiggan:

"Blogs kill books. At least, that’s what I always thought. Between 1988 and 2000, I wrote four books and edited a couple of volumes. In 2002, I started blogging, and I haven’t done a book since then.

But, in the mysterious way of things, it turns out that blogs generate books, or at least book contracts. In comments at Crooked Timber not long ago, Miracle Max wrote

The discredited ideas theme really needs a book, and JQ appears to be the ideal person to write it.
I will even contribute the title: “Dead Ideas from New Economists.” No charge.

Brad DeLong picked it up, and a couple of days later I got an email from Seth Ditchik at Princeton University Press suggesting that it really would be a good idea. Now, we have a contract, and we’re going to use Max’s suggested title.

Blogs and books
John Quiggan
July 7, 2009

The power in Nunavut has shifted

Below is a picture from Friday's Nunatsiaq News.

It shows, I think, a strange thing you start to notice if you spend any time in the Eastern Arctic. It is Inuit women, now, and not the men, who are most active in really attempting to provide some direction and leadership to the new territory.

Of course, this could simply be me drawing too quick a conclusion but it was a notion that was hard to avoid arriving at while working in Nunavut.

With rare exceptions my staff were all women who did bring to work their share of standard Northern problems but were hard working and generally determined to get on with actually building a public service from the ground up. In my experience it was also the women, or girls, who went out to Southern community colleges or universities to seek training.

Of the 3 Inuit in the picture, I don't know Elisapee well but both Leona and Eva I do. It's fun to see these last two - Leona now the Federal Minister of Health and Eva the Premier of Nunavut - standing around chitchatting, when I meet them they both were working as part of the Office of Nunavut Interim Commissioner, as I was, before the new territory actually separated from the Northwest Territories.

Boy 10 years, Nunavut just had its 10th official birthday on July 9th, and the old "father of Nunavut" - John Amagoalik - seem to have slipped off the page so-to-speak. The last time I remember seeing him, on my way to the airport to fly out somewhere, he was shuffling through town on his way to the post office, I think. I'd heard he had fallen on bad times which I hoped was just a rumour.

Technorati Tags: Nunavut

Remembering when "panic" was rife

and, of course, realizing now that no one, least in the corporate media, is wondering why it might have been so, eh.

A Tiny Revolution points to an article the Spring edition of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and highlights part of a nice passage that could twig maybe some media curiousity:

"There were many factors at work to dampen consumer and business spending, including the weak and deteriorating job market and huge wealth losses in both housing and equity markets. And yet, the way in which the TARP was proposed and eventually enacted surely must have contributed to the lockup in spending. Having long known that Treasury could not obtain the authorities to act until the Secretary and Chairman could honestly state that the (economic and financial) world seemed to be ending, they went up and said just that, first in a private meeting with Congressional leaders and then several days later in testifying to the Congress on September 23 and 24. Americans might not have understood the precise channels by which credit markets would affect the real economy, but they finally realized that it was happening—and whether or not they agreed with the proposed response of buying assets with the TARP, they could plainly see that the U.S. political system appeared insufficient to the task of a considered response to the crisis. Surely these circumstances contributed to the economic downturn—though the extent is something that will be studied in the future.

The Financial Crisis: An Insider View
Phillip Swagel
Brookings Papers
Spring/2009
(via A Tiny Revolution)

Me, I'm off for my 40 klick biking jaunt on my great swiss bike (who said Americans can't make anything any more - Oops it was manufactured in Taiwan, but it was thought up in the states least and under a DOD contract to.) before it gets to hot outside, but I might wonder along the way who may have benefitted from a little confusion and panic back in September 2008.

Technorati Tags: Amusing?

Get a grip on yourself Netanyahu

"Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama's senior aides: as "self-hating Jews."

Netanyahu's paranoia extends to 'self-hating Jews' Emanuel and Axelrod
Barak Ravid
Haaretz Correspondent
Haaretz
July 9, 2009

(via Links Harper's)

Technorati Tags: Funny, Those shmucks, eh!

One of the only people I'm willing to listen to

on climate disruption has pronounced on what the boys and girl at the G-8 summer fiesta have been up to on the matter.

I like that Hansen mentions what condition the current leaders (sic) physical beings will be in, in the target year 2050 they've set for achieving their truly Olympic carbon suppression goal. They will be either  "dead or doddering".

I think it's very important that a leader's actual state of existence be kept in mind on this critical issue.

If the corporate media takes up this practice, I have no doubt that the Obama will begin to refer to his children as hostages to the fates so that people might trust him on the matter. The use of the phrase, of course, will make his fans swoon over his learnedness but won't prevent him from being a doddering old climate criminal if things don't work out. But that will all be in a distant future, right.

______________________

Thinking of the past, and the physical state of leaders, back in the summer of '07, prior to an APEC meeting in Australia, I posted a chart to indicate what age a few leaders of that time would be heading towards 2050.  Remember back then the leaders, et pal, noted in the chart had adopted an aspiration approach to dealing with a possible approaching calamity - i.e. producers of carbon would aspiring to doing good, sort of, maybe, well of course they will:

The USAs media and health care - oh it's like Groundhog Day all over again*.

Trudy Lieberman has an interesting piece in the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review remarking, ostensibly, on the similarities of the present Obama orchestrated healthcare fandango to the one that took place back in 1993.

"...  It isn’t just that the debate is the same and the press isn’t acknowledging it—the coverage actually suggests that things are different. “Not Yesterday’s Health Fight”, read the headline on an April column by The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne. ..."

Trudy Lieberman
Groundhog Day
July/August 2009
Columbia Journalism Review

So why is it that:

"As in the early nineties, the press is covering the process of [healthcare] reform, not the substance.

Trudy Lieberman
Groundhog Day
July/August 2009
Columbia Journalism Review

I wonder if it really matters - process or substance? I wonder if the average media consumer would welcome substance? Wouldn't knowing the real elements of a matter maybe require wondering what could be best? The busy modern world might just be more complex and demanding. Better to leave it to those that understand the detail of the stuff?

Anyway, it's nice to know that, what some of us call, the corporate media hasn't really changed all that much since the Clinton's tried their busy little hands at reforming the US health industry monster.

___________________________

*Apologies to Yogi

Technorati Tags: Media, Healthcare

A good start to the day

Best line of the day (so far) - something to cheer my heart, put a smile on my face and a spring in my step:

"... But, honestly, Judge Chin, how can a man who ruined John Malkovitch be really bad?

Madoff, the Convenient Villain
Bernard Chazelle
A Tiny Revolution
July 1, 2009

Best Medal of the day (via Pulse and TºDAY BBC ) - an award to NATO, USAF and the IDF?:

Collateral Damage
Suffer the Children

Steve Bell
Medals of Dishonour
British Museum
25 June – 27 September 2009  /  Room 90

Technorati Tags: Bullshit, Irony?, Sarcasm

Bill J. Clinton (aka William Jefferson Clinton) gets a down grade!

(Via Harpers): Ken Silverstein posts a link - Clinton Boner Picture Identified - to Gulnara Karimova's paparazzi page to highlight the above mentioned former POTUS posing with said daughter of man who "boils people to death".

Billy Boy, it seems unfortunately, is always a smiling opportunist for any good clause, particularly if the clause is HIM.

Anyway it's fitting and a little confusing to see that Gulnara thinks that Bill is a senator. Has she mistaken him for Hilary, gads what does that say?

It's Canada Day here so I'm not thinking about what that may imply.

Technorati Tags: Funny, too much!, Politicians

Is timing everything?

Poor Farrah, upstaged by Michael? I doubt she would have much cared, but I'm just an ordinary mortal, not particularly attracted to shiny things, so what I doubt maybe in another realm.

But if one did care, she'd be in, some would think, good company, at least?

The Eclipsed Celebrity Death Club (ECD)

"... The classic ECD example is Groucho Marx, who passed away the same week as Elvis Presley, and thus missed out on a good week's worth of TV tributes. But the easiest way for a famous person to vanish from the earth without so much as a blip is to follow a president of the United States. ...

Christopher Bonanos
NYMag
June 16, 2009

Of the ECD - though I'd not classify him in the modern celebrity genera, more a "gifted" eccentric, maybe - Aldous Huxley seems to have taken a unique way to oblivion:

"... Huxley, at least, made it interesting: At his request, his wife shot him up with LSD a couple of hours before the end, and he tripped his way out of this world. ...

Christopher Bonanos
NYMag
June 16, 2009

Technorati Tags: Fun things to do

The absurdity of the Israel and US game, in clear focus.

US welcomes easing of restrictions in West Bank

The US administration said on Thursday that it appreciates the steps Israel has taken to ease the day-to-day lives of Palestinians in the West Bank.

Yitzhak Benhorin
Ynetnews.com

So, so nice for the Obama regime to appreciate something that doesn't directly effect it.

Yet, the nonsense headline and following article is meant to portray a marginal change in brutish behaviour as another mystical sacrifice by a long suffering group.

No doubt many kilos will be extracted from the Palestinians in the future for Israel's wink at civilized behaviour, supported by whatever regime is in control of the USA at the time.

In the new expanded era of hilarious hypocrisy, it is good to know that some are appreciative of empty gestures, right?

Technorati Tags: Blindness, Bullshit, Nation Building, Shmucks

Hey they come in 3s ya know!

Celebrity deaths that is, or so they say.

So why pick Jeff Goldblum as the third man so-to-speak?

The hair girl is gone; followed closely by the weird nose guy; but what body part or extremity is  Goldblum to represent?

Since we are in dreamland, imagination is in control so I spectacled "ears" - because ..., remember the elephant, The Tall Guy gad do I have to explain everything ... .

Ah, too many questions on a hot muggy morning, better to just enjoy the moment, enhanced more if you've only 140 characters to express yourself.

Anyway Australian TV paid tribute to the imagined dead but still warm Jeff:

Note Jiam Ghomeshi in the clip.

Is it a premonition?

Of course it is!

Technorati Tags: Superstition, Weird

Borat △'s Character

Bruno, a.k.a. Borat, sort of, takes Berlin in knit 'naked' suit

Updating: A View from the other side

I expected, at the time I posted it on June 7th, that this might happen to the copies of Max Blumenthal's video clip residing on YouTube. The clip gives a little taste of some attitudes in Israel towards Palestinians. 

Maybe I should be a fortune teller or better a financial analyst as the future did unfolded as I expected.

Here's the clip again at Vimeo:

Feeling The Hate In Jerusalem -- The Censored Video from Max Blumenthal on Vimeo.