Bookstore extortion

One of Australia's biggest retail book sellers, Angus & Robertson, tries to extort money at punitive interest rates from small Australian book publishers -- and then the publisher of the 2007 Miles Franklin Award winning book decides to fight back, with a very public "up yours" letter.

And when I say punitive, I mean it: 1825% per year. Yes, almost two thousand percent per year, five percent per day.

A&R's Commercial Manager, Charlie Rimmer, is apparently a hatchet-man from A&R's former owners, British bookseller chain the W H Smith Group. According to comments, the British retail book market has been gutted by similar tactics employed by (among others) W H Smiths. Rimmer has worked at A&R for a little over a year now.

A&R's demands were not just arrogant, they were actually quite extraordinary, as this analysis by Teresa at Making Light reveals:

Later we will read how A&R has been determinedly paring down, de-rationalizing, and generally muddling their own purchasing operation so badly that their bookbuyers no longer see any of the books they’re ordering.

We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers,

Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren't. A house built with bricks from one or two brickyards will be just fine. A bookstore that only carries stock from a few publishers will have a thin, poor selection to offer its customers.

Multiple suppliers--that is, a broad range of publishers and books to choose from--is a good thing, if a bookstore chain knows what it's doing.

...

Wouldn't life be interesting if we could just tell our trading partners that we've decided to raise our "minimum threshold of profitability" on past transactions, and they owe us?

...

All rebates are paid quarterly for the previous quarter's performance, you must ensure that your remittance, with calculations, is received by us by the 7th of the month following the preceding quarter. Any remittances not received by this date will attract a daily 5% interest charge.

There's no way the publishers can calculate that in time. The only way to avoid that piratical interest charge is to overpay, then try to get a refund on the overpayment. And you can bet your booties that A&R doesn't pay publishers anywhere near that quickly.

...

Alternately, it's possible that A&R's management stands to personally profit if the company goes public and the initial stock offering does well, so they're running a quick slash-and-burn raid on their more vulnerable suppliers in order to temporarily make their company look more profitable. Or maybe it's something else. It's tacky and stupid and self-defeating, whatever it is.

Self-defeating is absolutely right. A&R's arrogant, ham-fisted money-grab against smaller Australian publishers hit the Internet and grew legs. Just a few years ago, it might have passed without comment -- but now, it's everywhere. After just a few days, the story reached number two on Google's search page for "Angus and Robertson", behind only A&R's website itself. (Oh my, wouldn't a Google bomb go down well now?)

Readers, that is to say, people who buy books, quickly inundated the original Sydney Morning Herald blog post with their promises to boycott A&R. Many readers explained that with lousy book selections and unhelpful, untrained staff, A&R was a poor shadow of its former self, and this was the final straw. And then a independent buying group stepped into the fray with a deliciously over-the-top parody of A&R's demands.

One thing that puzzles me... every time I go into a Borders bookstore, it's full of customers, the shelves are jammed full with a great variety of books, the lines in front of the cash registers are long. At A&R stores, the customers are thin on the ground, the shelves are lightly stocked and mostly cheap remainders on sale for half price or less, and there's never a line at the cash register. So how come the rumour mill has it that A&R is likely to buy out Borders Australian operation? Is the Australian retail book market from Bizarro World, where you make money by not selling lots of books, and lose money by having a thriving business?

Sicko - Moore versus the media

Mike Moore's new movie, Sicko, takes aim at the American healthcare system, and by the look of it, the entire corporate media is closing ranks to defend the rotten system. Not just the conservative wingnuts who would argue if Moore said water was wet, but the (supposedly) liberal media like CNN. And Mike is taking aim right back at them.

PZ Myers points out that the supposed "facts" argued by CNN's hired-gun doctor differed from Moore's only by trivial amounts: e.g. the claim that Moore was wrong to say that Cuba spends $251 per person per year on health care when the "correct" figure is $229.

Now, honestly, figures like $251 and $229 have utterly spurious accuracy: it is beyond credibility that the government of Cuba, or any other country, knows medical spending down to the closest dollar. (The medical budget and the actual spending are only approximately the same.) Mathematically, I'd be surprised if we could do any better than round both of them to "about $240", give or take twenty dollars.

But that's not the most important point.

The important point is that even if CNN's hired gun was right, even if Moore's figures were wrong and his were correct, the US would be spending $6000 per year per person on health care to get results barely better than Cuba was for their $230. The US rates #37 in the world for the quality of health care, compared to Cuba #39. That's the scandal, and supposedly liberal CNN is trying to whitewash that by pedantically nit-picking on a few allegedly wrong numbers, as if a difference of a few dollars was really significant.

One of the comments on PZ's blog describes Mike Moore as "a propagandist, muck raker, and rabble rouser". I knew I liked the man. When society is broken, it takes a muck raker and rabble rouser to drag the sickness into the light. Another comment pointed out that one half of the one million bankruptcies in the US in 2000 were because people couldn't pay their medical bills. I expect the figure is even higher now.

One million bankruptcies per year is a frighteningly high figure, and one which casts a completely different light on the American Dream. That's a proportion of about one bankruptcy per 300 people. By comparison, Australia's bankruptcy rate is the highest since records began, at one per 800 people.

Marriage and journalistic honesty

I came across a particularly interesting (in the sense of ew, what's that freakish thing living under a rock???) case of yellow journalism recently.

First, some background: in January, the New York Times ran a story [story has been archived] about their analysis of the latest census results. They reported that, for possibly the first time in recorded history, a majority of women in the USA are living without a husband.

Take note of the story headline, 51% of women were living without a husband. The story says:

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

It's quite clear: not "single women", or "unmarried women", but "living without a husband".

In case there is any doubt, the New York Times gives details about what they mean: they tell what counts as "living without a husband", they explain that one reason for the change is that women are getting married later than ever before, and they even admit that the living arrangements are often temporary:

In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military or are institutionalized. But while most women eventually marry, the larger trend is unmistakable.

"This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people's lives," said Prof. Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group. "Most of these women will marry, or have married. But on average, Americans now spend half their adult lives outside marriage."

The New York Times couldn't have been more clear and upfront about what the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community survey results show.

But that's not good enough for conservative pundits, like the fine citizen journalists at Lifesite.net. This is what Peter Smith had to say about the story:

New York Times Gets Another Story Very Wrong - This Time it's about Marriage
Accused of "journalistic malpractice" for skewing stats to incorrectly show most women not marrying
By Peter J. Smith

Strong words, but hardly correct. As the earlier quotes show, the NYT did not, by any stretch of imagination, claim that most women are "not marrying". If there is any "journalistic malpractice" here, it is by Smith. What part of "Most of these women will marry" was too hard to understand?

Smith writes:

However, Roberts creates his own analysis by using the Census Bureau's "Living Arrangements of Persons 15 Years Old and Over by Selected Characteristics", by including in his 51% figure of women living without a spouse: unmarried teenage and college girls still living with their parents, women whose husbands work out of town, are institutionalized, or are separated from husbands serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I have to wonder why Smith thinks it is appropriate to exclude women who are living without a spouse when talking about women who are living without a spouse.

Naturally, the conservatives questions the NYT for including young adults, 15 years and older, in the survey. But fifty years ago, marriage at 16 was relatively common -- now it is virtually unheard of. That's a significant shift, and one which continues as people choose to remain unmarried for longer periods of their life. That's precisely the point the NYT is making.

Smith criticises the NYT figures for failing to match the the census figures which show that "60.4% of men and 56.9% of women over 18 years old are married." But the last US census was in 2000, and the NYT is explicitly referring to 2005 data. Naturally there is going to be some difference.

Smith is less than transparent with his quoting of statistics:

Among marriageable women over 18 years old, 56.9% of women are married, with 53% having a spouse present, 1.4% with a spouse absent, 9.9% widowed, and 11.5% divorced.

The numbers don't quite add up... 53 + 1.4 + 9.9 + 11.5 = 75.8%. That falls short of 100% by almost a quarter. Who has he left out? But even his figures for married women are off: 53 + 1.4 = 54.4%, shy of the 56.9% in total he quotes. I suppose the difference could be "no answer": those who declined to say whether their husband was absent or not.

Who are the people of LifeSite? Their About Us page gives a couple of clues:

2. LifeSite emphasizes the social worth of traditional Judeo-Christian principles but is also respectful of all authentic religions and cultures that esteem life, family and universal norms of morality.


3. LifeSite's writers and founders have come to understand that respect for life and family are endangered by an international conflict. That conflict is between radically opposed views of the worth and dignity of every human life and of family life and community. It has been caused by secularists attempting to eliminate Christian morality and natural law principles which are seen as the primary obstacles to implementing their new world order.

(Emphasis added.)

Yes, you read that right. "Secularists" are against life and family. "New world order" (at least they aren't capitalising it any longer). And as for war, well, the only war worth talking about is the supposed (that is, imaginary) war against Christian morality.

If you think I'm exaggerating, I urge you to spend some time with Google investigating the stories on their site. Google on "site:www.LifeSite.net war" and you will find plenty of references to the "war on families", the "culture war", "war on religion" and even the "war on home-schooling", but very little if anything on any actual war involving soldiers and bombs and death.

It isn't that the people of LifeSite are ignorant of the Iraq invasion and occupation. Oh no, they are happy to tell their readers that media coverage of anti-Iraq war protests are examples of the culture war. But as for the actual war itself, virtually nothing. The NYT reporting on marriage is a Clear and Present Danger, but an actual war with actual deaths started by people like George W. Bush (born-again Christian), Donald Rumsfeld (another fundamentalist Christian), and Dick Chaney (what a surprise, another devout Christian) is barely remarked on.

But I digress... unfortunately it isn't just the axe-grinding fringe upset with the NYT for reporting facts which disturb the conservative blinkered worldview. Even the mainstream Boston Globe (deliberately?) misunderstands the NYT story, writing:

...how does the Times reach a contrary conclusion? By excluding from the category of women with husbands the "relatively small number of cases" -- in fact, it's more than 2 million -- in which "husbands are working out of town, are in the military, or are institutionalized." That startling Page 1 headline is true, in other words, only if the wives of US troops at war are deemed not to have husbands.

Sheer and utter nonsense. The NYT never said they didn't have husbands. It said they were living without a husband. That's a legitimate distinction: a legally separated women still "has" a husband, since she's still legally married, but she's clearly living without a husband. Although the reasons are different, wives whose husbands are in jail, or in Iraq, are likewise living without a husband -- just like the NYT says, in plain and simple English.

The NYT takes care not to confuse "living without a husband" with "unmarried", while the conservative pundits deliberately confuse the two. And let's face it, if they didn't, there would be no story here -- except, naturally, the original story that more than half of all women of marriageable age in the USA are now living without a husband. Whatever the reasons for this social change, whether the true figure is 51% or 50% or 49%, it is a significant social change from the "Good Old Days" when girls married at 16 or 17 and stayed with their husband until one of them died.

The Boston Globe makes a point of noting that the "relatively small number of cases" mentioned by the NYT is in fact two million women. Two million people is a lot of people to invite to a party. But compared to the approximately 120 million women of marriageable age in the USA, "relatively small number of cases" is a completely accurate description.

Yes, that one or two percentage points tips the number of women living with their husband from (approximately) 51% to 49% -- which is the whole point. World War One lasted for only four years, and the social changes set in motion by women going into the workforce are still taking place today. The invasion of Iraq is a few weeks short of four years old, and with no real sign (just a lot of talk) of it coming to an end any time soon. Why is the Boston Globe so resistant to the idea that it too might have social consequences?

Probably because conservatives, by definition, are conservative, and social changes are disturbing and frightening to them.

We can see where the Boston Globe is coming from:

Taken at face value, that's a pretty disquieting statistic. If society is to flourish and perpetuate itself, it must uphold marriage as a social ideal

Oh really? Says who? Does he really think people won't go to work to put bread on the table if they don't have a wedding ring on their finger?

What it looks like to me is that some pundits and journalists, like Peter Smith of Lifesite.net, have found a way of doing investigative journalism that has all the advantages of theft over hard work, with the extra advantage that it isn't illegal.

1. Start by taking a perfectly responsible, honest, factually-correct newspaper article that discusses facts you disapprove of. Being responsible, it will almost certainly go into details of what facts they are actually talking about: e.g. the NYT story clearly mentions the temporary nature of the separation for women whose husbands are serving in Afghanistan or Iraq, and takes great care not to confuse "living without a husband" from "unmarried".


2. Accuse the authors of the original story of making extreme claims which they never did. It helps if you attack an article in the NYT or other big commercial newspaper -- your "exposé" of their "malpractice" will still be on the Internet years after the NYT has pulled their article off the free list and made it by purchase only.


3. Support your claims by tossing the article's own honest disclosures back at them. Take care to imply -- but not actually say -- that the original story never mentioned them.

The more honest the journalist, the more information he gives you to accuse him of dishonesty. Why investigate actual dishonest reporting, when it is so much easier to fling mud at honest reporters?

The Internet killed the talk-show wuss

Ezra Klein has noticed an interesting shift in television talk-show guests, one which may bring balance to an industry dominated by Right-wing ideologues. Thanks to the ability of the Internet to distribute short videos very efficiently, the incentives for "playing nice" and not fighting back while some lying sleeze misrepresents you is rapidly disappearing.

Say you were going on Fox News (or whatever) a decade ago. And say you delivered a whipping to the host. The host, the show, and likely the network would be loathe to invite you back while, simultaneously, just about no one would ever know the beating you delivered. So you'd lose your channel into the media without any commensurate reward for your performance.

Conversely, for liberals going on television now, a smackdown of a conservative host can be distributed and replayed virtually endlessly [...] Suddenly, picking the fight has become a surer way to notoriety and name recognition than playing nice in hopes of an invitation back. And that's been a decidedly healthy shift.

It is too much to hope that it will lead to some actual intelligent debate on American television, but at the very least it will lead to some real balance.

Wikipedia 1, China 0

China has demanded that Microsoft, Yahoo and Google all censor their web applications or be banned. All three software giants -- reluctantly in the case of Google, seemingly willingly in the other two cases -- complied.

China also demanded that Wikipedia censor itself for Chinese viewers. Wikipedia refused, and the powers-that-be in Beijing responded by blocking access to Wikipedia from within China.

Or rather, they tried to block access. But it seems that China needs Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs China -- after barely a month, China has stopped blocking Wikipedia, instead concentrating on the cat-and-mouse game of trying to block only certain sensitive (that is, embarassing to the political leaders) pages, like those on Tiananmen Square.

China is desperate to catch up to the West, and that means accessing our knowledge banks, especially the Internet. If China can't afford to block Wikipedia, they certainly can't afford to block Google, Microsoft or Yahoo -- let alone all three. China is bluffing with a pair of twos, and unlike Wikipedia, the three software giants didn't have the cajones to call their bluff.

Warner does deal to open up video library

And in further news, pigs have been spotted flying south for the winter.

(How many mixed metaphors can I fit in one post, I wonder?)

While Universal is suing YouTube for copyright infringement, Warner Brothers' music division have seen the writing on the wall and, instead of trying to keep the tide from coming in, have done a deal with YouTube to let their music videos roam free on the Internet.

The deal will involve Warner Brothers opening up their entire back-catalog of music videos, including those from major artists such as Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Madonna, which will be posted to YouTube. People will be allowed to download and remix the videos and repost them on YouTube.

The MPAA and RIAA, who have claimed that Internet sharing is causing the sky to fall, have apparently locked themselves in a bunker under Washington and are waiting for the world to end.

Justifying violence

The Rude Pundit has a few things to say about justifications for violence:

They were so positive that Tony Blakeney had something to do with the disappearance of Patrick McClendon that they cornered Blakeney in his house and beat him to what would become death at the hospital later on. [...]

The mob believed they had the right intelligence. They had pieced it together from the few clues they had and decided to act before someone else was hurt. You can bet, though, that there was a man in the group who perhaps thought that maybe they were wrong, especially since chances are they beat Blakeney for a while to get information, which he could not give since he didn't, you know, have any. And you can also bet that any man who thought they were wrong didn't say a word for fear of being labeled a traitor and just let the beat down continue.

Unfortunately for them, these ten murderers don't have Faux News constantly pushing propoganda and misinformation for them, and consequently, they don't have fifty percent of Americans convinced that Tony Blakeney was involved with al Qaeda responsible for the disappearence.

Heroin-chic models not wanted

A Madrid fashion show has banned underweight models:

"The restrictions could be quite a shock to the fashion world at the beginning, but I'm sure it's important as far as health is concerned," said Leonor Perez Pita, director of Madrid's show, also known as the Pasarela Cibeles.

I wonder how long this will last?

The Ultimate Showdown

This amusing, silly Flash animation tickled my fancy:

The Ultimate Showdown

Call it the inner sixteen year old, but I thought it was fun, if childish, and has a catchy tune. I enjoyed seeing how many cultural icons I could recognise -- and puzzled over those I didn't.

The more things change...

So much for the propoganda that we went to Iraq to overthrow a dictator and bring freedom to the Iraqis. The reality is, whether they were voted in or not, the Iraqi government (propped up by the US government) is turning to the same secretive, authoritarian style of dictators like Saddam Hussein. They recently closed the widely watched American-style satellite network station Al-Arabiya for a month as punishment for reporting inconvenient truths, and warned newspapers and TV stations to toe the government line or else be shut down.

And last week, health officials changed morgue policy: morgue officials who had been supplying statistics on deaths have been "retired". Statistics on deaths will no longer be provided except through the Ministry of Health. The Iraqis themselves are worried about this sinister turn: the Ministry of Health is controlled by people loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. Effectively, al-Sadr controls the very government agency responsible for releasing accurate information on the murders committed by his own Mahdi Army.

More details from Juan Cole.

On a related note, it seems that the reason for the apparent drop in the death toll in Baghdad is that the US military no longer includes victims of suicide bombings and mortar attacks.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Having failed to find WMDs, find Osama, bring freedom to Iraq, or control the violence, Plan E is to minimize the bad news that gets out.

American docudramas

To someone raised on actual documentaries which have at least an attempt to be factually and historically accurate, the practice of American docudramas messing with reality is rather disturbing. It isn't the way they change the facts for dramatic purposes; that, at least, is understandable. No, it is the incessant right-wing, ra-ra-Ameri-ka politicisation of the docudrama that catches in my throat.

Take, for example, the recent movie "United 93", about the passengers of the airplane who took on the September 11 hijackers, crashing the plane and killing all on board, but (presumably) preventing a major disaster. As Mercury Rising points out:

The movie "United 93" shows how American heroes take on the hijackers -- but only after a German passenger has tried to persuade them not to. The movie is described as "meticulously researched" and "fact-based", but there is not any indication that Christian Adams, deputy directory of the German Wine Institute and a Fulbright Alumnus, acted in the cowardly appeasing way he is portrayed in the movie.

And then there is Disney's The Path to 9/11, which tries to put the blame for the terrorist attack on former US President Bill Clinton -- or at least equal blame with President Bush. Washington Post media critic Tom Shales has this to say:

The impression given is that Clinton was spending time on his sex life while terrorists were gaining ground and planning a nightmare.

It would have made as much sense, and perhaps more, to cut instead to stock footage of a smirking Kenneth Starr, the reckless Republican prosecutor largely responsible for distracting not just the president but the entire nation with the scandal.

(From Mercury Rising.)

Reasonable conservative Jon Swift does a better job than I could at explaining why it should be conservatives, not progressives or liberals, who get upset at the Disney docudrama about Sept 11:

While I appreciate that the miniseries reportedly puts most of the blame for 9/11 where it belongs--on Monica Lewinsky--I am bothered by reports that it also criticizes President Bush.

[...] It seems to me that President Clinton is more accountable for not getting Bin Laden after two years especially since we reportedly had him surrounded in Afghanistan and let him slip away (though perhaps not exactly the way it's depicted in the film). How hard could it have been to find a 6-foot-4 terrorist after two years?

[...] I was very chagrined to discover that not only had some events been invented, some important events had been left out of the film entirely. Apparently the director didn't bother filming the scene where President Bush learns of the attacks while reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren. How could they leave out one of the Bush's greatest moments as President, the seven minutes when he sat there motionless and plotted out his entire strategy for the War on Terror in his head? Perhaps it wouldn't have been very dramatic to film the President just sitting there for seven minutes but the filmmakers could have telescoped time a bit, as they claim to do in other scenes, and showed him sitting there for, say, four minutes. And I have not heard any mention of a scene showing Saddam Hussein planning the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Leaving out an important scene like that seems to me to be a big dramatic oversight, basically confusing the viewer by making the invasion of Iraq appear to be completely pointless.

Film makers eat their young

Stronger copyright laws are enabling film and documentary makers to eat their young: with the costs (both royalties and legal expenses) of clearing even tiny, fair use clips exploding out of control, it is harder than ever to create films and documentaries, and existing film studios are able to lay down legal minefields to prevent smaller, up-and-coming artists from creating films -- especially documentaries. At a time when the technological barriers to becoming a film maker are shrinking, the artificial barriers are growing ever larger.

LA Weekly has an article about some of the trials and tribulations of documentary makers. British documentary maker Adam Curtis has not been able to distribute his BBC miniseries in the USA because of the cost of copyright: from $1,500 per minute in Britain to at least $7,000 per minute in the USA.

Remember that copyright law was created in order to encourage, not discourage, the creation of new artistic works, and it becomes clear that existing copyright laws are not just broken but actively harmful and require a major overhaul.

"Copyright holders have become so aggressive, they've limited the creative process in all different kinds of mediums," says [film maker Kirby] Dick. "That's bad for artists and bad for the studios. I think they're shooting themselves in the foot."

All is not darkness and gloom. While many copyright monopolists are often greedy and grasping, there are others who understand that what goes around comes around. The BBC is apparently keen to release large amounts of their archived work for royalty-free use via the Internet. Now that will be very, very interesting indeed!

Pictures that lie

News.com is running a pictorial report on photo manipulation. The old cliche "the camera never lies" is not true any more, and possibly never was.

There is also an interesting article about software that is being developed which can detect photo-manipulated images by looking for discrepencies in lighting and statistical anomalies at the pixel level.

Photo manipulation is (potentially) big business: as Gartner analyst L. Frank Kenney points out, the potential commercial and political gains from faked photos are huge:

"How much is the presidency of a country worth, or control of a company? People tend not to read the retractions," he said. "Once the stuff is indelibly embedded in your memory, it is tough to get out."

It is interesting to see the difference in photo manipulation strategies during recent American elections. For example, there were no shortage of photoshopped pictures of President Bush carrying "Presidenting For Dummies" or pretending to read books upside down: silly and obvious fakes. On the other hand, somebody faked a photo of John Kerry together with hated anti-Vietnam war protestor "Hanoi Jane" Fonda. Nobody really thinks George W. Bush can't tell when a book is upside down -- that's satire. But a photo of presidential candidate Kerry apparently sharing a podium with the woman who millions of Americans still consider a traitor... that goes beyond satire into outright dishonesty. If you can't find mud to sling, fake some.

I must admit I was rather disappointed with the manipulated images chosen by News.com. Too many of them were obvious fakes (which is not the same as being bad fakes) and the political implications were merely implied rather than discussed.

If you want to see highly imaginative and excellent quality photoshopped images, you could do far worse than to visit Worth1000.com and check out the contests. The possibilities are shown by entries like Paris Hilton's newest pet:


or Bishop Hugh Hefner:



[Click on images for full view]

China criminalises journalism

Seems that China is about to criminalise the reporting of news without government permission.

Didn't the Soviet Union try that? How did it go for them?

Politics and the English language

A classic, timeless piece by George Orwell that everybody interested in politics or writing should read.

This is treason?

The American Prospect discusses the depths that U.S. cable television has sunk to:

I never, ever, ever watch prime time cable news because it makes me want to kill extremely large numbers of people. Tragically, I walked through the door yesterday and my roommate already had Hardball on. There were two people debating the issue of . . . whether or not The New York Times should be brought up on charges of treason. Seriously. Treason. For publishing an article in a newspaper. Treason. And there was Chris Matthews happily presiding over the whole thing as if this was a serious conversation that people should be having. This all taking place on a network that, allegedly, does journalism.

(Emphasis in the original.)

It has been said that the greatest advantage the Devil has is that he has convinced the world that he does not exist. The Republicans have taken a leaf out of the Devil's book, and have spent the last few decades spreading the message that the U.S. media is controlled by liberals and progressives. In reality, of course, the mainstream U.S. media is either explicitly far-right wing (such as Fox News) or so terrified of being accused of "liberal bias" that they give more air-time to the far-right.

Not that it saves them from the accusations.

The mainstream media has made torture and threats of jail for journalists who report the facts something to debate -- with the spin that standing up for media honesty against Pravda-style manipulation is what needs to be defended. Instead of demanding President Bush defend his outrageous claim that he is allowed to disobey the law and the Constitution at a whim, the mainstream media has made that the norm, with those who believe in the rule of law having to defend the principle that the law applies equally to all people.

According to this so-called "liberal" media, it is normal and desirable to lock people away forever, based not on an open, fair trial, but on the say-so of the President, who doesn't have to give any reason other than "'cos I say so".

Last year, George Bush's minions declared in open court that he has the power to seize anyone on earth -– even "little old ladies in Switzerland" –- and imprison them forever, if he chooses. Any person Bush declared was "an enemy combatant", regardless of whether they took up arms, regardless of even whether they even knew their actions were related to terrorism, could be kidnapped from any nation on Earth, friend or foe, even in the American Homeland itself, and jailed indefinitely, without trial, at the President's discretion, stripped of all rights and legal protections.

Assistant Attorney-General Brian Boyle said these captives were entitled to a single hearing in a military tribunal, without legal counsel, without even access to the evidence against them, with no guarantee that they will even be told the charges against them -- just like the old Soviet Union used to do, and any number of military dictatorships.

Boyle admitted that evidence could be obtained by torture in foreign countries, and that there were no restrictions whatsoever on using torture evidence, as long as the president or the military decided it was "credible." Like the "credible" evidence of Iraqi nuclear weapons.

Last November, the Sunday Times tracked down the movements of planes used by the CIA to carry victims of his lawless kidnappings. People have been kidnapped from all over the world, including Sweden, and flown to torture chambers in Jordan, Egypt, Libya and Uzbekistan, where so-called "credible evidence" can be obtained with fists, cattle prods, rape, drugs and starvation.

And according to the so-called "liberal media", this outrageous criminal behaviour is normal. When the old Communist dictators acted outside the boundaries of all ethics and morality and the law, the U.S. media had no difficulty in shouting out that it was wrong. But now that their own Mad King George is doing it, they give "equal" (where equal means more) time to criminals and fascists.

Here's the problem: for decades now, progressives and liberals have danced to the far-right's tune. The worst excesses of totalitarian thugs has been portrayed as normal, and ordinary civilized behaviour is treated as treason. The crooks have controlled the terms of the debate, and this is where it has come to: report the facts, and be treated as a traitor.

Public diplomacy

Marc Lynch from Abu Aardvark recently gave a workshop about public diplomacy:

I laid out the rapid transformation of the Arab media, especially satellite TV, and said something about the causes of anti-American attitudes. But mostly I argued for taking the "public" in "public diplomacy" seriously, thinking about it as an environment rather than as an instrument: an environment which isn't amenable to centralized control, where information can't be compartmentalized, where messages can't be tailored for a domestic or international audience without the other listening in, and where the game rewards argument and engagement rather than message control and spin.

I got some pushback on my argument that this growing "publicity" means that PsyOps and strategic deception should be avoided because of the devastating effects of their inevitable exposure on the credibility of America and America's would-be defenders in the Arab political realm. Several military and psyops folks objected, pointing out that I don't know how many PsyOps have not been exposed, and expressing great confidence that their operations would never be exposed. Maybe - they're the experts. But I still urged them to take seriously the implications of the transforming Arab and global media environment, where the the odds of eventual exposure of secret programs is high and increasing. Look at the wiretapping or the CIA flights or Abu Ghraib or the Lincoln Group payola scheme - the planners of all of those policies must have assumed they would never be exposed, and here we are. Exposure should be assumed, and its implications worked in to the operational plan, even if it doesn't happen. Even if 19 out of 20 of the operations remain secret, the one that gets exposed is enough to devastate credibility.

Credibility is a major issue in all of this, and I would like to see more serious thought put into America's failure there. It's a heck of a lot easier to lose credibility than to get it back, and "partially credible" is like "partially pregnant" - no such creature. American credibility in and about Iraq is so low now that everything it says is met with skepticism, even if it's true. Somebody should take responsibility for that lost credibility, and learn some lessons from it beyond just blaming the media.

Fascinating stuff, and worth reading.

There is another lesson to be learned, which so many people don't do. Instead of planning for the exposure of bad schemes, and working to minimize the harm from them, here's a radical thought: don't be a mongrel in the first place. If you think that world public opinion will hate you if they find out you've done something bad, just don't do that bad thing. Do something else instead.

International politics would be so much simpler if people weren't such dicks.

TBW addiction

Don Hazen from AlterNet challenges progressive journalists and writers to ignore the Tall Blonde Woman in the Short Skirt with the Big Mouth:

Today is the devil's day, a celebration for the evildoers; that's right, it is 6-6-06. [...]

And on this day, the devil herself -- the Tall Blonde Woman in the Short Skirt With the Big Mouth (TBWSSBM, or TBW for short) -- has a new book out. You know who I'm talking about. I will not mention her name, nor the name of the book, the publisher or any of her previous books. She is releasing her book today as "a little tribute to liberals." The time has come to ignore this woman.

He's right. As satisfying it is to rage against the TBW, it does no good and considerable harm. The extremists of the Republican Party are masters of setting the agenda, forcing the issues and framing the terms of the debate. Arguing against the TWB just gives her publicity and reinforces her frames. It just helps keep her message front and centre in the public eye. And don't be fooled: the TBW is said to be easy on the eye (perhaps to Republicans and men who haven't seen a woman for twelve years), and as such she gets far more attention than her words deserve. There are hundreds of wingnuts spreading hate and bile across America, and yet the TBW gets far more liberal media attention than any other.

Hazen's solution, to just ignore her, works. Imagine if all those "liberal media" newspapers, television stations and so forth just refused to interview her. Sure, she's still get her message across, but she'll just be preaching to the choir, and no longer speaking to the moderate audience.

Sadly, so many people just don't get it. Reading the comments on the AlterNet article, person after person points out the irony of Hazen writing an article telling people not to write about TBW -- and no doubt each and every one of these folks were so swelled up with pride that they were sooooooo smart to notice the irony that they were in danger of drifting off into space.

Newsflash bozos: recognising irony doesn't make you a great wit. Perhaps half of one. To get the other half, you have to realise when the message needs to be said, despite the irony, and let it be. Or at least read the comments and realise that your brilliant comment has already been said a dozen times before.

Sadly, some people don't get it unless it is laid on with a trowel. For those, here it is: yes, we should ignore the TWB. But the first step in ignoring her is to spread the message that she needs to be ignored. Without that message, she'll continue to get attention and publicity for years to come. The plan is simple: a few short days or weeks of telling everyone to move on, followed by the cold shoulder, or never-ending publicity to the TWB. You choose.