Fast, Furious, and Not Too Bright

I'm not going to get too much into whether or not this movie was good (not really) or enjoyable (sure), but I do want to get into the truly high comedy in the script. In fact, this may be the first of a series of posts breaking down the golden nuggets of dumb sprinkled throughout your average Hollywood script, but especially action movies (each gunfight/explosion/car wreck=10% more dumb), horror movies (each screaming co-ed/cat in cupboard/invincible killer=15% more dumb), and sci-fi movies (each mutated creature/city destroyed/time travel=12.347% more dumb).

Here are just a few choice examples of many from the fourth (!) Fast & Furious movie (if you haven't seen it yet and plan to, knowing some plot points will detract exactly zero enjoyment, so don't worry):

Exhibit A: Says the FBI boss: "Badguy WhatshisLatino has smuggled more heroin into the United States than Pablo Escobar..."

Yeah, and so did our neighbor when she brought a poppyseed bagel back from spring break at Cabo. Pablo Escobar smuggled cocaine, not heroin...and if he's saying this jackass smuggled more heroin with his brain-damaged scheme (see below) than Escobar smuggled cocaine, then he doesn't know anything about Pablo Escobar and shouldn't work for the FBI. If this is law enforcement, I should smuggle drugs.

Exhibit B: Badguy WhathisLatino's drug smuggling scheme involves super-expensive cars, enough uniquely skilled drivers to kill after each run, an enormous tunnel somehow constructed under a mountain on the most heavily guarded border in the hemisphere.

Badguy WhatshisLatino is clearly not aware of how easy it is to get drugs into the United States using a beat up 1993 Saturn and any body with a driver's license. If this is my competition, I should smuggle drugs.

Exhibit C: FBI boss to Paul Walker on his way to his first undercover smuggling run: "Hey there, champ, I think you just broke three traffic laws right there."

Maybe you didn't notice, but last night this same agent participated in a race that killed at least two people and caused at least four serious accidents across the city. Little nitpicky to start bitching now, don't you think?

Exhibit D: Paul never mentions to anyone that there is a an enormous tunnel used for smuggling drugs somehow constructed under a mountain on the most heavily guarded border in the hemisphere.

Paul is, at the time, employed by the FBI, who probably have an interest in just this type of information. While this conveniently allows for another tunnel chase, it is also fantastically dumb.

Exhibit E: Paul Walker to FBI boss: I can't give you the $60 million worth of heroin. I want to set up a meet with Badguy to get him. FBI boss: Why not just take these drugs off the street? Paul: Because he'll just go right back to smuggling more drugs. FBI boss: Why would he meet with you? Paul: Because he can't afford not to.

Sure he can; you just said he could just smuggle some more, perhaps through the tunnel you didn't bother to tell anyone about!

Exhibit F: Despite all outward appearances, Vin Diesel is a weakling OR Despite all outward appearances, Paul Walker is the toughest man alive.

Vin beats the living shit out of Paul, pummeling him in the face five or eight times at one point, and Paul wipes away the only sign of injury, a tiny smear of blood under his nose, in the blink of an eye. Personally, I doubt the second possibility, because immediately after the beating, Paul flails about on the floor, kicking at furniture and crying like Vin just demanded a divorce.

Exhibit G: Paul, who has had his life threatened a couple of times for screwing Vin's sister, walks into Vin's garage to chat with him, then abruptly leaves to go to the kitchen and screw Vin's sister.

It is Jordana Brewster, so I guess I can't really argue, but discretion is (or should be) a virtue.

Michele Bachmann Should Probably Stop Talking Now

Representing Minnesota's 6th District in the House of Representatives, Michele Bachmann was nearly defeated in 2008 in what should be a safe Republican district after offering her opinions on ferreting out anti-American Americans (including, of course, the Obamas) a few weeks before the election.

The lesson she took from this was: say crazier shit.

"...the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums."

Yeah, look at these Democrats -- trying to re-educate people when poor Michele didn't even get any education the first time around! For shame...

Presidential Trials

And the winner of the sweepstakes to become the first democratically elected head of state to be convicted on human rights violations is....(drum roll)....Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru! Your prize is twenty-five years in a comfortable, specially constructed cell...unless your daughter is elected, which is looking more likely lately, in which case you'll probably be pardoned completely.

Thanks to all our other contestants; we're sure your time will come eventually.

What makes this conviction so interesting - especially in light of recent developments in Spain - is that Fujimori was convicted for abuses committed by special units to combat terrorism (in his case that of the Shining Path guerrillas) about which he was aware and the responsibility for whom ultimately lay with him. As US embassy documents and witness testimonials indicate, Fujimori was fully aware that one such unit was going to engage in extrajudicial executions, which they did, including those of nine university students and a professor, and of fifteen people at a barbecue (including an 8-year old witness).

The implications of actually enforcing the concept of the buck stopping with the president when it comes to abuses committed under that president's watch - whether they think they're defending their country from terrorism or not - should be apparent.

Stealing School

Finally, someone is standing up to the terrible plague of children from poor areas getting better educations than the property taxes in their neighborhood dictate they should receive: A woman from Rochester, New York (71% of students below the poverty line) has been arrested and charged with third-degree grand larceny and first-degree "offering a false instrument for filing" for enrolling her kids in the wealthier, more successful schools in nearby Greece (20% of students below the poverty line).

It's hard for me to adequately articulate the scope of this woman's crime, so let me quote from the local Greece Post:

"School officials say Miranda’s five children were driven from her home in the city to their grandmother's home in Greece, where Miranda allegedly asserted in multiple documents that her children lived. The children later boarded buses and attended various Greece schools, school officials said, then returned to their mother's city home in the evening.

The larceny charge alleges a theft of about $28,000 — the cost of providing the education to the children."

Apparently, another local newspaper reporting the story helpfully provides a number citizens can call to report other suspected cases of school theft. We can only hope these citizens stand up and do their duty to protect their children from poor people black people stolen resources as an example for the rest of us.

Ooooohhhh.....

As has been attempted about a half-dozen times since moving pictures became an American entertainment staple, Hollywood is trying really, really hard to make 3-D work this time. Each previous cycle, the gimmick has failed spectacularly, but with the advent of digital projection and the newfangled cameras now invented make the idea seem more appealing and feasible than usual.

Now there's certainly no guarantee that this latest wave of 3-D movies will manage to stick when all the others haven't, largely because the problem has usually been the filmmakers themselves, and their inability to do anything with that extra dimension that adds enough to the films to make it worth your while to forget you're going to be looking like a dork for two hours.

And that's where my new Most Awaited Movie of 2009 comes in.

A guy who has been pretty much at the cutting edge of every major technological advance in movies and special effects for going on three decades now, James Cameron is one of the only filmmakers I can think of who could actually make this idea live up to its potential...and he's making Avatar in 3-D, with a camera he invented himself.

And, fittingly, the movie is a science fiction epic, the type of movie with which Cameron is a master at pushing boundaries. Between Aliens (which has aged amazingly well), The Abyss, the first two Terminator movies, the man knows how to blow minds. Even if he has a tendency toward melodrama, and he unfortunately tends to insist on writing the dialogue for his movies, no one ever notices this when his movies first open because they're too busy getting their minds blown by whatever he's thought up.

Plus, he has such an eye for detail and visual realism (if not plot realism) that he tends not to fall into the trap at the bottom of which Steven Spielberg (among others) make everything CGI and make it obvious that it's CGI (computer animated groundhogs, anyone?). This is the guy who built a near-scale highway to blow up for True Lies and a jillion-gallon artificial lake in Mexico for Titanic.

And this passage from the Time article linked above makes me suspect similar amazement from Avatar:

"I couldn't tell what was real and what was animated--even knowing that the 9-ft.-tall blue, dappled dude couldn't possibly be real. The scenes were so startling and absorbing that the following morning, I had the peculiar sensation of wanting to return there, as if Pandora [the planet in the movie] were real.

Cameron wasn't surprised. One theory, he says, is that 3-D viewing "is so close to a real experience that it actually triggers memory creation in a way that 2-D viewing doesn't." His own theory is that stereoscopic viewing uses more neurons. That's possible. After watching all that 3-D, I was a bit wiped out."

So if anyone can make this 3-D thing work, it's this guy. And I'll be the first one lined up to get my neurons stroked...

I'd Buy That Perfume

So I caught myself a little double feature with Duplicity and I Love You, Man the other day, but the one I actually paid for was I Love You, Man...and I'm pretty disappointed about that.

Not that I Love You was terrible -- I didn't hate it -- but it certainly wasn't nearly as good as the other flicks in the Rudd/Rogen/Segal vein...it reminded me most of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, in that it didn't seem to be filmed with any particular skill or energy, didn't quite have the timing these types of movies need to have, and didn't have any lines or gags I'm going to remember in a month.

I laughed occasionally, but not like I did with Knocked Up, for example, probably the most successful of these types of comedies. I don't share one of my friend (and regular film debater)'s disdain for Segal (I think he's got enough charm to work in the right role) or Rudd (he was much better as a sarcastic asshole in Knocked Up and Role Models, another good comedy, than as a sweet romantic lead). There just wasn't anything about this movie to make me remember it in a month or two, so...blah.

Duplicity, which I did enjoy, was still mildly disappointing in that I wanted to like it more than I did in the end -- much like Michael Clayton, which I also liked a lot...but not enough, considering the talent involved (I also disagree with my friend over whether Clive Owen's just a good actor -- his opinion-- or a sex symbol as well..I mean, just look at that picture...well, I'd do him, anyway...).

Both of Tony Gilroy's movies featured excellent actors acting excellently , delivering crisp dialogue in well-shot scenes, all following a compelling plot line to a satisfying conclusion. Which is enough to make for a good, solid, well-done movie -- and both of those are -- but not quite enough to really exceed my expectations or surprise me in a way that has me on another plane when I leave the theater. Taken individually, though, a lot of the scenes do have that transcendent quality, like the one in which Tom Wilkinson's CEO creepily explains his fascistic view of the world to Julia Roberts while he prunes his little bonsai tree.

It certainly seems like Gilroy -- and the great cast he tends to assemble (I like the new icy persona Julia Roberts has been displaying, which seems to irritate those who want her to be cute all the time) -- has the talent to elevate a film as a whole, but hasn't quite gotten there yet. Still, making just damn good movies instead of great movies isn't exactly a tragedy...

Thin Blue Lines

The first five headlines on the front page of philly.com, the website for the city's two newspapers, as of 8:25 PM, March 27, 2008:

"Feds: Philly Cop Sold Crack"

"Cop Admits On-Duty Sex With Hooker"

"Former Philly Officer Denies Theft Charges"

"Montco Cop Charged in Shooting"

"Cops Need Smell Sense, Courts Told"

It ain't easy being blue in PA.

P.S. That last one, by the way, is the ruling of an appeals court dismissing an officer's case that he was wrongfully terminated for losing his sense of smell in an accident; apparently, he couldn't smell weed smoke on suspects and tried to help an old lady relight her furnace without being able to detect the gas in the air.

Chronicles of American Darwinism, Part 1

Not much need for comment...

Here's the headline: "Mich. baseball park to offer 4,800-calorie burgers"

Here's the description: "The West Michigan Whitecaps, a minor league baseball team, will be offering...an enormous hamburger being added to the menu this year...The 4-pound, $20 burger features five beef patties, five slices of cheese, nearly a cup of chili and liberal doses of salsa and corn chips, all on an 8-inch sesame-seed bun."

Here's the kicker: "The Grand Rapids Press reports that anyone who eats the entire 4,800-calorie behemoth in one sitting will receive a special T-shirt..."

Special in that it will be used to cover your bloated corpse so the other baseball fans don't have to look at your salsa- and chili- and cheese-encrusted face? Special in that it attaches with velcro so the mortician has an easier time putting it on you for the viewing? Or special in that it warns children and those with small-to-medium sized pets to avoid coming within your (probably limited) range of motion?

Do tell.

Weapons Ex?

One of the things we still do best, even in this time of supposed hegemonic decline: weapons.

No, not the expensive ones -- we still can't quite get the $140 million dollar fighter planes right.

I'm talking the more basic necessities, like assault rifles and cluster bombs and white phosphorus, each of which is showing up in the news these days, though there is a bit of possible progress in each.

We've passed on our use on dense civilian populations of white phosphorus munitions -- an oxygen-ignited chemical agent that burns through almost anything, including people, regardless of water or almost any other attempt at extinguishing it -- to our sidekick in the Middle East. Always nice to see the junior partner follow in your footsteps...but at least there's some attention being paid, and more scrutiny and awareness makes it that much more costly in public opinion for nations to utilize such weapons.

By the way, I'm not entirely certain the picture above is actually of white phosphorus being used in Gaza (could be a fireworks mishap in Pakistan or something), but it's the best close-up approximation I could find in 45 seconds of searching Google Images...hopefully it gets the point across in terms of visualization.

Meanwhile, revisiting a topic I touched on a while ago, Secretary of State Clinton provided a sharp and welcome departure from the fear-mongering of the cable news networks regarding the Mexican drug wars by pointing the finger back at ourselves and decrying failed anti-drug policies, American narcotics consumption, and sales of assault weapons that end up across the border. I actually don't have anything snarky or cynical to add; well said, Mrs. Clinton.

As for our new attorney general, Eric Holder, who might be backing off previously promised moves to reinstate the assault weapons ban Bush let lapse in 2003: don't be a pussy.

Finally, while we're on the topic of evil little weapons, some rare good news on my favorite munitions topic: cluster bombs -- the hundreds of tiny bombs stuffed inside larger bombs or artillery shells that are dispersed over large areas and roughly 30% of which fail to explode on impact, creating instant minefields of toy-looking "bomblets" -- might become less common as Pres. Obama made permanent rules restricting the sale of most of the anti-personnel weapons.

We'll probably always hold the title for Most Cluster Bombs Deployed, but we're still certainly willing to give the rest of the world a fair shot, as the United States -- along with Russia and China, the other major manufacturers and distributors -- continues to refuse to join 96 other nations to sign on to international treaties to (a) end the use and sale of cluster bombs, (b) clear areas affected by them, and (c) destroy stockpiles. Each of these elements presents its own problems:

(a) We just used more than 10,000 cluster bombs in our most recent war (happy sixth anniversary this week, by the way) and who knows what will happen once we roughly double our forces in Afghanistan this year? Why limit ourselves to the most advanced guided missiles and JDAMs when we can randomly scatter tiny mines and make this whole Afghan war even more exciting for insurgents, civilians and, why not, even our own soldiers...

(b) Would it be the responsibility of the country who dropped the bombs in the first place to clean them up? 'Cause that could be a real pain in the ass for us, seeing as we dropped 270 million on Laos alone as part of roughly 4 billion -- yes, billion -- pounds of munitions dropped during 580,000 bombing runs over a decade on one of the poorest agrarian nations on the planet. And cleaning them up could be dangerous for us -- the leftovers have already killed or injured a few hundred people per year, mostly children and farmers, for the last 35+ years. So that sounds like a no-go to me...

(c) We apparently have more than a billion of the little bomblets stockpiled here, so destroying our stockpile might take awhile...

Yeah, it's probably not worth it to make all these changes; we'll just keep on keeping on in the cluster bomb department. I'm sure nobody in the rest of the world resents these weapons -- or the others mentioned above, or still others of the billions of dollars worth we distribute worldwide -- being used on them by us or our customers. Can't see how this could come back to bite us. Nope.

Latest Batch O' Music #1

For someone with no musical talents, training, or literacy, I own a lot of music, and fancy myself something of an amateur audio connoisseur...a music critic who only knows how to use the terms "bridge" or "chord" from reading reviews in Rolling Stone...a trove of information about bands and artists about whose art I could not knowledgeably speak...an audiophile of ignorance for the common people, if you will.

Look, if you're interested in so-called "informed opinion" from an actually "talented" "musician", check out whatever the PoliSciGuy has to say.

Anyway, I tend to acquire music in clumps of several albums at a time -- a "batch" in layman's terms -- so this entry will serve as the first of an intermittent series of multi-album reviews. This one is almost exclusively hip-hop oriented, but I listen to anything and everything of quality (recommendations always appreciated).

And here...we...go:

The Truth is Here, Brother Ali ~ First up is the latest nine-song disc (not really an album, I think) of new material from my favorite overweight Minnesotan albino muslim underground hip-hop star, Brother Ali. As always, his flow is forceful but smooth, skilled but not flashy, and earnest but still witty and angry when appropriate -- all the traits that make him almost singularly enjoyable both live and in studio. Production from ANT (of Atmosphere) is top notch, original instrumentation nicely sprinkled with unique samples (oxymoron?) and swings in tempo and beat from song to song. What stood out to me was the increased level of political and religious tone of this disc compared to his two full-length LPs, Shadows on the Sun and The Undisputed Truth, the former most notably on the standout "Philistine David", a first-person discourse on rebellion against one's circumstances and oppressors in which, without ever saying it explicitly, Ali is clearly speaking as a Palestinian in the the Occupied Territories. It speaks to Ali's range that his tone can seamlessly veer from this seriousness to that of the most fun track, "Talkin' My Shit," a bouncy, keyboard- and funk-heavy song referencing Nogales lap dances, Sam Kinison, and, of course, a healthy dose of shit talking. Ahh, Ali, when will everyone else recognize your talent as much as I do?

On Sacred Ground, Eligh & Jo Wilkinson ~ Now here's something a little different in the hip-hop world: an album blending the talents of Eligh, one of the most dextrously-tongued MCs and best producers in the independent scene, and Jo Wilkinson, an honest-to-god, New-Agey, kumbayah-singing folk artist (and Eligh's mom). As might be expected from an album so genre-blending, the results are occasionally excellent but usually at least above-average...and occasionally doesn't work at all. "By and By" probably best utilizes Wilkinson's folk singing as an accent and chorus between verses from Eligh, frequent partner The Grouch, and some sweet viola (I think). Most tracks work in this context (especially "Safe" and "Starchild"), and the production is varied enough to mask the album's main obstacle, which is the lack of variety from Wilkinson, whose similar sounding tones can cause tracks to run together, especially on those on which she's the lone vocalist. While not a complete success, the album is definitely good enough to bode well for this mix of styles and different enough to check out, and it continues to grow on me the more I hear it.

Genocide & Juice, The Coup ~ Finally, I managed to procure the long-out-of-print second album from the Coup, an Oakland-based rap group whose fierce politics and acidic humor are expertly dispensed by lead rapper Boots Riley, DJ Pam the Funkstress, and co-MC E-Roc (for this album and their debut, Kill Your Landlord). I've been looking for this 1994 album - the title of which is a play on Snoop Dogg's classic Gin & Juice - since being introduced to Riley's meticulous, complex lyricism and Pam's funky production on Steal This Album (featuring one of the best examples of hip-hop storytelling ever on "Me & Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night", Party Music (whose quickly pulled original cover from the summer of 2001 was Boots setting off a huge explosion with a guitar tuner...in the World Trade Center), and, most recently, Pick a Bigger Weapon (which a younger and more attractive person reviewed here). As always, this early album features skilled narratives, a better sense of humor than any rapper displayed until Eminem appeared, and just makes me all the more excited for Street Sweeper, Boots' new project with Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello, the first songs from which you can hear for free here and here.

Ghetto Love EP, Spinnerette ~ This new band from, Brody Dalle, the former lead singer of the punk rockers The Distillers and wife of Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme is much, much more aurally appealling than her previous projects, especially on the title track that caught my attention in the first place. The disc reminds me of Shirley Manson's better work with Garbage, for which I always keep a little nostalgic corner of my heart open, with enough variety among the four songs here to make the upcoming album seem quite promising. Pushing right up against the edge of being too poppy for its own good, Dalle sprinkles enough sex and darkness over her lyrics and delivery and seems to have picked up enough of her husband's musical tendencies to keep me from feeling too embarassed to have listened to this EP a few dozen times. And spent a little too long watching the video for "Ghetto Love" - which, if you're into sexy mouths, should do it for you. Go watch it...see what I mean? Josh Homme, you lucky bastard...

So, that's it for this batch. Pick some of these up and enjoy...

One Step Closer to Civilized

My home state of New Mexico has joined almost the entirety of the rest of the industrialized, modern world and left the ranks of Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia by ending the practice of the death penalty.

There had been some question as to whether Governor (and former presidential candidate and nominee for Commerce Secretary) Bill Richardson would sign the bill that had finally -- after years of failing by a handful of votes -- passed through the legislature.

The Democratic tide that swept New Mexico the last two election cycles has colored blue the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, all three U.S. House seats, and strengthened the Democratic majorities in the state legislature, and despite the recent jailing of a prominent Democratic state senator (not quite as corrupt as the state senator from Philly -- and don't even get me started on New Jersey -- but nice try, NM), the state has finally managed to pull it off.

Richardson's decision was based primarily on the practical issues surrounding the execution of executions, the deeper flaws of the criminal justice system, and potential savings in a depressed economy, and expressly not any moral objection to the practice...but a win's a win.

As my good friend and advocate for sanity The PoliSciGuy said, "Only 35 more legislatures and governors to go..."

Ethical Incentives

From The Times of London: "CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers"

I'm not saying I endorse such behavior (and especially not this particular incident), I'm just saying...

It couldn't be all bad for the next Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling/Dennis Kozlowski/Dick Fuld/Bernard Ebbers/etc., ad infinitum, to have this in this in the back of their mind the next time they have to choose between the proverbial shoulder-perching angels and devils....

Shocks to the System

I often argue that there are certain things all people need to see/read/hear/experience, regardless of the delicateness of their individual sensibility, because the need to understand (viscerally, not logically) the reality of a certain situation outweighs the desire to avoid uncomfortable or downright shocking experiences. I know and have known several people (of both genders and across age ranges, but most often young or middle-aged women) who refuse to watch, for example, any explicit war movies, or The Wire (the best television program ever produced), or a documentary on Darfur, because it would upset them too much. Some of this self-enforced ignorance, as you might expect, led to a passivity or open support toward war and drug policy they understood only in cliche, generality, or stereotype.

But many of these people already share the opinions I expect most people would develop after experiencing (either personally or vicariously) these issues themselves, and yet still refuse to commit to sacrificing their personal comfort for a more thorough and vivid understanding of the world. I would argue that they are doing themselves as much of a disservice by not truly understanding the realities and particularities of vitally important situations and events, and therefore not being able to react to them with the firm certainty required to change them -- especially in the face of dissembling and smudging of reality carried out by those who wish things to remain as they are.

The point being, read Mark Danner's treatise on America's use of torture from the New York Review of Books.

Read it all.

I follow this issue closely, and there is something about the accumulation of details and the presentation of this torture in the first person and the ugliness and horror of it all that helps winnow out any last bit of equivocation or doubt-harboring about the nature of very official, very precisely planned and executed torture.

The report is based only on information the International Committee of the Red Cross, the institution responsible for ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions, managed to gather about those terrorism suspects held in the CIA's "black sites" who have since been transferred to Guantanamo. This isn't about Abu Ghraib, or the experiences of Guantanamo's average inmates, or those still held in the prison at the Bagram airfield in Afghanistan, or extraordinary rendition, or any other element of American detainment policy this decade (see the amazing, Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, or some of Mark Danner's other important, groundbreaking work for some of these stories).

This is just a view of the experiences of a dozen or so men (probably very bad men), it will take you probably half an hour to read, and if it doesn't provide that discomfort, that shock described above, you're more hardened than I am.

Which is probably not a good sign for you.

False Choices

One of the many facets of the current debate over our national economic turmoil is that of regulation, as it is now common to blame (as I do below) the dismantling of certain regulatory systems for the blending of the financial services, insurance, and real estate industries. This, of course, leads to the usual back and forth about the extent to which the government should interfere with the invisible hand that supposedly rubs the knots out of the back of the economy (or something...).

One of the best, most cogent rebuttals to both the current Republican/Wall Street arguments against strict regulation of the financial services industry and the Democratic tendency to accept the framing of the argument around regulation as "less vs. more" comes from Dean Baker, an economist currently serving as one of the directors of the Center for Economic and Public Policy Research. In an article in the Boston Review (a publication worth perusing on a regular basis), he argues that progressives and liberals need to reject the idea that there can be significantly more or less government regulation in a society as state-centered as ours; instead, we should accept that government intervention is a constant, and that we should concern ourself not with its extent but with its beneficiaries.

For example, a few years ago, their was a vicious debate over the revision of bankruptcy laws which made it more difficult and costly for individuals to declare bankruptcy and made it easier for creditors to pursue their debtors' wages and other income. Predictably, this debate was framed by the then-in-power GOP as decreased government intervention and increased personal responsibilty vs. government intervention to protect irresponsible borrowers. As Baker describes, the bankruptcy laws actually significantly increased the role of government as an enforcer and monitor of debtors and their financial situations, while simultaneously rewarding irresponsible lending practices, the signifigance of the latter of which should be apparent in our post-sub-prime landscape.

Baker lays out other illuminating alternatives to the currently narrow policy debates that suddenly become available if one accepts that government intervention in the economy is more or less constant and that it is the results of that intervention and not the fact of it that should be the focal point for leaders and activists. He describes how patent/copyright laws that result in artificially inflated prescription drug prices could relatively easily be replaced by a "prize" system or direct contracting for research and production that would minimize costs to consumers and reduce the cost of entitlement programs like Medicare.

So if you, like me, are tired of the usual ideological battles that ravage our fine country's political landscape and would like a new one, take a look at the article...

Bob the UnBuilder and Obama's Economics

I don't want to fall into the trap of having ridiculously high expectations of the new president that has some media experts denouncing his 1st term after 50 days, but I have to say, I'm getting more and more nervous about the weakness of his approach to the economy so far. My main concern is that that pool of economists and business 'experts' acceptable to the narrow political spectrum (especially when it comes to economics) represented in Washington that he's stuck with people who simply can't concieve of doing anything other than what they've already done in the past. This dearth of new thinking that doesn't cling to the Greenspan ideology that has dominated political economics in America since the early Reagan administration may be leading us down a deeper, darker path than we have to follow. These guys (I'm thinking here of Bob Rubin and Larry Summers, both former Secretaries of the Treasury, for example) and their media counterparts keep harping that it's a question of fear, that as soon as this irrational nervousness breaks, everything can go back to the way it was: the financial institutions can overleverage themselves into some new bubble in order to paper over their previous losses, the United States' economy can continue to be driven by the financial services industry instead of any real production or innovation, and Bob Rubin can go back to getting disgustingly rich. Bob, you see, was as Clinton's Treasury Secretary (followed by his successor Larry) very helpful in arguing for and justifying the dismantling of regulations and legal barriers (including the posthumously-famous Glass-Steagall act) designed to prevent financial institutions from getting too deeply entangled with other industries' dalliances with the bubbles that had been inflating and bursting with ever greater speed and intensity since the mid-70's. Bob then wandered over to Citigroup, where he helped direct the company as it took advantage of the weakened regulatory environment to expand into areas of the economy it really had no business being, as its primary role up to that point had been banking. Bob then resigned after Citi (now referred to by certain late-night comedians as ShittyBank) had imbibed the subprime poison to the extent that it has become what the New York Times refers to as the banks of the "walking dead". And now, of course, he's one of Obama's economic advisors. And I worry that it's partially he and others like him who helped craft a stimulus bill that was almost certainly too small and too tax-cut laden to work, and that he and others like him will continue to pump money into seives like AIG without any public benefit, and that he and others like him will refuse to look beyond the same neoliberal policies to solve a problem whose roots are in large part based in those policies. Until of course, it gets bad enough that this administration finally starts thinking outside the box into which our economic policy been duct-taped for the last quarter-century.

Black Market

At work, in addition to the dozens of computers, scanners, and other resources, we have about ten TVs hanging from the ceiling at various intervals around the room, some set to rotating camera feeds around certain freeways, most silently tuned to the big three cable news channels (MSNBC, CNN, FOX), meaning I can often look up and read along with the closed captioning as the latest developments on, for example, Anna Nicole Smith (Isn't she dead? Like, years ago? Move on, Greta Van Sustern...) play out. Even if I'm not really paying attention, the availability of all three networks at once makes it easy to get a good impression of what stories they're covering or not covering, and at one point earlier this week, all three were running stories with various breathlessly ominous headlines about the possibility of Mexico's drug wars spilling into the United States or threatening innocent spring-breaking college students. Several of the attendant commentators or guests made urgent noises about an increased military/police presence along the border or military aid to the Mexican government to combat this threat to American national security. I don't mean to downplay the importance of this particular story, but the mewling of the punditry, terrified at being victimized by the very real drug violence across the border seems a bit misplaced, especially when I picked up an issue of Time magazine lying around the office and saw a little 150-word item noting that "9 out of every 10 guns recovered at Mexican crime scenes can be traced to U.S. gun shops." [My emphasis] Not only is it our consumption of these drugs that creates a market for cartels to fight each other and terrorize the Mexican state over, but some of us make a nice profit providing the guns they use to kill each other for the privilege of filling our noses, lungs, bloodstreams with the best powder and plants...at the rate of 6,000 people a year. We're definitely getting the good side of this deal, so maybe we should stop whining and pretending to victims and do some that might actually reduce violence in our neighboring nation: work to cut our consumption. Or legalize and nationalize production. Either would help. Fretting about whether college kids will still be able to party in Cabo...not so much.

Jon Stewart: American Hero

As someone who consumes a lot of media in many forms, I think it is becoming harder and harder to deny that a guy who spends a total of eighty minutes a week on Comedy Central is one of - if not the - most important people on television, that most American of mediums.

While being called the most important person on television is kind of like being the smartest kid in remedial math, I'm not trying to damn him with faint praise, nor just pointing out a comedian as a way of shaming the more self-important TV personalities that populate the Sunday news shows, cable news Republican-vs.-Democrat bitchfests, or nightly network broadcasts (though they certainly should be ashamed).

What I do want to point out is that Stewart, when not pursuing his primary job of dick and poop jokes and celebrity interviews (though even the latter includes more serious authors and experts than many legit news shows), manages to do what so few network or cable news shows can manage, which is (a) synthesize and contextualize the information they present and (b) save their harshest critiques for the times they are most needed or deserved.

As for the former, the nightly news broadcasts tend to have to cram as much as they can of the day's events into their half-hour per day, and can't focus on one topic a few days after it has occurred, as Stewart can, so they get somewhat of a pass. The Sunday news shows care more about access to the big names than they do pursuing big questions. And the worst offenders, the cable networks, have between 14-18 hours a day of coverage to fill, and they tend to use either insignificant, easy-to-report stories like Octomom or disappeared blond children or significant issues and events "covered" by having two opposing political operatives (who are only on the air to promote their respective backing interests, not inform anybody in good faith) bicker for fifteen minutes.

Stewart and his writers and 'correspondents', meanwhile, don't feel obliged to linger on the details of the season finale of The Bachelor and pretend that they are worthy of attention just because the Neilsen ratings show an uptick on reality-TV related segments, as do the cable networks. Instead, they usually pick a topic or two, rip apart the stupidities and hypocrisies of both the story and the accompanying media narratives, and use the story to underline a larger point.

Granted, Stewart usually does this primarily to mock his subjects, but sometimes, as with this week's already legendary dispute with CNBC and Jim Cramer, he gets deadly serious. And his seriousness -- and his anger -- is shocking, not so much because he's usually the funny guy, but because this is one of the only places I see this type of serious criticism expressed, especially to the face of the responsible parties.

Sure, you'll see anger elsewhere...Lou Dobbs sounds like he'd strangle a illegal immigrant with the cord to a leafblower most nights, the Fox News band of geniuses often scream and shout until their veins bulge, and Keith Olbermann gives almost weekly lectures to somebody or other for disappointing him -- but that's all part of their respective acts, however heartfelt the sentiments. If Olbermann doesn't wag his finger at someone or if O'Reilly doesn't cut off someone's mic about once a week, they're failing to fulfill the roles they've established for themselves, and once they've ranted about one too many insignificant cultural happening on a slow news week, they no longer have the credibility to seriously challenge a true outrage.

Stewart, because his main job is to get Paul Rudd to dance and do funny voices over clips of congresspeople embarrassing themselves, has, paradoxically, more credibility when actually does challenge someone, as he did CNBC (and, a few years ago, CNN's Crossfire, the epitome of the two-sides-bickering phenomena described above). He is actually smart enough and well-informed enough to really crush his targets, usually under the weight of their own words, as when he had the audience booing Jim Cramer by showing clips in which the analyst and former hedge fund owner told members of his internet-based Wall Street advice business how to avoid regulation and illegally manipulate markets.

While it's a shame that we have so few who do what he does, we are lucky to have at least him doing it.

Here's the uncensored, full-length Cramer interview:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/03/stewart-destroys-cnbc-cramer-calls.html

And the episode as aired:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/62203/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-thu-mar-12-2009

Taxes

So the IRS is giving me shit about documenting the deductions the wife and I took on last year's taxes for the cost of our master's classes, which we had to take in order to be certified for Teach for America, an Americorps program hyped by both of the last two presidents as an ideal way for young Americans to serve the country by getting the hell out of the labor pool for a couple of years.

Then, while doing this year's taxes, I find that the Americorps awards (which can only be applied to loans for education) we were given upon completion of our years of service have been classified as "other income", meaning that we'll be taxed on it just like real income -- despite the fact that we had to use the money we were awarded by the government to reward us for working in undesirable governement jobs to pay off the loans we took out from the government to be certified by the government to work in said jobs to get said award. They wrote us a check, we literally had no other choice but to write it right back to them, and now we have to pay taxes on that 'income' as if we legally could have saved it or spent it on a cruise or given it to charity.

Goddammit.

And then I read this...(I suggest you read the whole thing, by the way)...

"...the top marginal tax rate is now higher than it was under Reagan, but lower than it was under Clinton, and much lower than it's been at various other points in history. (The average top marginal tax rate since the income tax was established is 60 percent).

What the discussion over the top marginal tax rate ignores, however (and what Ygelsias picks up upon) is that this rate has been assessed at very different thresholds of income. In 1940, for example, the top marginal tax rate was 81.1 percent -- but this rate only kicked in once you made $5,000,000 or more in income, which is equivalent to about $75,000,000 in today's dollars.

But today, the threshold where the top tax bracket kicks in isn't $75 million, or $5 million, or even $1 million ... it's a mere $357,700. The progressivity of the tax code stops there.
[skip]
...The question, of course, is why there isn't a millionaires tax bracket now ... or even a multi-millionaires tax bracket. I haven't run the numbers, but I'm guessing that if you established a new tax bracket at, say, 40.5 percent, that started at incomes of $1,000,000 or more, this would bring in as much revenue to the government as restoring the $250K tax bracket (which is really $360K now given indexing to inflation) to 39.6 percent, as it was under Clinton."

Without even getting into the baffling lack of discussion about changing these rates to keep the country running, I'm also sick of the way every time somebody brings up the fact that Roosevelt raised taxes on the wealthy during the soon-to-be-First Great Depression, the punditry's reflexive response is that the tax rate on the top bracket was 90%, "...and no-one wants to return to that..." or "...and clearly that's not a good idea..." -- and the discussion ends there, leaving most people watching with the impression that the Rockefellers were turning over $.90 of every dollar they made to Roosevelt, and well, I guess that does seem a little extreme...

I guarantee you that the majority of people watching these more and more common discussions -- I've seen some version of this exchange at least five times, and I hate watching cable news -- don't understand the idea of marginal taxes, as demonstrated by the worry that people have of being "bumped into the next bracket" by some unexpected burst of income. As Paul Krugman explains (imagine the sound of his palm slapping his own forehead as you read this):

"Oy. No, your income tax doesn’t suddenly shoot up if your taxable income rises one penny into a new bracket. To belabor the obvious, the tax code specifies marginal rates: your rate rises from 33 to 35 percent if your taxable income exceeds $372,950, but only the income above $372,950 pays the higher rate."
(My emphasis)

Um, hello? I sure as hell wouldn't mind the people earning over $1 million a year paying, oh, I don't know, 45-70% of the money after that first million in taxes... especially if it'll get the IRS to stop harassing twenty-five year olds who couldn't see the top tax bracket with a telescope about "income" they didn't even possess for more than ten minutes.

Or, I don't know, keep the country solvent or something, I guess.

Superbad

Speaking of mean, disturbing superheroes... I saw Watchmen, the big blockbuster of the spring movie season, and I am conflicted.

On the one hand, I do like what it was trying to do, and I respect the issues, moral conflicts, and subversions of superheroics in popular culture the movie brought up. I especially liked the idea that a given group of superheroes would be just as neurotic, criminal, politically split, and psychologically damaged as the rest of us. The film's visuals were inventive and skillfully done, it's literary airs were solid, and the movie's ability to maintain a dark near-nihilism for nearly three hours was impressive. The socio-political details of the alternate universe were a treat: Nixon still president in 1985, the Vietnam War won by American superheroes, Kennedy assassinated by a particularly fascist "hero", etc. The soundtrack was also littered with '80s music, which, while representative of the sad output of that decade, added to the pleasantly weird tone of the proceedings.

On the other hand, the script's devotion to the original graphic novel's dialogue (which I haven't read, I should note) was a mistake - writing for the screen is distinct from other forms of writing for a reason - and certain actors, while displaying the, um, physicality of their roles very well, struggled with other, non-nude, parts of acting, like emoting and believable speech patterns. And I'm not talking about the fifty-foot naked blue guy, either (this would be a fun sentence to take out of context).

More importantly, though, the bleakness of the whole thing was off-putting even to me -- and people who know me know I love me some bleakness: my preferred level of levity in movies is pretty much matched by Se7en; my teachers in elementary school referred me to psychiatrists for excessive morbidity; and I'm a Philadelphia sports fan. Still, the unending, seemingly aimless sociopathy of the movie, though it does end up being used to make some strong points, lacks the drama and propulsive excitement that made the last dark superhero movie, last summer's nearly perfect The Dark Knight, so much less of a chore to sit through.

In sum, I respect Watchmen, and a second viewing might be more rewarding with foreknowledge of where the damn thing is going, but I'd recommend it only to people who might be interested enough in the philosophical underpinnings of the movie to ignore some of its weaknesses in production and insensitive enough to overlook the general depravity and griminess of the movie.

Hey...

So even though this blog's raison d'etre is to keep one of my friends living overseas for the Peace Corps properly socialized and acclimated to the depraved, materialist mindset and cynical, ironic detachment one requires to live in the United States, I've decided to write as if I had an actual audience of people that I was trying to inform/entertain/disturb/confuse.

Why? Partly to keep myself from lapsing into the kind of interaction and humor that is common with this friend and thereby risk legal/marital/social/future employment repercussions. Partly because I'm betting my abrasiveness is less offensive when it seems like it's directed at a broad audience instead of a handful of people who actually know me (cross your fingers!). Partly on the off-chance that I might accidentally do something of note and draw more than a half-dozen people to this blog at any given time. Partly because I just like sounding more important than I actually am (though that may be redundant; I just spent two paragraphs justifying the tone and voice I'm using).

Anyway, in keeping with the purpose of the blog you can expect to see posts that fall into five broad categories: Current Events (often), Personal Stuff (rarely), Entertainment (books/music/movies/sports), Philosophical Whimsy (mostly bitching about random things), and a Weekly Sex Advice Mailbag (submit your questions now!). Profanity and discussion of adult topics and themes are pretty much unavoidable, so if you happen to be in the company of a particularly conservative Moroccan family or my mother-in-law, discretion is advised.

I should probably explain the name of the damn thing while I'm here in the introductory phase: I work nights, usually from 8pm-4am or 9pm-5am or 10pm-6am, and these nights change from week to week and include weekends. The impact on my sleep and dietary schedules has been quite significant, and can occasionally leave me pretty entertainingly incoherent, whether I'm at work at the time or I just had to wake up after two hours of sleep to drop off my wife somewhere or I get plenty of sleep and at 7:30pm realize I haven't had any food in 24 hours. So needless to say, and as affirmed those who know me pretty well, take what you see here with a grain of salt.

Enjoy, and please post comments as often as you want...and even if you don't want. Nothing is more entertaining than debating and discussing when you don't actually have to look anyone in the face.