Virtual, but permanent.
Missives from the most primitive place on earth.
BBC NEWS | Business | US economy at a glance
Perhaps the only thing gloomier than this picture is the fact that no American news source can be bothered by the simple process of consulting publicly available data from the government. The Brits seem to have grasped the utility of the internet browser better than American journalists. Perhaps that’s because it was a Brit who invented the world wide web and the browser.
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The only thing more puzzling about the rapid decline of Los Angeles as a functional, livable city is the bold transparency with which the destruction of the city is undertaken by its elected officials and the contractors who have successfully corrupted them. The above link cites but the most recent instance of the grotesque cronyism and lack of accountability that has 
made Los Angeles the most unlivable and unmanageable city in the United States. Even though Los Angeles has the most unsafe airport in the country and the worst traffic in the country, no leader in this city can sustain moral fortitude long enough to address problems that imiserate millions of people daily.
One would surmise that after hosting the most embarrassing public works project in human history (one in which the Federal Government calls the Los Angeles Government corrupt!), the processes of improving the city’s infrastructure would improve. As the above articles shows, quite the contrary is true. The city’s airports, roads and public transit system are destined to wither and perish under unrelenting corruption before the eyes of a citizenry apparently too sleepy to care for its own well being.
As nature has demonstrated time and again, evolution is more likely to eliminate the weak than to promote the strong. Evolutionary data from the primordial soup that is Los Angeles strongly suggest that evolution on occasion favors the stupid and the weak over the judicious and prudent. Whatever organism emerges from the primordial soup, I am ecstatic that, for now, I have managed to extricate myself from the unbearably ugly evolutionary process that is shaping the primordial soup.
You should be too, if you don’t live in Los Angeles.
Photo by VirtualErn.
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One of the blogs that I maintain has been inundated with Spam from the site above. According to the site, this woman is a “Palestinian model” and television presenter. I have no idea what either means. I am struck with a tinge of pity, however, that there are models who feel as if they need to resort to spamming in order to achieve the sort of groundswell from the internet underground that lifted Cindy Margolis and several other models whose names are not worth seeking or remembering.Â
Alas, even the title of the site is misleading. She’s not nude. Was this out of respect to her Muslim heritage? Is she a traditional Palestinian Christian? Would she reject an Israeli agent or photographer?
Ah, useless questions that hound us in the primordial soup.Â
For inexplicable reasons, I did more research. Her Wikipedia entry and her official site (Italian) imply that she is Jewish of Moroccon descent. Her portfolio includes little work that would be recognized in the US. So, these damned spam bots are working overtime on any site that happens to mention Italy.
Is this fortunate or unfortunate for her? Â
The American obsession with rankings and the “competition” that rankings are believed to spur is so fervent, so strong and so overwhelming that any ranking–no matter how unscientific, how thoroughly biased or how flawed–is bound to get press. The college football and basketball rankings, the US News & World Report’s annual college rankings, hospital rankings, etc., etc., etc. So many rankings exist that they have obscured the more important question of whether all universities, hospitals or whatever are competent at all. After all, overall competence and excellence is the goal of standards, not individual competence or excellence. Who cares if you have 50 good universities (or even 200), if 1000 universities are lousy? A thousand competent hospitals do much more for public health than five stellar ones.
The 14th annual  City Crime Rankings: Crime in Metropolitan America published by Congressional Quarterly threatens to be the most irresponsible of such rankings primarily because it is published by a trusted source. When a report on crime is anticipated by such criticism from the highest sources on criminology, the reasons why anyone gives it press become baffling. The criticism included in the above article include:
The study drew harsh criticism even before it came out. The American Society of Criminology launched a pre-emptive strike Friday, issuing a statement attacking it as “an irresponsible misuse” of crime data. Â
…
Critics also complain that numbers don’t tell the whole story because of differences among cities.
“You’re not comparing apples and oranges; you’re comparing watermelons and grapes,” said Rob Casey, who heads the FBI section that puts out the Uniform Crime Report that provides the data for the Quitno report.The FBI posted a statement on its Web site criticizing such use of its statistics.”These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region,” the FBI said. “Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents.”
But, most appalling is the CQ Press’s own insistence and admission that the study is worthless:
 CQ Press spokesman Ben Krasney said details of the weighting system were proprietary.   Â
Thus, the publisher asserts that it is propounding a hypothesis–their statistical model–that they refuse to have tested independently. This runs contrary to all scientific principles of inquiry. In all sciences–including social sciences like sociology–openness is the most essential ingredient. Without it, hypotheses cannot be tested independently in order to be verified. Without independent verification, there is no truth. By making the hypothesis proprietary, CQ Press is disallowing scrutiny and forbidding independent verification. Thus, CQ Press propagates an untested notion, a falsehood. In effect, it is acting as a propagandist.Â
Hopefully other silly rankings will soon be discredited by similar confession of inadequacy by their publishers.Â
One wonders what happened to those unlucky 5000 people who managed to buy copies of one of Marquez’s lesser known works. The appeal of Marquez’s work in Iran is abundantly manifest because his works are suffused with a disdain for Spanish colonialism specifically and imperialism in general. In as much, they are grist for a regime that frames its repressive methods and its catastrophic failures in the context of the struggle against Western imperialism.Â
Memories of My Melancholy Whores is such a wonderful title. The content of the novel could not possibly differ significantly from Marquez’s other writings. One Hundred Years of Solitude contains many stories of men who were ruined by whores, men who discovered their manhood with whores and men who fell in love with whores. Hence, the Iranian government’s objection to the title and the content of Memories of My Melancholy Sweethearts (the sanitized title) seems especially out of place. After all, the story is ultimately that of the salvation of a pervert at the age of 90. Furthermore, the following quote from Solitude clearly demonstrates that there is just as much content in Solitude that would be deemed objectionable to Islamic law.
…until he heard some old man tell the tale of the man who had married his aunt, who was also his cousin, and whose son ended up being his own grandfather. “Can a person marry his own aunt?” he asked, startled. “He not only can do that,” a soldier answered him, “but we are fighting this war against the priests so that a person can marry his own mother.”Â
Hence, Marquez’s seemingly favorable depiction of incest was deemed acceptable in Iran, but the story of a 90-year-old pervert who falls in love with an innocent girl is apparently taboo.Â
What tangled webs we weave when we first choose to lie, the famous saying goes. The complexity of this web pales in comparison to the web woven by religious zealots who insist on reconciling their backward and repressive ways with modern philosophy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said,
It is quite possible to live with uncertainty, with the possibility, even the likelihood, that one is wrong. But beware of certainty where none exists. Ideological certainty easily degenerates into insistence upon ignorance.
It is very clear exactly what it is that religious zealots, Islamic or otherwise, insist upon these days.
KosherChefsDiet is a remarkable new service. They deliver Kosher California cuisine (my ascription) to your door daily, fresh or frozen.
They targeted me in one of their junk mail campaigns. Without a doubt, they must have obtained my information from organizations like the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish organizations who must have targeted me because I am a Jewish man who lives in Beverly Hills, who has a good credit rating and who has donated to Jewish charities in the past.
“The past” is, alas, a rather long span of time. Though I have not contributed any money to these organizations in years, past donations and my prestigious zip code must place me in that class of people who are most likely to pay $27 or more per day to have gourmet Kosher food delivered to their houses.
This cost is considerably more than the standard “Jewish” food for which delis in New York are famous. The price is higher because kosherchefsdiet.com serves California cuisine: the latest varieties in healthy, fusion culinary delights designed especially to help people lose weight.Â
The fact that this luxurious service is based in New York suggests that even New Yorkers have finally fallen pray to the sedentary life spent in cars and office chairs that has plagued the rest of the country for the past twenty years. No more walking to work or even to the subway station. Worse yet, no more kibbitzing over nosh at Nathan’s or the Carnegie Deli. Potato kugel? That’s for the birds. The modern Jew prefers small portions of low-cal potato puree, instead. Yiddish and pickled herring in sour cream are for boat people. Kosher needs to be as modern as Napa Valley, and if people can’t go to Napa Valley, then Napa Valley is going to come to them.
In Kosher form, no less.
I don’t know about you, but this is exactly what I have been dreaming about….even praying for.
Over the decades, the question of whether rock and roll bands belong in a place of worship has befuddled many a religious or spiritual mind in this country. It comes as a shocking surprise to learn that even the believers–especially the “Christian” believers–are beginning to resent and even regret the transformation of religion to pop culture to which they have dedicated themselves. It seems as if the relegation of profound religious sacraments to inane 4/4 time rock medleys is making people sick of their own religion just as they tire of ephemeral pop songs. The political power plays of churches are starting to be perceived as corruption of religion rather than elevation of government. And relentless, uncompromising proselytizing is beginning to be perceived as a rude expression of insecurity rather than a noble act born of strength.
It would be ever so nice if the profound wisdom of the Founding Fathers of the United States–the wisdom with which they codified the separation of church and state–were to reassert itself again in the minds of the populace. The rediscovery of a principle so manifestly true by a people so thoroughly removed from the pragmatism that made the country successful will be testimony to the wisdom of the founders and hope for the population. Alas, one can not have either one or the other.
It was quite a few months ago when I began composing this post, and it seems as if the journalism community has finally caught on to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office’s phenomenal economic forecasts of the past two years have declared the Iraqi war an economic disaster. In fact, mainstream reporting on the costs of the military conflict in Iraq has been so abysmal that I am utterly shocked that somebody at Reuters finally bothered to look at numbers that are available to everyone through the CBO web site, and that somebody at Yahoo! had the good sense to put the bleeding obvious on the front page.
What will journalists read next? Perhaps, that Clinton’s economic policies succeeded and Bush’s policies failed, as demonstrated in this budget projection (read chapter 1)?
It is true that the information age is here, and that most information is available to anyone anywhere. Nevertheless, it is also clear that mainstream news sources have gone out of their way to make themselves irrelevant. After all, it has taken them an entire year to report number that have been publicly available all along.
The California wildfires of 2007 will rank among the greatest tragedies that the state has endured. The only positive outcome of this tragedy could have been the halting of the filming of some of the horrible shows that that pass for entertainment on American television. Alas, the producers of 24 managed to resume filming at their Los Angeles studio, instead. The Writer’s Guild strike is the only hope we have left.
KTLA anchor Hal Fishman dead at 75 | Los Angeles Times
It is an awful thing to rejoice in another human’s demise, and that is not the intent of this essay’s writer. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to feel a sense of relief at the demise of a mainstream newscaster who had made the spreading of ignorance the primary purpose of his life in his final years. Hal Fishman, the famed anchorman of the ten o’clock news hour on channel five in Los Angeles is the subject, and his death feels like a blessing for the utterly anesthetized citizens of Los Angeles.
Although the thinking denizens of this city had long ago tuned away from the inane commercial blather that has passed for local broadcast news in Los Angeles, Fishman’s presence was singularly vexing in this lanscape of stupidity because he refused to hold the line at commercial blather. He insisted on disseminating an altogether common and utterly senseless ignorance in the guise of news analysis–the acceptance and the repeating of which by many in the primordial soup has been a source of anguish for the thinking members of this city since September 11, 2001. Fishman’s manifest existence as an irresponsible news director, a horribly misinformed reporter and a man radically deficient in faculties of reason and compassion is missing from all the obituaries that have been written. Perhaps, this post will set the record straight.
The Channel 5 News at Ten was a venerable news program, until Fishman became the news director some twenty years ago. On his watch, world news was reduced from a quarter of the broadcast to a minute while Los Angeles became the most ethnically diverse city in the United States. Fishman greeted the influx of Mexicans, Chinese, Koreans, Persians, Japanese, Israelis, Armenians, Russians and countless other nationalities with a reduction in the coverage of global events. As the American and especially the Californian economy became ever more dependent on global politics, Fishman deprived viewers of the information they needed to understand their own city.
At the same time KTLA became a member of the new Warner Brothers television network, and Fishman spinelessly went along with corporate directives to promote the networks programming during the news hour. Consequently, the raw news content of the news hour was reduced to less than twenty minutes of news and nearly forty minutes of advertising posing as “entertainment news” and sports advertising masquerading as “sports news”. Naturally, as the foreigners were driven to the international channels to get international news, Fishman and the rest of the management justified this stupidity on grounds of ratings.
To compensate for this demise, Fishman elected to speak his mind on subjects as inane as Britney Spears and as profound as military strategy in Iraq. In the former case, Fishman exhibited unbelievable hypocrisy, and in the latter he displayed his prejudices and his ignorance as proudly and as conspicuously as a peacock.
Fishman was the consummate curmudgeon when he complained about all the attention that Britney Spears was receiving from the press. Yet, he allowed the prime time news hour to be hijacked for the sake of advertising by the CW network bosses. It was on Fishman’s watch that half of the News at Ten (and the entirety of the KTLA morning “news”) became advertising space for Warner Brothers products. Fishman complained, but he never complained about the corporate overlords to whom he had capitulated when he allowed his news program to be used in the service of people like Spears.
Fishman also never cared to reconcile his half-baked patriotic ideas with the realities of world and war. In one salient instance, when a New York Times article that the insurrection in Iraq had reduced some cities to virtual “ghost towns”, Fishman advocated the carpet bombing of these cities because this action would have minimal “collateral damage” and because carpet bombing of cities like Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin had won World War II. Fishman even went so far as to claim that such carpet bombing wins wars.
Apparently Fishman was unaware that historians (civil and miliatry) have assessed the indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese towns as strategically useless in WW II. Germany ultimately succumbed because its production of munitions, fuel and soldiers was insufficient for a fight on two fronts. Similarly, Japan’s resolve was not weakened by the firebombing of the country, but by the specter of the atomic bomb. No historian has ever claimed that indiscriminate bombing of civilians win wars. Why would they? The strategy had no effect in WW II and disastrous effect in Vietnam.
Nevertheless, Fishman felt emboldened to speak something that was completely and utterly false on the air. One can offer a great many reasons for why he did so, but it is difficult to ascribe such comments to anything other than ignorance born of misplaced patriotism and arrogance.
These elements suffused nearly every commentary Fishman ever made. He never bothered to correct the record, or to make his remarks more considered. When I corrected him by bringing to his attention that his remarks regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction had been thoroughly and absolutely refuted by the WMD Commission years prior, he only responded by saying that he may take those findings into consideration. In as much, Fishman spent his later years not just as a lousy commentator, but a decidedly incompetent reporter.Â
What a shame that the man felt compelled to forego the legacy he had built through many good years in the seventies and eighties. May Hal Fishman rest in peace, and may his legacy be defined by the good years he had; not the miserable final years. People should not forget, however, what an instrumental role he played in the destruction of the news service in Los Angeles.