Category: Primordial Soup

Missives from the most primitive place on earth.

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Good or Bad?

BBC NEWS | Americas | Iran ban for Garcia Marquez novel

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. 

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.” 

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. 

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.

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The Deli is Dead, The Deli is Dead, Long Live the Internet

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.kosherchefs.com“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. 

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.

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Jesus Did not Suffer for This

Christianity’s image taking a turn for the worse | Los Angeles Times

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.

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Officially Disastrous Cost of the Iraqi Conflict

Congressional Budget Office – July 2007 Testimony on the Costs of the Military Conflict in Iraq (pdf)

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.

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Silver Lining to California Fires?

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Californian fires affect TV shows

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.

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Hal Fishman 1931-2007; The Primordial Soup Remembers an Advocate

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. 

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.

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West Hollywood Book Fair

The West Hollywood Book Fair is not by any means the largest in the country or even in LA. The largest book fair in the primordial soup is indisputably the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is held annually at UCLA. The West Hollywood Book Fair is a very small and civilized affair held in West Hollywood Park. (The term “park” is used liberally here, for the actual plot of land allotted to the public under this designation is astoundingly paltry. Public spaces in the primordial soup typically are astoundingly paltry.)

The WeHo Book Fair is composed primarily, naturally, of gay and new age literature. A healthy contingent of writing groups are also well represented because this is the city where nearly 50% of the population (yours truly excluded, for now) are writers. And, last, though by no means least, are the various political groups: the ACLU, Pacifica Radio and other fringe groups. Especially radical groups were pleasantly and conspicuously absent.

I was surprised to see John Dean‘s name listed on a panel that was about to start in five minutes, so I lingered to hear what he and the others were going to say. The other panelists were Dennis Loo and Susan Estrich, who neglected to show up.

It proved to be an instructive panel to attend primarily because of the juxtaposition of an eminently rational man like John Dean against a polemicist like Dennis Loo. (The juxtaposition would be instructive were it made with any polemicist, even with Bill O’Reilly.) Such a juxtaposition is the perfect means of demonstrating the intellectual deficiencies of the political fringes. Whether it’s the radical right or the radical left, placing either one next to a man who coolly and civilly advocates the boring, fair and historically proven method of due process vanquishes all doubt regarding whom people need to support politically: the boring guy.

Lest one be tempted to dismiss the boring guy, one must bear in mind that the boring guy here, John Dean, brought down the entire Nixon Presidency. Hence, it is absurd to think that such men are ineffective or otherwise useless in the establishment of an effective government. Quite the contrary, history and the cabal of fanatics that has been in control of the US government since 1994 clearly demonstrate that it is the fanatics that invariably destroy governments and subsequently nations. Hitler, Mussolini, Khomeini, Pol Pot, Karadzic, Mugabe and countless others have proved the destructive force of fanaticism beyond the shadow of any doubt. Yet, we are stuck with fanatics.

And, what do we do against fanatics? Dean admirably argued for the restoration of the processes that have kept fanatics out of the political system and have kept in check the fanatics who managed to enter politics. Loo argued for buying and wearing orange colored products in order to advocate impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

Dean argued that the processes that assert the will of the people and that advocate the interests of the nation need to be restored. Loo asserted that we need a “hero” to fight this battle against the titans of evil who are governing our nation. Dean advocated a practical focus on winning elections. Loo simply asserted that elections are hopeless, and that we have no remedy, though he did offer hope in the form of his book. 

The moderator gave me the microphone, and I asked these men what we, the disenfranchised public, can do to reverse the nation’s course? Loo suggested that I buy orange personal decorations, because it was his brilliant idea to start an “orange campaign” for impeachment. Dean reasserted the fact that the Republicans understand the importance of process enough to have modified it heavily in their favor. He, therefore, advocated that Democrats erase these imbalances while they wield power. Loo did not disagree with this, but all he could advocate was wearing orange and protesting.

Loo also employed fear tactics for no apparent reason. He insisted that the US will attack Iran, that electronic voting machines are hackable and will be hacked, that impeachment is the only answer even if diverts resources from worthwhile causes. Naturally, he offered no real remedy to these doomsday scenarios. An ostensibly educated man, Loo could not offer so much as a notion of a process by which electronic voting machines could be challenged. Fear of the devices was apparently enough for him.

And, that is where I lost my faith in the “left” in American politics. The American “left” differs little tactically from the radical right in American politics. Its tactics consist of fear. Practically, the difference is like night and day. The right, as Dean correctly noted, understands process. It understands power, and it has the desire to wield it. It will go far in corrupting the process, as Hitler did (Dean’s comparison, not mine!), in order to wield absolute power. And, the American “left” responds to this corruption of process with a symbolic orange campaign. In insisting on a “hero” it was almost as if Loo was begging for another Martin Luther to start a new movement, a new government, a new nation.

Heroes are the desire of the hopeless. I have no heros for I have some confidence (still) in my abilities. Dean asked for no heroes because he has been in politics enough to know that process has a far greater impact than the impact that any one “hero” can have. After all, the only difference between democracy and fascism is, in fact, the process. 

Perhaps it’s in keeping with the American tradition of creating a new religious sect or movement when one is not satisfied with one’s innate religion. The American left’s fantasies of revolution (a mantra repeated ad nauseum by the left and the right), however, can never become reality. Freedom of religion enables new religions. The Constitutional system provides little recourse for change outside the Constitution itself. Hence, Dean is absolutely right when he says that it is important to restore and repair the processes of governance, and Loo and his fellow “leftists” are little more than egomaniacal fear mongers who are far more content with selling orange clothing than they are with advocating action. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” is a message that many baby boomers are happy to propagate, albeit from their comfortable tenured positions. And, somehow, they are mystified by the (good) fact that they wield no power.

Ahhh, to be free to think and to act. Neither the left nor the right will ever advocate freedom of thought and expression, for this freedom is inimical to the stupidity that both sides advocate under the headings of objectivism, neo-conservatism, liberalism, communism and, yes, even conservatism. 

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Drama in the Morning

Today’s morning walk went far to clear my head. At 10 a.m., I passed by the Belmont Cafe on La Cienega. On their beautiful patio, David Spade was engaged in a rather heated and emotional exchange with an absolutely stunning waitress. It is difficult to posit any reason other than hubris for a celebrity to be bothering a common citizen at her workplace at ten in the morning.

Then again, in the primordial soup, the title of “celebrity” seems to be sufficient license for many to do as they please. The tacit acceptance of such license is the reason why so many wish to be celebrities, and why the rest wish nothing to do with them.

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Failing Infrastructure is not News

Online NewsHour: America’s Infrastructure Needs Crucial Repairs — April 4, 2006

Ever since one of the major bridges connecting Minneapolis to suburbs across the Mississippi river spontaneously collapsed, considerable time has been spent on the discussion of the state of the American infrastructure. In all of these discussion, little mention was ever made of the bipartisan report commissioned by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The results were released over a year and a half ago, and the commission endorsed the findings of the Association of Civil Engineers’ estimates.

What the association of civil engineers has done — and they do this every two or three years — is they do some kind of a balance sheet of the nation’s public assets. And they give it a grade, about A, B, C, D, on the level of being adequate.

And they’ve come up — their latest figure is that it would take a $1.6 trillion dollars to bring the infrastructure of this country up to an acceptable level of decency. We’re falling another $300 billion every two or three years behind because we don’t provide adequate support to this problem.

Now, I can also tell you that it’s very difficult to do this if you religiously think that you can’t raise taxes, and that you can’t raise revenues, and that fees are a problem, and, certainly, taxes are a problem.

Future failures of the sort that unraveled so dramatically in Minnesota in August of 2007 should therefore come as no surprise to anyone. We were all adequately forewarned, it would seem.

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Apple’s Ace in the Hole: Music Industry Stupidity

Technology News: Music: SpiralFrog Hops Into Digital Music Pond With Free Downloads

Undoubtedly, the greatest challenge to Apple’s dominance of the digital music market has come from the Russian pseudopirates allofmp3.com. Fortunately for Apple, allofmp3.com was shut down recently by a Russian court responding to international charges of piracy, but unfortunately for Apple, another Russian court recently ruled that allofmp3.com’s operation are legal, and allofmp3.com will be operational again, soon.

In the meantime, the American record industry has been wasting its resources with perhaps the dumbest idea ever to emerge from this industry: www.spiralfrog.com. According to the article linked above:

Once downloaded, the user can play the songs via a PC through Windows Media Player or a portable player that supports WMA files. SpiralFrog doesn’t support playback on Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPod line or even Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Zune, nor does it provide a solution for Mac OS X users. The service only works via Windows XP or Vista PCs.

Furthermore, the user must remain active on the web site while songs are downloaded one at a time.

In other words, the recording industry has elected to challenge Apple’s service–which is functional and portable on Mac and Windows platforms–with a service that is functional only on the Windows platform and portable on no platform: the songs cannot be transported even on Microsoft’s Zune player. Spiralfrog.com seeks to challenge Apple by offering none of the features for which iTunes users are willing to spend hundreds of dollars (on an iPod, iPhone or other media player), and then charging the users by taxing their time in front of the computer.

Virtually all economic systems–barter, capitalism, communism, etc.–are based on the principle of quid pro quo, exchanging this for that. In total ignorance of the centuries of economic development that have resulted from the acceptance of this principle, the American recording industry is putting its weight behind a system that gives users absolutely nothing in exchange for their time and trouble. If spiralfrog.com is to be in anyway construed as a symbol of American capitalism, then heaven help the United States. The country will collapse under the weight of such stupidity long before any terrorist group can dream of executing another well coordinated attack.

As long as Apple’s iTunes Music Store is countered by such moronic efforts, buy Apple stock. 🙂

PS Universal Music has an inkling of business savvy left in its brain trusty by virtue of the Gbox service that it started in collaboration with Google. Unfortunately, this service is still for the Windows platform only, but it does sell DRM-free music in mp3 format. So, it may well become a viable challenge to Apple. PNM