Moonbat Shot Down

Apparently, NBC has finally noticed that frothing lunatic Keith Olbermann is not a professional journalist.

MSNBC is replacing Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews as co-anchors of political night coverage with David Gregory, and will use the two newsmen as commentators.

Throughout the primaries and summer, MSNBC argued that Olbermann and Matthews could serve as dispassionate anchors on political news nights and that viewers would accept them in that role, but things fell apart during the conventions.

The tipping point appears to have come during the GOP convention when Olbermann criticized MSNBC for showing a Sept. 11-themed video prepared by the Republicans.

Personally, I think the tipping point came during the Democratic convention, when Olbermann angrily proclaimed, as part of his theoretically neutral coverage, that an Associated Press reporter should "look for a new job" after daring to criticize The Obama's speech. Even for Olbermann, who usually plays fast and loose with reality and fills America's living rooms with unhinged rants, that was over the line.

During her acceptance speech last week, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin talked about the "Washington elite" not accepting her qualifications for the job. Some delegates on the convention floor began chanting, "N-B-C, N-B-C."

Olbermann began to have difficulty keeping his opinions in check, or simply stopped trying.

He sarcastically dismissed GOP pundit Pat Buchanan on the air after Buchanan said the Republicans had been enlivened by the entrance of a conservative Republican.

"Those reading US Weekly with the picture of her and her youngest daughter with the word 'scandal' written across it won't be so happy," Olbermann said.

He expressed little sympathy at another point when GOP anger at rumors over the Internet about Palin were being discussed.

"We'll see if people feel sorry for unfounded rumors on the Internet," he said. "If that's the case, Senator Obama's probably standing up and cheering and waiting for people to feel sorry for him."

Perhaps most embarrassing, Joe Scarborough was discussing positive developments in John McCain's campaign at one point when Olbermann was heard on an offstage microphone saying: "Jesus, Joe, why don't you get a shovel?"

How MSNBC thought this was going to work is beyond me. Having Olbermann anchoring serious political coverage eliminates any appearance of impartiality that they might want to have. There's no escaping his persona, which is, to put it mildly, not generally associated with factual accuracy or intellectual honesty. It's like asking Bill O'Reilly to anchor the coverage. You can't do it without fostering a general sense that something untoward is going on. In Olbermann's case, it clearly was.

All the drama made MSNBC a punch line when top NBC anchor Brian Williams appeared on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" last week. "Is there no control?" host Jon Stewart asked him. "'Is it 'Lord of the Flies?'"

A sheepish Williams said that every family has a dynamic of its own.

"But does MSNBC have to be the Lohans?" Stewart said.

When Jon Stewart, whose show, in his own words, is on after "muppets making crank phone calls", says your news organization is acting like a bunch of petulant, bloodthirsty children, you may have a legitimate problem. His perfectly valid analysis of the problems with Crossfire preceded the surprising death of the show by only a couple months.

Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at "Crossfire" when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were "hurting America." Mr. Klein said last night, "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise." He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

...and yet, CNN, like the rest of the MSM, still fails to deliver, and their public trust continues to collapse, just like the rest of the MSM.

I Feel Sorry For Them

CNN journalist Roland Martin opines on the moral rights of criminals, as they relate to the Joe Horn incident:

They had it coming." "Tough stuff." "They shouldn't have broken the law." I heard all of those comments and more on my radio show, blogs and other call-in shows, as a nation fed up with crime gave a big "Hooray!" for Horn.

But I just don't see exactly what there is to celebrate. Two men -- both illegal immigrants and one of them with a conviction for selling drugs -- are dead for stealing some personal effects, and we are supposed to welcome this vigilante justice? (I suppose it's ironic that one week after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the rape of a child doesn't merit the death penalty -- one that I disagree with -- many others are celebrating a man not standing trial for the killing of two others who committed robbery.)

Martin is confusing two different issues: the penalty given for a crime that has been committed is different from the action taken to stop a crime. Few would make the argument that it's wrong to use deadly force to stop the rape of a child. The point of contention is whether it does any good to use it once the wrong has already been done.

In this case, what's welcome and worth celebrating is not that the two men are dead, but that the theft of the hard-earned and rightful property of Horn's neighbor was stopped. The deaths are a tragedy, not because Horn was wrong to kill them, but because the two thieves were wrong to stupidly throw their lives away doing wrong to others.

Yes, the law was on Horn's side, whether he knew that or not when he fired. But when does our core decency come in when we make such life-altering decisions in a snap?

Where was the core decency when Hernando Riascos Torres and Diego Ortiz were choosing to break into a family home? Didn't the thieves know the law when they took this risk, voluntarily putting their lives in jeopardy to do something they had no right whatsoever to do?

I think of my dad, who as a child I witnessed chase down two men who snatched a woman's Christmas gifts from her hand in a mall parking lot. If he had a gun, should he have just fired away, protecting this unknown woman's property?

What difference does it make that she was a stranger? Is that a factor in Martin's estimation of right and wrong? Isn't going out of your way to help a stranger supposed to be a sort of epitome of right-minded behavior?

Should it matter that Horn was protecting the property of his neighbor, or is the salient point that he was stopping a crime?

I really want to know: Would you have pulled a Joe Horn and racked your shotgun and fired on the men if you were in his shoes?

Maybe, maybe not. That decision, however, is up to me, and isn't for journalists (to whom I am an unknown) to cast moral judgment on.

Update: Erik Kurtis Low, however, may be pushing it.

The Utah Supreme Court today threw out the manslaughter conviction of Erik Kurtis Low, who killed a Park City man after the victim gave him a "wedgie."

Both men were using cocaine, and Hirschey yanked on Low's underwear so hard he threw him to the ground.

Perhaps he shouldn't have done that.

Stop Talking About The News

Apparently, the Associated Press has now grudgingly admitted that it's perfectly legitimate for people to quote their stories.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers' group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.

The meeting comes after AP sent a legal notice last week to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort, a news community site whose name is a parody of the prominent blog the Drudge Report.

The notice called for the blog to remove several postings that AP believed was an improper use of its stories. Other bloggers subsequently lambasted AP for going after a small blogger whom they thought appeared to be engaging in a legally permissible and widely practiced activity protected under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.

In response, the AP indicated it would seek to create guidelines, though even that idea triggered further protests. Michael Arrington wrote on his TechCrunch blog Monday that AP "doesn't get to make its own rules about how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows."

I certainly hope the Associated Press is OK with this excerpt. I've certainly seen more than a few instances of newspapers quoting blogs without permission, and this whole line of thinking leads to a conclusion and to a type of confrontation that nobody, including the AP, would want.

The AP was making the particularly bizarre assertion that quoting even a headline and lede to send readers to a story constitutes a violation. Ironically, some AP licensees, like Yahoo! News and several major newspapers actually encourage bloggers to link and discuss their stories, recognizing that the attention generates traffic that fuels their ad sales. That raises serious questions about the merits of the AP's complaint that it dilutes the value of the intellectual property their licensees pay for. In many cases, people wouldn't see a given story at all if a blog didn't point them to it and get them thinking about its significance.

As far as I'm concerned, bloggers are using a story in a perfectly ethical manner as long as they reasonably limit their excerpts to the portion required to support their point, provide a link to the original story for interested readers to follow, and are running a site where it's manifestly obvious either that the blogger's writings, rather than the excerpted quotations, are the purpose of the site and the primary traffic draw, or that the site's primary purpose is to drive traffic to the original stories (a use that, given the very nature of the web, has to be legitimate).

I can't imagine how else it would work, but people are obviously free to discuss the news. That is supposedly the very purpose of journalism, and it's implied that the information is meant to inform the public and can be cited and quoted as an authority. Accurately paraphrasing the relevant content (a common use that I can't imagine being reasonably challenged) should, in theory, be no less "diluting" than quoting the same ideas directly, and the former is a lot more likely to lead to accidental misrepresentation or inaccuracy, another concern of the AP. Like Wendy Seltzer, a legal scholar quoted in the Associated Press article, I sincerely hope that whatever scheme they come up with will be primarily oriented toward keeping their legal department from overreaching, rather than trying to manufacture intellectual property "rights" that lack any basis in law.

The Prime Directive

A happy euphemism from this AP story, announcing new photographs of an uncontacted native tribe in Brazil.


Actually, they're pointing arrows at the plane.

You Don't Get To Decide

In February, I noted the absurdity of the media polling their own audience to see if they believe we're in a recession.

You can bet that 61% of people, if asked to define a recession, most certainly could not do so....I suspect that 61% of journalists can't define it, either. Since the media provides the entirety of most people's knowledge about the economy, one would think it raises an ethical concern to present a poll of media consumers as evidence that media claims are true, despite the fact that for all intents and purposes, most of us are roughly as capable of constructing an informed opinion on the subject as Ozzy Osbourne.

Now? This.

Most people believe oil is running out...

So what?

There's a story about a pamphlet published in Germany entitled 100 Scientists Against Einstein, to which Einstein responded that if they were correct, they would've only needed one scientist.

Lee at Right-Thinking covers similar ground, but the fact is, oil has been "running out" for quite some time now, and this prediction has consistently failed. It's also clear that the people who actually know don't believe it's going to happen any time soon, as historical oil prices have not shown the wild increase you'd expect if oil-dependent industries feared that the oil they were purchasing might be the last. 1998 oil prices were, adjusted for inflation, lower than those in 1958, and 2007's "high" oil prices were dramatically lower than what we saw in the panic of 1979 and 1980. This is essentially the reason that Paul Ehrlich was so fantastically wrong about nearly everything. The words "Peak oil" do not mean what people seem to think it means, and these type of resources don't "run out" in the conventional sense.

This poll is a fallacious prop that "supports" a mythology which bears the same relationship to real, useful economics as the anti-Christ bears to Jesus Christ. Apparently, that's what makes it newsworthy.

Update: Futurepundit soundly thrashes the New York Times on this subject.

On the one hand, a New York Times [article] discusses worries about future energy availability. On the other hand, the analysis still lends considerable credence to the idea that large increases in oil production are possible.

Today's tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers: The planet's population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years - to more than two billion - as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

In all likelihood? How does that work? If the oil can't be found (and I do not believe it can) how can the number of passenger jetliners double?

I have my differences with his post, but he raises an important point about the problems of this "crisis" talk.

Global oil consumption is currently somewhere in the vicinity of 80 million barrels a day. Even if you assume that we use all that can be found in known traditional oilfields, it's believed that there is two trillion barrels of shale oil available in the United States and Canada. Then there's the tremendous amount of synthesized petroleum that can be taken from the world's currently untapped recoverable coal reserves, which is something like 1 trillion tons.

Consider that our definitions of what is "recoverable" are elastic, changing as the need to recover it (and therefore, the amount of capital it seems reasonable to expend to do so) grows and the technology improves, and that the fuel efficiency of our consumption increases with time, and it's not difficult to realize that the world will lean heavily on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Our lifestyles will adapt, as high-speed passenger rail becomes more viable and many passenger air and bus routes become less so, as people choose motorcycles and mass transit over SUVs, but these people holding echo-chamber "World After Petroleum" conferences to learn how to keep chickens in their laundry rooms and put solar panels on their toilets in preparation for some medievalist, Postman-like future are absolutely batty.

So That's Why He's Like That

The first time my father saw CNN International's Richard Quest, he jokingly asked me "what is that guy on"?

The answer, according to the NYPD? Crystal meth.

A few bits of his work, as used on The Daily Show:


Update: Uh oh. Mark Steyn and Ann Althouse are both outraged. While I do have some sympathy for the guy's humiliation, if he was doing what it seems clear that he was doing, well, how surprised are you supposed to be when you end up in the paper?

A Valid Point

Truckers want their cut.

With the price of diesel fuel reaching record highs, independent truckers today stood together protesting the companies they contract with, saying that while those companies are charging fuel surcharges on their freight, they are not sharing that increase with drivers.

Freight rates have not risen in years, the truckers said, even though the price of fuel has quadrupled.

This is a valid issue, and it's true even for smaller haulers. A member of my family contracts for a regional newspaper and has the same problem, just driving a minivan. Fuel prices have gone up dramatically in terms of nominal dollars, but the per-mile compensation has not. It creates, to put it gently, a financial challenge.

Market analysts say the rising diesel fuel prices are reflected in the increased cost for goods at the supermarket and department stores. Virtually everything that reaches the shelves today at one point is transported by truck.

Santiago said he transports everything from ice cream to scrap metal.

"We just can't take it anymore," he said. "We are prepared to strike until the rates are raised."

Just how long that will be remains uncertain. One trucker played a recording over his cell phone he said was from his company's dispatcher who said if he didn't show up for work, he would not be getting any jobs for the rest of the week.

"They're threatening us," said Julio Rodriguez, who showed a pay stub that said he was paid just less than $300 last week.

Unfortunately, the real issue still isn't quite clear to everyone:

In western Michigan, independent trucker William Gentry had been scheduled to pick up a load and take it to Boston, but his dispatcher told him there was a change of plans.

"She told me that her shipper was shutting down," fearing that someone would sabotage deliveries if their drivers worked during the protest, Gentry said at the Tulip City Truck Stop outside Holland, Mich.

"If something isn't done about fuel prices, the cost of consumer goods will shoot up, Gentry said. "People aren't seeing that the more we pay, the more they're going to pay," he said.

Gentry is mistaken. Lots of people see it, but the fact is, there's nothing for them to do about it.

As high as they are, American fuel prices are still very competitive with the rest of the Western world. Refineries in America, like in most of the world, are pushed to their limit, and existing regulations and taxes seem almost deliberately designed to deter fuel companies from investing in new ones. In turn, the existing refineries are increasingly ancient and unreliable, leaving us with frequent outages and, as a result, unpredictable supplies. Demand for diesel is skyrocketing worldwide, but supplies are not keeping up, and in America, when oil companies start turning higher profits because of that demand (precisely the kind of thing that might encourage them to expand their capacity and grow), the first instinct of government is to take that money away from them and flush it down the toilet of "alternative energy solutions" like corn ethanol. Appendix C of this 2003 Energy Information Administration study seems to make it pretty clear that this stupid game is quite a bit more profitable for government than it is for the oil industry.

One potentially viable alternative is coal liquefaction, something that has finally attracted military attention, but still frightens Congressional Democrats because of their apparent blood oath to the enviro-cultists.

"We're going to be burning fossil fuels for a long time, and there's three times as much coal in the ground as there are oil reserves," said Air Force Assistant Secretary William Anderson. "Guess what? We're going to burn coal."

"We don't want new sources of energy that are going to make the greenhouse gas problem even worse," House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said in a recent interview.

Waxman's starry-eyed wishes aside, fossil fuels are, in fact, reality. The infrastructure is largely in place, and coal liquefaction will be an inevitable step, because as long as there is coal in the ground, there are going to be people looking for a way to burn it. However, it faces many of the same obstacles as improving our existing refining capacity, in that it requires a massive capital advancement and years of work to get underway. Of course, the development of the industry, one that has a high probability of proving viable where the "environmentally-friendly" technologies promise to wreck world markets for resources like iron and corn, would be a tremendous boon for large parts of the country and for the American economy.

So, which is more likely?

A) In a moment of lucidity, Congress and state legislatures will come together to ignore frantic leftist shrieking about "corporate interests" and pseudo-scientific enviro-cultism to pave the way for the construction of new oil refineries and coal liquefaction plants, thereby helping to secure the future.

B) Congress and the state legislatures will do exactly what they've been doing, and saddled with a finite supply of fuel, consumers will continue to drive prices up until it motivates them to change their behavior and thus reduce consumption, thereby stabilizing the price at some needlessly high level for the foreseeable future.

Everybody gets two guesses.

The sad part, of course, is that those behavior changes won't just mean that consumers will choose motorcycles, mass transit, and urban lifestyles over 40 mile commutes in an H3, it will also mean that people like Gentry may find themselves out of a job. Trucking is not a particularly efficient means of freight transportation, and both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have seen fit to buy into railroads. There's a reason for this, and as capital is expended to improve the railroad infrastructure to accommodate increasing demands, you can eventually expect high-speed passenger rail to follow, filled with passengers abandoning the already heavily-subsidized short-haul routes of ailing airlines, who will eventually break under the same pressures that are hurting the trucking industry.

As for the newspapers, well, they've been having a rough time of it already.

According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

The cost of delivery skyrocketing and the profitability of doing so collapsing? Gee, I wonder what will happen.

Update: Reader Thrill notes that a refinery "outage" can be a bit euphemistic.


Behold, our infrastructure.

The News You Need To Know

The Rodina's mighty ground forces.

A Russian tank crashed through a villager's house after the crew stopped to buy more vodka at a nearby shop.

The Russian army says the tank must have been broken. Cell phone camera footage shows the driver laughing and clutching bottles.

Meanwhile, in England, tragedy:

A farmer has died after an incident with a cow on his property.

"No more details about the farmer's death have been released," says the story, but the cow, you will be relieved to know, has been destroyed.

Humanely.

A Joke From The Rathergate Era

Politicians lie, while journalists merely "make mistakes".

That worldview was reinforced by last night's Hardball, as a guest discussed the notorious New York Times piece about John McCain:

"That means either John McCain is lying, or the New York Times got the story wrong."

I can think of at least one other possibility.

Stop Emitting Carbon or Giant Snakes Will Eat Your Children

USA Today:

As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps released Wednesday.

In fact, that isn't what's suggested by the USGS maps at all. Here they are:

 
The first map shows "areas of the continental United States with climate matching that of the pythons' native range in Asia". The second map uses "projected climate in the continental United States in the year 2100, based on global warming models". There's little difference between the two maps - they make it absolutely clear that, in theory, "giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA" right now. The only significant change climate change, assuming it will occur as the model predicts, adds to the equation is a dramatic expansion of the "maybe" area in the lower Midwest.

Of course, you should take even that with a grain of salt: the "yes" areas are, in reality, also "maybe" areas, since these maps are based entirely on climate, with no variables for whether or not the animals would have the food and shelter they require to survive. Right now, they're only known to have established a foothold in the Florida Everglades.

In other words, the USA Today story is so misleading that it's difficult to conclude it was written for any other purpose than frightening people, not about Burmese pythons, but about "climate change".

ScienceDaily took this same story and felt no need to distort the facts. This is almost as stupid as the "Bangkok sinking under rising seas" lunacy.

Facts Are Not Democracies

Take a look at this AP story from Jeannine Aversa regarding the economic stimulus package:

An increasing number of economists, however, believe the country has already fallen into its first recession since 2001, and they are simply hopeful the rescue package will limit the damage. Most people - 61 percent - say the economy is now in a recession, according to the AP-Ipsos poll.

We're told that "an increasing number of economists" believe it (certainly so), but we're given a very different piece of data to complete the thought. Not to say there isn't currently or isn't going to be a recesion, but how would 61% of the general population know? Have 61% of people been laid off? Do 61% of people have any personal knowledge of the state of the economy whatsoever, or even know where to start looking?

Of course not, but most of the people who would know seem to think it'd be irresponsible to make assertions of fact at this point, and this was much easier than calling around for a quote from someone who'd actually know what they're talking about. You can bet that 61% of people, if asked to define a recession, most certainly could not do so. This is a problem that was noted in 2001, as well, by The Motley Fool's David Gardner.

"Recession" is defined as a decline in real gross domestic product for two consecutive quarters. Many people out there today who are tossing around "that 'R' word" are not doing so with a clear sense of what it actually means.....Next time you hear the word -- any time you hear the word -- quiz the speaker. Go ahead. Just say, "Well, Mike... and how do you define 'recession,' exactly?"

I suspect that 61% of journalists can't define it, either. Since the media provides the entirety of most people's knowledge about the economy, one would think it raises an ethical concern to present a poll of media consumers as evidence that media claims are true, despite the fact that for all intents and purposes, most of us are roughly as capable of constructing an informed opinion on the subject as Ozzy Osbourne.

Not that there's no place for that polling data, there is, but it is not in economic analysis.

"Is this the work of a serial arsonist? Police say no, our producers say yes."

Everything is 9/11, Speculative Analysis is Crap: A Counter-Review of 'Cloverfield'

Earlier this year, I went over the blatant insanity revolving around the release of the film 300, with Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers like AlterNet's Steve Burgess and Slate's Dana Stevens having thoroughly convinced themselves that the film's release was a propaganda tool designed to lead us into a war with Iran. Burgess compared the film to Triumph of the Will and expressed his confusion at why the Greeks wanted to repel the invading army (an interesting insight into his politics), while Stevens, apparently tapping into some sort of alternate dimension consisting of pure hysteria, not only referenced The Eternal Jew, but claimed that the film defamed elephants, lesbians, and the disfigured by associating them with the Persians. Neither of these beetle-heads seemed concerned that the "graphic novel" on which 300 was based had been released years before 9/11, that the film was created to be nothing if not faithful to the original work, and that it was all based on the story of a confrontation between ancient Iran and the West which did, in fact, happen thousands of years before the existence of Islam.

Stevens, it turns out, is still be paid to go to the movies, woe unto the clerk who sold her a ticket to Cloverfield. The sad thing is that while I haven't even seen the movie yet, and fully expect it to be as bad as monster movies always are (that's what makes them good), I don't need to. The problems with this review scream right off the page, with Stevens once again referencing her political frustrations before the first paragraph ends.

The concept: A monster takes Manhattan, Godzilla-style (or maybe al-Qaida-style, but we'll get to that in a second). Instead of witnessing the havoc from the traditional omniscient point of view, we see everything in real time from a handheld camcorder, wielded by a group of panicked kids fleeing the beast. It's The Blair Witch Project all over again, complete with the logic holes (at what point does recording your life become more important than running for it?) and Handycam-induced nausea.

You know, that's a good question. At what point do people in grave danger come to their senses and run for their lives? I suppose we could ask any of the hundreds of people who stand there filming as tornadoes bear down on their homes every year, or people who stood in the path of the 2004 tsunami with their cameras rolling. In fact, people do this all the time. This isn't a "logic hole", it's exactly what you'd expect to see. In any case, cut past some snide remarks to the meat of the madness:

As the Statue of Liberty's head lands in the middle of a screaming crowd, the Woolworth building collapses in a cloud of dust - the most direct 9/11 reference I've seen in a movie that wasn't explicitly about the attacks.

I won't reveal in detail the fate of the six partygoers who flee, spangled dresses and all, through the panicked streets toward a military evacuation site (though I will note that their fates are more varied and unpredictable than in most movies of this type). I'm more interested in how Cloverfield plays on 9/11 anxieties - not in the way one "plays out" issues in therapy, but in the way one plays a video game. 2008 has already seen a notable uptick in America's historical eagerness to eradicate New York in our imagination. Besides Cloverfield and I Am Legend, there's the upcoming History Channel special Life After People, whose ubiquitous poster shows a crumbling Brooklyn Bridge overgrown with vines. As this fine piece in the Guardian points out, Americans seem almost soothed by replaying the fantasy of our flagship city in ruins. What's that about?

In a quote from the press notes, Abrams says, "We live in a time of great fear. Having a movie that is about something as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe." Cloverfield's entertainment value remains to be determined over its opening weekend. For viewers in the same demographic as Rob and his buddies, I suspect it will be a big hit. But maybe its re-imagining of 9/11 as the ultimate buzzkill is a little too safe. The movie may be the first to repackage the events of Sept. 11 as pure entertainment. It's certainly the first to use those events as part of a viral marketing hook, in a spooky untitled trailer that premiered before last summer's Transformers. Whoa, that would be intense, if lower Manhattan was suddenly destroyed by some terrible, faceless agent of evil. Oh, wait.

Stevens seems absolutely bent on the idea that Cloverfield is, quite literally, not simply a monster movie that evokes 9/11, but, in fact, about 9/11. Sure, and Snakes on a Plane is actually about United Airlines Flight 93. If True Lies, a film about Islamist terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons, were released today, instead of in 1994, Stevens would call it a manifestation of 9/11 and our paranoia about Islamist terror. She's the Rudy Giuliani of film reviewers.

In real life, Hollywood would most likely be afraid to release the film, for fear of the political backlash from, well, from people who read Dana Stevens reviews. As the great Mark Steyn noted, when Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was released in 2002, Hollywood had neatly cropped out the Islamists, and replaced them with politically-correct enemies - neo-Nazis.

Imagine it's 1943, you're at a Warner Bros script meeting about Casablanca, and Jack Warner says: "I like it. But do the bad guys have to be Germans? How about if we re-set it in Massachusetts and make them sinister British neo-Redcoats?"

Stevens is looking increasingly detached from reality, here. The Cloverfield scene with the head of the Statue of Liberty landing in the street? A direct and obvious homage to Escape From New York. You remember that movie? From 1981, two decades before 9/11?

A single exception, of course, doesn't invalidate her larger point, but the fact is that 9/11 was a disaster so vast in scope that virtually any misfortune that occurs in New York City, to people in a skyscraper, or to anyone in any city anywhere can be twisted into some kind of a metaphor for 9/11. Aircraft hijacking? 9/11. Burning building? 9/11. Subway tunnel collapse? 9/11. Stock market crash? 9/11. Your flight's cancelled and you have to wait at the airport? Oh. My. God. 9/11!

It's not just Escape From New York, either. There's no shortage of films about utter destruction and mayhem in New York City, and much of it cannot be a metaphor for 9/11, because the films containing the scenes were made well before it ever happened. Deep Impact and Independence Day put it right on their posters, just to make certain we see it.

 
One can't escape the conclusion that if the original Planet of the Apes were released today, Stevens would, seeing the legendary final scene with the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, jump out of her chair and proclaim that the entire film was a metaphor for 9/11, and that the apes were therefore some racist interpretation of Muslims. Cloverfield is not "the first to repackage the events of Sept. 11 as pure entertainment", it's merely one of the first films since 9/11 that decided not to tapdance around that kind of imagery.

The "fine" Guardian article Stevens references, authored by Shane Danielsen, is a victim of this flawed reasoning.

Watching it, you're struck by how American cinema is still struggling to process the events of 9/11. Oliver Stone's World Trade Centre was a creditable effort but this, despite its genre trappings, is probably the definitive filmic take on the attack on Manhattan so far...The visual cues are hardly subtle ones: in the shadowy distance the Chrysler Building collapses upon itself like a sandcastle; the streets are engulfed in clouds of dust; reams of paper flutter earthwards from the exposed shells of skyscrapers.

Using this method, we may as well be talking about the destruction at Nakitomi Plaza in Die Hard. Simpler explanation: That's just what it looks like when a building is destroyed. There are only so many ways for buildings to blow up and/or fall down, and they're all going to look quite a lot like 9/11, just as any urban firefight is to going to resemble the ones we hear about in Iraq, because, as a rule, groups of soldiers emptying automatic weapons at a target all tend to look more or less alike.

Sadly, even the central thesis of the Guardian article, another point on which Stevens leans heavily, falls flat.

But America also has its destruction myth, inevitably set in New York, whose reduction to rubble both confirms that city's pre-eminence and signals that the stakes are high. The spectacle of NY landmarks (the Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron Building) being totalled is as much a recurring obsession for American filmmakers as among the higher echelons of al-Qaida. I can't recall another culture - even the Sumerians, no strangers to fatalism - which has rehearsed its own extinction with such apparent relish.

In fact, I was quite surprised. I set out writing this assuming that this theory would hold true, but rifling through lists of various disaster movies, I'm startled at how many are set in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities. Some highly apocalyptic films, like Children of Men, and that terrible one with the dragons, whose name I can't recall, are set right in merry old England. V for Vendetta, of course, culminates in a 9/11-like scene of Parliament itself being destroyed. (What are we rehearsing there?) The most prominent films featuring the destruction of New York City don't neglect to take (or at least threaten to take) the rest of the world with them: Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, for example.

If New York City isn't overrepresented in disaster films, then perhaps it's just that scenes of the destruction of Manhattan are the ones we find most memorable, because it's the skyline we're most familiar with. As the effective capital of the planet and the largest city in the most wealthy and powerful nation that's ever existed in all of human history, New York City is naturally the most popular site for, not just American disaster movies, but American movies, period. I suspect that the the biggest offenders in this department are not films about apocalyptic disasters, but rather romantic comedies.

Don't believe me? Guys, go ahead. See how many romantic comedies you can name off the top of your head that aren't set in the five boroughs. (Women have an unfair advantage in this contest, in that they may actually watch romantic comedies.) I can name three (and naming all three Father of the Bride movies doesn't count), and my family owned a video rental store, for God's sake.

It's almost as if we're soothed by replaying some kind of fantasy, set in our flagship city. Oh, wait.

For bonus crazy: Religion Dispatches' Gabriel McKee takes it in another direction entirely.

Many reviewers have made the obvious connection to 9/11, and it's certainly true that the monster's initial rampage eerily evokes that day's images. But there's a deeper level to it. At one point, the characters are caught in the middle of a firefight between the monster and a National Guard regiment. Make no mistake: this is a movie about the invisibility of the Iraq war.

Yeah, because it's not been on every news channel, every day, since the year before it began. It's invisible.

Update: Reader Kevin weighs in:

The "terrible one with the dragons" would be Reign of Fire, starring a pre-Batman Begins Christian Bale.

I should be ashamed that I know the answer. I should be even more ashamed that I actually own the DVD.

Yep, that's the one, with London burning on the cover. Says the Wikipedia entry, it "was considered only a modest failure".

Frederal Power

Fred Thompson is campaigning heavily in Iowa, releasing a compelling 17 minute video available on YouTube and touring the state, with Zogby polling reflecting his success, a 4% bump exceeding the margin of error and tying him with surprising 3rd place John McCain. Thompson isn't afraid of the media, either.

In referring to me, she reported "he doesn't like modern campaigning, isn't interested in running for President, and will not be devastated" if he doesn't win.

Below is a transcript of what I actually said in response to a question by a local Burlington resident which was the basis of the reporter's story.

It is clear that there are those in the media who will exact a high price for candor and from those whom they consider to be insufficiently ambitious. But it is with increasing amazement that we see that those who are willing to slant or leave out important parts of a story to make their point.

If a candidate succumbs to this he will be reduced to nothing more than a sound bite machine.

As for me I am going to continue to say exactly what is in my heart and is on my mind and give straight and honest answers to those who ask straight and honest questions.

Incidentally, the audience in Burlington broke into applause in the middle of my answer. The reporter wouldn't know that because she wasn't even there.

For pro-war libertarian conservatives, Fred Thompson remains the candidate of good conscience. He supports school choice, wants to increase troop pay, has publicly slammed the NEA, wants to dissolve the IRS, backs missile defense, opposes gun control, supports federalism and strict constructionist legal interpretations, condemns sanctuary city policies, and he's open about all of it. Aside from the McCain-Feingold issue, he's a great candidate, and he deserves your support, even if you don't feel his campaign style is aggressive enough. I'm not the least bit deterred by his calm, personable attitude or criticisms of his campaign; it's different, and that's for the best, because if Clinton and Romney are running "typical" campaigns, we need to rethink what we respond to. Professor Reynolds nailed it:

Thompson is running the kind of campaign - substantive, policy-laden, not based on gimmicks or sound-bites - that pundits and journalists say they want, but he's getting no credit for it from the people who claim that's what they want. It's like in Tootsie when Dustin Hoffman tries doing the things he's heard women say they want from men, only to discover that they don't really want those things at all.

I do, though. Thompson is the sane candidate. Consider that my formal endorsement, and hope for a stronger-than-expected finish in Iowa.

Update: Rumors of the campaign's imminent death are greatly exaggerated.

GOP presidential hopeful Fred Thompson said in an in-studio interview with KCCI-TV in Des Moines that there is no truth to rumors that his campaign will fold before New Hampshire if he doesn't have a strong showing in Iowa.

"That is absolutely made up out of whole cloth," said the former U.S. Senator from Tennessee.

Thompson said a rival campaign was likely the source of that rumor.

Thompson touched on his plan for strengthening border security to prevent terrorist attacks, and his plan to simplify the tax code.

Probably the same guys threatening churches for supporting Huckabee.

...and that's why they're estranged.

The estranged wife of Paul McCartney, Heather Mills, explains how we can save the world:

Mills focused on the environmental impact of deforestation and livestock on global warming, citing figures from animal rights group Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (Viva!).

"When (Viva!) told me it was 18 percent, that's more than all global transport, I was in shock. Airplanes only bring 3 percent, while they are being picked on with taxes," she said Monday.

"We are the only species that drinks another person's milk, so why aren't we drinking rat's milk, or dog's milk, or cat's milk, that's how crazy it is," she said.

I think she meant "another species' milk", but really, one can be sure cats would drink cow's milk as junk food, if they had thumbs. All kinds of crazy things would happen if animals had thumbs and a basic grasp of tool use.

Mills, around whom an almost unlimited variety of bizarre stories swirls, may be entirely serious.

She said: "There are many other kinds of milk available. Why don't we try drinking rat's milk and dog's milk?"

"I'm not telling people to go vegan overnight. That's not really a possibility for most people."

"But if they stop drinking their cow's milk lattes maybe this sort of thing won't have to happen."

The solution, obviously, is to eat more beef. We must destroy the cows. Why she felt compelled to rip off the Simpsons for her planet-worship ritual is unclear.

Also, get a load of this completely unbiased caption the Washington Post is displaying beneath an Associated Press photo:


Nevermind the "insane homeless lady" pose. She's highlighting "the fact that meat, dairy and fish are principal causes of global environmental collapse"?

No Charges Pressed For Crime Not Committed

The first time I heard this story, it sounded like there had to be more to it.

Prosecutors have dropped the case against a TV reporter who was arrested carrying a loaded gun near a high school while working on a story on school violence, authorities said Tuesday.

Jeffrey Weinsier of WPLG, an ABC network affiliate, was arrested last month after police said he carried a weapon onto the grounds of Miami Central High School and refused to cross the street when asked by an officer.

A cameraman caught the encounter on videotape, which the state attorney's office used in deciding not to pursue the charges, Assistant State Attorney Maggie Gerson wrote in a memo released Tuesday.

Weinsier had been charged with armed trespass on school property, possession of a weapon, violation of carrying a concealed weapon and resisting arrest without violence. But he was not on school grounds when police approached him and ordered him to leave, Gerson said.

Weinsier had gotten a concealed carry permit and begun carrying a firearm after receiving death threats for reporting on unsanitary conditions at local restaurants.

"From day one, I knew that I had been on the public sidewalk outside the school," Weinsier said Tuesday. "I knew the law clearly. This is false arrest."

The reporter said he has filed a formal complaint with the Miami-Dade Schools Police Department and is considering legal action.

The initial arrest had nothing to do with his carrying a loaded gun. The police force had originally asserted that a "trespassing" Weinsier had stepped on the grass but that the media was merely failing to show that footage. The actual tape showed an officer telling Weinsier to leave the public sidewalk and grappling with his cameraman, trying to force him to stop filming and claiming that it was at the request of the school board. When Weinsier made it clear that he would not leave, he was handcuffed, arrested simply for refusing to leave the sidewalk in front of the school. He was also mocked by the Vancouver Sun and other papers, who unfairly implied he was carrying the gun to add color to his story on school violence.

Specifically, the story was about an insane Islamic math teacher who rushed a bunch of military police shouting "Death to America" in an apparent suicide attempt. Why a man who had recently done time in a mental institution was teaching math in a public school is unclear. No wonder the school board didn't want reporters around.

WE MUST ACT NOW!

"BANGKOK SINKING UNDER RISING SEAS", reads a terrifying Associated Press headline.

At Bangkok's watery gates, Buddhist monks cling to a shrinking spit of land around their temple as they wage war against the relentlessly rising sea. Jutting above the water line just ahead in the Gulf of Thailand are remnants of a village that has already slipped beneath the sea.

Can't somebody help these people? They're drowning, drowning like polar bears!

Experts say these waters, aided by sinking land, threaten to submerge Thailand's sprawling capital of more than 7 million people within this century.

...wait, which is it? Are the monks waging a war against rising seas or their own sinking island? Your answers, right after some additional fear-mongering:

The loss of Bangkok would destroy the country's economic engine and a major hub for regional tourism.

"If the heart of Thailand is under water everything will stop," says Smith Dharmasaroja, chair of the government's Committee of National Disaster Warning Administration. "We don't have time to move our capital in the next 15-20 years. We have to protect our heart now, and it's almost too late."

"DESTROY!" "EVERYTHING WILL STOP!" "PROTECT OUR HEART!" "IT'S ALMOST TOO LATE!"

The still expanding megapolis rests about 3 1/2 to 5 feet above the nearby gulf, although some areas already lie below sea level. The gulf's waters have been rising by about a tenth of an inch a year, about the same as the world average, says Anond Snidvongs, a leading scientist in the field.

But the city, built on clay rather than bedrock, has also been sinking at a far faster pace of up to 4 inches annually as its teeming population and factories pump some 2.5 million cubic tons of cheaply priced water, legally and illegally, out of its aquifers. This compacts the layers of clay and causes the land to sink.

"You notice that every highway, road and building which has no foundation pilings is sinking," says Smith. "We feel that with the ground sinking and the sea water rising, Bangkok will be under sea water in the next 15 to 20 years - permanently."

Bear in mind that Bangkok is not a particularly ancient capital: It was founded in the 1760's, making it about a generation or two younger than New Orleans. Ironically, it has roughly the same problems: Bad engineering in an attempt to grow a city in a swamp makes the area prone to all sorts of crazy flooding.

If you look at the article, they admit plainly that "rising seas" would cause Bankgok to start slipping beneath the waves in 420-600 years, more than long enough for the cities' natural growth to relocate everyone well away from the shoreline with no special government action, and over twice as long as the city has existed to date.

The sinking process, on the other hand, without the aid of rising seas, would submerge the city's ground level in only a couple decades. The difference in timeframe claimed by climate change is nearly statistically insignificant. The human activity that is dooming Bangkok is primarily being perpetrated in Bangkok, and whether it sinks "in this century" or not will have nothing whatsoever to do with climate change, it will be in the hands of Thai engineers.

However, perspective and reality does not get in the way of a sensational "climate change" story:

More than one-tenth of the world's population, or 643 million people, live in low-lying areas at risk from climate change, say U.S. and European experts.

How many of them are actually sinking?

"There is no one single solution to respond to climate change," says Anond, whose team is putting forward recommendations based on several scenarios. "We have to start doing something about this right now."

No, we don't. We can wait a century, and, at current rates, the seas will still not have risen a single foot. If Bangkok weren't sucking it's aquifer dry and wrecking their natural drainage system, we could wait three, and the current city still wouldn't be under water.

Facts Checked

I guess the New York Times is trying to start a race war.

A front-page article on Saturday about the troubled life of Carol A. Gotbaum, a Manhattan woman who died in police custody at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, misstated the specialty of Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, who was hired by Ms. Gotbaum's family to conduct an autopsy. (The error was repeated in some editions yesterday in an article about her funeral.) Dr. Wecht is a forensic pathologist, not a psychologist. Also, the article on Saturday gave an incorrect spelling in some editions for the school her children once attended and misspelled part of the name of Ms. Gotbaum's former employer, a department store company, and misidentified its country of origin. The school is Rodeph Sholom, not Shalom, and the department store is the House of Fraser, not Frasier, and it is Scottish, not English.

...but, you know, the rest is fine. Heh.

Needing Attention

If you've ever wondered just what lengths some people will go to to make themselves feel important, here you go.

She had, she said, survived the terror attack on the World Trade Center despite having been badly burned when the plane crashed into the upper floors of the south tower.

Crawling through the chaos and carnage on the 78th floor that morning, she said, she encountered a dying man who handed her his inscribed wedding ring, which she later returned to his widow.

Her own life was saved, she said, by a selfless volunteer who stanched the flames on her burning clothes before she was helped down the stairs. It was a journey she said she had the strength to make because she kept thinking of a beautiful white dress she was to wear at her coming marriage ceremony to a man named Dave.

As a matter of history, Head's account made her one of only 19 survivors who had been at or above the point of impact when the planes hit.

The family and friends of the man to whom she claimed to be engaged say they have never heard of Tania Head and view the relationship she describes with the man, who truly died in the north tower, as an impossibility.

A spokeswoman for Merrill Lynch & Company, where she told people she worked at the time of the terror attack, said the company had no record of employing a Tania Head.

And few people, it seems, who embraced the gripping immediacy and pain of her account ever asked the name of the man whose ring she had returned, or that of the hospital where she was treated, or the identities of the people she met with in the south tower on the morning of 9/11.

In recent weeks, The New York Times sought to interview Head about her experiences on 9/11 because she had, in other settings, presented a poignant account of survival and loss. But she canceled three scheduled interviews, citing her privacy and emotional turmoil, and declined to provide details to corroborate her story. During a telephone conversation on Tuesday, she would not explain her reticence, saying only that she had not filed any claims with the federal Victim Compensation Fund. "I have done nothing illegal," Head said.

Trust no one, etc. I'm reminded of the deeply disturbing story of Jamie Reynolds, a journalism student who had fooled Southern Illinois University's Daily Egyptian newspaper with letters from an eight-year-old girl whose mother had died and whose father had been sent to Iraq. The hoax went on unchallenged for two years, with Reynolds finding a man to visit the Daily Egyptian office pretending to be the soldier, and even finding a little girl to play the part, telling her she was going to star in a documentary. Nobody would bother to check it out until, perhaps in an attempt to end the charade or perhaps just trying to whip up a final burst of drama, the "father" was reported KIA. Of course, no report of his death could be found, and when caught, Reynolds claimed that she had fallen in love with Daily Egyptian reporter Mike Brenner, who she said had tricked her into whipping up the story. "Jesus Christ, that is completely not true," said Brenner. In another account, he notes that he thought he had taught the little girl how to do algebra over the phone, but now understood why she picked it up so fast: The little girl was Reynolds, speaking in a little girl's voice.

Brenner, a sportswriter, wouldn't have known who to call to even begin checking out the story...and that's exactly how things like this end up in your newspaper.

Dramatic Story Ripped From Last Century's Headlines

If the ice caps were to melt, shorelines would flood, warns the Associated Press.

We know, OK? Waterworld was made in, what, 1995?

Ultimately, rising seas will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be slowly erased.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old money Wall Street and the new money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp the locations of big city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians - the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place on the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Texas and Florida favored by budget-conscious students on Spring Break.

If these dunderheads think that's what makes America what it is, we've found a large part of the problem, but nevermind that: Shorelines are inherently impermanent. Old beaches are submerged or eroded, new ones form. Entire cities get washed into the sea, and this single meter rise, if it happens at all, is projected to happen over a period of a century. If we get a century of use out of the buildings that we're putting up in coastal areas now, we're doing pretty well.