news hole

One day David Brody of Christian Broadcasting Network shows up on Meet the Press, but Amy Goodman of Democracy Now never does.

Just one snip from a very rich pressthink post by Jay Rosen.

No Sex, please

Multi-National Force - Iraq established this YouTube channel to give viewers around the world a "boots on the ground" perspective of Operation Iraqi Freedom from those who are fighting it.

Video clips document action as it appeared to personnel on the ground and in the air as it was shot. We will only edit video clips for time, security reasons, and/or overly disturbing or offensive images.

What you will see on this channel in the coming months:
- Combat action
- Interesting, eye-catching footage
- Interaction between Coalition troops and the Iraqi populace.
- Teamwork between Coalition and Iraqi troops in the fight against terror.

What we will NOT post on this channel:
- Profanity
- Sexual content
- Overly graphic, disturbing or offensive material
- Footage that mocks Coalition Forces, Iraqi Security Forces or the citizens of Iraq.

Speaking of teamwork:

When Iraqi imams sit down with prisoners at a US detention center in Iraq to discuss Islam, they are working for a subsidiary of Global Innovation (GI) Partners LLP, a California- and London-based private equity firm that claims to have "$2 billion in capital under management." Truthout

Steaming past Macedonia

US rockets up 12 places in press freedom rankings - to 36th in the world. via Digby.

Last year's performance was noted here.

Relief for troubled assets! Just in Time!

From big Wall Street houses to small community banks, executives have expressed an interest in signing up for the bailout. wsj

Let's make that the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. So many of God's assets are troubled. So little time.

The general public has bristled at the notion of risking $700 billion in taxpayer funds to address mistakes on Wall Street, and many constituents have urged their elected officials to vote against the plan. nyt

One odd thing: The WSJ headline is*:

Crisis Hits Europe's Banks
As U.S. Seals Bailout Deal

But the story doesn't mention European banks a single time.

Guess we're all a little woozy.

[*The story was later reduced to "U.S. Seals Bailout Deal" - "seals" still sounds bit ominous]

As Obama noted after the debate, McCain didn't mention the middle class. Nor do these stories. Perhaps McCain is actually speaking the mainstream argot, and Obama, not.

Does the WSJ grok the difference between investing and wagering?

Among the measures announced Friday, the Treasury temporarily extended insurance, similar to that on bank deposits, to money-market mutual funds and the Federal Reserve said it would buy commercial paper from the funds. The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, banned short-selling of 799 financial stocks -- a financial bet that they will fall in price -- for at least 10 days. And the Treasury said it -- along with mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, recently taken over by the government -- would step up their purchases of mortgage-backed securities to help keep the housing market afloat.

The most ambitious part of the government plan is to create a new entity to purchase impaired assets from financial firms.

The Murdockal WSJ immediately loses track of the analysis, scratching its head over how it would work.

People like Ellen Brown are asking questions we are not hearing from the corporate media:

Treasury bills are the I.O.U.s of the federal government. We the taxpayers are on the hook for the Fed’s “enhanced liquidity facilities,” . . .. What’s going on here? Why not let the free market work? Bankruptcy courts know how to sort out assets and reorganize companies so they can operate again. Why the extraordinary measures for Fannie, Freddie and AIG?

The answer may have less to do with saving the insurance business, the housing market, or the Chinese investors clamoring for a bailout than with the greatest Ponzi scheme in history...

How's that, Ellen?

...the greatest Ponzi scheme in history, one that is holding up the entire private global banking system. What had to be saved at all costs was not housing or the dollar but the financial derivatives industry; and the precipice from which it had to be saved was an “event of default” that could have collapsed a quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble, a collapse that could take the entire global banking system down with it.

...snip...

“The point everyone misses,” wrote economist Robert Chapman a decade ago, “is that buying derivatives is not investing. It is gambling, insurance and high stakes bookmaking. Derivatives create nothing.” link

Add: Phil Gramm: uno, dos.

NewsPorn

The US media has apparently learned nothing from the hot anal action it provided leading up to the invasion of Iraq, in view of its Pre-K-level coverage of the conflict in Georgia/Ossetia.






A couple of salubrious correctives:

CounterSpin - Interview with Helen Cobban. (See also this earlier bit).

Informant here, here, here, here, and passim.

It would be ungracious of this blog,

having celebrated Mr. Friedman here on more than one occasion for his stalwart billionaire bravado, his goody two-shoes sadism, his facile one flat suck-on-this world of dyslexic olive oil and so much more not to note the latest in a series of panegyrics honoring his moustachioed meatbath, this, from Greenwald:

Tom Friedman doesn't understand why America is unpopular in the world

Losers in Beijing

Those who are unable to join President George W. Bush at the Olympics in Beijing might console themselves with a film that will probably be worth its weight in Olympic Gold, and more than that long after these games are forgotten. See Lost in Beijing and let me know if it doesn't offer more China than you'll ever get from NBC and its multi-tiered affiliates.

The plot involves the mutually assured destruction of two marriages, two claims to paternity, several assertions of mastery (boss, husband, player, trickster) executed with geometric exactitude. Everybody loses as the lives of families unravel along with the city and the larger entity in which it once meant something.

Pieces of the city get sort of not seen by a casual, target-less, restless, jerky camera. It displaces or maybe un-emplaces. You get the piece of something without the foundation shot that sets it within a graspable context. The piece is usually nothing worth seeing, It's more like what you ignore before you get to what you mean to see, which is pushed out. It's a bullying sort of unscenery.

Bullying is big in this film. So is Sino-tchatchke. Characters keep looking for something that keeps not being there. A woman is raped by her boss, the rape is witnessed by her husband, the rapist dreams of finally becoming a father, he ends up paying his cuckhold for the privilege of sham paternity, wives subvert partners and get their deals in writing. They stumble through festoons of hopeless banners, wall hangings, and objets d'art. As the opening scene tells us, you are in for trouble when you hire a prostitute and then feel cheated when she's not carrying a torch. For you.

The film bears traces of censor bullies - 53 of them - which could account for that jerky sense of the camera's not quite being able to see what it's trying to shoot, or shoot what it's trying to see. But I think that's serendipitous -- the censor doing to the film what the film shows China doing to itself. What a rich, mindful, distracted gaze it offers.

For their pains, the film's producers are barred from working for two years.

Data dada

Hey now, another dadaist blog (if that's what this is) entitled Amy:

High Quality And Fashionable Design Ceramic Jar

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But it's not at all the same thing as Emilyshlomoeme. On Amy, the disruption of the standardized "conversation" appears driven not by some authorial intervention, but by some spasmodic tagging mechanism that apparently thinks it fine to just punch holes in anything resembling prose, and add links to seemingly unrelated business propositions:

Caesar Salad Southwest Style

Jalapeno Croutons

2 Tbs Jalapenos, seeded car insurance insurance quote diced. If fresh jalapenos are not available you can use canned Macaroni & Cheese for a milder taste try substituting canned green chilies.

tsp Cayenne Pepper
1 tsp Salt
2 Cups Milk
1 Cups Cornmeal
Vegetable Oil for cooking

In a medium sauce cheap, reliable website hosting combine the jalapenos, cayenne, salt and milk and bring to a boil. [link ]

or

Come On In - The Water Is Fine

The Bible uses water as a symbol of the Holy Spirit mesothilioma the Word of God. We know that without water there can be no living matter as we know it on the earth. Water is essential. Go without water for a day or so and you will see just how important water is to the human body. The same thing is ture concerning spiritual things.

Without spiritual water all things remain in a mortgages loans state. [link]

"Unrelated" is hardly the word. The linkage, burrowing up from below (or, blasting through, like a shotgun perforating a television screen from behind), connects to the drive to sell. (Can we simply recognize, with Zizookian aplomb, that Freud's death drive is not unrelated to Capitalism's sell drive?) The irrelevant has never seemed so germane.

What's arbitrary is the "content." Amy delaminates the myth that blogs are composed by individuals sharing their passions. Under a certain lens, the New York Times might not look entirely dissimilar.

love what you've done with your cognitive reduction system

Note to self:

If corporate media and academic JSTOR*izers work to place human experience on a pay-per-view basis, NPR music programming works to ensure that our open range aural worldview consists of mincing pissant bullshit.

*Did you know...

• JSTOR includes 1,856,206 full-length articles across 47 disciplines [that you can't read].
• There are 1,387,437 book reviews in JSTOR.
• The oldest content in the JSTOR archive was published in 1665.
• JSTOR is active in Facebook.

The NYT understands Politics as JSTOR comprehends Open Access, Merrill Lynch grasps Credit, Countrywide has mastered mortgages, Comcast delights in...

At least three USians thought last night's debate offered no signs of infantilism or trivialization: Adam Nagourney, Jeff Zeleny, and

I-thought-the-questions-were-excellent

David Brooks.

Brain fair and balanced, but dead

The River finds The Times working on a low-pulp diet with regard to failing to have covered Winter Soldier.

FAIR finds The Times' reasons for not having covered Winter Soldier virtually insane on arrival.

The more The Times works to excuse itself, the more brittle is its hypothesis of being something other than an unnecessarily elaborate weather vane.

panopticon of the asinine

Thivai recalls Brian Springer's Spin - an open site of media archaeology of the 90s.

TV might oughta be this entelechy

Much thanks to whatever apocalyptic beast is driving Twitter and other compressions of voice and data for providing a mutation:

War is the father of all conversational impasse

This week, NPR's morning edition is doing a 5-year-review of the war in Iraq - sober, thoughtful, involving interviews with guys who sound truly humane and heroic.

Then there is the enterprise as told by veterans of Iraq, which makes NPR seem parochial, and offers a war run like My Lai turned into systematic policy:

Something else we were actually encouraged to do, almost with a wink and a nudge, was to carry drop weapons or, by my third tour, drop shovels. What that basically is, is we would carry these weapons or shovels with us, because in case we accidentally did shoot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body and make them look like they were an insurgent.

he watched the commander, who had given us the order to shoot anyone on the street, shoot two old ladies that were walking and carrying vegetables.

Winter Solder

Winter Solder 2

Winter Soldier reprise

The movie

[update:] Jeff Cohen finds a validation of new media in Winter Soldier. via

If the medium is massage

media are lobotomy.

Thanks to Jeneane via Chris Locke for the brainblowing treatise.

We see the shinola, where's the shit?

Kia on the sad state of book reviewing; on what it means to educate the book audience; on Cyril Connolly and Marvin Mudrick; on the stupefaction of stupid fiction; on the reasons she reads; on the relation of a news timeframe to a literary timeframe; on Mudrick's method of reviewing and his kind of good judgment; on remembering that "nobody gives a shit about you"; on academic "collegiality":

The great virtue is collegiality, the maintenance of this specious chumminess among people who secretly and violently loathe each other. What brings them together is saying shit about the stupidity of students and grad students and (I suppose) of those untenured phantoms who roam from campus to campus, living on Top Ramen, doing the actual teaching.

on preferring British book reviews to the USian species; on the wellsprings of USian essay tedium:

in order to say anything critical about anything and keep your mass audience you have to play the self-deprecating curmudgeon. “Oh, don’t you mind Uncle Frank. The Katzenjammer Kids set fire to his underpants again.”

on a certain parallel between contemporary essayistic (/blogistic) finery and the somnambulent procession of 19th century Augustanism; on getting "a pretty strong sense of the difference between shit and shinola," among other things.

I've not been reading many blogs lately. And whatever happens on Twitter can stay on Twitter. Who has time for Facebook? But this is like suddenly being hauled out of the ClichéoSphere with a Swiftean smack of sanity. I warmly recommend the whole thing.

Examplary displacement

Britney Spears has "mental issues," manager says

This bit of anxiety copyright MSNBC

David Lynch, Man of Mystery

remerciements a Tony