A must watch

This is a must-watch new homemade trailer for the movie The Shining

Katrina aftermath in the media

As one would assume, newspapers around the country did not run headlines rebutting their own previous headlines of atrocities and murders. Katrina was over, so media moved on to the next story which would sell newspapers or boost viewership. They did not report how they got facts wrong. Except the newspaper where Katrina is still news: the Times-Picayune

Times-Picayune
That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.
...
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan said authorities had confirmed only four murders in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina - making it a typical week in a city that anticipated more than 200 homicides this year. Jordan expressed outrage at reports from many national media outlets that suffering flood victims had turned into mobs of unchecked savages.

"I had the impression that at least 40 or 50 murders had occurred at the two sites," he said. "It's unfortunate we saw these kinds of stories saying crime had taken place on a massive scale when that wasn't the case. And they (national media outlets) have done nothing to follow up on any of these cases, they just accepted what people (on the street) told them. ... It's not consistent with the highest standards of journalism."

Let's blame environmental groups

Via Talking Points Memo:

Clarion-Ledger:
Federal officials appear to be seeking proof to blame the flood of New Orleans on environmental groups, documents show.

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained a copy of an internal e-mail the U.S. Department of Justice sent out this week to various U.S. attorneys' offices: 'Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.'

Beauty products from the skin of executed Chinese prisoners

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The beauty products from the skin of executed Chinese prisoners:
A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered.

Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot. The agents say some of the company's products have been exported to the UK, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts is 'traditional' and nothing to 'make such a big fuss about'.
...
He suggested that the use of skin and other tissues harvested from executed prisoners was not uncommon. "In China it is considered very normal and I was very shocked that western countries can make such a big fuss about this," he said. Speaking from his office in northern China, he added: "The government has put some pressure on all the medical facilities to keep this type of work in low profile."
...
Peter Butler, a consultant plastic surgeon and government adviser, said there had been rumours that Chinese surgeons had performed hand transplants using hands from executed prisoners. One transplant centre was believed to be adjacent to an execution ground. "I can see the utility of it, as they have access and no ethical objection," he said. "The main concern would be infective risk."

"The Demise of Camembert" By Ron Slate

"The Demise of Camembert" By Ron Slate:
I remember my mother squeezing
the Camembert. She bought it five days

before unwrapping it, unwrapped it
two hours before she served it.

But what the French sociologist calls
la destructurisation of family meals

means there's no more patience
for ripening on the cold shelf.

This message comes to us
on a tray with quick-serve cheddar puffs

passed across the cocktail party,
across news networks via satellite.

Also it lands thudding with the flat bread,
bean salad, raisins, fruit bar,

seedless jam and plastic cutlery
in the humanitarian airdrop.

Pah! A man rejects the bland cheese couplets.
And the pre-moistened serviette.

In this world he fears annihilation.
This world has made him a nihilist.

Now he sits on a bed, on the bedspread
in a motel on the edge of Las Vegas

or a hotel near Narita Airport
eating an engineered salty snack,

planning deaths designed his way,
getting more and more thirsty.

So hear me. Compassion begins in the pasture.
Adoration of cow breed, grass strain,

the certain season for milking,
the way the curd is cut and pressed

and salted and cured and shaped,
the time and temperature at each stage.

The marketing man from Coeur-de-Lion,
the number-one brand of Camembert,

is revising the resumeof his ripe life.
And you and I, paring away the rind,

do you and I have a patient nose
for the creamy inwardness of things?

U.S.A. a role model for the world

Sept 11 2005:
Fifty-three percent (53%) of Americans say the world would be a better place if other countries were more like the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 20% disagree.

Those numbers reflect a sharp decline in the number who view the USA as a role model for the rest of the world. While 53% now say the world would be better if more countries were like our own, that figure is down from 61% a year ago and 67% two years ago.

A related survey found that most Americans now believe that the 9/11 terror attacks changed the nation for the worse. Four years ago, in October 2001, most Americans held the opposite view.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of Republicans view the USA as a good role model along with 41% of Democrats and 45% of those not affiliated with either party.

Placebos and homeopathy

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Ben Goldacre: A tonic for sceptics: Transparent modern medics often say: 'I don't know what the cause of your problem is. This might make it better, but it might not, and it might have these side effects.' They sometimes follow this with: 'What do you think?'

Enter the alternative therapist, who understands your problems whatever they are, who is privately employed and has time to listen, who has an answer and who gives a complicated (often wilfully obscure but always authoritative) explanation of what is going on, maintaining the power imbalance in the therapeutic relationship with his or her exclusive access to arcane knowledge. If that's not old-fashioned medical paternalism, I don't know what is, and the paradox is clear: while modern medicine, without even pausing to discuss the question, has championed patient autonomy and informed consent - and thrown the placebo effect out of the window - the market has shown that the old paternalism, in a new guise, is still very popular.

Whether mainstream medics would want to go back to the old ways and embrace the placebo-maximising wiles of the alternative therapists is an easy question: no thanks. The didactic, paternalistic, authoritative, mystifying mantle has passed to the alternative therapist, and to wear it requires one thing most doctors are uncomfortable with, dishonesty.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don't dumb me down

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don't dumb me down:
it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, 'hard to understand'.

This misrepresentation of science is a direct descendant of the reaction, in the Romantic movement, against the birth of science and empiricism more than 200 years ago; it's exactly the same paranoid fantasy as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, only not as well written. We say descendant, but of course, the humanities haven't really moved forward at all, except to invent cultural relativism, which exists largely as a pooh-pooh reaction against science

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don't dumb me down

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don't dumb me down:
So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. 'Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned.' And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were 'divided' over the safety of MMR). One scientist will 'reveal' something, and then another will 'challenge' it. A bit like Jedi knights.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don't dumb me down

As much as I love to blame the media for many things, including people not understanding science stories, I think most of the blame should lay with the people who are too ignorant of science or the scientific method (or even the ability to critically critique something in general) to understand the spuriousness and speciousness of most science articles in the first place.

This is still an article I enjoyed though.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don't dumb me down:
It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science. This week we take the gloves off and do some serious typing.
...
But enough on what they choose to cover. What's wrong with the coverage itself? The problems here all stem from one central theme: there is no useful information in most science stories. A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the 'correct form' of the drug. I don't use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information.

Remember all those stories about the danger of mobile phones? I was on holiday at the time, and not looking things up obsessively on PubMed; but off in the sunshine I must have read 15 newspaper articles on the subject. Not one told me what the experiment flagging up the danger was. What was the exposure, the measured outcome, was it human or animal data? Figures? Anything? Nothing. I've never bothered to look it up for myself, and so I'm still as much in the dark as you.

Why? Because papers think you won't understand the 'science bit', all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word 'biophoton' on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.
...

Politics played in the firing of Brown

Of course they waited until Friday after newspapers had been published to fire Brown. As the internet more and more becomes the major source of news, this weekend ploy will stop working.

Katrina-Brown

Katrina-Brown, Urgent 2nd Writethru:
The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, is being removed from his role managing hurricane Katrina relief efforts and is returning to Washington, The Associated Press has learned.

Maybe this catastrophe could change things.

A lot of people must have been personally connected to this tragedy in a way that most tragedies don't provide the opportunity for. I wonder if more Americans have visited New Orleans than have visited New York City. I'll bet there are more.

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09:
35 percent of Americans have visited New Orleans before.

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09:
WHO IS MOST TO BLAME FOR SITUATION IN NEW ORLEANS LAST WEEK?

Federal government
17%
New Orleans city gov't
15%
Government generally/ all levels
14%
The residents themselves
12%
Louisiana state gov't
7%
President Bush
5%
New Orleans mayor/ Ray Nagin
4%
LA Gov./ Kathleen Blanco
2%

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09:
Americans fault government at all levels for lack of preparation before the storm hit. More than two-thirds of Americans say the federal government did a poor job preparing for Katrina. State and local governments fare just as poorly.

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09:
There has even been a decline in just the last week in perception of the government’s ability to protect Americans from terrorist attacks -- 40 percent now have either not much or no confidence, up from 26 percent a week ago.

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09

CBS News | Poll: Katrina Response Inadequate | September 8, 2005�21:30:09:
This drop in ratings for Bush reflects greatly lowered views of his management, and somewhat lessened views of his compassion. Asked if Bush cares about the needs and problems of people like them, 55 percent of Americans say he does, and 43 percent say he doesn't -- these views have changed a bit from February 2004, when 62 percent said he cared and 38 percent said he did not. And 51 percent today say Bush cares at least somewhat about the needs and problems of blacks, specifically; 46 percent say he doesn't. Two years ago, 59 percent said he cared about blacks and 34 percent said he did not.

The human cost of political appointees

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: September 04, 2005 - September 10, 2005 Archives:
'[E}xperts inside and out of government said a 'brain drain' of experienced disaster hands throughout the agency, hastened in part by the appointment of leaders without backgrounds in emergency management, has weakened the agency's ability to respond to natural disasters.'

Bush uses 50 firefighters as photo-op props

Think Progress � KATRINA TIMELINE:
BUSH USES 50 FIREFIGHTERS AS PROPS IN DISASTER AREA PHOTO-OP: A group of 1,000 firefighters convened in Atlanta to volunteer with the Katrina relief efforts. Of those, “a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew’s first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.” [Salt Lake Tribune; Reuters]

Barbara Bush: Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans

Barbara Bush: Things Working Out 'Very Well' for Poor Evacuees from New Orleans:
In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of
evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: 'Almost
everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to
Houston.'

Then she added: 'What I’m hearing which is sort of
scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is
so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

'And so many of the people in the arena here, you
know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she
chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.'

Apt descriptions of the real world

Lying Media Bastards
Some of the first descriptions of the destruction in New Orleans said “it looks like the Third World'. You know what else looks like the Third World? The fucking Third World!

Infoshop News - Fake relief station set up for Bush photo op

with picture

Infoshop News - Fake relief station set up for Bush photo op:
Several sources report that a fake food distribution center was set up Friday for President Bush's photo op.

Interesting quote - Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King: "When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative."

Only Whites Claim Katrina's Poor Response is NOT Racist - by Kirsten Anderberg

Only Whites Claim Katrina's Poor Response is NOT Racist by Kirsten Anderberg:
...
Yesterday morning, Sept. 2, 2005, I went out and wrote 'Stop the genocide in New Orleans NOW! Impeach GWBush' in chalk on sidewalks near my house. I found it wildly interesting that as I was writing one of these, a white male in his 20's came up and said 'If you were not a woman, I would beat the sh*t out of you right now.' I said, 'Why, for writing this in chalk?' He said 'You are so ignorant. You do not even know what genocide is.' I said, 'Excuse me sir, I have a degree in political science from the University of Washington and also have successfully passed all my prerequisites in law school, and I am well aware of what the word genocide means.' I quoted the Webster Collegiate Dictionary definition: 'the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.' It was as if steam began coming out his ears at this, he puffed his chest, and began to stand in a physically threatening manner close to me. I said, 'You know, I am twice you size. And I can be absolutely crazy if you push me. Just know you may endanger yourself physically if you touch me.' He left with his legs between his tail, but why did a white male want to BEAT ME for saying that?!

I watched this trend continue all day yesterday. White men threatened me with violence ALL DAY yesterday for not giving an inch, calling this a genocide. I took a very large protest sign out to the streets yesterday. It said 'No more RACIST and CLASSIST genocide in New Orleans. Impeach Bush Now.' The first bus I got on, a black man immediately said to me 'You got that right, sister.' Then as I waited for the next bus, a black delivery man unloading near where I was waiting came up to me and said I was 100% right with my sign. When I got on the bus, I sat down, and an older black man turned around from the seat in front of me and said my sign was right on, and wondered how a white girl like me ended up out there protesting the racism. We talked for quite some time. Then I got off the bus into downtown Seattle.
...

NBC Deletes Criticism of Bush

No profanity deleted by censors, just political opinions.

NBC Deletes Rap Star's Remarks on Telethon - Los Angeles Times:
Kanye West's impromptu attack on President Bush during a live telecast Friday prompted NBC to delete his remark in its West Coast broadcast of the benefit for hurricane victims.

'George Bush doesn't care about black people,' West said.

The rap star also criticized coverage of the catastrophe. 'I hate the way they portray us in the media,' West said. 'If you see a black family, it says they're looting. See a white family, it says they're looking for food.'

West's remarks aired unedited in NBC's East Coast and Midwestern markets, and also on the simulcast versions for MSNBC, CNBC and Pax. However, the network turned off his microphone and switched to another performer shortly after he mentioned Bush.

7 year old vs. a 35 year old

Microsoft and Google Trade Accusations in Suit Over Executive - New York Times:
Google's filing included a sworn declaration by a former Microsoft engineer, Mark Lucovsky, who said he met last November with Microsoft's chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, to discuss his decision to leave the company after six years.

After learning that Mr. Lucovsky was taking a job at Google, Mr. Ballmer picked up his chair and hurled it across his office, according to the declaration. Mr. Ballmer then berated Google's chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, Mr. Lucovsky recalled, saying he was going to 'bury that guy - I have done it before, and I will do it again.' He also said Mr. Ballmer vowed to 'kill Google.'

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

For my anti-Google/Google-hating friend--just to prove that even though I am a Google-loving, Google whore, that doesn't interfere with finding humor for my friends.

Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to 'organize the world's information,' announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.
...
"A year ago, Google offered to scan every book on the planet for its Google Print project. Now, they are promising to burn the rest," John Battelle wrote in his widely read "Searchblog." "Thanks to Google Purge, you'll never have to worry that your search has missed some obscure book, because that book will no longer exist. And the same goes for movies, art, and music."