WanderRust

Somehow, this parody re-mix of the "2012" trailer has taken me off of the fence, and I'm actually looking forward to seeing it more.

So for the past two days I've been trying to follow what is going on in Iran, and have found many helpful resources on the internet like here and here...and Twitter has exploded with updates from the Iranian people themselves, who are otherwise completely shut off from the outside world.  Still, while the various reports, photos and youtube clips have been plentiful this weekend, I still found myself thinking "Man, I wish I had my cable back so I could flip over to CNN or MSNBC to check it out live..."

...Uh, no.  It turns out I didn't miss a goddamn thing by not having cable.

So, I'm trying to find out something about what's going on in Iran, and on CNN I can watch a rerun of Larry King interviewing several gentlemen without shirtsleeves who apparently assemble choppers. On Fox Mike Huckabee is trying to explain why Jesus hates credit card relief. MSNBC is rerunning something about a prison in New Mexico. CNBC is evaluating whether college students should be able to afford Chanel tote bags.

Media fail.

That's a rerun of Larry King inteviewing the cast of "American Chopper", mind you.  Of all the 24-hour cable news stations, CNN has been getting hammered the worst, and deservedly so, in my opinion.  CNN is the television granddaddy of breaking international news, from Tiananmen Square to the initial bombing of Baghdad in the First Gulf War.  It's so well know for breaking international news coverage, it's even an iconic fixture in movies and TV shows that require exposition of an international event from a conveniently placed TV set; they occasionally even use the official CNN anchors and graphics instead of obvious fictional doppelgangers.

It will be interesting to see what the cable news talking heads will say once they come back on Monday.  If these weaksauce tweets from self-appointed "media watchdog" Howard Kurtz is any indication, they'll just steamroll ahead like no sins of journalistic lethargy were ever committed.

Boy, CNN sure has come a long way from the days when the lead CNN anchor, Bernard Shaw, was broadcasting from a Baghdad hotel while bombs and missles were falling all around him...in the middle of the night.  Keep this in mind the next time Kurtz, or any other mainstream-media blowhard waxes paternalistic about all those lowly, amateur blogs out there.

UPDATE:
A more recent Howard Kurtz tweet:

Not that I "miss" watching commercials, but it is a handy barometer on the memes that flow throughout the popular culture.  For years my bugaboo has been the often repeated theme of a family presented with a hip, attractive, intelligent, full-of-common-sense mom with two adorable toddlers and a fat, balding, jeans/t-shirt/ratty flannel shirt clad, moron of a husband who is every bit as helpless as his kids - in effect, the 3rd child the super mom has to care for.  It wasn't just one commercial like this, there were tons.  It's not that I take the insult to my whole gender for that portrayal, it's just that I can't figure out how these two ever got hooked up in the first place.  It's kind of a double whammy to the whole idea of getting married as well - how many guys would want to get married if it means handing over your balls and being led around like a big dumb ox?  How many gals would want to get married if it meant immediately becoming a single mother to a helpless, overgrown child who also has access to the checking account before you even considered having any real kids of your own?

Today, I found a youtube clip of a new commercial I never would have gotten to see otherwise, and it's much worse than the dumb-ox dad ads I mentioned before.  Here it is:


What makes this worse is that I don't detect the presence of an ad exec pushing stereotypes in a ham-fisted attempt to flatter one group over another - Instead, I see this as a vignette into the real life of the ad exec and his/her college-aged, spoiled rotten kid.  Seeing that kid immediately made me think of this Kurt Vonnegut line:


(HT: Dvorak Uncensored)

Of course, maybe this commercial will do more good than harm.  Unlike the cheesy stereotyping of the other ads, this ad might just be a little too authentic - a little too close to home, with the result being that the viewer will watch and come away with the lesson that all the touch-screen communication devices in the world won't compensate for bad parenting.

...in just the last 10 years.  This picture really brought it home for me.

Mommy Comes Home

I used to listen to a lot of sports talk radio when I was in college.  I mean A LOT of sports talk, for hours a day, national and local.  To this day, If Guns 'N Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" comes on the radio, I think the Jim Rome show is coming back from a commercial break.  In retrospect, I don't think it was about me being so much of a sports junkie as it was my fascination with the punditry; from the pregame predictions to the post game arm-chair quarterbacking.  I think it had a hold on me because, more than any other endeavor, sports are the best crucible to test every assumption and statement that flows from the mouths of the talking heads on radio and TV.  Every sporting contest is a scientific experiment, in which, sooner or later, every hypothesis is put to the test, repeatedly.  A couple of years following the links between box score reality and pundit fantasy turned out to be good training as I became more engaged in understanding the larger world around me.  So, even as I started tuning out ESPN's feigned conniption fits about Terrell Owens doing push-ups in his driveway, I was already hip to the games being played by political pundits on FOX, CNN, MSNBC, etc.  Sadly, politics moves at a snails pace compared to sports...imagine if the NFL only played one game every 2 years, and you had to listen to Sean Salisbury and Peter King bloviate about the potential outcome for 2 years prior...eesh!

There is, however, one flavor of pundit I'm not all that familiar with; the financial pundit.  I've caught a few minutes of Jim Cramer's "Mad Money" on occasion, but beyond the novelty of watching a guy hollering at the top of his lungs, pacing around like he's hopped up on Red Bull laced with crystal meth, smashing comically oversized buttons with wacky sound effects, I really had no idea what to make of all the sound and fury.  Not that I don't understand how the stock market works, it's just that I'm not a day trader, and have no reference (i.e. a stock portfolio) from which to judge whether or not this guy knew what the hell he was talking about.  Instinctively, I suspected his show was based on the same premise shared by every other pundit based show: It's not about whether you're right or wrong, but how aggressively and loudly you make your case.  And pundits can succeed on this premise because any past performance is irrelevant; they hit the reset button, and go on to pontificate about the next game or the next election.  They are never held to account for any predictions they got wrong.

Well, almost never...


(I encourage you to watch the whole show if you haven't already, or better yet, watch the uneditied interview directly from Comedy Central)

Cramer wanted to come on the show, offer up a few mea culpas about some bad calls in the past, share a few make up laughs and call it a night; Jon Stewart didn't let him off the hook.  I've often been annoyed by pundits, and have indulged in a little schadenfreude when they're proven wrong, but I've never been truly angry at any pundit before...because until now I've never considered that they could have a profound impact on our lives.  Sports hacks have no impact whatsoever on anyone's life of course, but even political hacks don't have much of an impact beyond receiving and distributing talking points to an audience that is more often than not a self-selected echo chamber.  But Cramer and the rest of the CNBC crew is different.  It's not the idea that people may have lost money on his stock picks that angers me (I mean, have you seen his show?  Would anyone even admit to losing money based on stock picks that came from that TV circus?) it's that Cramer really isn't just another dart-throwing buffoon.  He used to be a hedge fund manager, who had intimate knowledge of the inside game played at the expense of everyone with an e-Trade account, a mutual fund or even just a 401k. 




He knew better, but decided to join in with the rest of the cheerleaders.  And now he's forced to grovel in a vain attempt to save his pundit cred; "vain" because Stewart's widely publicized interview has already exposed him as something far worse than your typical clown pundit...an accomplice to fraud.

Long time, no posts.  I've been in super-sponge mode for the past 3 months, trying to learn and absorb as much information as I can during this economic crapfest.  Here's the most concise explanation I've come across to explain how it all got started:


I've tended to gravitate to heavy topics like this in the past, but right now I'm just overloaded, so I expect I'll ease back into this blog with some quick, light stuff for a while.

It went as I had hoped; a landslide victory for Barack Obama.  And to top it all off, he met the boorish onslaught of hate and derision from the Rovian Right with quiet grace and dignity, executing a jujitsu that has sealed much of the Rightwing Noise Machine's arsenal with a complete and long deserved discreditation.  I should have felt at least as elated, if not more so, than many of the people around me who cheered as Obama walked up to the podium in Grant Park to give his victory speech. It was a beautiful speech, it's essence distilled to so much of what I yearned for when I first began following his campaign over a year ago.

But instead I remained seated, with a mixture of relief and melancholy.

I wish I could have been as ecstatic as I thought I would have been,  but I couldn't; I'd been mugged.  Back around the middle of September, Americans were slapped in the face by a financial crisis that shook the financial sector to the core.  It could be said that the housing bubble, with it's toxic mortgages were the root of the problem, but that's actually looking at the whole problem backwards.  As bad as the housing collapse was, the damage would have been contained (allowing for residual effects on the economy) to the borrowers and lenders of those toxic mortgages, where it not for the creative packaging of those bad mortgages with good mortgages into securities that were subsequently sold and resold many times over.  Who owns the bad mortgages?  Everybody with a mutual fund, everybody with a 401k.  Nobody knows the real "value" of these securities at this point, so they're valued at zero.  The short of it is a lot of wealth was just destroyed, and the effects of that wealth disappearing continue to effect the financial markets today and is beginning to effect the rest the economy as a whole, cementing what was already thought to be the start of a recession.   

The beginning of this financial crisis basically ended the Presidential contest.  It neutered all of the shallow culture war bullshit flowing from the Right and brought both candidate's responses to the crisis into crisp focus, with McCain's flailing stunts only serving to accentuate his erratic personality (and Sarah Palin's abject ignorance certainly didn't help either).  Americans noticed Obama was the adult in the room, and everything that followed for the next month and a half was just political pageantry, as the polls steadily widened the lead for Obama..  I knew he was going to win, but so much of the joy and hope of that prospect had been drained out of me. 

This problem is too pervasive and systemic for any President to fix.  Whatever the merits of the government $700+ Billion bailout may or may not be, it is that much more in taxpayer dollars that won't be available to Obama and the Democratic Congress to fulfill their agenda.  Obama will be hamstrung.  He will be stuck with a nation short on credit.

I can't help but feel Obama came too late, that the best he can do is delay the inevitable.  I hope I'm wrong.  I hope the people who voted for him understand that if there truly is going to be any change, they have initiate it themselves; that their responsibility didn't end at the ballot box last Tuesday.  I fear most people in this country think things will get better just because we've replaced one of the worst Presidents in our nation's history with someone of a demonstrably finer quality; but much of the hardship that lays ahead of us didn't spring forth from George W. Bush, and it won't disappear when he leaves office.

In the end, I don't so much wonder if Barack Obama is up to the challenge; I wonder if we are up to the challenge.

There's a lot I need to write about Obama's election, considering all of the posts on this blog concerning the subject (to the point where It's become an almost exclusively political blog).  I don't have all of my thoughts collected yet, but when I do I'll try and put a cap on all of this public and personal drama, and restore some balance to my attentions.

No, really...I promise.

What?  Why are you looking at me like that?

When watching the Presidential Debates, it might seem more civically minded, more responsible, to focus on the issues and not the personalities, but that would actually be misguided.  The "issues" each candidate appear to debate each other about never get beyond the rhetorical phraseology crafted for them by their campaigns, never into a true policy wonkish point-to-point argument over each fact or premise.  There are many reasons for this, but principle among them is that the vast majority of Americans watching do not possess advanced degrees in finance, law, foreign policy and the like, and they don't want to sit through the 6 or more hours it would take for two candidates, who themselves aren't experts, to attempt to faithfully recite and channel the points and counter-points of their respective campaign experts.

But even if we were to assume a complete review and comparison of the positions and plans for every issue could be known by everyone, it still wouldn't matter what positions each candidate stated.  Every President has to negotiate with Congress.  Every President has to adapt to changing conditions.  As Mike Tyson once put it, "Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth."  So don't stay up late going over both health care plans with a fine tooth comb - it is absolutely assured that if a health care plan is finally agreed upon, it won't look anything like either posted on McCain's or Obama's websites; even a filibuster proof majority in Congress will haggle with an Obama administration over the details.

To put a finer point on this topic, let's assume, for example, that (like me) you strenuously disagree with the Neo-conservative vision of an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy.  If you went by "the issues" discussed in debates and campaign speeches, the candidate who said the following would resonate strongly with you:

And if, like me, you recoil at the divisive, 50+1 base pandering tactics of Karl Rove that infect not just campaigning, but governing as well, then you would also like this particular candidate's stand on the issue:So, based on "the issues", you might go ahead and vote for this candidate, assured that he will go on to govern in such a way as to promote these particular views that you agree with him on.

Well, congratulations, you just voted for George W. Bush in 2000. (link and link)  How did that work out for you?

So what are we left with?  We're left with a general knowledge of the ideas and history of their respective Parties, which is relevant to predicting the views held by the people that will get hired by their respective administrations.  But ideology and party affiliation alone can't account for the lack of competence and general buffoonery displayed by the likes of Mike Brown, Alberto Gonzalez and Monica Goodling.  For that, you would need a more specific and personal judgment of the man doing the hiring.  "Psychological Analysis" would be a sophisticated way of putting it, but at the end of the day, you would be doing what everyone else watching those debates are doing - judging behavior, comparing personalities...you know, all that egregious "non-issue" stuff an informed voter isn't supposed to do.  But that's exactly what a voter should do...judge their temperament, assess their character.  Personality and character will always beat out position papers and campaign speeches as predictors of future behavior and decision making.

If there is to be a debate, it should probably be among voters over which aspects of personality and character are most important to determining someone's fitness to lead.  I, for example, don't happen to think that George W. Bush being "the guy you'd rather have a beer with" is relevant to Presidential leadership, but would be inclined to agree that Barack Obama's "calm, centered demeanor" can say a lot about how he would govern.

So feel free to judge the mannerisms of the man or woman at the podium.  It's actually the responsible, civically minded thing to do.