As seen from Just Above Sunset

Friday, 5 March 2004

Topic: The Culture

Open Season on Those Who Make Us Uncomfortable

This week's issue of L.A. Weekly seems to feature analyses of political gadflies. Each item is quite long and worth a click and a read.

First up is Michael Moore.

See American Bigmouth: Why Michael Moore won't shut up
Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly, issue of March 5 -11, 2004

Taylor interviews him and offers some thoughts. She opens with this:

Other things being equal, Moore's president of choice remains Dennis Kucinich, but he knows his favorite doesn't have a prayer, and given that all the candidates are "to the left of Gore in 2000," he says he'll go with any of them who can get George Bush out of office.

Except, apparently, Howard Dean.

... Moore insists -- twice -- on his admiration for what Dean has done to energize young people to become politically involved. "But spend 10 minutes in the same room with Dean," he says, "and you're asking, do you want to support him?"

Why?

"He's kind of a prick."

There's a moment of revisionist silence, followed by Moore's trademark high-pitched giggle.

"Prickly, really. I hate to slag him, but as you look at him, where will he win?"

Well, Moore isn't exactly subtle.

But here's the core:

... It's not hard to understand why conservatives can't stand Moore and why there are several Web sites exclusively devoted to zealously combing his every speech, book and movie for inaccuracies. For all Moore's protestations that liberals are less nasty and more laid-back than conservatives, he is one of the few on the left who hacks away at the right with its own methods, and he's usually more to the point. While Matt Drudge pants away on his Web site trying to drum up sexual dirt on John Kerry, Moore is busy firing off "Dear George" letters out of his, calling Bush on his policies at home and abroad. He remains the left's only well-known shock jock. And it's unlikely that either Al Franken or Molly Ivins, both of whom have anti-Bush books on the best-seller lists, would have gotten the book deals they did without Moore's trailblazing hits. Moore lacks the intellectual chops of either, but he's a deft popularizer and a very funny guy.

Which may be one reason why so many liberals and leftists, at least those who are over 30, don't like him. One New York Times piece fingered him as a senior member of the "Bush-hating left," and Daniel Okrent, introducing himself as the paper's new ombudsman, wrote snootily, "I'd rather spend my weekends exterminating rats in the tunnels below Penn Station than read a book by either Bill O'Reilly or Michael Moore." And few on the left are likely to be amused by his "endorsement" of Oprah, Paul Newman or the Dixie Chicks for president.

Moore has been dumped on by organs as disparate as Alexander Cockburn's shrill far-left rag Counterpunch and the staidly democratic-socialist Dissent, which last spring heaped scorn on Moore's confrontational tactics, sniffed at his gifts as an entertainer, and accused him of cynicism for railing at both political parties. This last is absurd -- you only have to spend five minutes in Moore's company to realize that sincerity is one quality he possesses in spades.

But even in England, the liberal newspaper The Guardian last November suggested that Moore has gotten sloppy and become a "left-wing version of loud-mouthed ultra-conservative shock-jocks such as Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter."

That is rather harsh, but perhaps true.

Then Marc Cooper gets his shots in with Moore Is Less: One stupid white man's problem with the man in the ball cap.

The problem? Moore is not Mort Sahl.

I know very well the role that Michael Moore ought to be playing.

For it was neither Marx nor Marcuse that initially radicalized me as a teenager in the 1960s but rather the comic, Mort Sahl.

... On Sahl's word that the now-defunct Hunters was L.A.'s best political bookstore, I began frequenting the shop on Little Santa Monica. And one afternoon in 1967 I bumped right into Sahl as he thumbed through the special table of titles on Vietnam. We chatted for a half-hour during which he told me I still had a lot to learn. As a last-minute gesture, Sahl bought me a copy of British correspondent Bernard Fall's classic The Two Viet-Nams -- a moment, and a book that would mark the rest of my life.

I cannot imagine Michael Moore having that sort of transformational effect on anyone. Moore arrives before us not with a newspaper under his arm, but rather with a bullhorn and a sledgehammer. Sahl engaged his audience in subtle, complicated dialogue, enticing his fans to think beyond the conventional wisdom. Moore's style is to bully and bluster. Sahl helped teach me how to think. Moore purports to tell us what to think.

Which wouldn't be so objectionable if there was evidence that Moore had any depth, any nuance or at least some consistency to his own thought.

I find no trace.

So it's "Dump on Michael Moore Week" here in Los Angeles?

Maybe so. But Brendan Bernhard examines Dennis Miller in Miller's Crossing: Can a pro-Bush comedian get laughs?

Actually, a lot of this item is a discussion of John Stewart's "The Daily Show" - and it's rather positive about that, and its format.

As for Dennis Miller and his new show on MSNBC?

Miller begins each episode of his program with "The Daily Rorschach," a segment in which he sits at a desk and delivers wordy -- some would say laborious -- riffs on the news, much as he once did on Saturday Night Live and Dennis Miller Live on HBO. (Sample jokes: "A new poll shows that Senator Kerry's support in the South is strongest among blacks. Kerry's appeal to Southern blacks is obvious: He's a white man who lives far, far away. Kerry's campaign is also gaining support among women. However, Kucinich is still tops among post-op trannies.") This part of the program, at least, could benefit mightily from a live audience, because without some laughter to feed off, Miller the comedian can seem a little lost, even with crew members providing some consolation chuckles offscreen.

Well, the show has been yanked for a few weeks to be "retooled." And it will come back with a live audience. But Miller will still be the bloodthirsty, mean-spirited, kill-them-all right-winger he has now become. It won't be any funnier, I'd guess.

Finally Kate Sullivan writes about Howard Stern in Really Hot Air: Viacom sucks up to FCC over Howard Stern's indecent exposure.

Stern was just cancelled by Clear Channel, the radio empire run by a personal friend of the Bush family and darling of the FCC run my Michael Powell, the son of the Secretary of State. Stern was indecent, it seems. But Stern has been all over the airways and in the press saying he was never in trouble with his naughty show until he made some anti-Bush comments. Then they canned him. Clear Channel says that's only a coincidence, that after the Janet Jackson bouncing bare boob thing at the Super Bowl, they decided it was time to be more responsive to the wishes of all Americans, who hate smut and nudity and dirty talk and all that sort of thing. If their audience is neo-Puritan, and the FCC is making noises about cleaning things up, well, they are just giving the audience what they are demanding and adhering much more strictly to what the FCC tells them to do. Heck, the FCC has rules. Ask George Carlin about the seven dirty words you are not allowed to say on television. Howard Stern had to go. Times are changing. Or to be more precise, now the rules really do matter.

Sullivan comments:

I'm no Howard Stern fan, but it seems unfair that a guy who was hired precisely to be trashy is now being punished for holding up his end of the bargain.

Obviously, it's also a bit retarded for the federal government to try and determine what is and isn't offensive to consumers. As Limbaugh said after his bosses at Clear Channel dropped Stern, "You know, I'm in the free speech business here, my friends. I couldn't survive without it. And it is one thing for a company in business to determine whether or not they're going to be party to it. It is quite another thing for a government."

At the same time, Washington's shrill reaction to everyday tastelessness has got to be a boost for Stern -- who banks on an outlaw rep. (Stern once released a CD called Crucified by the FCC, which contained censored bits from his show and featured cover art of Stern carrying a cross.) Last week he waxed heroic on his show. "They are so afraid of me and what this show represents," he said. "I don't think I'm going to last a month."

That was just prior to the air going dead.

Moore, Miller, Stern... surprising that we now, given this administration, even allow them to live.

Posted by Alan at 13:56 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Thursday, 4 March 2004

Topic: Election Notes

Get with the program - the most influential item published today...

What might that be? What is being linked everywhere (even by the conservative but gay Andrew Sullivan) and quoted everywhere? Who gets the big prize for actually managing to nail the proverbial mashed potatoes to the wall?

It's William Saletan.

See Confidence Man: The case for Bush is the case against him.
William Saletan, SLATE.COM, Posted Thursday, March 4, 2004, at 4:24 PM PT

I recommend reading the whole thing by clicking on the link - but here's the core.

After a long discussion of how Bush will run as "steady and principled" and try to portray Kerry as "wavering" and ever changing and thus dangerous, Saletan offers this advice:

How can Kerry persuade moderates to throw out Bush? By turning the president's message against him. Bush is steady and principled. He believes money is better spent by individuals than by the government.

He believes the United States should assert its strength in the world. He believes public policy should respect religious faith. Most Americans share these principles and think Bush is sincere about them. The problem Bush has demonstrated in office is that he has no idea how to apply his principles in a changing world. He's a big-picture guy who can't do the job.

The idea is to show what "steady and principled" really means.

From foreign to economic to social policy, Bush's record is a lesson in the limits and perils of conviction. He's too confident to consult a map. He's too strong to heed warnings and too steady to turn the wheel when the road bends. He's too certain to admit error, even after plowing through ditches and telephone poles. He's too preoccupied with principle to understand that principle isn't enough. Watching the stars instead of the road, he has wrecked the budget and the war on terror. Now he's heading for the Constitution. It's time to pull him over and take away the keys.

Then, of course, you give Bush credit!

Bush was right to go to war against the terrorists who struck us on 9/11. He was right to demand the overdue use of force against the scofflaw Iraqi regime. But he couldn't tell the difference between the two threats. He figured that since both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were evil, they had to be connected. Saddam must have helped orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. He must have built weapons of mass destruction to sell to al-Qaida.

Well, he had the GENERAL idea. Not subtle, but we bought it.

And really not based on any facts - but no problem, right?

In recent months, congressional hearings and document leaks have unearthed a disturbing history. Again and again in 2001 and 2002, U.S. intelligence agencies sent signals that Bush was wrong. The FBI and CIA debunked putative links between Iraq and al-Qaida. The CIA rejected the claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa. In its National Intelligence Estimate, the CIA calculated that it could take Saddam up to five years to make a nuclear weapon and that he would transfer WMD to terrorists only if he were invaded. The Defense Intelligence Agency advised the administration that there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons." The Air Force disputed the suggestion that Iraq had developed aerial drones capable of delivering chemical or biological toxins. Analysts questioned whether the White House was right that Saddam's aluminum tubes were designed for building nukes, or that two trucks the White House found suspicious were designed for making biological weapons.

Bush ignored every one of these warnings. They couldn't be true, because they didn't fit his theory. He couldn't stand the complexity of the facts or the ambiguity of intelligence. "Until we get rid of Saddam Hussein, we won't get rid of uncertainty," he told aides in November 2002. Four months later, on the eve of his invasion of Iraq, he declared, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." After the war, when Diane Sawyer asked Bush about the discrepancy between his ironclad statements and the more tentative weapons estimates provided by U.S. intelligence, he replied, "What's the difference?"

Well, perhaps most people feel exactly the same way.

The problem is some people, maybe more than you would expect, don't feel the same way.

Here's the deal. We all needed certainty. And that's what Bush provided, in spades. And may get him reelected.

This all comes down to whether one values certainty above all else.

That's Bush all over: Certainty. No doubt. No difference. But it makes a difference to Britain, France, and Mexico, which no longer trust our requests, based on U.S. intelligence, to cancel flights to the United States. And it makes a difference to China, which refuses to accept our report, based on U.S. intelligence, that North Korea is operating a highly enriched uranium program. Bush's overconfidence - reflected in a series of exaggerations wholly unnecessary to the punishment of Saddam for his noncompliance with U.N. inspections - has trashed our credibility and cost us vital help with other terrorist and WMD-related threats.

Yeah, well, who needs these other folks? When you're certain you are just, well, by definition, right.

The Saletan extend the argument to other areas:

Bush was right to propose tax cuts in 1999. The economy was booming. The surplus was ballooning. Liberals were itching to spend the money on new programs, despite Bill Clinton's promises to pay down the national debt. Bush wanted to get the money out of Washington before that happened. That's why, under his plan, the size of the tax cut was to grow from year to year. The point was to keep the surplus from piling up, refunding more and more money as it poured in from a growing economy. That's also why Bush cut taxes across the board instead of targeting middle-class families who would spend the money immediately. He wasn't trying to stimulate the economy. He was trying to give the money back to the people who had paid it in, which meant largely the rich.

Then everything changed. The stock market tanked, and the economy slowed. Sept. 11 shook the nation's confidence and drastically altered military budget projections. Bush didn't need to drain a surplus anymore. He needed to fund national defense and stimulate the economy. He needed to get rid of his back-loaded across-the-board tax cut and replace it ... with front-loaded tax cuts aimed at consumers. Instead, Bush claimed that his original tax-cut elixir was just as good for the new malady as for the old one. The deficit exploded, the economy failed to recover the jobs it had lost, and much of the country remained unprotected from terrorism. The world changed, but Bush couldn't.

Ah yes, but he WAS certain and stuck to his principles.

Then there are some other matters:

When Bush banned federal funding of research on new embryonic stem cell lines, he said sufficient research could proceed because "more than 60" existing cell lines would still be eligible for grants. The true number turned out to be less than half that, but Bush didn't budge. Last fall, in the name of human life, he signed into law a bill that required any doctor performing a second-trimester abortion to cut up the fetus inside the woman instead of removing it intact. Good principle, atrocious policy. His initiative to fund faith-based social programs has been a classic liberal misadventure, adding religious mini-bureaucracies to various Cabinet departments despite a study last year that showed faith-based job training programs were no more effective, and in some ways less effective, than regular job training programs.

Now, to save the family, Bush proposes to monkey with the Constitution. Why is this necessary? Because conservative states might be forced to honor gay marriages performed in liberal states, says Bush. But didn't the Defense of Marriage Act void that requirement? Yes, Bush argues, but DOMA might be struck down. Unwilling to wait for a ruling on DOMA, Bush prefers to circumvent the court system and local democracy by reopening the nation's founding document. He seeks to impose a permanent federal definition of marriage on "any state or city," regardless of what the voters in Boston or San Francisco want.

As I have said elsewhere, this forms a symbiotic "call and response" liturgy with the American people.

It's like this. Thousands die two and a half years ago - and most Americans suddenly realize that the world is indeed a dark and scary place, full of mortal uncertainty. Of what now can we be certain? Oh woe, the world is a chaotic place -

"... for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

"Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

See The Bumper Sticker Version Of Existentialism from February 6, 2004 for a discussion of Matthew Arnold's poem and all the rest.

Anyway, we were desperate for strength and confidence, and certainty. We needed that. George jumped in and started chanting back to us. He was sure. Evil was evil and one just had to say so. We were good. They were bad - whoever thay were. As simple as that.

Was he wrong about things? No matter. He was confident. What a relief!

We all signed on and worshiped him.

Not Saletan.

President Bush. Strength and confidence. Steady leadership in times of change. He knows exactly where he wants to lead this country. And he won't let facts, circumstances, or the Constitution get in his way.

But we're scared, still, and we know we're innocent victims who never did anything bad to anyone anywhere else in the world, and thus we will reelect [sic] him. We need the comfort.

He may be a fool, and dead wrong, but he's certain of himself. That's his trump card. He knows our need for strength, for certainty, far outweighs our need for common sense.

And that's the price of assuming the role of frightened, innocent victim. We get four more years of this foolishness, but can feel noble and wronged.

Stay sacred - and feel noble and wronged - and this is what you get. You get what you deserve.

____

The emphases are mine throughout.

Posted by Alan at 22:13 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 4 March 2004 22:02 PST home

Wednesday, 3 March 2004

Topic: Bush

Kulturkampf? Blitzkrieg? Why would a critic of George Bush use such words?

Sidney Blumenthal is a former senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars - a book which explains, in detail, just who was out to "get" Bill Clinton and when, and who paid for it. And he's a man with a grudge. Here's something he just published regarding Bush's new culture war against gays and uppity scientists and who know who else....

See: Bush goes to war with modernity: The more Bush supplicates his core voters, the more he repels the rest
Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian (UK), Thursday March 4, 2004

After a discussion of the primaries here, he gets to the point:

The launch of his Kulturkampf has been a blitzkrieg. Bush proposed a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. He dismissed two scientists who dissented on his bioethics board, which he has used to ban forms of stem cell research, replacing them with adherents of the religious right. Bush made a recess appointment of William Pryor of Alabama as a federal judge, blocked in the Senate for his extremism. Pryor had said that "abortion is murder" and supported the building of an altar of the 10 commandments in a courthouse. Then the attorney general, John Ashcroft, subpoenaed the medical records of women who have had abortions at planned parenthood clinics.

Bush followed by supporting the unborn victims of violence bill, creating a new federal crime of foetal homicide that passed the Republican-dominated House of Representatives on February 26. At Bush's order, the Senate is being transformed into a battlefield of the culture war.

But Bush's instigation of religious wars in America, while it mobilises the evangelical Protestant faithful, is also unexpectedly thwarting him.

Well, his popularity didn't exactly jump due to all this.

But as Blumenthal points out, Bush lost the popular vote by more than half a million. And Bush does seem to have decided he has no choice but to chase his base, so to speak.

And I haven't said much about the Pryor appointment, or about Ashcroft's subpoenas of the medical records of any woman who has had an abortion. What is there to say? That's the way things go. I did, a bit back, comment on how twenty Noble Prize winning scientists were a bit put off by this administration's sort of kind of changing the basic findings in all sorts of studies because those findings gave people the wrong impression - that global warming might be real, that minorities had rather bad health and even worse healthcare, that condoms actually worked to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, and so on. (See Not that it matters from Thursday, 19 February 2004)

Blumenthal ties this all together in a discussion of Bush courting the Jewish votes by leaning toward Israel and, at the same time, courting the Evangelical Christian Right vote. Heck, that is rather hard work. You have to satisfy the neoconservative theorists who want the world changed to be full of new secular free-market democracies in the Islamic world, and, on the other side, appeal to the folks who long for a theocracy here at home run on the idea the New Testament contains everything you need to run a society and order the functioning of its government. Satisfying both sides a lot of work.

The problem?

The born-again Bush, who reconstructed his self-image after 9/11 as a messianic leader, assumed that the agendas of the neocons and the theocons were one and the same. However, Bush outsourced his foreign policy on the Middle East and Israel to the neocons in part for an electoral purpose, hoping to capture the Jewish vote, which will not be fulfilled because of his anxious devotion to the theocons.

Cool. Each part of the base was concerned with different, contradictory things.

But both sides hated the sixties, if that matters. And this alliance worked for Ronal Reagan.

The neocons and the theocons were bound together in reaction against the 1960s for different reasons: the neocons by foreign policy, the theocons by their continuing fundamentalist revolt against modernity. Under Ronald Reagan, this coalition was held together in the crusade against godless communism. But George Bush is haunted by what happened next to his father.

Yep, what are you going to do when what Ronald Reagan called "the evil empire" is gone. Find another, of course. The Muslim hoards and the gay guys! They'll do.

After all whole lot of words Blumenthal then trots out the fellow who loves making crude jokes about gay guys and films devoted to torture and death:

Just as Bush stokes the culture war, Mel Gibson enters, sprinkling holy gasoline on the fires. Only in the combustible atmosphere Bush has fostered could Gibson's grand guignol version of an anti-Semitic medieval passion play, The Passion of the Christ, become the number one box-office hit. This is the ultimate Mad Max escapade: blowing up the cultural contradictions of American conservatism.

Yep, the culture war is underway. And it's a mess. Gibson forgot the Jews are the good guys now - killing Palestinian children (by mistake) and building big walls to keep them out (Bush chants again and again Ariel Sharon is a "man of peace"). Mel, get it straight! Jews are victims of the Islamic bombers killing their children! They aren't the bad guys! They may vote Republican in the fall! Man, you just can't depend on religious zealots anymore....

But Blumenthal sees the real problem for Bush in broader terms.

With his culture war the son is echoing another political error of the father, who alienated Jews and Catholics by permitting his 1992 convention to be used as a platform for the religious evangelical right. This latest revival is frightening Jews, cautioning American Catholics (overwhelmingly of the liberal John XXIII/Vatican II persuasion, and holding the same view on abortion as other Americans), and scourging mainline Protestants. The more Bush supplicates his base, the more he repels the others. Moreover, Bush is running against a Democrat who's a modern Catholic, with lineage to the oldest mainline Protestant families of New England and Jewish ancestry.

This political miscalculation at home is far outweighed by the disastrous consequences in the Middle East. With increasing desperation, Bush is campaigning on behalf of his various fundamentalisms in a crusade against modernity in America, his greatest war of all.

Oh well. The modern world is overrated, isn't it?

One sort of wonders if Bush was always like this? Was he always so opposed to what some call modern ideas?

One of his former teachers says this:

At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition." To him, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was "socialism."

Recently, President Bush's Federal Appeals Court Nominee, California's Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown, repeated the same broadside at her Senate hearing. She knew that her pronouncement would please President Bush and Karl Rove and their Senators. President Bush and his brain, Karl Rove, are leading a radical revolution of destroying all the democratic political, social, judiciary, and economic institutions that both Democrats and moderate Republicans had built together since Roosevelt's New Deal.

Hardly surprising.

See President George Bush and the Gilded Age
March 1, 2004 - Yoshi Tsurumi (now Professor of International Business, Baruch College, the City University of New York)

Read all about the economy and about the man who wishes to direct it. He has his principles -- moral and economic -- from which he has never really wavered. He just didn't mention them in his campaign against Al Gore. Wouldn't be prudent. But we should have known.

Geez, at least none of my former students has really embarrassed me, so far.

Posted by Alan at 22:33 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: World View

Mel Gibson gets his audience in France...

On Sunday, 29 February 2004 I commented on how Mel Gibson's new film "The Passion of the Christ" was creating some uproar in France and might not find a distributor. Passions regarding anti-Semitism were running high. See Jerry Lewis, not Mel Gibson for that.

Well, the matter has been settled as I see from a scan of items from l'Agence France-Presse (AFP) by way of The Tocqueville Connection.

See GIBSON'S "PASSION OF THE CHRIST" TO BE SHOWN IN FRANCE

Here's the scoop:

PARIS, Feb 29 (AFP) - Mel Gibson's controversial film "The Passion of the Christ" will be shown in France despite rumours that it could not find a distributor, the Journal du Dimanche newspaper reported Sunday.

Gibson's production company Icon was quoted as saying that the name of the French distributor would be revealed Monday.

Marin Karmitz, president of the French National Federation of Film Distributors, angrily rejected reports that the film might be boycotted because of fears it could stoke anti-Semitism -- saying the row was manufactured as a marketing device.

"It was a deliberate tactic on the part of Icon to make themselves look like martyrs ... It is a totally unacceptable kind of marketing," he said.

It is? Unacceptable?

This Karmitz fellow doesn't know anything about marketing as we practice it here. And no wonder Vivendi made such a hash of their brief ownership of Universal. The French think us crass, but this seems just na?ve.

On a lighter note, I did also come across this:

PARIS STATIONS BREATHE SCENT OF THE SOUTH

PARIS, March 3 (AFP) - Nostrils were twitching at Paris railway stations Wednesday as olfactory advertisements wafted the scent of rosemary over commuters to remind them of the joys of holidays in the south.

Timed to coincide with the return to work after the winter school break, the week-long campaign was launched by the region of Languedoc-Roussillon which wants to boost its image as a tourist destination.

Posters set up on the metro system are equipped with tiny emitters which spray out essence of rosemary -- the odour which "best evokes the atmosphere, food and landscape of Languedoc-Roussillon," the region's tourist office said.

Perfume manufacturers have used olfactory advertisements in the past, but this is the first time the technique has been used to promote tourism here, the office said.

Will we catch a whiff of similar promotions in the subways of New York and Boston? Perhaps a strategic puff of nitrous oxide mixed with taco spices to make you think of visiting Los Angeles?

As for the French thinking of heading south, just don't take the TGV to get there. I once took the TGV nonstop run from Paris to Avignon. Nice trip. I wouldn't do it today.

See this: BLACKMAILERS THREATEN BOMBING CAMPAIGN ON FRENCH RAILWAYS

PARIS, March 3 (AFP) - The French government is being blackmailed by a previously-unknown group which has planted at least one bomb on the country's railway system and is demanding a ransom of more than five million dollars, the interior ministry said Wednesday.

Since December a group calling itself AZF has sent six letters to President Jacques Chirac and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, condemning France's political and economic establishment and threatening to explode 10 bombs on the railways unless the money is paid.

The government said it is taking the threat seriously and has activated the anti-terrorist section of the police as well as the domestic intelligence agency DST. A judicial investigation has been set up under the country's top anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere.

No group called AZF is known to the authorities, but it may be significant that AZF was the name of a chemical factory that blew up in the southern city of Toulouse in September 2001, killing 30 people and injuring around 1,000 others. The accident caused enormous local anger.

Police said there was not believed to be any link with Islamic terrorism.

The first letter, received on December 14, contained a series of denunciations of "politicians more pre-occupied with themselves than with the state ... a corrupt economy ... and a reductive education system" and ended with the words, "You will hear from us again soon."

In subsequent messages AZF described itself as a "pressure group of a terrorist nature." It said that 10 devices had been planted across the railway network, and that these had been fitted with timers to go off at intervals unless four million dollars and one million euros were handed over.

Actually this is quite refreshing. Not much of a political agenda here, and certainly no fanatical religious agenda either - these guys just want the money. Quite straightforward, isn't it?

Perhaps this group could ask for a bit more if they identified themselves with some religion or other, or against some religion or other. "Entrepreneur" may be a French word, but these guys need to get with the program.

Posted by Alan at 09:25 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Tuesday, 2 March 2004

Topic: The Culture

Who to trust on the question of whether Lars and Spanky should have the right to be legally married?
On one side you have Bush and the Evangelical Christian Right, and then on the other side....

Okay, get your press releases here!

First up? The good folks over at the American Anthropological Association.

See Statement on Marriage and the Family from the American Anthropological Association

Here's what these subversives and perverts say:

American Anthropological Association
2200 Wilson Blvd, Suite 600, Arlington, VA 22201
February 25, 2004

Arlington, Virginia; The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropologists, the people who study culture, releases the following statement in response to President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as a threat to civilization.

"The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples."

Media may contact either of the names below:
To discuss the AAA Statement please contact: Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, AAA President (847) 491-4564, office.
To discuss anthropological research on marriage and family please contact: Roger Lancaster, Anthropologist, author, The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture, - (202) 285-4241 cellular

Well, these folks are not moralists, or theocrats. Make of it what you will.

What do doctors say? Well, there is The American Academy of Pediatrics.

See this press release: AAP SAYS CHILDREN OF SAME-SEX COUPLES DESERVE TWO LEGALLY RECOGNIZED PARENTS

These guys seem to think gay folks with children might be better parents of they were legally married. Huh?

Below is a news release on a policy statement published in the February issue of Pediatrics, the peer-reviewed, scientific journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

For Release: February 4, 2002, 12:01 am (ET) (Headline updated February 7, 2002)

CHICAGO - The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says children who are born to, or adopted by, one member of a gay or lesbian couple deserve the security of two legally recognized parents. Therefore, a new AAP policy statement, "Coparent or Second-Parent Adoption by Same-Sex Parents" supports legal and legislative efforts that provide for the possibility of adoption of those children by the second parent or coparent in same-sex relationships.

The statement says there is a considerable body of professional literature that suggests children with parents who are homosexual have the same advantages and the same expectations for health, adjustment and development as children whose parents are heterosexual.

Coparent or second-parent adoption protects a child's right to maintain continuing relationships with both parents in a same-sex relationship. Several states have considered or enacted legislation sanctioning coparent or second parent adoption by partners of the same sex. But other states have not yet considered legislative action, while at least one state bans adoptions altogether by the second parent or coparent in a same sex relationship.

According to the policy statement, coparent or second-parent adoption in a same-sex relationship provides for the following:

Guarantees that the second parent's custody rights will be protected if the first parent falls ill or dies.

Protects the second parent's rights to custody and visitation if the couple separates.

Establishes the requirement for child support from both parents in the event of the parents' separation.

Ensures the child's eligibility for health benefits from both parents.

Provides legal grounds for either parent to provide consent for medical care and other important decisions.

Creates the basis for financial security for children by ensuring eligibility to all appropriate entitlements, such as Social Security survivors benefits.

The AAP recommends that pediatricians become familiar with professional literature regarding gay and lesbian parents and their children; support the right of every child and family to the financial, psychological and legal security that results from having both parents legally recognized; and advocate for initiatives that establish permanency through coparent or second-parent adoption for children of same-sex partners.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The February issue of Pediatrics also contains "Technical Report: Coparent or Second-Parent Adoption by Same-Sex Parents." The technical report provides details on the growing body of scientific literature that suggests children who grow up with gay or lesbian parents fare as well in emotional, cognitive, social and sexual functioning as children whose parents are heterosexual.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The American Academy of Pediatrics is an organization of 55,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults.

Well, they're only doctors. They could be wrong. Bush could be right.

One never knows.

These sites courtesy of pointers from Helena Montana (pseudonym?) writing in Demagogue.

Posted by Alan at 21:44 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 2 March 2004 21:46 PST home

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