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There are so many brilliant, disarmingly beautiful moments in WALL•E, I want to watch it – or at least the first chapter – a few more times to begin to understand what I’ve seen.

The plot is easier to recall, especially as it’s a series of precise political punches. The EVE robot, newly arrived to an arid, dusty, garbage-strewn landscape shoots first and ask questions later. WALL•E lives to build skyscrapers – ziggurats – out of garbage. The complete arc of the movie is to deliver the audience – fat, lazy spectators – “back to earth.”

An irresistible truth.

from Wired:

For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

Almost everything I get paid to do, I learned to do by applying one sort of “science” or another.

What happened next in the life of a small-time revolutionary after he was given $25 million and was repatriated to the U.S. with a new identity, might make for quite a show:

The hunt for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed involved the entire American intelligence establishment, with its billion-dollar arrays of spy satellites and global eavesdropping net. But his capture came down to a simple text message sent from an informant who had slipped into the bathroom of a house in Rawalpindi, near the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

“I am with K.S.M.,” the message said, according to an intelligence officer briefed on the episode.

The capture team waited a few hours before going in on the night of March 1, 2003, to blur the connection to the informant, a walk-in attracted by the offer of a $25 million reward. The informant, described by one American who met him as “a little guy who looked like a farmer,” would later get a face-to-face thank you from George J. Tenet, then the C.I.A. director, at the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi, intelligence officials say, and he was resettled with his reward money under a new identity in the United States.

to the victor the spoils (of the GWOT):

And of course if I were Barack Obama it’s very possible that I wouldn’t think giving the executive branch unlimited surveillance powers was a bad idea at all — I’m going to be president in a few months.

Is it possible to send both a contribution and a rebuke all at once?

What Barack Obama did here was wrong and destructive. He’s supporting a bill that is a full-scale assault on our Constitution and an endorsement of the premise that our laws can be broken by the political and corporate elite whenever the scary specter of The Terrorists can be invoked to justify it. What’s more, as a Constitutional Law Professor, he knows full well what a radical perversion of our Constitution this bill is, and yet he’s supporting it anyway. Anyone who sugarcoats or justifies that is doing a real disservice to their claimed political values and to the truth.

I’m so naive, it never occurred to me that people did this in real life:

There are reports from very reliable sources that Hoyer, after engineering this “compromise” and ensuring it has enough votes to pass, will then vote against it so he can claim it’s not his fault (as will Pelosi). Worse, the Democratic leadership in the Senate (Reid and Durbin) have been saying that while they oppose the “compromise” and will vote against it, they will do nothing to impede its passage.

We would never permit a network to physically beat people in order to report on the beatings as sensational news.

The body politic is another story. Frank Rich:

The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided, and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the loyalty of white male bowlers and other constituencies who tended to prefer her to Mr. Obama in the primaries.

This is reality turned upside down. It’s the Democrats who are largely united and the Republicans who are at one another’s throats.

Yet the myth of Democratic disarray is so pervasive that when “NBC Nightly News” and The Wall Street Journal presented their new poll results last week (Obama, 47 percent; McCain, 41 percent) they ignored their own survey’s findings to stick to the clichéd script. Both news organizations (and NBC’s sibling, MSNBC) dwelled darkly on Mr. Obama’s “problems with two key groups” (as NBC put it): white men, where he is behind 20 percentage points to Mr. McCain, and white suburban women, where he is behind 6 points.

Since that poll gives Mr. Obama not just a 19-point lead among all women but also a 7-point lead among white women, a 6-point deficit in one sliver of the female pie is hardly a heart-stopper. Nor is Mr. Obama’s showing among white men shocking news. No Democratic presidential candidate, including Bill Clinton, has won a majority of that declining demographic since 1964. Mr. Kerry lost white men by 25 points, and Mr. Gore did by 24 points (even as he won the popular vote).

“NBC Nightly News” was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr. McCain (and outperformed Mr. Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt: independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence that pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr. McCain is as nonexistent as the evidence of a female stampede. Mr. Obama swamps Mr. McCain by 62 percent to 28 percent — a disastrous G.O.P. setback, given that President Bush took 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, according to exit polls. No wonder the McCain campaign no longer lists its candidate’s home state of Arizona as safe this fall.

There are many ways that Mr. Obama can lose this election. But his 6-percentage-point lead in the Journal-NBC poll is higher than Mr. Bush’s biggest lead (4 points) over Mr. Kerry at any point in that same poll in 2004. So far, despite all the chatter to the contrary, Mr. Obama is not only holding on to Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic constituencies but expanding others (like African-Americans). The same cannot be said of Mr. McCain and the G.O.P. base.

That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.

World tips Hollywood on its axis:

The studios may be Hollywood-based, but their conglom parents are thinking globally, which affects every business and creative decision.

In the past, each country’s box office was a mix of Hollywood blockbusters, U.S. midrange and indie pics, and local fare. Recently, the midrange pics have been squeezed out by local titles, such as by French blockbuster “Bienvenue chez les Cht’is.”

And, as the studios enter local-language production, Hollywood finds its monopoly on big-scale epics also being threatened. Cash-rich Asian companies grabbed headlines in Cannes with a string of deals and presentations for ambitious films that reached far beyond their traditional markets.

glenn greenwald:

Just in the first three months of 2008, recent lobbyist disclosure statements reveal that AT&T spent $5.2 million in lobbyist fees (putting it well ahead of its 2007 pace, when it spent just over $17 million). In the first quarter of 2008, Verizon spent $4.8 million on lobbyist fees, while Comcast spent $2.6 million. So in the first three months of this year, those three telecoms — which would be among the biggest beneficiaries of telecom amnesty (right after the White House) — spent a combined total of almost $13 million on lobbyists. They’re on pace to spend more than $50 million on lobbying this year — just those three companies.

as my dad would say “what a racket.” as in racketeering.

the executive branch asks companies to become accomplices in a crime spree. the companies accede. a few years later, the white house gets caught. the companies get caught. and now the legislative branch, via its unofficial intercessors, is asking these companies to pony up some money or else they’re going to get fined, prosecuted, whatever.

it almost makes arguments for small government conservatism sound reasonable. why empower crooks to lie and steal?

unfortunately that logic would also dictate that we do away with freeways because they lead to forty thousand deaths each year when the reasonable response is to make freeways more efficient and less dangerous by making them more “transparent.”

the same logic applies to governance.

Almost.

Orangutan escapes pen at US zoo – Zoo officials say the animal was easily sedated and captured.

Catastrophes are like a political x-ray machine. They reveal the true condition of civic institutions.

Following the earthquake in Sichuan, China:

Among the developments to watch in coming days is growing public anger over the shoddy construction of schools in rural China. Among the dead are a massive number of children. Many parents are already asking: Why did the schools collapse when other government buildings remained standing?

Following Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar:

In the wealthy neighborhoods where the generals and diplomats live, groups of soldiers are clearing away debris and workers are perched on rooftops replacing tiles. But in the poorer neighborhoods, “there are no soldiers at all,” said one resident.

Following Hurricane Karina in New Orleans, USA:

Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government’s failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives, according to a blistering report by House investigators.

Military columnist Joe Galloway as quoted by Glenn Greenwald:

…Marine Gen. Paul Van Riper had walked out of an Iran scenario war game where he was commander of the opposing forces when he outfoxed the U.S. Navy & Marine attacking forces, sunk over a dozen major American ships and killed over 10,000 U.S. sailors and marines. The headquarters response was to re-start the war game with new rules forbidding Van Riper to employ any of his successful tactics — using small speedboats and small aircraft packed with explosives in a mass kamikazi attack on the fleet; defeating U.S. eavesdropping by dispatching his orders by messengers; etc.

At this point Van Riper walked out. An investigation of the whole affair was done & DOD promised Van Riper they would release it within a year. They never did.

Awesome eight years, excellent political movement.

update. Eric Martin: “Making important policy choices based on hoped for outcomes is something of a pattern for the Bush administration.”

Great tits cope well with warming

update. it’s a thing of elegance, indeed. two days after noting the above, the headline – just the headline – was on BoingBoing.net. the story – rather, the headline – stayed in BBC News’ site most e-mailed category for at least a week.

Newsweek via Schneier on Security:

Sir David Omand, who used to head Britain’s version of the National Security Agency and oversaw its entire intelligence establishment from the Cabinet Office earlier this decade, described terrorism as “one corner” of the global security threat posed by weapons proliferation and political instability. That in turn is only one of three major dangers facing the world over the next few years. The others are the deteriorating environment and a meltdown of the global economy. Putting terrorism in perspective, said Sir David, “leads naturally to a risk management approach, which is very different from what we’ve heard from Washington these last few years, which is to ‘eliminate the threat’.”

There is only a single scene in Iron Man where the movie threatens to become a lie about advanced American firepower and the power (right?) it grants us to police the world. Luckily, the scene is short and bittersweet. The rest of the movie is like watching an excellent – detached, methodical – surgeon performing open heart surgery on the American body politic. “You have everything and you have nothing,” a convenient but not entirely one-dimensional Third World humanist tells us, via Tony Stark, at the start of the movie and it’s quite right.

The Tin Man is back and it’s never been a more compelling character. This is the finest of the Marvel adaptations and, not surprisingly, the first it financed.

Ana adds: “I like that Iron Man got his ass kicked by…” and was unable to defeat his opponent. In fact, it’s only when Stark’s likewise workaholic and lonely assistant blows up a magical sustainable energy reactor that the bad guy is defeated.

Could this be the best super hero movie made to date? Better than the first Superman?

Bonus: it really brought home just how much of a shit movie Transformers was. And, Audi / Marvel: that last Audi integration, with the perfectly white soccer mom and family, it nearly derailed the movie. Easy does it.

Last night I wrote:

I wish more comedies – including this one – would sustain absurdity for longer intervals.

This morning I discovered The Mighty Boosh. It’s like a waking dream: my wishes have come true.

Two weeks after watching the final season of The Wire, I believe it does mark a turning point in my understanding of television – as it has for so many. A few days ago, I had the privilege of reading a script for a pilot by a friend and my only serious suggestion was, more or less, to include the kind of pedagogical sequences that made the first season – or any season – of The Wire so spectacular. I can’t imagine a good television drama that lacks its attention to social detail.

I know that’s quite a high bar given the culture – the business culture – that dominates television production. My guess is many, many people are going to try to imitate it and that’s a great thing.

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), like Schindler’s List, succeeds in making history personal. Like the Spielberg film, it brings the viewer into a world turned upside down by a political catastrophe, and affirms both hope and the possibility of redemption by celebrating a man who makes a right turn from a wrong turn lane. I can’t imagine it didn’t rock Germany. I pray someone will make the Cuban version. And, now, sadly, the American version, as well.

We Own the Night is a very well produced, well acted and tightly constructed drama in the best – or, at least, the oldest – tradition. At heart, it is a movie about sacrifice and the bond between siblings. (”Blood is thicker than…”) But it has a mise-en-scène detailed enough to satisfy our modern taste for the surreal or fantastical: the early scenes at the nightclub, the Russian patriarch’s house, the car chase in the rain are all exquisitely rendered. I only wish it would have had a bigger budget to add additional scenes into the climax.

Mystic River is a movie about actors acting A Script That Is About Moral Ambiguity. Also, the movie is about moral ambiguity. And it has really impressive acting. If you enjoy seeing actors acting a script that is about moral ambiguity, this could be for you. I didn’t like it so much.

28 Weeks Later. Kill mommy. Not once, not twice, but three times. I read they’re going to make a third installment. Presumably, to kill mommy again. What did she do?! (Also, that midday scene with the zombies approaching all spread out on a tranquil field: it is good. I totally understand why they used it twice.)

You know when you have to pee real bad? Like, really, really bad, and then you get to go? Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. I guess you do need a slow, almost dull first-half – or two-thirds – to create the tension that is relieved when the movie becomes surreal. Because when it does, it flirts with beauty. The cheetah ride and the “marijuana love” daydream sequence are delightful. They remind me of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice or, more recently, the final sequence (DVD extra?) in The 40 year-old Virgin. I wish more comedies – including this one – would sustain absurdity for longer intervals.

This is England. British History X. In color. With some charming (really) depictions of adolescence. Complete tangent: has anyone ever made a short, for the festival circuit, of nothing but funder credits? This one, like so many European movies, had quite a few.

Douchebag:

The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” he said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.

Two for two:

Our elections are dominated by the same tired personality script, trotted out over and over and over. Democrats and liberals — no matter how poor their upbringing, no matter how self-made they are, no matter how egalitarian their policies — are the freakish, out-of-touch elitists who despise the values of the Regular Americans. Right-wing leaders — no matter how extravagantly rich they are by virtue of other people’s money, no matter how insulated their lives are, no matter how indifferent their policies are to the vast rich/poor gap — are the normal, salt-of-the-earth Regular Folk. These petty, cliched storylines drown out every meaningful consideration and dictate our election outcomes, and they are deployed automatically.

Glenn Greenwald:

But beyond just that, there is something deeply misleading — disturbingly self-justifying — about the stampede to depict John Yoo as some kind of singular, isolated aberration. It’s redolent of the scapegoating of Lynndie England and her low-level Abu Ghraib colleagues for what was official government policy. The responsibility for the torture regime does not rest with John Yoo or even just isolated Bush officials. It’s far more collective than that.

Today, I have enjoyed the travelogues of:

Dorothy Gambrell, artist, on her blog and Flickr stream.

and

Craig Robinson, artist, on his blog.

Because I am no longer on a hiatus from making music and thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I am lately very much enjoying these:

Foals. “Hummer” and “(Tron) Is A Great Movie” make math rock less hard.

The Virgins. “Rich Girls” and “Love Is Colder Than Death” are infectious. The former could start a pandemic.

Cornelius. It took me a year – and the rare good fortune of attending a live concert – to dig into his most recent album, “Sensuous.” Now I really, really dig it. (Thanks, Enrique, for the gift.)

Of Montreal. I suspect I’m one of many to have fallen in love with “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games” thanks to its video. What a wonderful surprise to find out his work is getting better – or, at least, closer to my tastes. “A Sentence of Sorts In Kongsvinger” is inspiring in every sense.

A few weeks ago I watched a late-stage Soviet movie and wondered if any movies made henceforth will ever be as alien to anyone else as this one was to me.

And then I watched the “Darjeeling Limited.” And it was even more alien to me than the Soviet science fiction film.

I suppose if you’re looking for a thorough account of the WASP in his element circa 2007, you could do worse. Surprisingly, Rushmore predates the coronation of George W. Bush by two years.

The feeling that I’m living in the future is beginning to overwhelm me:

Websense is reporting that Gmail’s CAPTCHA has been broken, and that bots are beginning to sign up with a one in five success rate. More interestingly, they have a lot of technical details about how the botnet members coordinate with two different computers during the process. They believe that the second host is either trying to learn to crack the CAPTCHA or that it’s a quality check of some sort. Curiously, the bots pretend to read the help information while breaking the CAPTCHA, probably to prevent Google from giving them a timeout message.

I know the feeling – like déjà vu – is just a trick. I mean, I might have had the same feeling in the 1910’s reading about the first tanks being subverted by mustard gas. But the fact that these are invisible and weirdly semi-autonomous machines really kinda takes it to another level.

The blog post in which this game is announced to the world has two comments, whereas a recent post about a dead child actor on the web site of an ogre has 198.

I sure hope the former wins out in the long run. It’s “game changing.”

More on the previous:

Scientists say conservation efforts that reduce conflicts between humans and animals could play a key role in limiting future outbreaks.

1. doctor, heal thyself:

I just heard Bush give one of his officious lectures about democracy with the news that Castro is stepping down. He said that he expects the Cubans to hold free and fair elections — “and I mean free and fair, not those staged elections the Castro brothers try to foist off on the people.”

I laughed when I heard that. Two political brothers staging elections and foisting them off on the people — where have I heard that before?

2. sound advice:

Lesson one: Failure is more common than success in the transition to a democratic market economy. Lesson two: The less internationally integrated, more centralized, and more personalized a former communist regime was, the more traumatic and unsuccessful its transition will be. Lesson three: Dismantling a communist state is far easier and faster than building a functional replacement for it. Lesson four: The brutal, criminal ways of a powerful Communist party with a tight grip on public institutions are usually supplanted by the brutal, criminal ways of powerful private business conglomerates with a tight grip on public institutions. Lesson five: Introducing a market economy without a strong and effective state capable of regulating it gives resourceful entrepreneurs more incentive to emulate Al Capone than Bill Gates.

It is therefore safe to assume that if the Castro regime suddenly implodes, Cuba will end up looking more like Albania than the Bahamas.

While looking at Taryn Simon’s photographs of “the hidden and unfamiliar,” I read:

In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born to a breeder in Bentonville, Arkansas on February 3, 1999. As a result of inbreeding, Kenny is mentally retarded and has significant physical limitations. Due to his deep-set nose, he has difficulty breathing and closing his jaw, his teeth are severely malformed and he limps from abnormal bone structure in his forearms. The three other tigers in Kenny’s litter are not considered to be quality white tigers as they are yellow coated, cross-eyed, and knock-kneed.

Nature finds a balance.

Sometimes dramatically. Just ask Roy of Sigfried and Roy.

I can see why the fiction of hell was created – in keeping with real-world, natural phenomena. Equilibrium.

Mass rituals have always lived beside – if not in a healthy opposition to – idol worship.

In the communal rite, everyone participates and is transported. The ego belongs to the group.

Before an altar, the ego is projected into an abstraction.

The movie camera – television, film – continues in this tradition of idol worship. Viewers focus on a few faces.

In the U.S., we have fewer carnivals, don’t we? Though there are a few efforts, here and there, to create mass play in the age of the iPod.

Our new rehearsal space is opposite one of the main Church of Scientology buildings on Hollywood Boulevard.

Parking is very difficult in this area, as many of the metered spots are turned over to valet use at night. (Quite a racket.) As a result, we sometimes have to circle the studio for a few minutes before finding a spot. It’s a roundabout way to experience the city as theater.

There was a sole protester outside this Scientology property last night, holding a placard and occasionally speaking into a small bullhorn. There were, however, two cop cars, double parked, and at least as many police officers on the sidewalk. The cops were mostly bored, though one was talking to a man in business casual clothing – presumably, associated with the beleaguered group.

While looking for parking, we always slow down whenever we see someone sitting in a car. Are they about to leave? Yes? No? “Are you leaving?”

And so when we spotted an SUV in a prime location, right on the corner of Hollywood and Ivar, we all but put our car in park. Inside the vehicle was a woman in her late 30s or early 40s, dressed in business attire, using a wired headset to talk into her illuminated smartphone. Nothing out of the ordinary there – much of Los Angeles lives and dies by the mobile phone. But this particular woman was parked kitty-corner from the Scientology building. And she wasn’t leaving.

For the 10 minutes or so we circled the block, she didn’t budge, her eyes focused on the solitary protest across the street. When we’d finally found parking and were walking towards the studio, she was gone. And the protester was nowhere in sight. But suddenly, the same SUV was pulling a sharp U-turn back towards the empty spot, its driver speaking animatedly into her phone.

The protester, we learned a few steps later, had simply crossed Hollywood to get a slice of pizza.

postscript: After finishing this entry I remembered that when we’d first rounded the corner in question, there had been another SUV with a passenger and driver in the same desirable spot – both white men in white shirts. A few minutes later, they were replaced by the car and driver described above.

The band Battles on the BBC television show Later!

The entire segment is full of clever, rewarding details like the decision to point a camera down at the sole – and idiosyncratically tall – crash cymbal. It’s just one example of many that suggests the producers took a moment to think about about this particular band, its quirks, and how to best translate its personality to television. Win.

I’m very, very late to this party, but, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is an excellent movie. Warm, generous, fluid.

Juno. As it was ending, I thought, “Well, it’s cute.” On the way out of the theater, Ana called it “cutesy,” which, to me, nails it.

In some ways, the protagonist is like any other movie hero – say Bruce Willis in Die Hard or Sylvester Stallone in Rambo. She’s not bound by the same rules.

But I do wish she’d cried in the first act and not in the last 10 minutes. Even John McClane had more stirring moments of personal weakness. When Juno lapses, she gets mad at her would-be boyfriend. That’s it.

I want to believe kids like Juno exist in the real world. Is there such a thing as minstrelism not based on race but age? (Look Who’s Talking 4²?)

For all the verbal fireworks, the sole conflict in the story is whether two 16 year-olds will go steady. Is Sixteen Candles a categorically different film or just much better?

The People vs. the Profiteers via Digby:

The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. “Inside, there were 15 human bodies,” he recalls. “A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again.”

…It is not unheard of for trucks in a war zone to perform hearse duty. But both civilian and U.S.-military regulations state that once a trailer has been used to store corpses it can never again be loaded with food or drink intended for human consumption…

But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice—ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers’s grisly discovery. “You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn’t even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.—the public warehouse center—several times. There’s nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded.”

Sylvia Poggioli’s latest series on NPR, Exploring the Status of Muslim Women in Europe, is excellent. One of the best reports I’ve come across on immigration, feminism and politics – let alone Muslim Women in Europe. Highly recommended.

The Chicago Reader quoted and paraphrased:

From Adlai Stevenson to John Kerry, high-minded liberals have acted as if they were blind to the root feelings that feed the followers of politicians like Nixon and Bush. Instead, they alternate between expecting a fair fight on the issues (and getting swiftboated instead) and imagining that once people realize what a bad person Nixon or Bush is, the people will turn against him.

Conservatism isn’t just a temporary delusion or a wacky distraction. In Perlstein’s view, it’s a deep-seated expression of human nature…His point: “We’re not going to eliminate them. The best we can do is to win our 51 percent. What’s fascinating is that we share this country together.

Followed by:

He’s right about this. Conservatism is not an aberration. It is a facet of human nature and a permanent fixture in American life. At the moment they have a successful political movement that first grew out of a genuine grassroots uprising and was soon funded by the aristocrats (who are always conservatives) to help them protect their interests.

I stupidly watched a Soviet science-fiction movie from the mid 80s this morning. We don’t get to see very many in-depth expressions of such a vastly different political reality.

Will Chinese movies ever shock American sensibilities? I don’t think so. My guess is that the American point-of-view is now so universal that no mass-market film can escape it.

Perhaps, not until there’s a new kind of entertainment; Japanese video games and the video music of Cornelius come to mind.

A few times now, on television mostly but once on the local NPR station, KPCC, I’ve caught breathless promos for “special reports” on race, gender and the Democratic presidential hopefuls.

Forty-three percent of all public school students are Hispanic and/or Black. Fifty-seven percent of college students are not men.

When will we discuss race, gender and the Republican presidential hopefuls?