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a blockbuster? without a doubt. environmentalist? sorta. last Friday on Korean television i caught sight of not just fake trees around the Olympic stadium but even faked high-rises.* the buildings were real enough but the authorities had set up lights inside each vacant room to simulate occupancy.

over the weekend i watched a few minutes of the marathon with my brother-in-law. as the helicopter followed the front of the pack into a lush urban park he remarked “it looks really nice, so much for the pollution.” never mind that the route and its coverage were planned to create just such a reaction.

to this day we don’t know whether or not Potemkin really did create similar fakes to impress his queen.

but for whom did China put on such a show if not, ultimately, for the Chinese? and by show I don’t mean the fireworks that were pre-taped or any of the other televisual spectacles. I mean our reactions – the world’s reactions – carefully filtered back into China’s national discourse.

Prestige is a complicated thing.

all dreams are a response to the gaps that form during the waking hours. yesterday, perhaps for as simple a reason as my having skipped lunched, I had become a pessimist by nightfall. (i was unwilling to acknowledge that the glass is not just half-full, it’s continuously overflowing.)

there is no greater cognitive gap than pessimism, especially when it is rationalized. worse, yet, it tries to extend its spell by becoming sadism and/or cynicism.

all of this is well noted in the literature of our civilization, but the vividness of my dream made me wonder how it was that monsters came to walk the earth.

my zombies are my grandfathers’ demons. both serve their purpose; in my case, to dramatize how those who lack empathy lack humanity. and though they are illusions, they are no less a part of our reality.

our eyes lack the physical ability to make out fine details at a distance. instead, our brains fill in the many gaps with narrative. likewise our dreaming mind – or inward eye, as the poets have called it – can show us what our waking mind will not.

if our brains serve any higher purpose, it’s to mind the gaps.

Related: ¿A Quién Le Importa? by Alaska y Dinarama.

weeks later: and there’s a fifth element, perhaps. they either contribute or take away from their ecosystem. the invasive exotic vs. the bee garden.

Christoph Niemann on upside down loans

Knocked Up was even more underwhelming. Being one-sided or wish-fulfillment isn’t its biggest weakness – it’s just too long.

If the right thing feels wrong then do it. If it feels right, it’s the wrong thing to do.

That may not capture it but it’s as close as I got on first viewing.

There are 301,139,947 Americans and one President.

The Chinese political system has to endure over four times the stress of the American.

I suppose there’s also a one-percent possibility that the international embarrassment will be a Chernobyl-type stimulus toward truly radical environmental action in China and around the world. But maybe that’s fooling myself too.

…at almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that whatever the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism, it would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and Americas interests in the world. These warnings came not just from political opponents, but also from experienced allies, including the British Intelligence Service, the experts in the traditionally conservative military and the FBI, and, perhaps most surprisingly, from a series of loyal Republican lawyers inside the administration itself. The number of patriotic critics inside the administration and out who threw themselves into trying to head off what they saw as a terrible departure from Americas ideals, often at an enormous price to their own careers, is both humbling and reassuring.

The alternative, of course, is to get on offense, to batter McCain for his gaffes and incoherence, hammer him for his flip-flops, highlight how his maverick status is a thing of the past, and turn him into a combination of Bush and Grandpa Simpson. God knows there are those in Chicago champing at the bit to do just that—not least, one imagines, Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who can wield the cudgel of negative ads with as much vigor and glee as any Republican. Yet Obama seems reluctant to go there. Tough pol though he is, he’s a conciliator and not a confrontationalist at heart; he seems to believe that once undecided voters know him better, he will have them eating, along with so many others, out of the palm of his hand.

If only we could vote on whether Obama will follow Axelrod to victory.

There is no taking the high road with the ad hoc coalition that has been ruling this country for the last 12 or so years. They’ve blocked that road with kills and blown up all the bridges. They operate in the gutter and that’s where the light of principled political discourse needs to be pointed.

America deserves a healthy conservative movement, not the animate corpse that is the GOP machine.

…”Batman can’t really afford to lose. Losing means death — or at least not being able to be Batman anymore.”

I had never thought of it before, but, yes, the implicit pleasure in any such masked hero movie is that he cannot lose. Losing means either death or being unmasked which is tantamount to death.

In real life, most people get second chances. Not so for the masked hero. It’s an accepted premise that heightens the tension in every battle. Nice trick.

All the people who made the movie must have gotten paid by the minute. Except for the writers.* (Their share may have been siphoned off to the MPAA.)

It’s a great movie in the tradition of cinema as experience (the IMAX version is doing gangbusters) marred by lazy dialogue, especially towards the end.

I hope the film industry is encouraged by the movie’s commercial success to invest more money in production and less in post-production, to push for more provocative characters and more elaborate mise-en-scène.

We need a return to realism – especially in our escapism.

 

*joke.

Over the last ten days or so, the President and the McCain campaign (who are clearly working in coordination, as they’re entirely entitled to do) have been systematically drawing back from their positions on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran and either fully embracing or moving toward those held for some time by Barack Obama.

I was wearing loafers. It was the sound of air coming out of my shoe whenever I pushed down on the clutch. There was indeed something wrong with the man-machine interface. But the problem was closer to the man than the machine.

According to this book review, cited by Matthew Yglesias, the new book by Jane Mayer on America’s descent into the ranks of states that imprison without due process and torture without aim is:

1) over-compensation by the Vice President and his office for not having prevented the attacks of 9/11/2001

2) eliciting so many false confessions and violating so many laws as to sabotage countless investigations and prosecutions

3) responsible for producing some of the bad intelligence used to justify the invasion of and war in Iraq

Which makes me think: elections are so incredibly important. Any voter who is flip about and/or unwilling to think out their position on elections is, in part, as guilty of the crimes spelled out above as the mad men who personally ordered them.

Yet, now that he is the presumptive nominee, Obama is standing not with Feingold, but with Bush and the special interests Obama once denounced. He says he’ll vote for a White House-backed FISA rewrite — which is likely to be taken up by the Senate this week — in opposition to the position taken by civil liberties groups, legal scholars on the left and right and, of course, Russ Feingold. Who can justify that?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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