perfidy

God bless the lowly search function. I knew that, at some time in the past, Minister Johno had admitted his admiration for the Mexican soap opera.

Due to my advancing years, it helps, of course, that said admission happened within the last three months, but never mind that. I remembered.

And while it wasn't the key point of his missive, or even anything other than a footnote, the second of many such footnotes, it caused me to stop and pay attention to a story in today's Wall Street Journal, entitled "With Sexy Story Lines, Low Budgets, News Corp. Will Launch MyNetworkTV" (sadly, unless I get lucky by linking to the "print" page, subscription required).

Now, my entire exposure to the Mexican soap opera can be found in old episodes of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", when Ryan Stiles was called upon to do improvisations on such things, and always made his point by using his hands to simulate having big, bouncy, heaving sweater puppets. So I, perhaps more than the average normal reader, was taken by the phrasing used by Brooks Barnes in describing the upcoming offering from News Corp. To wit:

Every time News Corp. launches a new television business, it turns to programming that entrenched players decry as schlocky and culturally debasing. Then, in many cases, the company starts printing money.

What? This sounds like fun, even for a guy who's got perhaps two TV shows he watches with any regularity. The article continues:

On Tuesday, Roger Ailes, chairman of News Corp.'s Fox Television Stations, will flip the switch on MyNetworkTV, a new broadcast network that will feature a novel format for mainstream U.S. television: Super-sexy -- and super-cheap -- prime-time soap operas that air six nights a week for limited runs.

It's an over-the-top format borrowed from Spanish-language broadcasters. While story lines on American soaps can drag on for years, Spanish soaps, or telenovelas, deliver immediate gratification. They wrap everything up after 13 weeks, offer a cliffhanger in each episode and culminate with shocking finales that can rack up Super Bowl-size ratings -- just the formula that MyNetwork hopes to duplicate.

U.S. viewers may be jolted by the style and content of the two shows MyNetwork is rolling out next week -- "Desire" and "Fashion House." But "Fox has a way of turning unsophisticated, simplistic programming into a success," says Laura Caraccioli-Davis, an executive vice president at ad-buying firm Starcom Entertainment. She adds: "And this is definitely unsophisticated."

(emphasis, of course, mine)

I'm not sure if they're trying to up the sophistication, or to provide full employment for second-tier talent in Hollywood (neither of which would offend me, nor would they improve my quality of life), but their approach might provide something to help waste more of Johno's increasingly limited free time:

MyNetwork has largely hired actors with limited experience. And in another bid to save money, it is buying telenovela scripts from Mexico, Cuba and other Spanish-speaking countries and translating them into English. It employs a staff of writers to smooth out the story lines and winnow the shows down to 65 episodes from 120, and taping is done on union soundstages well outside the Hollywood infrastructure in San Diego.

Schlock TV, but now in English, with "smoother" story lines, and shorter runs. What more could we ask for in mindless entertainment?

And it's not that I have a problem with mindless TV. Perhaps I'm the only guy who remembers a feature that used to be on (the Comedy Channel? - heck, it might still be on for all I know), called Short Attention Span Theater. Reading the plot development for one episode, SAST was the first thing that came to mind, minus the alleged comedy:

The plot points are rapid-fire. "Desire" is the tale of two brothers who are on the run from the Mafia and happen to be in love with the same woman; one brother sleeps with two different women, dodges a spray of bullets and escapes from an exploding building -- and that's just in the opening 10 minutes of the first episode.

For those rare cases when I'm in the mood to watch crap (and of course, sometimes I am), I prefer that it be really efficiently delivered crap, so that I can either watch twice as much in the allotted time, or spend half as much time watching it.

News Corp to the rescue, it would seem. And I'm rather looking forward to seeing just how bad this stuff can possibly be.

[wik] This all reminds me - I really miss MST3K. Is it still shown anywhere on cable?

[alsø wik] I was surprised to preview this story and see the phrase "...fuck, it might still be on for all I know", and came back here to the entry to find out if I had suffered Tourette's Syndrome. Nope - I typed "h e c k". Honest. Blogging software is amazing, no?

You scored as Serenity (Firefly).

You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you.

Speaking of mild embarrassment, I'm passingly familiar with something like half of the specific alleged cultural icons on the list above. So there's that. I await the assistance of my fellow Ministers in analyzing what these results mean. At their extreme leisure, of course. First pass, though, my pictorial montage makes me seem a Buckethead clone, of sorts.

[wik] HTML, as a markup language, rivals grunting and farting for clearly enunciated communication.

Proper deployment of dramatic reaction would require that, since Minister GeekLethal, and before him, Minister Johno, has risen to the bait, I should hold off until Minister Ross has abased himself by tossing an entry across the transom.

But that wouldn't work, because Ross is our touchstone in these matters. As a ferinstance, when some of us (not naming names, mind you) get so busy that we can't squeeze out a screed, the standard excuse is "Hey, man, I'm totally Rossed." It's an apt synonym for being too damned busy to take a breath, and it's both understood and accepted in lieu of providing, well, something interesting for our readers.

My excuse, since I've just obliterated that one for my purposes in the foreseeable future, is that I'm half-Rossed (hey! a new adjective) and unwilling to bother the assemblage with my standard fare.

That standard fare, in all but the rarest of instances, involves me venting my spleen at a piece of idiocy from one or another quarter of our world. Most of those idiocy chunks are politically-oriented, and I really do try to avoid turning this blog into a rant-box for my own, surely non-universal, views on what's stupid, what's an attempt at shouted and repetitive group hypnosis, what's an attempt to play to the short attention spans and poor critical thinking practices of some small bit of the populace, and, well, what's interesting. For that, I've got another blog or three that I could use, and I don't, so why would I do it here, and urinate all over the ambiance?

But, honest, the moment I find something outside that standard fare that twists my tail, you'll read it here.

(clock starts again on the Buckethead bad-blogger bash-o-meter....now)

Or at least I do. In between inane-but-cleverly-crafted spam pushing the latest pump and dump stock (It's on the Pink Sheets now, but Honest! It could be the next Exxon!), I get the occasional email message that doesn't intend to offend, but still does, all the same.

Like this nugget, peristaltically placed in my inbox within the last hour, from Grassfire.org:

Despite a truce to end the current fighting, lasting peace in the Middle East will never take hold so long as anti-Semitic Islamic leaders continue calling for the elimination of Israel.

But that isn't the only battle front facing Israel. They are also battling the liberal media who seems to accept the spin that this latest battle is about some ancient claim to land--when in reality the fighting is based on a hatred of Christians and Jews.

A look at the media coverage during the incursion underscores that fact. Doctored photos and misleading reports have all found their way into mainstream
reporting.

That is why Grassfire, along with our partner the Media Research Center launched a national petition supporting Israel against these anti-Semitic attacks.
Over the next 30 days, we want to rally 75,000 "Friends of Israel" petitions to present to the Israel Embassy. Click here to sign:(link expunged)

It's not clear to me whom Grassfire is accusing of "anti-Semitic attacks" - I know it's either the various Muslims, Islamic leaders, the press, all three, or someone else entirely.

And when I saw the note, I got mildly irked, possibly at the imprecision of their rationale for requesting an electronic "signature" on a truly meaningless "document".

First off, as strange as it sounds, even as I type it, nobody is attacking Jews, per se. They might be attacking Zionists, and are definitely attacking Israelis, but I'm quite comfortable asserting that neither the press, the more murderous and adventuresome of the Islamists, nor the area's governments, is attacking "Semites".

The actions of the aggressors in the current unpleasantness are distinctly terroristic, distinctly anti-Israel, and reek of "please, kick my ass", but they're not anti-Semitic, because if they were, then there's a chance they'd be killing some of themselves, too. Neither, then, are the noticeably biased (against Israel and, by extension, the US) reports in the popular press. There's anti-American and anti-Israeli froth in full flower, but to call it anti-Semitic is both lazy and unhelpful.

The world's made up of two types of people: Those who believe the world's made up of two types of people and... No, scratch that.

If the world could be said to truly be made of two types, one possible classification would be those who dislike anything Israel or the US does to protect itself and those who don't. Another possibility would be a preference for "the little guy", no matter how cynical and childishly lame his protestations of correctness. Reflexively being against the US or Israel is not a new phenomenon, and neither is a preference for David (ironic, that) over Goliath.

But an email trying to get my knickers in a twist by playing on some silly-ass claim of anti-Semitism shows a lack of intellectual seriousness on Grassfire's part, and on the part of those who share their lazy methods of eliciting support.

• I prefer that the attacked be allowed to defend themselves, vigorously, and that if they happen to be in the right, they prevail.
• I prefer that opportunistic militants who play with fire get burned, preferably badly enough that they stop playing with fire.
• I prefer that the weaker-constitutioned nations of the world desist in their (successful, it would seem) shaming of Israel into a cease fire whose purpose is solely to allow Hizb'allah to rearm, in the manner dictated by the prophet himself (piss be upon him), who thought truces were good ways to lick one's wounds and live to fight the same fight another day, or later on the same day.
• I prefer the simple, unvarnished truth in the reporting that I read, rather than being told, obliquely or not, what I should think of a given situation. If I care what someone thinks, rather than what they saw, I'll read the op-ed page (and I do)
• I'd prefer that "we" could stop pretending to be shocked when propaganda is used as a tool of war, and that instead, when a non-party to such a war intentionally spreads propaganda, they should be punished in the marketplace of reputation, ideas, or business

And I'd prefer that those allegedly well-intentioned souls who seem to think that 75,000 imaginary signatures on an imaginary document will do fuck-all for the Israeli people go find some better use of their time and my mailbox. Such an imaginary signature has no effect on any of the things about which they've gotten their bowels in an uproar.

I'm perhaps overly sensitive to the inanity of the supposed security at our nation's airports, having seen too many instances of Barney Fife syndrome on the part of puffed up losers at various airports. While I'm sure there are many competent screeners, they all seem to work shifts that keep us coming in contact. My typical encounter with the breed makes me certain that they had three choices: TSA, some form of work requiring a white paper hat and a name tag, or one or another variety of animal husbandry. Sadly, in each case, they didn't read past the first item.

Watching these folks, in fits of mild sadism, drag uniformed pilots (to say nothing of blue-haired grandmothers and crying 6 year olds) through baseless subjugation has always struck me as misguided and fruitless.

But, on a recent trip through this month's opinings from Bruce Schneier, I saw another of his recent essays (in addition to the item I've added as an update to the drug-related post below). This one is entitled "Focus on terrorists, not tactics". I found it an interesting read, and commend it to your attention.

Key points include:

• Everything you know about airport security, you can pretty much ignore as a device to keep you safe
• No fly lists, secondary screening, prohibition of fingernail clippers, Richard Reid inspired shoe-checks, and the rest, had nothing to do with foiling the plot at Heathrow
• Neither did banning box-cutters
• Old-fashioned intelligence work, however, did
• The resulting intensified security measures are prudent
• But will cease to be, shortly

His point, well and succinctly articulated, is that strategy is more important than tactics. Standard fare, really, but he expounds:

It's easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it's shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we've wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we've wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets -- stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security -- and too many ways to kill people.

Security measures that require us to guess correctly don't work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It's not security, it's security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.

Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it'll catch the sloppy and the stupid -- and that's a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely -- but it won't catch a well-planned plot. We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly keep them off airplanes.

(emphasis mine)

Given the choices of capitulation, constant and counterproductive "pretend" security measures, or applying a bit of brainpower and shoe leather to the problem while still treating it like a life-or-death chess game, I'd choose the latter. And not just because I have a fondness for cheesy spy thrillers.

Today's Onion installment contains an item called "Millions Of Americans Buying Floyd Landis-Inspired Bracelets". I refer to it as an "item" because it's just a picture, rather than even an article with commentary. Fair use, then, dictates that you have to click the link to see the picture. Deal with it, because it's one of the keys to my premise here.

I find the Tour de France, and bicycling generally, to be uninteresting, and couldn't care less that half the field's big names were axed on drug-related charges just prior to the start. I care just a bit more about Floyd Landis' case, primarily because, contrary to all rational indications reported so far, I still think he might be deserving of the, well, whatever it is that a Tour de France winner wins.

He went from a day of abject failure in the Tour to a day of reportedly unprecendented athletic achievement. Or so I've read - I don't know for certain, because, honestly, the Tour interests me not even slightly. Nobody seems willing to claim his pass on the mountain climb was anything other than majestic. And, just in case his reported high-testosterone levels had something to do with it, here are the odd things:

• Only a dumb-ass would shoot testosterone during the Tour de France, where everyone is assumed to be cheating, and is regularly tested like the cheaters they most likely are
• Testosterone isn't fast-acting, and from what I've seen, takes several weeks' lead time to be of any effect
• If, in fact, he did inject testosterone, he's both clinically retarded and likely quite surprised that it didn't kick in to avoid his abject failure of the previous day's ride
• All due respect to the doping agencies and their tests, I wouldn't trust the results of such tests any farther than I could throw a bull by the dick

Why the skepticism on my part about such tests? Other than my general skeptical nature, there was an interesting article in Saturday's WSJ (subscribers only, most likely, but who friggin' knows?) reporting on tests using "Etg Alcohol Testing" (ethyl glucuronide). The article, "A Test for Alcohol -- And Its Flaws".

Boiled down to its basics, the article describes a test that's supposed to get past the problem of detecting weekend binge drinkers during the work week, when they're presumably not tippling. The problem is:

The test "can't distinguish between beer and Purell" hand sanitizer, says H. Westley Clark, director of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's center for substance-abuse treatment. His office intends to study EtG and issue a statement on its use in the fall. "When you're looking at loss of job, loss of child, loss of privileges, you want to make sure" the test is right, he says.

I'd hate to have my rights impinged for washing my hands with Purell (not that I do, but that's not the point).

The point is that I think the drug testing zealots spend a lot of time on precision and completely disdain accuracy.

That and, honestly, who gives a shit about cheating in a stupid bicycle race?

[wik] See also this essay on Wired by Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Internet Security, explaining, I think, why doping is forever.

Selectively true at best, I'm sure. But some allegedly smart money seems to think so:

HuffingtonPost.com – New York, NY; a provider of a left leaning political news and blogging site; $5 million; Series A; Greycroft Partners, Individuals, Softbank Capital Partners.

Go "Zsa Zsa"! Or would "Eva" be the more apt analogy? (I don't remember Magda well enough to know whether the caricature is still fitting)

At the risk of disrupting Minister Buckethead's ongoing feature enlightening us on state mottoes, I'm forced to drop in a note about a story in this morning's Wall Street Journal (subscription possibly required), entitled "Naming a State Dirt Just Doesn't Wash with New Jerseyites".

All due respect to residents of the Garden State, but I'd expect that the only problem with naming a state dirt would be the confusion caused on the part of people like me, who think they should simply rename the entire state "Dirt". (excepting some of the nicer, western portions of the state, which should simply be given to Pennsylvania)

The protagonist in this Quixotic endeavor, David Friedman, runs the Ocean County soil-conservation district, and appears to be, in his own way, a deep-thinking poet, of some kind:

"What's beneath our feet," Mr. Friedman continued, "is a whole other world of earth and worms and...help me out, Chris."

"And roots and organisms," said Chris Miller, a specialist with the U.S. Agriculture Department who was on an inspection tour; he was riding in the back seat.

Truly a man of words, that.

"They all serve," Mr. Friedman said. "If we manage what's below our feet, it's going to benefit mankind."

Apparently, the Journal decided not to print the quote from the guy who responded "Hey! Don't bogart that joint, Spanky!" But they did present some balance, with this:

By unanimous vote, the Assembly passed the bill in May, prompting local resident Jay Lomberk to write to the Asbury Park Press: "State dirt? Are you kidding?" And another local, Jackie Daly, to write: "If it weren't so pathetic, it would be funny."

Douglas Fisher, a legislator in NJ "is sure the mockery explains why" the bill to name a state dirt failed in the state Senate. No! Ya think? He was shocked, it seems. But then, he's also the guy who tried to nominate the tomato as New Jersey's official vegetable. Never mind that a tomato is a fruit, notwithstanding some obscure US Supreme Court decision from 1893 that Fisher cited.

We learn, as the article continues, several related facts:

• Various state legislatures have "ordained official fossils, odes, dogs, and doughnuts"
• There's a site, netstate.com, that actually tracks this crap
• South Carolina's official snack food is boiled peanuts
• An outfit (United Square Dancers) has "lobbied Congress to make the square dance a national symbol, alongside the flag, the rose, and the bald eagle"
• In an example of one thing that's good about war, they claim that "What with the war, we were not able to pass it"
• In an example that proves we probably need more wars, they were somehow able to convince 31 state legislatures that "they need an official folk dance, and that the square dance is it"
• America's biggest crop? Lawn. Who knew?

"Lawns," said Mr. Miller from the back seat as Mr. Friedman drove west toward Lakehurst. "Personally, I don't know what the draw is."

And there's the problem. Dirt matters, of course. But the cluelessness that underlies an assumption that dirt matters and grass doesn't might explain why they're chasing this particular parked car.

Either that, or I'm just a hardened cynic.

As in "What the hell we supposed to do, ya mo-ron..."

I have friends in Beirut, and after the first runway at Rafic Hariri International Airport was bombed, I dropped a note to them to ask how they were doing. Since they're residents of the hills northeast of Beirut, the response last Saturday was somewhat reassuring:

First, let me start off by saying that we are all fine.
{...} Though Lebanon is tiny, it has very distinct areas that are variably affected. We live in the mountains in the Christian area of Lebanon and are less likely to be in danger than the Moslem areas in the South, especially those areas with Hizballah presence, which have been mainly affected.

We hope this cluster fuck started by Hizballah resolves soon so that we can get back normal life.

Mazen

By this past Friday, as the effects of this latest war had ground northward, he'd been reduced to wondering whether CNN, NYT, or anyone else was covering the action, and just in case they weren't, quoting Robert Fisk articles in the Independent. Among the snippets of the two articles he sent ("Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's Elegy for Beirut", July 19, and "The Child Lies Like a Rag Doll: A symbol of the latest Lebanon war", July 20), Fisk complains:

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.

and then (in the latter article), "reports":

How soon must we use the words "war crime"? How many children must be scattered in the rubble of Israeli air attacks before we reject the obscene phrase "collateral damage" and start talking about prosecution for crimes against humanity?

The child whose dead body lies like a rag doll beside the cars which were supposedly taking her and her family to safety is a symbol of the latest Lebanon war; she was hurled from the vehicle in which she and her family were traveling in southern Lebanon as they fled their village - on Israel's own instructions. Because her parents were apparently killed in the same Israeli air attack, her name is still unknown. Not an unknown warrior, but an unknown child.

...(includes details of a gut-wrenching set of circumstances leading to the girl's death, along with others, after Israel had warned citizens to leave)

The Israelis constantly boast of their "pin-point" or "surgical" precision in air attacks. If this is true, then there are far too many civilians being killed in the Lebanese bloodbath to make every one of them an accident. And since Israel's target list now includes obviously civilian targets - deliberately bombed to punish the civilian population - the evidence is mounting that these air raids are intended to kill the innocent as well as the Hizbollah guerrillas whom Israel claims to be fighting.

True, the Hizbollah are killing civilians in Israel, but their missiles are inaccurate and the West, which has done no more than mildly disapprove of Israel's retaliatory onslaught, must surely expect higher standards of the Israeli armed forces than of the men whom both Israel and President George Bush describe as "terrorists".

A couple of things occur to me here - because Hizb'allah are less-well-armed, we should just pass on the fact that they're killing Israeli citizens? Because any such killings are just lucky, given the presumed shittiness of the Hizb'allah arms? And not only that, we're supposed to reserve all ire for Israel, instead?

I don't know who this "we" is that Fisk refers to, but those tut-tutting about proportionality are either ignorant or, worse, wilfully ignorant of how it is that wars actually end. Lebanon is taking it in the ass, again, and that's truly something to regret. The loss of life, livelihood, and living quarters is both sad and intensely depressing.

But Lebanon has a problem that's a precursor to the present tragedy, namely the Hizb'allah "state within a state" that felt free to take action of its own, presumably without the consent of the elected government of the country. Lebanon claims not to have a militia capable of challenging the Party of God's militia, and after this latest provocation, someone had to. Israel was the only candidate - the UN sure couldn't be counted upon, and think of the howls of indignation should the US have offered to do the job, gratis, in response to the 1983 Beirut bombing which killed 241 Marines.

The sixty rockets that have rained down on northern Israel today (so far, at least, at the time I'm typing this) can't simply be ignored, and the fact that Israel has been able to effectively blockade Lebanon is an example of how proportionality must be ignored if the fighting with Hizb'allah is ever expected to end. It sucks that there's no valid way to blockade just the Shiite south of Lebanon, and in any event, that wouldn't achieve the desired effect. It sucks that such blockades include the need to damage infrastructure, such as the largest milk-producing facility in the country, in order to grind down the ability, if not the will, of the Hizb'allah aggressors. It also sucks that anyone outside the Hizb'allah militia has died, is dying, or will die.

And that suckage includes the damage to the lives of the Shiites in the south - they can't go against Hizb'allah, for several reasons. First and least important, they're all Shia. Of more importance is the fact that Hizb'allah takes good care (in a "Chicago ombudsman" sort of way) of it's civilians. Hizb'allah isn't just a terrorist organization and, in fact, may not now even be best classified as one, though they certainly were in the 1980s and 1990s, and they have terrorist adherents, still, today. They make up roughly 25% of the elected Parliament of Lebanon, and during the Cedar Revolution Mazen's brother Ziad referred to Nasrallah, the head of Hizb'allah, as among the least corrupt and most admired politicians in all of the body politic. Which says a lot, given the strict sectarianism of Lebanon, and the fact that Z & M are from a Christian family.

But, back to Fisk's "we": What are "we" supposed to do here? If "we" is the United States, are "we" supposed to shrug off their "Jew rays" and reign in "our" oft-claimed Zionist overlords from Israel? If "we" is Europe, are "we" supposed to increase the volume of "our" tut-tutting, attempting to shame Israel into accepting constant bombardment from a non-state actor? If "we" is the UN, are "we" supposed to suddenly become much less corrupt and vastly more competent, or would it be OK for "us" to just reduce the volume of piddle running down "our" legs at the thought of having to, for once, justify "our" continued existence?

Damn, I don't know the answer, but I, along with an apparent majority of my countrymen, think that, for now, it's just fine to state the obvious: Israel has a right to defend itself, and I wish there were a way to do so without such grievous damage to the Lebanese infrastructure. Short of a full-blown occupation, I don't see what alternative exists. Oh, wait - I guess Nasrallah could stop bombing Haifa and return the two kidnapped soldiers. But that seems unlikely, at least for now. Vaunted Arab ego, and all that.

Oh, and the latest dispatch from Mazen, this afternoon?

Dear Friends,

I am leaving Lebanon this Monday morning by road to Syria and then on to Jordan. From there I will fly to Egypt where I will be based for a while on a new project.

{His employer} is taking care of all travel arrangements, etc. My parents and brother are still in Lebanon and awaiting being contacted by the Canadian embassy for evacuation.

I appreciate all of your concern and if you do say a prayer or two, throw a little something my way for a safe journey and for the safety of my family in Lebanon through these difficult times.

Much love to you all.

Mazen

No tut-tutting here. Just a sense of resignation that, again, good people from a country that deserves much better have been horribly affected by forces seemingly beyond their control.

[wik]: Oops. Looks like there's a chance, according to Allah @ Hot Air, that some of Lebanon's leaders at least tacitly approved Nasrallah's adventurism. Bummer, that.

Most folks, even those utterly disinterested in soccer, have seen the incessant replays of the head-butt that Zinedine Zidane laid on Marco Materazzi during the second overtime period of last week's World Cup final.

It's a story that won't die.

Aside from endless regurgitations (like this one) about the right and wrong of the matter, it's become an apparent staple that every smart-ass wants to get into an article, even those ostensibly unrelated to soccer, let alone sport. An example, from a July 12 Wall Street Journal about Nissan, Renault, and the potential for a partnership of some sort with General Motors, with a focus on whether it's too much to put on the plate of Carlos Ghosn, the much admired savior of Nissan:

Can he do that and run two other companies? This time at Renault, he has yet to work his magic. True, he has been there only for a year or so. But that is precisely why Renault shareholders want his attention focused on the French firm. They feel like their superstar has delivered a head butt to the chest.

That's not the sort of tiresome cuteness I normally associate with the WSJ. ...

But the excessive blather about the butt-head's head-butt itself has gotten tiresome. Zidane acquitted himself admirably, on most points, during his multiple televised descriptions of what happened, each of which was combined with an apology to the French people for his lapse.

The point that he's failed on (from another WSJ story of July 13) is encapsulated in this excerpt:

"These were words that touched the deepest part of me," said the 34-year-old Frenchman, seeking to explain why he had head-butted the Italian and got himself thrown out of the game, the last of his long and brilliant career. "I would rather have taken a punch in the jaw than have heard that."

France ended up finishing the overtime with only 10 players, and then lost in the subsequent penalty shootout. Mr. Zidane is France's star penalty kicker and had scored from the penalty spot early in the match.

"I reacted badly, and I would like to apologize for it," added Mr. Zidane, who has occasionally erupted in the past. But he said he didn't regret the head butt. "The guilty one is the one who provokes," he said.

I mean no offense to Mr. Zidane, who seems to have truly deserved the Golden Ball as the best player in the World Cup. He's had an amazing career and served his country well. But jeez, what a thin-skinned pantywaist. He really needs to butch-up, I think.

If the "guilty one" truly was he who provoked, then Materazzi would have been thrown out, instead of Zidane. While the officiating at this World Cup was uniformly awful, the red card Zidane got was the only red card I saw in the entire tournament which was justified. And once it was clear that Zidane hadn't stopped Materazzi's heart from functioning, I hope Marco laughed his soccer-goon ass off. Because he played fair (within limits - grabbing clothes is bush-league, but so is all the melodramatic faked-injury acting that goes on in European soccer) and he did his job.

The reason Materazzi didn't punch him in the jaw is that, well, then Materazzi would have been the one trotting his ass off the pitch, not Zidane. Punching someone in the jaw is against the rules. Ghetto-talking that same someone is completely legitimate.

Zidane remains loved in France, which is as it should be. He should shut up about who's guilty, and so should all the lip readers and journalists who're trying to find some way to lionize Zidane and demonize Materazzi. Materazzi won that particular engagement, simply by drawing a red card for Zidane. But the worst offender would be this unnamed twit (from the same story):

A French lawyer announced yesterday that he will go to court to try to get the World Cup final invalidated on the grounds that Mr. Zidane's expulsion was illegal. He wants the match with Italy replayed.

Dream on, Pierre.

On a side note, the WSJ article points out that one of YouTube's most-viewed videos (500,000+ views) is that of Zidane laying the wood to Materazzi. Have a look, if you like, at another version (en Italiano) that seems to remove all doubt as to who the dumb-ass is, in this case, if not necessarily who the bad guy was.

But personally, I'd say that of the Zidane head-butt genre, this might be my favorite:

I pose a purely rhetorical question, apropos Minister Geeklethal's earlier comment which includes a reference to "the all-consuming white and black ball".

Ignore for a moment the fact that, at least in the final, the ball wasn't white & black:

I'm a guy, so I don't know if that not-black, not-white color is taupe, mauve, or some other made-up name.

But, on to my rhetorical question: When did FIFA decide to allow brand advertising on the ball? Have a closer look, at this picture:

Is it just me, or does it look like a sneaky product placement by Kotex? At least Nike, when doing product placements related to soccer balls, makes them both transparent and interesting, with goofy, snaggle-toothed football wunderkinds like Ronaldinho.

This just in, copied verbatim, other than the cheesy background graphic:

我有新的電郵地址！

你現可電郵給我：{encode="mosesrfracisssys@yahoo.com.hk" title="mosesrfracisssys@yahoo.com.hk"}

DEAR,

BUSINESS WORTH US$22M I NEEDED A PARTNER

MR MOSES FRANCIS

- Francis Moses

I'd be tempted to introduce him to one of the, I'm sure, millions of crapweasels who try to effect such scams on a daily basis, if I knew of any of them. His entreaty was so poorly done that (ahem) it made it through my trashfilter, where all the "good ones" are instantly rejected without my ever knowing of them.

I have a small personal interest in getting him more in line with the state of the art, the "best practices", if you will, in his "industry". (The SIC code for his "industry" is, coincidentally the same as the one for "Assknobs" - look it up if you don't believe me). Messages such as his have to be at least a little better done to even be recognizable as the crap they are. Hopefully, some trollbot will pick up his email address from this page (which I've helpfully enclosed in a "mailto:" tag for easy digestion by said scum-sucking bottom-dwellers) and nuke his tiny alleged Yahoo mailbox into oblivion.

[wik] I'm not saying that "419" scams are actually so-named because they all originated in Toledo, Lima, Findlay, Fostoria, or Mansfield. But I'm not saying that they're not, either.

[alsø wik] If that really were his email address, I'd be tempted to suggest he learn to spell his own last name. But since he's clearly a bastard, he has no last name, at least not in the "polite 1950s society" sense of the word.

[alsø alsø wik] What do I know of "polite 1950s society"? Not much, to be honest, but while reading up on my family's genealogy four or five years ago, I learned for the first time that my grandfather was married 5 times, the first, third, and fifth, to my grandmother, after very short intervals of being married to other women. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

In today's OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today, James Taranto makes a point well worth repeating, about the two soldiers tortured and mutilated by the brave freedom fighters disaffected dead-enders in Iraq.

To most of us, this is a reminder of the depravity of our enemies. But blogress Jeralyn Merritt sees it as a reminder of America's sins:

"Violence begets violence. Inhumanity and cruelty bring more of the same. The whole world is watching and we don't have the right to claim the moral high ground so long as those responsible for the abuses at Guantanamo and detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan go unpunished, the policies stand uncorrected and the Pentagon continues to prevent the media from learning the facts first-hand."

The always excitable Andrew Sullivan similarly laments "the cycle of depravity and defeat."

This rhetoric about "cycles" appears to reflect a theory of moral equivalence, but in fact it is something else. After all, if the two sides were morally equivalent, one could apply this reasoning in reverse--excusing, for example, the alleged massacre at Haditha on the ground that it was "provoked" by a bombing that killed a U.S. serviceman--and hey, violence begets violence.

But America's critics never make this argument, and its defenders seldom do. That is because it is understood that America knows better. If it is true that U.S. Marines murdered civilians in cold blood at Haditha, the other side's brutality does not excuse it. Only the enemy's evil acts are thought to be explained away by ours.

Implicit in the "cycle" theory, then, is the premise that the enemy is innocent--not in the sense of having done nothing wrong, but in the sense of not knowing any better. The enemy lacks the knowledge of good and evil--or, to put it in theological terms, he is free of original sin.

America ought to hold itself to a high moral standard, of course, but blaming the other side's depraved acts on our own (real and imagined) moral imperfections is a dangerous form of vanity.

{emphasis mine}

I find myself barely able to muster anything but contempt for those, such as Merritt and Sullivan, who can't seem to get their heads around the fact that these two fine soldiers' deaths are the fault of Islamic misfits, rather than due to the failings of the United States. And while Sullivan and Merritt will decry it when it occurs, I think it will be quite appropriate when the US Military effects justice on the perpetrators.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled penis blogging, already in progress.

While driving to a lunch meeting today, I heard a commercial that could have, under different circumstances, caused me to drive off into a ditch.

Luckily, in Houston, there aren't a lot of ditches next to major 6 lane divided urban surface roads, so I was safe.

I can't (yet) find an MP3 of the ad, and I don't know if it's playing in any markets outside of Texas, but I do know, from my search for it, that a lot of other people are searching for that MP3, too. As a side note, I also find that there's apparently a subculture of (I'm sure fine and upstanding) folks who trade the audio files for Bud Light commercials, but never mind that.

Located at the Houstonist, the words, at least, for the latest installment in Bud Light's "Real Men of Genius" series:

Bud Light Presents Real Men of Genius.

Real Men of Genius

Today we salute you Mr. Way Too Proud of Texas Guy.

Mr. Way Too Proud of Texas Guy!

Men from lesser states might know their state's capital, but you? You know you're state's bird, tree and even reptile.

Love that horny toad.

You display your pride with your Lone Star tattoo, "Native Texan" bumper sticker, and contempt for any state that doesn't start with "Tex" and end with "as."

That spells Texas.

Sure, there are 49 other states in the Union, but they are smaller, wussier, and the people talk funny.

Yankee wussies.

So crack open a nice cold Bud Light, oh lover of the Lone Star state. Because all that flag waving must have made you thirsty.

The one magazine (though they prefer "newspaper") I read each week without fail is the Economist. I never question why it's been one of my habits for so many years, but if I ever did, an article lead-in like this would provide the answer:

IN THE film “Zoolander”, some male models stop to refuel their car and, just for fun, spray each other with petrol (gasoline). One then lights a cigarette. They all die in a vast fireball. The film-makers appear to believe that male models, though beautiful, are stupid. When it comes to crafting policies to deal with the price of petrol, American politicians appear to believe the same thing about voters. Except that they do not think voters are beautiful.

The entire article, entitled "Politics and petrol prices - Much ado about pumping" is well worth reading.

Sadly, it's not one of the handful each week that the Economist makes available other than to subscribers. It's a good enough article that, were I incorrigible, I'd just post it here. But, being corrigible, I can't see stretching fair use that far, lest I break it. So I'll summarize the points they laid out in the article, most-but-not-all of which were known to me before I read it. (Since I'm paraphrasing and summarizing, of course, I'll be tarting it up, too)

• Politicians are smarmy pencil-dicks who prefer to be seen to be doing something than actually to be doing something.
• This affliction is not unique to either side of the aisle.
• Regardless of your biases and the biases of those you read and listen to, the primary driver for gas prices is the price of crude oil.
• Taxes in the US make up only 18% of the price of fuel, compared to 67% in Great Britain.
• Prices are more volatile in the US because (according to the Economist), fuel is not taxed as heavily as it should be. To the Economist's moderate consternation, not even Algore is stupid enough to be calling for such heavy additional taxes.
  This is an argument they've long made that I disagree with - whatever externalities they think any tax so collected will offset, giving the self-same pencil dicks from #1 above access to any other revenue streams would be profoundly retarded.
• The US is still short about 10% of its refining capacity due to last year's hurricanes.
• The additive MTBE is no longer mixed with gas in "Texas and several eastern states" - its function was to reduce smog and pollution.
• Turns out its other function was as a carcinogen, so the industry switched to ethanol to help with the smog problem
• Ethanol can't be mixed with gasoline and sent down pipelines, because the two tend to separate
• As a result, there's been a backlog in ethanol deliveries, as separate infrastructure was needed to deliver it closer to the point of sale, where it could then be mixed with the gasoline.
• Gasoline demand in the US is finally heading down
• Within two or three years, sufficient refining capacity should be available to avoid supply shocks such as those caused by hurricanes Katrina & Rita
• The government predicts that gas prices this summer will average about $2.71/gallon, which is less than current average prices

Of the bullet points on that list, there are at least four that were news to me. I leave it as an exercise for the reader, but only in a time of extreme boredom, to guess which those were.

And, because the wrap-up to the article is almost as good as the intro, and does a passable job of condemning of the politicians who feign both competence and respect for the intellect of their betters, the voters, I'll quote it here for your reading convenience:

For the most part, Americans are responding rationally to the high price of petrol. Suppliers supply more; consumers consume less. Politicians, however, take it as an opportunity to bluster. The House of Representatives has passed a bill barring “price-gouging”—that is, making it a criminal offence to charge more for petrol than some bureaucrat deems appropriate. This is popular; 69% of Americans even favour price controls. But in the long run, it would reduce the incentive for firms to invest in supplying petrol to Americans, and so would raise prices at the pump. With luck, the bill will die in the Senate.

Both parties tout their determination to free America of its dependence on jihad-fuelling foreign oil by some conveniently distant point in the future. Neither, however, proposes anything that might plausibly accomplish this. House Republicans passed a bill last week to allow oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which would help a tiny amount at best, and in any case is highly unlikely to get through the Senate.

Both parties say they wish to promote ethanol, not just as an additive, but as a fuel in its own right. In practice, this means a futile attempt by government to pick promising new technologies, plus fat subsidies for midwestern corn farmers while cheaper Brazilian ethanol is kept out with tariffs. Lawmakers could free the ethanol market, but many would rather drive their SUVs to a petrol station a block away from their offices for a photo-op denouncing Mr Bush and Big Oil.

The faithful, Christians and others, are parodied as mouth-breathing lunatics in some quarters. One reason, I'm afraid, might be that too much attention is paid to stories like this: Lioness in zoo kills man who invoked God

Witness the story of this former genius/stupid loser:

KIEV (Reuters) - A man shouting that God would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal's enclosure, a zoo official said on Monday.

"The man shouted 'God will save me, if he exists', lowered himself by a rope into the enclosure, took his shoes off and went up to the lions," the official said.

"A lioness went straight for him, knocked him down and severed his carotid artery."
...

Granted, some might consider this story proof that there is no God. Consider the possibility, however, that God does exist but just thought the man from Kiev was a faithless schmuck who deserved to die. Or had made a promise to the lioness. Whatever. Because lions are people too, ya know.

From the Economist's current issue - an opinion piece that attempts to describe what's wrong with the body politic in America today.

And, bless their pointy little heads - it's outside the subscription firewall so the opiniony goodness is available to all.

I think they've nailed it, but what do I know?

As if it were needed. You reach a point in your life where you're so boring that you get quiz results like those below. Which, by the way, were totally predictable in my case.

You scored as Natural Causes. Your death will be by natural causes, though not by any diseaese, because that is another option on this test. You will probably just silently pass away in the night from old age, and people you love won't realize until the next morning, when you are all purple and cold and icky. So be happy, you won't be murdered.

[wik] Entire contents of table above are [sic]. I'm not one of those whose raison d'etre is to edit other peoples' sloppy spelling. Or my own, for that matter.

Based on the latest antics of "Denny Pelosi", one could reasonably get the impression our elected leaders are either gutless or elitist.

Sometimes, reality sucks. Current gas prices are a great example of that.

The French way, it would seem, is to propose a half-solution to the problem (better than none, mind you), and then to climb down from it after street protests by the disaffected presumed-losers from the policy. Examples abound, but the recent tail-between-the-legs by "Black Jack" Chirac on the utterly reasonable attempts by Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin to grease the market for youth employment in France is perhaps most instructive.

That was a case either of the government being too weak-kneed to tell the people what they needed to hear or being certain the people were too stupid, greedy, or both to understand the need for change. Result? Cram-down policies, rejected by the people because they weren't explained fully and correctly.

Same deal today in the US, it seems - the scary correlation between Bush's approval rating and gas prices has awakened the sleeping and impotent populist in each of our Republican leaders. Morons. It's bad enough when the Democrats do it, but flatly embarrassing when the GOP does.

I'm sure that sometimes it's better to be seen to be doing something rather than not, but this isn't one of those times, and will simply feed and nurture the economic illiteracy of those who don't know better. How many times will we go through this charade of pretending that if prices go up, someone's slipping us the high hard one? When prices go down, these same folks, illiterates and impotent populists both, seem not to think it odd at all.

Via an opinion piece in today's WSJ, Peggy Noonan gives us this:

The president has taken, those around him say, great comfort in biographies of previous presidents. All presidents do this. They all take comfort in the fact that former presidents now seen as great were, in their time, derided, misunderstood, underestimated. No one took the measure of their greatness until later. This is all very moving, but: Message to all biography-reading presidents, past present and future: Just because they call you a jackass doesn't mean you're Lincoln.

I couldn't help but share.