Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Wow–Christina Aguilera’s music video for Candyman gives you the double pleasure of 1) totally shiny high production values plus 2) the illusion of a retro time-machine view onto 1940s USO totally shiny high production values.

But I repeat myself.

As does Ms. Aguilera, who sings all the parts and co-stars with herself as multiple (blonde, brunette, redhead, etc.) glamorous 1940s performers.

Much as I love the Web 2.0 “authentic” experience of amateurish web video–I have to admit that I also appreciate witty scripting and…did I mention? shiny, shiny high production values!

In this YouTube video, “peacekeeping poultry” (thanks, Kottke!) bust up a rumbustious battle between two rabbits.

After a recent run-in on Daily Kos, I’m picturing dialog that went something like this.

Rabbit #1: You what?
Rabbit #2: I voted for Ralph Nader for President.
Rabbit #1: You moron–people like you put George W Bush into the White House!
Rabbit #2: You cynical twit–people like you empower politics-as-usual where both parties…
Chicken #1: Hey, stop that!
Chicken #2: Now, quit it–both of you!
Rabbit #1: Hey, but he…
Rabbit #2: No, but she…
Chicken #2: Oh yeah, and fighting each other will really help both of you?
Rabbit #2: I was just explaining…
Rabbit #1: I have a right…
Chicken #1: Oh yeah, you both have a right to be idiots…
Chicken #2: Use those bunny brains of yours, who benefits when you fight?

But never mind my translation, just watch the video.

Creationist car

Originally uploaded by Amy Watts.

What a month this has been for the First Amendment, which protects us from getting arrested, but not from getting yelled at or even fired.

Stephen Metcalfe’s deconstruction of Imus’s downfall has the best explanation I’ve seen yet for Imus’s “funny” riff on abusing some young women who play college basketball. Imus and his fans felt free to enjoy a wide range of sexist or racist insults because they were “really” mocking Political Correctness and boring old middle-class decorum. Says Metcalfe,

In talk radio, the P.C. bogey is kept on life support, the better to allow the heaping of abuse on the marginal and disenfranchised to pass itself off as speaking truth to power.

In other crazy-speech news, the rightwing program of “abstinence only” sex education, financed by our tax dollars, turns out to be useless in protecting young people from any of the bad outcomes that sex education is supposed to help them avoid.

I fear this may be a bad thing for my corresponding suggestion of “Abstinence-Only Drivers’ Education.”

p.s. Even more photos of this inspiring car…


Update: Not so funny, but more eloquent–Ronni Bennett defends free speech. And taking a cue from David Weinberger’s “Moral means ambivalent,” I also was more eloquent in 2003:

Moral absolutes–they’re easy to ridicule when they’re the “absolute” morals of born-again Baptists from Birmingham, Alabama. But we on the Left have our own cherished absolutes–and we need to refresh our ambivalence about them too.

Is any remark claimed as “authentically Black” immune from criticism? If so, does that make any XX type who ever had sex a ho? Or should we switch perspective, and say any statement that degrades women is evil, deserving of powerful retaliation? If so, does that mean we should demand lip service to middle-class ideals before any kid from the ghetto gets to speak?

No–absolutes make for fast and powerful moral judgments, but not for intelligent moral judgments. Because….

Moral means ambivalent.

This is André Weil’s Law of Faculties — a theorem propounded by the mathematician André Weil (1906 – 1998), which appears on page 10 of Absolute Zero Gravity, a collection of science jokes I once coauthored.

Weil’s Law also gives insight into the problems inside our White House and Justice Department–which one former Reagan US Attorney analyzed rather cynically for the LA Times:

“The incompetence has been amazing … There are too many Stepford husbands in this administration: young men who are perfectly coiffed and have great clothes, but very few of them have ever been in a courtroom.”

Weil’s Law explains so much about the progression from young Karl Rove pushing George W Bush into politics because Bush looked so good in cowboy boots, down and around to George W Bush agreeing to turn Federal Emergency Management over to the inexperienced Michael Brown, an old college roommate of his pal Joe Allbaugh.

Lift a rock, and see Stepford husbands, all the way down.
…….
(thanks to Talkingpointsmemo for pointing to the Stepford quote.
……..
Not to disappoint any Bourbaki fans, I had the pleasure of spending many hours with Andre Weil for a 1990s project at the IAS, collecting an oral history from four retired mathematicians there. You can find transcripts in the IAS library–my only surviving mention from that era now on the web is a footnote in a memoir by Armand Borel.

About those Bourbaki meetings, Weil recalled with delight the way participants would meet to dispute mathematics with screams of rage, then emerge from the meeting room in perfect amity to enjoy an excellent dinner. One evening, Weil himself emerged from the meeting room a bit earlier than the others and encountered the hotel concierge standing outside the door. “Oh Monsieur,” she said with great anxiety, “I have been standing here for half an hour trying to decide whether I should perhaps call the police to make sure that nobody in there is being harmed.”

This memory gave Professor Weil enormous pleasure–and, remembering his pleasure now, I’m smiling too.

How do our new Democratic Senate and Congress look to the many who have so much to hide?

Scarily revealing is the oh-so-subtle promo for DC white-shoe lawfirm Covington and Burling co-authored by one of the many high-priced DC lawyers who worked for the RNC on the NH phone-jamming, one Robert Kelner.

Phone-jamming fans may recall that Kelner let slip some embarassing info to a TV station in NH–making it clear that the RNC’s defense lawyers were fully informed about DOJ investigations into the phone-jamming’s White House connection, although said investigations were kept a deep secret from Democrats.

Kelner’s remark inspired a Freedom of Information Request to the DOJ (pdf here), filed on April 18, 2006 but not yet answered by the DOJ….

(Quotes, etc. below the fold at my DailyKos page.)

Yesterday ten tourists died in a fire in a popular Chilean hotel with no in-room fire detectors.

Why do US hotel owners spend good money to buy smoke detectors and install sprinkler systems? Intrusive government regulation of their business practices. The kind of thing nobody would have to contend if right-thinking economists could just shrink government down to a size drownable in the bathtub.

Chile’s economic model is still largely based on policies urged by Milton Friedman and applauded by right-wing economists in the US. But if no law enforces fire safety on all hotels, then pity each individual hotel builder, having to decide whether or not to pay for such an unusual and unproductive extra.

Meanwhile, even right-wing Chilean politicians admit that Chile’s private pension system, once touted as a model for what US Social Security should become, has turned into an unfunded disaster, with pension companies raking off one-third or more of workers’ savings and posting annual profit margins near 50%.

Democrats, please pull our government out of that bathtub.

“Accountabalism” (says David Weinberger) results from “accountability” pushed too far–into the realm of “eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil.”

Accountabalism tries to squeeze centuries of thought about how to entice people toward good behavior and dissuade them from bad into simple rules by which individuals can be measured and disciplined. It would react to a car crash by putting stop signs at every corner. Bureaucratizing morality or mechanizing a complex organization gives us the sense that we can exert close control. But grown-ups prefer clarity and realism to happy superstition.

Stop signs at every corner? Nobody wants that!

Centuries of thought about how to dissuade people from bad behavior, however, haven’t come up with great substitutes for punishment of the few people who get caught. Harsh punishment for drunk driving made that “insoluble” problem much less of a problem. The “insoluble” problem of men who beat their wives found a much better solution when researchers noticed that getting hauled off to jail even briefly cut recidivism better than years of counseling.

In the NH phone-jamming scandal, a NH judge sentenced warm-hearted family man James Tobin to ten months in federal prison. Sorry as I am for Mr. Tobin and his family, I think that such harsh “accountabalism” is needed to dissuade other politicians from breaking the rules on elections.

When our society has such a big stake in the outcome of individual decisions, we need to put up big stop signs and whomp people with big penalties if they go through them.

In fact, I doubt I’d have disagreed with his article at all if I hadn’t been doing that half-awake ought-to-be-packing-now-blogging-at-dawn from Kyoto.

Nancy Pelosi has a real opportunity to shine this week when she picks a new head for the House Intelligence Committee.

Josh Marshall points out that there’s an option besides the current no-win tossup of Hastings v. Harman.

There is after all, another member of the committee who used to work at the State Department monitoring nuclear weapons in North Korea, Iraq and the former Soviet Union and is also trained as a nuclear physicist. That’s Rep. Rush Holt (D) from New Jersey. Given our current focus on proliferation, those seem like decent qualifications for the gig.

Rush Holt was for years head of Princeton’s big plasma physics lab before, in a real Mr-Smith-Goes-To-Washington moment, deciding to run for US Representative.
Making a name for himself in DC since 1998, he’s made headlines (and this blog) for his work promoting a paper trail from voting machines.

Holt is smart, savvy, hard-working, experienced, and rock-bottom decent. By choosing him to head the Intel committee, Nancy Pelosi would herself look like the foe of corruption and business-as-usual America went to the polls this month to elect.

My fellow bloggers, let’s encourage Pelosi to look beyond the bad choices of Harman and Hastings.

“…this would be a chance for Pelosi to send a signal: the Democrats do regard national security seriously and are willing to put aside political concerns to do the right thing. She would be saying, merit matters most when it comes to protecting the United States.”

You can contact Nancy Pelosi via this webpage.

I recently stumbled across AN Wilson’s “Tolkien was not a writer“:

“Take the example of the Ents, the talking trees. It seemed obvious to me on this reading that the Ents in The Lord of the Rings have partly been suggested by the talking apple trees in the film of The Wizard of Oz, and more by the suicides who have turned into trees in Dante’s Inferno. Beside both originals, Tolkien’s imitation seemed feeble.”

Jeesh! Of course you’re not going to like Tolkien’s “writing” if you try to read it this way–if you can’t willingly feel swept away by the miracle and mystery of (just for example) talking Ents. It’s like eating limburger cheese while holding your nose–all very well if you’ve made your mind up you won’t like it, but not the right way to find out what’s so great about it.

One of my favorite don’t-be-a-culture-snob factoids is that after the death of Charles Dickens, he was despised by a whole generation of English highbrows–at the very time Dostoevsky was studying how Dickens got his effects and Tolstoy would feverishly re-read David Copperfield when he ran into trouble while writing War and Peace.

The magical talking trees of Middle Earth are enormously different from the magical talking trees of the Emerald Kingdom. There’s no shame for Tolkien in his being inspired, if he was, by such richly-imagined and well-loved popular culture as Wizard of Oz.

What are my issues?

Yes, I do believe terrorists want to harm us–and we can’t afford to have “emergency management” by incompetent cronies of cronies of cronies of Republicans.

Think Republican’s one-party rule in DC is making us safer? You must not live in New Orleans. The level of incompetence and disorder at FEMA still astounds–and the only staff support poor Michael Brown could get was advice from his PR team to roll up his shirtsleeves so he’d look as if he was working. Compare the government’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina to their swift, hard-hitting, well-organized jump on the case of Terry Schaivo, which smelled to them like a political wedge issue.

Oil companies dictating our energy policy as we watch gas prices go through the roof

Our nation is weakened by our dependence on oil-producing nations. Our world is threatened by global climate change. Yet Republican “leadership” does nothing to help get gas mileage standards or promote fuel conservation, because the oil companies don’t want to see anything done.

“Family values” that are shocked by John Kerry but wink at Mark Foley

Mark Foley’s “page problem” was an open secret in Washington, DC. If any Republican leader had wanted to investigate further, the first thing he’d find out is that pages routinely warned one another about Mark Foley’s behavior. But Republicans didn’t want to know there was a problem, because Foley was holding a safe seat for the party. When the secret finally came out, compare the muted responses from GOP leaders to their full-throated outrage campaign about John Kerry’s remark about “stuck in Iraq.”

And finally, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.

Osama Bin Laden was in Afghanistan. Instead of concentrating our forces there on a winnable war against some very bad terrorists, Bush and Rumsfeld trumped up a bunch of fake excuses to start a new war against Iraq, something they’d wanted to do before 9/11. Now our young soldiers are fighting without the support or equipment they need, defending with their lives the failed NeoCon plan for the Middle East.

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Thanks to my brother-in-law Bill for sending me a long list of things to think about today, which inspired my much shorter version.

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