Via Slog… Another reason not to check myself into an Ex-Gay ministry…
“A Consequence of Misuse of the Internet”
That’s how a New York judge has summed up this tragically effed-up mess, in which a 48-year-old man (who’d been posing as an 18-year-old Marine in online chat rooms) murdered his 22-year-old rival for the virtual affections of a middle-aged West Virginia mother posing online as an 18-year-old student.
The Associated Press untangles it all for you here.
You know…I’ve never lied about myself on the Internet…about my age or my looks or my income or anything. Not on the Internet, not on the few dating sites I’ve tried. I just don’t do it. Believe that or not as you like, but I’ve never even used a pseudonym. I’ve have always gone by my birth name online. It’s not rectitude, it’s vanity.
It has been an honor and a privilege for both of us to serve on the Human Rights Campaign Business Council. Since joining the Business Council in 2002 we have both played active roles in advancing workplace equality, providing education, guidance and leadership, and ensuring that workplaces in America are fair for ALL employees. Our collective work has been at the forefront of the successes that HRC has enjoyed in recent years, has affected the daily lives of GLBT employees throughout this country in profound and substantive ways, and is a continuing source of pride for us both.
Rather than rest on past achievements, the Business Council continues to develop critical new initiatives to support transgender employees. We are working to raise the bar on the Corporate Equality Index. We are planning to revise and re-publish the booklet Transgender In the Workplace: A Tool For Managers. We are planning a Female-to-Male educational DVD. We have been working on insurance issues affecting transgender employees. Never before have so many important efforts for transgender workers been underway and we are both heavily involved in all of them. That is why the decision we are announcing today is an extremely difficult one.
Recent HRC policy decisions – to actively support a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that excludes our transgender brothers and sisters as well as gender-variant lesbian, gay, and bisexual people – have placed us in an untenable position. On November 8, the day after the ENDA vote in the House of Representatives, we requested an opportunity to meet personally with HRC President Joe Solmonese to share our concerns and to discuss HRC’s strategy for addressing recent legislative shortcomings before making a decision to stay or go. As the only transgender representatives on the Business Council our community expects us to have some influence, or at least to receive the courtesy of a consultation. Almost 3 weeks have passed since that request and we have heard nothing in response. This lack of response speaks volumes, so we feel compelled to take this stand today.
(Emphasis mine…) After a while, you finally begin to realize that the reason you’re there is window dressing. And then…you’re no longer needed.
That the bill in question doesn’t really do anything is wrongheaded, only if you think it’s purpose to make a difference in the lives of GLBT Americans, and bring this nation a little closer to reaching its promise of liberty and justice for all. No. That’s not the purpose of this bill. What the bill does, is give Barney the place in history he’s always wanted, as the man who put through the nation’s first non-discrimination bill for gay and lesbian Americans. It’s not that it doesn’t actually protect any of us, it’s that its got his name on it. That is why transgendered Americans had to be thrown under the bus.
For the millions of fans on our planet and beyond, our new line of STAR TREK urns, caskets, monuments and vaults will be an important discovery indeed. After ten movies and five television series, phrases like “Live long and prosper,” “Resistance is futile” and “Space: the final frontier” have become part of our global vocabulary.
Monuments and vaults will also debut next year. The Eternal Image STAR TREK line is licensed for sale in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Korea and Japan.
The first two products to debut will be the STAR TREK urns and caskets.
Like any other human being on this earth, I have my own little obsessions. They’ve given me hours and hours of enjoyment in this life. I don’t need to be buried in them however.
In case you haven’t been following it…Time Magazine, courtesy of its columnist Joe Klein, has been giving the nation a textbook example of the problem with American corporate journalism. Some days ago Time columnist Joe Klein huffed that, basically, the democrats were once again coddling terrorists.
Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that — Limbaugh is salivating — would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only. In the lethal shorthand of political advertising, it would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans. That is well beyond stupid.
Note that this verbiage has now been…altered…on their website since the netroots started blasting Klein and Time over the original text’s blatant, in-your-face-falsehood. In fact, the bill did no such thing as even a child with third grade reading skills could clearly comprehend. Glenn Greenwald has been on it relentlessly since Klein’s bullshit column hit the newsstands…
"Well beyond stupid" is a good description for what Klein wrote here. "Factually false" is even better. First, from its inception, FISA did not "protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." Its warrant requirements apply to all "U.S. persons" (see 1801(f)), which includes not only U.S. citizens but also "an alien lawfully admitted [in the U.S.] for permanent residence" (see 1801(i)). From 1978 on, FISA extended its warrant protections to resident aliens.
But Klein’s far more pernicious "error" is his Limbaugh-copying claim that the House bill "require[s] the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court." It just does not.
The only reason why Congress began considering amendments to FISA in the first place was because a FISA court earlier this year ruled that a warrant was required for foreign-to-foreign calls incidentally routed through the U.S. via fiber optics. Everyone — from Russ Feingold to the ACLU — agreed that FISA never intended to require warrants for foreign-to-foreign calls that have nothing to do with U.S. citizens, and thus, none of the bills being considered — including the bill passed by the House — requires warrants for such foreign-to-foreign calls. Here is Rep. Rush Holt, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and one of the key architects of the House bill, explaining what the House bill actually does:
* Ensure that the government must have an individualized, particularized court-approved warrant based on probable cause in order to read or listen to the communications of an American citizen. . . .
The RESTORE Act now makes clear that it is the courts — and not an executive branch political appointee — who decide whether or not the communications of an American can be seized and searched, and that such seizures and searches must be done pursuant to a court order.
Under the House bill, individualized warrants are required if the U.S. Government wants to eavesdrop on the communications of Americans. Warrants are not required — as Klein falsely claimed — for "every foreign-terrorist target’s calls."
While the government (in order to prevent abuse) must demonstrate to the FISA court that it is applying its surveillance standards faithfully, the warrant requirement is confined to the class Rep. Holt described. Klein’s shrill condemnation of the House FISA bill rests on a complete falsehood (that’s not surprising; the last time Klein wrote about FISA, he said that "no actual eavesdropping on conversations should be permitted without a FISA court ruling" and then proceeded to defend a FISA bill which, unbeknownst to him, allowed exactly that).
What Time Magazine did, essentially, was smear the democrats as terrorist coddlers in the minds of millions of Time Magazine readers, and if you think that was accidental or merely a case of slipshod journalism you are not paying attention.
Klein’s broader point is even more odious. Along with most of the "liberal" punditocracy, Klein has been singing the same song for years and years and years now. The salvation for Democrats lies in following Republicans on national security issues. He’s been warning Democrats from the very beginning of the NSA scandal that they had better stop condemning Bush’s illegal spying on Americans or else they will justly suffer the consequences, and he issues similar lip-quivering warnings about Iraq: Democrats better stop opposing the Leader’s War or else they will lose.
The big joke here you have to realize, is that Klein is Time’s Liberal columnist. The corporate news media has been playing this game for decades…dragging the American political dialogue ever further and further to the right, by pitting hard core movement conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and outright lunatics like Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter against ersatz liberals like Joe Klein. Democrats and progressives are never represented in the corporate news media dialogue, and indeed are usually portrayed as extremists, while the likes of Ann Coulter are given plenty of time to spread their venom in the name of "Balance".
And in that environment, where the playing field is relentlessly tilted toward the right, actual policy differences between the republicans and the democrats have been consistently represented in a "he said, she said" format, where actual facts are never discussed, never even sought. For years now, the republicans have been able to push any damn lie they wanted into the public discourse, with absolutely no fear of being contradicted by the press. And this latest Joe Klein column has been a perfect example of how that not only works, but how the corporate news media remains doggedly determined to keep it working that way. After days and days of being raked over the coals for the blatant in-your-face factual inaccuracies in the Klein column, Time Magazine finally prints a…correction…but not…
Time Magazine has done a superb service for the country by illustrating everything that is rancid and corrupt with our political media. After I emailed Time.com Editor Josh Tyrangiel asking why the online version of Joe Klein’s column remains online uncorrected given that — as Managing Editor Rick Stengel now says — the article contains a "reporting error," this is the "correction" Time has now posted to the article. Seriously — this is really it, in its entirety:
In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.
Leave aside the false description of what Klein wrote. He didn’t say "that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets." He said that their bill "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target’s calls to be approved by the FISA court" and "would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." But the Editor’s false characterization of Klein’s original lie about the House FISA bill is the least of the issues here.
All Time can say about this matter is that Republicans say one thing and Democrats claim another. Who is right? Is one side lying? What does the bill actually say, in reality?
That’s not for Time to say. After all, they’re journalists, not partisans. So they just write down what each side says. It’s not for them to say what is true, even if one side is lying.
In this twisted view, that is called "balance" — writing down what each side says. As in: "Hey – Bush officials say that there is WMD in Iraq and things are going great with the war (and a few people say otherwise). It’s not for us to decide. It’s not our fault if what we wrote down is a lie. We just wrote down exactly what they said." At best, they write down what each side says and then go home. That’s what they’re for.
That our typical establishment "journalist" conceives of this petty clerical task as their only role is not news. But it is striking to see the nation’s "leading news magazine" so starkly describe how they perceive their role.
After watching our corporate news media passively allow the election of 2000 to be stolen by the republicans, after watching them cheer Bush on as he lied this nation into a war that has killed hundreds of thousands, ruined our economy, and thoroughly trashed our moral capital, after watching them help Bush cover up the outing of one of our CIA agents in an act of cold, calculating political retribution, none of this should surprise anyone. Journalism is dead and rotting in America, everywhere but in the alternative press, and on the Internet, which, not coincidentally, is the one place corporate America cannot dictate the rules of the game.
You should go read Glenn Greenwald’s evisceration of this whole sorry episode, starting Here, and then moving on Here, Here, Here, and Here. You need to see, all Americans need to see, how the news media many of us grew up reading and watching, has bellyflopped itself into the gutter.
For Tax Year 2007 I Will Not Be Bringing My Schedule C Income Onto My Balance Sheet
Via Atrios…
From CNBC: "Citigroup will not be bringing its SIV assets onto their balance sheet."
SIV = Structured Investment Vehicle. The Wiki article isn’t bad…go read it for some insight into why big capital is getting anxious about what’s happening now due to the sub-prime mortgage collapse. Basically what Citigroup is trying to do here is a little creative Enron style shell company book keeping in the hope of propping up their market value. Oh no…those aren’t Our worthless assets…they belong to that company over there…er, the one we created to hold those worthless assets… What’s…astonishing…is how brazen they’re apparently being about it.
And you thought the stock market was the only form of gambling Wall Street did. Oh goodness no…
Charles and Harry could be many a bickering, thoroughly co-dependent couple who’ve been together for two decades, but life wasn’t that simple for gay men in the London of the ’60s. That’s what adds some dramatic meat and bite to Charles Dyer’s "Staircase," the otherwise schematic if waspish 1966 comedy that opened Saturday at Theatre Rhinoceros. The darker notes that creep into the last scene humanize the camp, bitchy-hairdressers couple and add depth to a fitfully funny show.
"Staircase" is of historical interest in any case. A late replacement for Mart Crowley’s unavailable "The Boys in the Band" in Artistic Director John Fisher’s 30th anniversary season, "Staircase" actually predates "Boys" (by a few months) as the first openly gay play on Broadway in the modern era. A hit in London (with Paul Scofield and Patrick Magee) in ’66, and a flop in New York (with Eli Wallach and Milo O’Shea) in ’67, it also bombed as a movie, starring Richard Burton and Rex Harrison, in ’69. In every case, the publicity stressed the heterosexual credentials of everyone involved.
If there was any doubt as to the heterosexual credentials of the makers of that film, watching it should have decisively hammered them to the floor. That rank piece of trash is even more offensive then Boys In The Band in the cheapshit stereotypes it trades in. It doesn’t need a fucking revival, it needs to be buried in the same grave as the blackface minstrel shows.
For two hours they moan and piss about their sad, wasted lives, never showing a sign of love or affection. We are meant to feel sorry for them, but after all their time together there is no sign of an emotional attachment between them, no indication of a commitment to the relationship. When they do cling to one another, it is in loneliness and desperation, emotions that have been used to characterize homosexual relationships in film and literature for a century. Throughout the film Charlie and Harry repeat how much happier they would have been if only nature had not played them such a dirty trick…
-Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet
Staircase mocks its aging gay characters, and invites the audience to join in. In that, Staircase was eminently typical of the films of its day that pretended to shine a light on the sordid homosexual underworld, and were in reality nothing more then freak shows. Played for shock value, and sporting a thin veneer of pity, straight audiences were supposed to come away from the experience happily horrified, and relieved that they weren’t like those poor twisted queers.
There’s a great movie to be made someday about the lives of older gay people back before Stonewall. It could have pathos, it could have comedy, it could be full of the human struggle of people living in an age when gay folk could only see monsters reflected back at them by the popular culture surrounding them…an age when most gay people themselves believed that they were sick in some deeply profound way. Maybe someday someone will do that story.
[Edited to add the Vito Russo quote, and some additional verbiage of my own]
Note that some of the statistics about emerging adulthood today are not historically unique. For example, young Americans in the 19th and very early 20th century, when society was more rural and agricultural, also married later in life than they did in the 1950s. Nevertheless, changes in the larger culture and social order in late 20th-century America make the experience of emerging adulthood today very different from the young adulthood of a century ago.
What then are some of the specific issues that this new life phase might raise for church and culture? First, we might consider the content and texture of the religious faith of emerging adults. Having grown up in whatever religious traditions, congregations, and families of faith they have, and having participated in whatever youth groups and Sunday School and catechism classes they have, what then becomes of the religious faith of youth ages 18 to 30? At a recent University of Southern California conference organized by scholars Don Miller and James Heft, in which I participated and which served as the basis of the edited volume Passing on the Faith, discussed below, the central image animating discussion was of young adulthood as a mysterious "black hole" in the life of the American church. Quite a dramatic idea. Does research bear it out? Two authors in the other books noted here address this question in some depth. Their answers, while not definitive, will not be particularly reassuring for Christian churches, educators, and parents.
Jeffrey Arnett explored the religious beliefs and practices of the more than one hundred emerging adults he interviewed in various locations around the country. Here is what he concluded:
The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults’ religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood … . In statistical analyses [of interview subjects’ answers], there was no relationship between exposure to religious training in childhood and any aspect of their religious beliefs as emerging adults … . This is a different pattern than is found in adolescence [which reflects greater continuity] … . Evidently something changes between adolescence and emerging adulthood that dissolves the link between the religious beliefs of parents and the beliefs of their children.
Although the transmission of religious faith is not a central concern of Arnett’s, he still finds this observation startling. He writes, "How could it be that childhood religious training makes no difference in the kinds of religious beliefs and practices people have by the time they reach emerging adulthood? It doesn’t seem to make sense … . It all comes to naught in emerging adulthood? Yet that seems to be the truth of it, surprising as that may be." Need I say that these findings raise serious questions? To be sure, Arnett is not working with nationally representative data, and so his findings must be viewed with some skepticism. Even so, the very possibility should make Christians sit up and notice.
(Emphasis mine) How could it be that childhood religious training makes no difference in the religious beliefs and practices of young adults? Let me hazard a guess. Because when you demand that people believe the bible over clearly observable facts that even a concrete block can grasp then religion starts looking less and less like a spiritual relationship with your creator and more and more like a self inflected lobotomy. What happens between adolescence and adulthood is you leave the nest, go out into the world and then you encounter reality. And reality never looses. You can’t walk away from it. You can only take your mind, your heart, your conscience, and ultimately your soul, around behind the barn and shoot them. Like this poor lost soul did…
It’s impossible to feel sorry for the hacks who promote intelligent design, especially after you hear the evidence presented at the famous Dover trial (if you haven’t watched it yet, NOVA has its complete Judgment Day episode up online—I recommend Chapter 11, in which the roots of ID are located in a Supreme Court decision rejecting the teaching of creationism in schools).
IDers clearly know they’re misleading the public, if not with regard to their beliefs, then at least with how those beliefs are described and marketed. It’s infuriating.
But I am not so cruel that I can’t see the tragedy in today’s New York Times Magazine article about young-earth creationists who have also earned legit PhDs. Their cognitive dissonance is heartbreaking:
Given the difficulty of their intellectual enterprise, the creationist geologists often have a story about the time they nearly gave it up. For [Kurt] Wise the crisis hit when he was a sophomore in high school. He was already an avid fossil collector who dreamed “an unattainable dream” of going to Harvard to study paleontology and then to teach at a big university. But as he told a friend, he couldn’t reconcile the geologic ages with what he read in his Bible. So he set about figuring this out: every night, for months, he cut out every verse of the Bible he’d have to reject to believe in evolution. “I dreaded the impending end,” he writes in a collection of essays called “In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation.” “All that I loved to do was involved with some aspect of science.”
When he was done, he tried to pick up what was left. But he found it impossible to do that without the Bible being “rent in two,” he writes. “Either the Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible.” In the end, he kept his Bible and achieved his unattainable dream. But it left him in a strange, vulnerable place. “If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.”
[…]
If Wise still has doubts, or unhappiness, he has learned to put them aside. When consulting for the Creation Museum, he considered his most important duty to be presenting a “coherent story line about the earth’s history,” he said. “Even if it’s wrong, it’s a starting point. We use coherence as a criteria. It ought to fit together not as a set of random processes but something coherent orchestrated by God.”
From searching for truth to fumbling after coherence. It’s so sad.
But if God is that which created all that is, all that was, and all that will ever be, then it is not those of us who are willing to let nature speak for itself who have turned away from God. The bible may be the testament of Moses, of Mark, Paul, and all the other authors who made the cut over the ages. The universe is the testament of God. It is the original manuscript. Everything else is commentary.
If all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.
No. The universe is the word of God. The rock that cradles the fossil is God’s handwriting. And if beholding that little two-hundred and fifty million year old trilobite cradled in Paleozoic stone makes you feel very very tiny in a universe that is immense and strange and sublime so far beyond your ken that just trying to grasp it all makes you feel ridiculous, there’s probably a reason for that. And if you’d rather flee from that universe into the embrace of an idol made of paper and ink because that idol cuts the universe down to a size small enough that you can imagine you’re the center of it and God made it all Just For You…there’s probably a reason for that too. For all the fundamentalist posturing that they’re simply bowing down to the will of God, fundamentalism is a very, very arrogant religion. And increasingly in an age where knowledge is literally at everyone’s fingertips, the cost of worshiping that idol is more then many want to bear. Young adults, raised in the age of computer technology and the Internet, just don’t see throwing their ability to reason away, and along with it their conscience, their self respect, their dignity, and their very soul, as being a normal part of having a spiritual life. If anything it is completely destructive to having a spiritual life. An empty vessel waiting patiently for some authority figure to give it meaning contains no spirit…it is just a blackboard waiting helplessly for someone to scribble something on it. But that’s exactly what the religious right wants us all to be.
And there’s Christian Smith’s black hole. It isn’t age. It isn’t that parents are more indulgent. It isn’t that society is more permissive. It’s that fundamentalism has put itself on a path diverging ever more and more away from reality, and if an adult knows anything that a child does not it’s that reality always wins in the end. Someone who really believed in standing humble before the will of God might actually appreciate how that works.
There is a signpost next to that black hole. It reads: When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.
Last night, some thieves stole the car parked Right Behind my new Mercedes. They apparently left behind another car they’d stolen previously. They took my neighbor Joe’s Dodge mini van. Joe is an elderly WWII vet and he has some trouble walking. The thieves left behind the walker he’d left in the back seat.
I woke up this morning, and looking out my front office window noticed Joe’s van was gone and assumed he’d gone to church early. Then I saw the walker laying in the grass and thought he’d accidentally left it behind. Later, I saw the police talking to my neighbor across the street and went out to ask what was going on and that’s when I found out Joe’s van had been stolen. It had happened right in front of my house. While I slept.
I’m assuming the Mercedes wasn’t disturbed because its built-in anti-theft devices still haven’t been cracked by the street, and the thieves didn’t want the alarm going off. Also, the evidence seems to indicate that these were joy riders, since they left behind another vehicle they’d previously stolen. I’m sure they’d have loved to have gotten their hands on my car. So on the one hand I’m a bit reassured that my car is deterring thieves, at least for now. But on the other hand our neighborhood seems to be a target lately.
It really burns me that Joe lost his car…and they had to know they were stealing it from someone who had trouble getting around since they took the time to take the walker out of the van. But I’m sure the thieves wouldn’t have even paused to know they were stealing from someone who put his life on the line for their freedom to be asswipes.
I’ve been considering putting up outdoor security cameras ever since we had that last bout of car thefts in the neighborhood a couple months ago. I’m going to do it now. Three hidden cameras out front…one looking directly in front of the house, one looking upstreet and one looking downstreet, and a DVR recording it all for posterity. Hopefully then when something’s stolen we’ll have their faces on record. I’ll start making inquiries this week. I’ll need someone to run a conduit for the cabling to the outside, and I suppose while I’m at that I should get an electrician to put in those outdoor outlets out front that I’ve been wanting ever since I bought the house.
The other thing I may do is go ahead and buy one of these, or one of these. If Joe gets another car to replace the one that was stolen, I’ll ask him if he wants one of those too.
[Update…] My brother in California says if I’m going to get a wheel boot, I should get one that covers the lug nuts. Apparently some thieves will just bring along a spare tire and just unbolt the one with the boot on it if the boot doesn’t cover the lug nuts. But then…I have locking bolts (on the Mercedes they’re bolts, not nuts) and maybe that’ll deter that.
Laying awake the other early morning, the twin images of Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton kept coming into my mind. Maybe it was the Ambien, but inevitably the choice between those two haunts the fevered brow in the dead of night.
Pay attention here…he’s been prescribed a CPAP machine (which he’s previously written flowery praises of) and he’s taking Ambien on top of that and he Still can’t get to sleep. I was on Ambien myself for a while and I’m here to tell you it knocked me flat.
Problem was, it also fucked with my head. Maybe some day I’ll go into more about the ugly episode in my life when I was dealing with insomnia and was taking sleep medication and eventually put onto a CPAP machine myself. It was an adventure in our modern health care system that taught me in spades how little the system actually cares about your health, as opposed to selling you treatments. There must still be some Baptist left in me because I’m feeling guilty right now as I type this at taking pleasure in the grim ironies in Sullivan’s predicament. He’s been bellyaching ever since Michael Moore’s Sicko came out about how superior the American profit motive health care system is over the socialized health care systems used by every other industrial nation in the world, and there he is, a perfect example of what it does to people. He’s on a CPAP machine, he’s downing Ambiens and he still can’t sleep. But you best believe his doctors have another pill he can take for all of that. And the best part is his sleepless nighttime is haunted by worries over the moral character of the person who will occupy the absolutist presidency left behind by George Bush, a man he once compared in a fit of giddy hero worship to Frodo, and then to Sam in Lord of The Rings.
You know…all that lefty field hippy stuff about eating more whole grains and fresh veggies and wholesome organically grown food and exercising more and keeping your weight down and not pigging out on junk food, really does go a long, long way toward getting you a good night’s sleep without drugs and machines pumping air into your lungs through a mask attached to an air hose. Ask me how I know. Ah…but that’s lefty stuff isn’t it Andrew…and that automatically makes it evil. So you’ll be popping those pills and hooked up to that machine and staring at the ceiling wide awake in the middle of the night for all of that anyway for the rest of your life won’t you?
I’ll not be posting much here over the weekend as I’ve got Thanksgiving dinner to go to with friends in D.C., and then my high school class reunion on Friday. Saturday I’ll be busy trying to get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted (you guys still remember that one?). So unless something comes up that I just Have to vent about here, I’ll be pretty quiet until next week.
Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow…(continued)
Via This Modern World… How our corporate news media covers the Writer’s Strike…
Atrios catches some anti-WGA strike bias on CNBC, a network that prides itself in catering to “business executives and financial professionals that have significant purchasing power”. The chyron reads :
WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?
4,434 Hollywood guild writers worked full-time last year.
Average salary: $204,000
Many earned $1 million or more
Well, to answer CNBC’s question, they aren’t fighting for “significant purchasing power”. They’re fighting for the financial security that would allow their members to remain in the middle class.
Middle class? Two hundred grand sounds like a good deal, but remember that’s the average salary. This number was chosen specifically because CNBC and the studios on whose behalf they’re arguing want you to believe that most writers are spoiled brats whining about their six-figure incomes. But in a case like this in which a deliberately-vague “many” WGA members earn over $1 million, the “average” income is misleading. A much more important measurement of writers income is the median.
For a good illustration of the difference between “average” and “median” incomes, let me refer you to this graph from the classic book “How to Lie With Statistics” (used without permission. go buy it now!) :
If you add up all of the salaries and divide it by the number of employees, you come up with an “average” that is a poor indicator of an ordinary worker’s income. After all, Mr. Moneybags at the top brings home more than twenty times what the dozen peons at the bottom of the graph make. And this “average” income is only earned by one person, who earns more than 20 of the 24 employees on the chart. While the “average” in this case is mathematically correct, it doesn’t represent the typical income. Or to use an oft-cited example, if Bill Gates walked into a homeless shelter, the “average” income would skyrocket, but it wouldn’t change the fact that everyone else is poor.
Now let’s go back to the WGA strike. Thanks to our friends at CNBC, we know that the “average” WGA member makes $200K, but what’s the median income? According to an LA Times op-ed written by a WGA board member :
“The median income of screen and television writers from their guild-covered employment is $5,000 a year, in part because almost half our members don’t work in any given year.”
Five. Thousand. Dollars. Now keep that figure in mind when you see these CEOs gush about how much money they’ll be making :
In summary…the big media moguls are waving the high dollar salaries of a few writers who’ve hit the big time in everyone’s faces, so they can suck dry the vast majority of other writers who are barely earning a living at their trade. And our corporate news media is happy to be of service.
Keith Mays, creator of the blog mocking men without that extra ‘Y’ chromosome Andrew Sullivan adores, is the creator of many other blogs besides Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians. One of them is titled, People I No Longer Speak To.
Via Atrios… In case you haven’t heard of it, Conservapedia is Wikipedia for culture warriors who want their reality filtered through the lens of their own bar stool prejudices. Or as Wikipedia puts it…
There are 45,009 total pages in the database. This includes "talk" pages, pages about Conservapedia, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don’t qualify as content pages. Excluding those, there are 19,565 pages that are probably legitimate content pages.
5,901 files have been uploaded.
There have been a total of 36,693,438 page views, and 334,231 page edits since the wiki was setup. That comes to 7.43 average edits per page, and 109.78 views per edit.
User statistics
There are 15,474 registered users, of which 27 (or 0.17%) are Administrators.
Well it ain’t economics. Geeze…I don’t think about homosexuality as much as these people and I’m a gay male.
Back when I was a teenager, this list would probably have been all about the International Communist Conspiracy. The top link would have been to an article on Communism, followed by a bunch of Communism and This, and Communism and Thats. Communism and Atheism…Communism and Jews…Communism and Liberalism…Communism and Democrats…Communism and Hollywood…Communism and Hippies…Communism and Feminism…Communism and Negroes… In my lifetime the American far right has gone from looking for communists under the bed to sniffing the underwear of gay men. That’s degeneracy for you.
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