"Sacred Cows Make the Tastiest Hamburger" ah

A review of a movie being released today....
I’d heard about this before.

If nothing else, I think these kinds of artistic & social retrospectives are fascinating .. to look back now on a totally different time that existed.. one that I was alive for ... and remember (OK, so I was 11…but other than my fairly innocent memories of then, I think of that summer and how it seemed that my parents thought the world was coming to an end).

I only wish that the last part of the review wasn’t the case… where they put in a forced or lame soundtrack and that they didn’t try to hard to put all those people into the perspective of the overall time.

The article's below...but first - some of my favorite Abbie Hoffman quotes:

"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars."

"You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists. "

"Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."

"Avoid all needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon."

"The '60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great"


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'Chicago 10': A look at Summer of Love's reckoning

By Ty Burr, Globe Staff February 29, 2008

Brett Morgen's absurdly engaging docudrama "Chicago 10" has a specific mission: to jolt inert young audiences of the early 21st century into fresh outrage and activism. If the movie has to be entertaining to do the trick, OK. The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure. Forget the R rating; if your kids want to know what the '60s were about, here's a start. You might welcome the refresher course, too.
In August 1968, antiwar protesters and disaffected college kids descended on Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, intent on creating a "guerrilla theater" that would bring their message to middle America via the news media. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley sent in the riot squad; four days of pitched street battles followed and middle America, thoroughly freaked, eventually swung to the right and Richard Nixon.
Eight months later, Nixon's new attorney general, John Mitchell, put the activists he considered responsible on trial in a Chicago federal courtroom, charging them with conspiracy and crossing state lines with intent to incite riot. They were called the Chicago 8, then the Chicago 7 after Bobby Seale's case was separated from the others; Morgen tosses in defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass (eventually convicted of contempt along with their clients) for an even 10.
It was a show trial, all right, but not the show the government expected. The defendants represented various distinct factions of the radical left: David Dellinger of MOBE (the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam) was a follower of Gandhi's nonviolent tactics, while Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis came from the much more confrontational Students for a Democratic Society. Seale was a Black Panther; John Froines and Lee Weiner were tangential figures charged with creating incendiary devices (stink bombs, to be exact).
Then there were the Yippies, represented by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin - counterculture pranksters who turned every waking moment into anarchist improv. "We believe politics is how you live your life, not who you support," said Hoffman in one of his more sober moments. He was a pop star in search of a stage; the trial proved to be it.
Morgen tackles this broad, busy subject in two distinct styles. He painstakingly stitches together historical footage of the lead-up to the convention and the riots themselves, documenting the day-by-day escalation into chaos without resorting to narration or talking heads. Because no cameras were allowed at the trial itself, "Chicago 10" takes the novel approach of animating the court transcripts, using voice actors and the slapdash, semi-photorealistic cartoon style of movies like "Waking Life" and "A Scanner Darkly."
These two interwoven strands, straight documentary and dramatic re-creation, build momentum together, creating a sense of a society spinning out of control. If the riots were a tragedy, the trial was pure paranoid farce that brought out the extremist in everyone. Hoffman (voiced by Hank Azaria) and Rubin (Mark Ruffalo) show up at court wearing jurists' robes and blow kisses that the jury is instructed to ignore. Poet Allen Ginsberg (Azaria again) chants "Om" from the witness stand. The collision between straight America and the counterculture has never seemed more surreal.
That conflict is ultimately personified in the showdown between Seale (Jeffrey Wright) and Judge Julius Hoffman, whose needling, querulous voice is provided by the late Roy Scheider. Seale wanted to represent himself, Hoffman refused, Seale made an angry stand for his constitutional rights - and Hoffman had the defendant literally tied to a chair, silenced with a gag, and knocked around by bailiffs.
It was at that precise moment the government lost its case, and "Chicago 10" gives us the stark visual correlative: a black man bound to a chair in an American courtroom, beaten for trying to speak his piece. Even Abbie had stopped laughing by then. You may have briefly stopped breathing.
The movie's not particularly interested in playing fair or providing a larger cultural context - its single biggest flaw - and the soundtrack choices (Eminem, Rage Against the Machine) are jarringly anachronistic, if not pandering. Morgen ("The Kid Stays in the Picture") does hold his defendants up to the light of history and gauges them differently, though. The Yippies get their laughs and provocations but on some level they're glory hounds, throwing bottles against the mainstream for the sheer thrill of it.
Dellinger, by contrast, is presented as a rock of pacifist sanity and Kunstler (Liev Schreiber) and Weinglass (providing his own voice) as attorneys of conscience. They're seen as heroes not because of what they did but where they drew the line, saying: If you cross here, you're no longer fighting for freedom but against it.
"Chicago 10" implicitly prompts a viewer to wonder where his or her own line is. Better yet, it makes you question what, if anything, you're doing about it. The movie dazzles us into self-examination.

Death, Taxes & Congress

WOW...2 deaths of note to report today...

William F Buckley
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/27/buckley.obit/index.html

And Roger Clemen's career & legacy
http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/articles/2008/02/27/congress_to_ask_for_probe_of_clemens/
There's no special announcement related to the "Taxes" part of the title ...
other than I have to do mine soon.

Number don't Lie... Hee!

Scientists Break Down Baseball, Find Jeter Does Suck

By Greta Lorge February 16, 2008 Wired Magazine
Long before fantasy leagues and Moneyball, baseball players, managers and fans embraced statistics. Of course, common stats like batting or earned run average are relatively easy to quantify because there are a only finite number of possible outcomes in hitting or pitching. But creating a model that accurately reflects the fielding performance of individual players is a much greater challenge.
For one thing, fielding is a more continuous aspect of the game, so there's an enormous amount of data to analyze. And that requires developing new statistical methods. This week at the AAAS conference in Boston, Shane Jensen of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School presented a method he developed called the Spatial Aggregate Fielding Evaluation (SAFE). Jensen's method uses a probability model to fit a smooth curve for entire teams, particular positions or individual players.
So far the model has produced some surprising results. For example, it might stand to reason that running backward to catch a fly ball might be more difficult—and therefore have a lower probability of success—than running forward. But in fact the opposite is true. The important variable, Jensen says, is actually the ball's hang time in the air. It also turns out that fields with a non-standard shape—like Beantown's own Fenway Park with the Green Monster looming in left field—don't make as big a difference as people might think.
And by analyzing four years of high-resolution data from Baseball Info Solutions (BIS)—containing information on some 120,000 balls in play per year—Jensen was able to rank the best and worst fielders at each position based on the number of runs saved or cost. The results showed what Derek Jeter-haters have long suspected: that with and average of 13.81 runs lost per season, he's a lousy short stop. Meanwhile, his teammate A-Rod is one of the best in the league with and average of 10.4 runs saved.
But what the model doesn't—and can't—take into account are intangibles like charisma and grace. As the influential baseball writer Bill James once wrote: “Hitters are judged on results; fielders, on form.”

No News is Good News .. NO, REALLY. ZERO NEWS. BURY IT.

I feel like I am beating a dead horse, but I cannot let things go regarding this administration. I sense that because we are in a new election cycle, the overall attitude is to just ignore any analysis or criticism of the current leadership's actions. And as I read the article below today regarding the Army's burying of a critical report THAT IT CALLED FOR, I once again am disheartened by the disreputableness of this country's leaders.

I am disgusted, incensed and just downright pissed off that for the SECOND time in my lifetime, I live in a country where leaders thoughtlessly run a war. It is inexcusable to me that these supposedly smart people can act with such selfish irresponsibility.

It proves that we have learned NOTHING. How pathetic. Without even getting INTO the entire misguided rationalization process for going to war (lying to the American public), it is infuriating that there was no postwar plan, inadequate use of resources, mismanagement, and even "old boy" fear regarding honesty with our leaders (the Secretary of State & the President). Can you imagine that we live in a country where troops & civilians have actually died as a result not only of no/poor planning, but that criticism & improprieties are not brough to light because a branch of the service doesn't want to "anger" the Secretary of State????!!! I'm not being extremist here, either. People died because of this. DIED.

Then, to bury the report that outlines the errors... inexcusable. I don't CARE that "it's human nature". It's criminal, and yet we are living in a time when these people will be allowed to carry on their lives with no repercussions for their actions.

In the lead up to the war and all arguements to keep us at war, I kept hearing over and over how we have to "stand up to evil" around the world. How we have to "do what is right." Well that starts here at home, and this was not right.

Happy Monday.


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Army Buried Study Faulting Iraq Planning
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published - The New York Times: February 11, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Army is accustomed to protecting classified information. But when it comes to the planning for the Iraq war, even an unclassified assessment can acquire the status of a state secret.
That is what happened to a detailed study of the planning for postwar Iraq prepared for the Army by the RAND Corporation, a federally financed center that conducts research for the military.
After 18 months of research, RAND submitted a report in the summer of 2005 called “Rebuilding Iraq.” RAND researchers provided an unclassified version of the report along with a secret one, hoping that its publication would contribute to the public debate on how to prepare for future conflicts.
But the study’s wide-ranging critique of the White House, the Defense Department and other government agencies was a concern for Army generals, and the Army has sought to keep the report under lock and key.
A review of the lengthy report — a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times — shows that it identified problems with nearly every organization that had a role in planning the war. That assessment parallels the verdicts of numerous former officials and independent analysts.
The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.
The Defense Department led by Donald H. Rumsfeld was given the lead in overseeing the postwar period in Iraq despite its “lack of capacity for civilian reconstruction planning and execution.”
The State Department led by Colin L. Powell produced a voluminous study on the future of Iraq that identified important issues but was of “uneven quality” and “did not constitute an actionable plan.”
Gen. Tommy R. Franks, whose Central Command oversaw the military operation in Iraq, had a “fundamental misunderstanding” of what the military needed to do to secure postwar Iraq, the study said.
The regulations that govern the Army’s relations with the Arroyo Center, the division of RAND that does research for the Army, stipulate that Army officials are to review reports in a timely fashion to ensure that classified information is not released. But the rules also note that the officials are not to “censor” analysis or prevent the dissemination of material critical of the Army.
The report on rebuilding Iraq was part of a seven-volume series by RAND on the lessons learned from the war. Asked why the report has not been published, Timothy Muchmore, a civilian Army official, said it had ventured too far from issues that directly involve the Army.
“After carefully reviewing the findings and recommendations of the thorough RAND assessment, the Army determined that the analysts had in some cases taken a broader perspective on the early planning and operational phases of Operation Iraqi Freedom than desired or chartered by the Army,” Mr. Muchmore said in a statement. “Some of the RAND findings and recommendations were determined to be outside the purview of the Army and therefore of limited value in informing Army policies, programs and priorities.”
Warren Robak, a RAND spokesman, declined to talk about the contents of the study but said the organization favored publication as a matter of general policy.
“RAND always endeavors to publish as much of our research as possible, in either unclassified form or in classified form for those with the proper security clearances,” Mr. Robak said in a statement. "The multivolume series on lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom is no exception. We also, however, have a longstanding practice of not discussing work that has not yet been published."
When RAND researchers began their work, nobody expected it to become a bone of contention with the Army. The idea was to review the lessons learned from the war, as RAND had done with previous conflicts.
The research was formally sponsored by Lt. Gen. James Lovelace, who was then the chief operations officer for the Army and now oversees Army forces in the Middle East, and Lt. Gen. David Melcher, who had responsibility for the Army’s development and works now on budget issues.
A team of RAND researchers led by Nora Bensahel interviewed more than 50 civilian and military officials. As it became clear that decisions made by civilian officials had contributed to the Army’s difficulties in Iraq, researchers delved into those policies as well.
Skip to next paragraph The report was submitted at a time when the Bush administration was trying to rebut building criticism of the war in Iraq by stressing the progress Mr. Bush said was being made. The approach culminated in his announcement in November 2005 of his “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.”
One serious problem the study described was the Bush administration’s assumption that the reconstruction requirements would be minimal. There was also little incentive to challenge that assumption, the report said.
“Building public support for any pre-emptive or preventative war is inherently challenging, since by definition, action is being taken before the threat has fully manifested itself,” it said. “Any serious discussion of the costs and challenges of reconstruction might undermine efforts to build that support.”
Another problem described was a general lack of coordination. “There was never an attempt to develop a single national plan that integrated humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, governance, infrastructure development and postwar security,” the study said.
One result was that “the U.S. government did not provide strategic policy guidance for postwar Iraq until shortly before major combat operations commenced.” The study said that problem was compounded by General Franks, saying he took a narrow view of the military’s responsibilities after Saddam Hussein was ousted and assumed that American civilian agencies would do much to rebuild the country.
General Franks’s command, the study asserted, also assumed that Iraq’s police and civil bureaucracy would stay on the job and had no fallback option in case that expectation proved wrong. When Baghdad fell, the study said, American forces there “were largely mechanized or armored forces, well suited to waging major battles but not to restoring civil order. That task would have been better carried out, ideally, by military police or, acceptably, by light infantry trained in urban combat.”
A “shortfall” in American troops was exacerbated when General Franks and Mr. Rumsfeld decided to stop the deployment of the Army’s First Cavalry Division when other American forces entered Baghdad, the study said, a move that reflected their assessment that the war had been won. Problems persisted during the occupation. In the months that followed, the report said, there were “significant tensions, most commonly between the civilian and military arms of the occupation.”
The poor planning had “the inadvertent effort of strengthening the insurgency,” as Iraqis experienced a lack of security and essential services and focused on “negative effects of the U.S. security presence.” The American military’s inability to seal Iraq’s borders, a task the 2005 report warned was still not a priority, enabled foreign support for the insurgents to flow into Iraq.
In its recommendations, the study advocated an “inverted planning process” in which military planners would begin by deciding what resources were needed to maintain security after an adversary was defeated on the battlefield instead of treating the postwar phase as virtually an afterthought. More broadly, it suggested that there was a need to change the military’s mind-set, which has long treated preparations to fight a major war as the top priority. The Army has recently moved to address this by drafting a new operations manual which casts the mission of stabilizing war-torn nations as equal in importance to winning a conventional war.
As the RAND study went through drafts, a chapter was written to emphasize the implications for the Army. An unclassified version was produced with numerous references to newspaper articles and books, an approach that was intended to facilitate publication.
Senior Army officials were not happy with the results, and questioned whether all of the information in the study was truly unclassified and its use of newspaper reports. RAND researchers sent a rebuttal. That failed to persuade the Army to allow publication of the unclassified report, and the classified version was not widely disseminated throughout the Pentagon.
Neither General Lovelace nor General Melcher agreed to be interviewed for this article, but General Lovelace provided a statement through a spokesman at his headquarters in Kuwait.
“The RAND study simply did not deliver a product that could have assisted the Army in paving a clear way ahead; it lacked the perspective needed for future planning by the U.S. Army,” he said.
A Pentagon official who is familiar with the episode offered a different interpretation: Army officials were concerned that the report would strain relations with a powerful defense secretary and become caught up in the political debate over the war. “The Army leaders who were involved did not want to take the chance of increasing the friction with Secretary Rumsfeld,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because he did not want to alienate senior military officials.
The Army has asked that the entire RAND series be resubmitted and has said it will decide on its status thereafter.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

So I'm on the elliptical machine this morning for my workout at the gym. The TV's are on and they are highlighting the terrible story about the man in Kirkwood, Mo. who shot & killed 5 people and wounded several others at a city council meeting. This obviously troubled man had had a series of problems with the city regarding tickets, public disturbances, disorderly conduct, and a failed law suit regarding his First Ammendment rights.

As I'm watching, his mother is being interviewed on FoxNews, by a local affiliate. She stated that her son's actions weren't his fault, and that "they were an act of God."

At that moment (as I was rolling my eyes), I glanced down at the elliptical machine; the calory counter at that exact moment read "666".

Just sayin'.

The Morning Agenda

So.. here are the stories of the day as I saw them this morning at the gym….
These are IN THE ORDER OF IMPORTANCE THAT THEY WERE GIVEN across all of the cable-drivel channels (MSNBC, FOXNEWS, CNN).
All I can say is: WE ARE DOOMED AS A SPECIES.


“Britney leaves hospital; Leads media on OJ-like chase; Parents fear for her life”
Personal Note: Media won’t be happy until they can cause her to do something outrageous - & ultimately WANT her to kill herself. On camera.

“Hillary loaned $5 million to her own campaign;”
One set of pundits say it’s a ploy to get more money, like her crying.
Another set of pundits say she has tapped out all the traditional Dem donators, but blew the $ taking private flights instead of on the press plane, etc, etc…
Personal Note: DON’T CARE.

“McNamee gives ‘physical evidence’ to federal prosecutors – syringes he says were used to inject Clemens
Personal Note: “WHO saves something like that? How can that be true? And if it is, what – Roger’s FRIEND saved evidence to set him up years later??”

The US admitted yesterday that it DOES, in fact, maintain a secret facility WITHIN its Guantanamo Bay naval base that is called “Camp 7”.

This camp holds 15 “high value” detainees, who are allegedly al Quada operatives. The location of he camp on the base is held in strict secrecy, because eof fear of a terrorist attack.
Personal Note: How long are we gonna allow people to push this level of secret behavior without accountability? It’s been proven time and again that, if unsupervised by outside groups & authorities, there is a tendency for abuse of power and illegal activities. No, I don’t want to be attacked by terrorists, HOWEVER, we are a land of rules and laws, and the ENTIRE POINT of our country is that we FOLLOW these laws that we, ourselves, set up. For example: waterboarding. How is it that we declared it torture when the Chinese performed it, the North Vietnamese did it, and the Mexicans did it … all at different times in history. YET, in THESE times our leaders, attny general, and PRESIDENT play word games as if we are stupid citizens. If it was torture then, it’s torture now. I don’t say we make it a country club, but we follow the rules.

Secretary Rice makes a “surprise” visit to Afghanistan.
Personal Note: Thanks, Condi. I was thinking that things might not be going so well there, what with Pakistan being a MESS, and all attention focused on Iraq, where it’s really going swimmingly now (not). But you have helped by secretly going there to state that things are going great. Whew!! Hey, while your over there, maybe could you pick up a rock or two and look under them for that bin Laden guy? Check the hotels while your there, too. And don’t just go by the names on the register … he might have used a fake one … He’s pretty sneaky, you know.

The Republicans…strict Republicans .. who like to call themselves REAL REPUBLICANS … HATE John McCain. Even though the people voting for Republicans are voting FOR HIM. That’s not good enough. It’s disgusting, you see. He plays well with others and sometimes tries to get things done. But he doesn’t have this unreasonable attitude of intolerance for everyone else’s opnion. He doesn’t throw the legislature into a stalemate. So he is evil. He’s ruining the extreme conservatives talk shows, and he probably likes trees and stuff. And hates torture of people who you think might be bad.
Personal Note: Ummm.. I got nothin’

People are living under bridges in Florida because they are sex offenders and the increasingly prohibitive rules simply don’t allow for these people to LIVE ANYWHERE. So the government is forcing these people to leave. These are people who have done their time and have been legally released, yet no one will employ them, and the good people of each town are having legal “contests” to see who can make the most restrictive and prohibitive laws.
Personal Note: Super. So now they are forced from where they are and it’s already been documented that several people have completely disappeared. They now DON’T report in as they are supposed to. Some are LIVING IN THE EVERGLADES. But really… we want to lose track of these people who have been following the laws, only the laws won’t let them live. Perfect NIMBY mentality. Won’t Y’ALL be surprised when something happens?

AND LAST … and apparently LEAST…. “There’s a patch of bad weather in the middle of the country.”

Something about wind or something. They didn’t really have time to go into it because on all 3 channels they had to get back to the replay of Britney “on the lam”.


As Barry McGuire said about 40 years ago …. “And you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction.”

Opposable Insurrection

Saw this on an episode of the TV show "Chuck", and did some research...because, well, it's the most stupid thing I've seen lately. So stupid, in fact, that it crosses over into the COOL category. Hee!

http://www.perpetualkid.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=1150

(sigh)

February 1st, 2008 ... MSNBC

"BREAKING NEWS: Bush says there are 'serious signs' the economy is weakening"

Yep!! MY president.
Sharp as a ball.

Seriously, YOU, as, what… THE DECIDER? Just decided this?