"All-Star Superman" is the name of the twelve issue series, written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Frank Quitely. It is thoroughly modern and yet is filled with all the missing gee-whiz that makes me so mawkish and intolerable. And if you read Morrison's history of super hero comics/memior, "Supergods," you will find a super-interesting anecdote concerning the exegesis of Morrison's version of Superman, involving the San Diego Comic Con in 1999 and more than a little synchronicity (or magic, if you will). But the Superman that I yammer on about being gone came back at least for the duration of "All-Star Superman," and everyone should read it.
And finally, thanks to reader John E. of Penfield, NY for noticing that I totally mucked up a certain slogan associated with the Man of Steel. Unfortunately, it's integral to a little passage that follows it, so it's going to have to stand, a monument to me misremembering something yet again.
(Yes, I intend to see the movie, but probably will wait to see what my folks think before committing to a theater crowded with people too young to know that talking while the movie is in progress is disturbing to those around you.)]]>
It's an appreciation, really, I swear, but sadly somehow my appreciations all come out reading like this:
And the movies and the TV shows never stopped. If anything, they proliferated. But each new sequel, new series, new reboot, Superman splintered, spinning off little baby Superman universes, connected to the others in name only. The awe and the wonder that powered the Superman mythos slowly bled away, and he became just another guy with his underwear on the outside, just like all the others.
Actually, now that I'm rereading that, I think I'm making an argument for atemporality? Weird.
But please enjoy, tell your friends, etc.]]>
But as I obsessively follow this stupid story, I realize that it's not the American people at all. In fact, who on Earth knows what the American people are thinking, and how many things they can care about at once? TV shows? Sports? The rent?
No, the numbskulls that are having the hyper-focus issue are the class of people who either professionally or semi-professionally write about these sort of things. They are the ones for whom the NSA revelations are either ground-shattering or ground-shatteringly irrelevant. And they are the ones that are ones who are ignoring all the other news out there while Greenwald bwoo-ha-has in between media hits in Hong Kong or Brazil or wherever the hell he is. And it is this chattering class that project their personal morbid fascination across the body politic — i.e., my hair's on fire about this, so therefore the hair of all Americans is on fire about this!
When that is not at all the case.
(This is of course an admission that I am one of the chattering class, that I am perhaps too fascinated by the story, and that I am inaccurately assuming that my fascination means that the Entire World Is Talking About It.)
But hopefully we can all agree that the "NSA bla bla email" jokes must stop.]]>
This whole thing stinks. The spying stinks, the whistleblower stinks, Booz Hamilton stinks and the cynical timing of successive revelations by the humorless scolds reporting this stinks. ]]>
I get it on a certain level: if you mistrust the government, then this is very alarming, because now Barack Hussein Obama knows what you call him when you think he's not listening. And even if you don't mistrust the government with a Tea Party loathing, the level of spying (if you read the actual facts being reported, which I'm not convinced everyone is doing) seems to rise to the level of Needing A Warrant. But under the laws as they stand, they don't need a warrant. Plus also Congress was notified, as required, so the only law being broken is the law of propriety.
Did anyone really think that all of these wonderful technological advances that allow us to, say, send a photo of a cat from a wallet-sized camera that makes phone calls around the world and back again in the time it takes to unwrap a stick of gum be absolutely benign? That the endless shifting of paradigms was only for the betterment, again and again? Can one be so naive?
In fact, is the reason that everyone's so upset is that someone killed all of the Internet's rainbows and unicorns?
I'm not sure why I'm less than roused by all of this. I guess that getting mad at a spy agency for spying is like getting mad at a cat for shedding — that's what they do! That's all they do! And it's what we all want them to do, but just on the bad guys and not us personally. I suspect what's at play here is that it's really hard to use the full computational power to find the bad guys without casting a net over all of us.
But if you're mad, don't be mad at the White House. Prism has been active since the last president. Get mad at the laws that strain credulity.]]>
(Also, I find Glenn Greenwald, he of the "scoop," a humorless scold, but it takes all kinds.)]]>
"To whisper the letters I-R-S strikes a shrill note on Main Street U.S.A., but when this behemoth tramples upon America's grassroots, few hear the snapping sounds," said Karen Kenny of the San Fernando Valley Patriots.
Hey now, that's gibberish!
And here's Becky Gerritson, the president of the Wetumpka Tea Party (of Wetumpka, Alabama, naturally):
"The demands for information in the questionnaire shocked me as someone who loves liberty and the First Amendment. I was asked to hand over my donor list including the amounts that they gave and the dates in which they gave them," Gerritson said.
I wonder how shocked Gerritson would've been if she was someone that hates liberty and the First Amendment?
But remember: behind the tortured locutions is a total failure to understand the obligations of the IRS to decide to grant 501(c)(3) status, that is to say, to determine if the entity is intending to engage in bald politicking, which determination is a whole lot harder now thanks to Citizens United and similar precedent established by the Supreme Court. So, say, if you were the type of party to qualify your every thought "as someone who loves liberty and the First Amendment" then I do not think it unreasonable to give your entity a closer look.
And as far as the damage done to these weepy patriots, their fundamental rights that were trampled: oh do shut up. What's at stake is the ability of the entity to not pay taxes. If that's the stifling of someone's free speech then I'm Joe McCarthy's ghost.
As the formidable Charley Pierce puts it:
There is a fearsome price to pay for empowering ignorance and paranoia in a democracy, no matter how great the short-term political gain might be.
I know you're not supposed to call the stupid people stupid to their face because it's uncivil or something, but they're really, really stupid, and they have as much of a chance to understand how the First Amendment actually works as they do getting a doctorate in particle physics.]]>
Large investment firms have spent billions of dollars over the last year buying homes in some of the nation's most depressed markets. The influx has been so great, and the resulting price gains so big, that ordinary buyers are feeling squeezed out. Some are already wondering if prices will slump anew if the big money stops flowing."The growth is being propelled by institutional money," said Suzanne Mistretta, an analyst at Fitch Ratings. "The question is how much the change in prices really reflects market demand, rather than one-off market shifts that may not be around in a couple years."
The primary concerns noted are that these non-local interests, the banks and funds, might not be the most interested, devoted landlords possible, and that actual humans are being shouldered out of the home-owning process.
But what's another way to look at it? Well, the housing market, post-2008, is a shambles, with home values shrinking by fractions with denominators like four and three, and a whole lot of distressed/foreclosed housing stock out there that the few possible human buyers can't touch because the banks are not giving out mortgages. Then the same banks realize that the housing market is exactly the kind of market trough that could turn around, so they start buying. Accordingly, prices start to rise, not back to 2006 levels, but a good steady climb, and the banks start to set points at which they will dump inventory and book massive profits.
So yeah, they're creating a bubble. And this time, they're not even bothering to sucker consumers into the bubble with them. It's their own personal, self-generated housing bubble, theirs all theirs.
And even to the extent that we disagree on macro-economic models, I think that we all agree that the up of the front end of the bubble is followed by the down of the backend. (A lesson apparently lost on Big Equity.)
But at least the great American dream of financial entities owning their own 25,000 homes is finally being fulfilled.]]>
Well, two things. First of all, GM food (and I mean meddling at the genetic level, not cross-breeding or grafting or any of the agricultural methods to manipulate outcomes) is about a generation old. What if, and this is pure conjecture, there was some sort of negative effect (not safe to eat, not safe to grow, etc.) that takes, say, forty years to evince itself? Or fifty? Then are any of the short-term tests on GM food worth anything at all?
Second, what if there is some Pandora's Box aspect to GM food? Like, what if a GM strain of, say, wheat is naturally dominant and eventually shoves all the natural strains out of the ecosphere? Because a Monsanto strain of wheat, abandoned years ago because of consumer resistance to the idea of GM wheat, was found growing in Oregon. Again, big deal? Well, most of our trade partners have banned GM wheat, so if the Monsanto strain is uncontrollable, then goodbye $8.1 billion wheat export market.
And meanwhile, Monsanto and the biotech companies are ardently opposed to possible NYS legislation which would make the state the first to require labeling of GM food. Why? Because labeling would could possibly hurt their bottom line, they say, which is as close to an admission that it should be labeled (i.e., if you're worried that consumers would avoid a GM label, then wouldn't that be in the public interest?) as you could expect.
It's a big, multifaceted story with long-ranging effects across the globe, and one that I need to pay better attention to.]]>
"I fully anticipate the mainstream liberal media to put a detrimental spin on my decision not to seek a fifth term," she said in a gauzy network-television quality video posted on her campaign Web site. "They always seemed to attempt to find a dishonest way to disparage me. But I take being the focus of their attention and disparagement as a true compliment of my public service effectiveness."
Okay, the first sentence — it's a bit clumsy, but it passes as a sentence. But the next two (or really one, should be), this is the essence of Michele Bachmann. That the mainstream media never really attempted, but seemed to attempt. That Bachmann wouldn't have a problem with an honest disparagement. That "of" is somehow the preposition associated with "compliment". She does the same thing that Sarah Palin does: throw in some adverbs, double up on the verbs, when in doubt, jam in an extraneous dependent phrase.
A, she's comically poorly spoken, even though she presumably has someone to write this stuff for her, and B, she is really, really trying to appear intelligent. It's like watching a nine-year old try to fit in at a dinner party.
The cynic in me wants to suggest that it's a deliberate choice, to dumb herself down to better appeal to the great unwashed. But that would assume that a great number of Tea Party types are, well, dumb, and that just wouldn't be nice.]]>
But you know what? She actually made more sense as a comic figure in 2007 than she does as a failed presidential candidate, and certainly than she does now. Give her credit, of course — she was bleeding edge crazy public servant, totally oblivious to the normal venalities of office that took down the likes of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay. She got there first, to that place of bum-rushing the stage to share stultifyingly stupid thoughts, seemingly in the service of nothing but her own dissociative disorder. She harkened back to a simpler time, being the lone lunatic in the House of Representatives was charming, in its way. "Thomas Jefferson wore corduroys!" "They are taking away our freedom, by which I mean to say, our Freedom-Flavored Pringles Snack Stacks!" Aw, ain't that cute?
But then came the Tea Party, and precious snowflake flower Michele Bachmann became just another loudmouth with a poor understanding of history. Once you had to look hard for Bachmann's specific batshit brand of shrill, and then all of a sudden you could find it at just about any town hall in America. And Bachmann tried to get in front of it, capitalize on the delusion of crowds, insert herself as the leader of the grassroots movement (an irony no doubt absolutely lost on Bachmann). But to no avail: she just couldn't compete with the savoir faire of eye doctor Rand Paul, or the everyman appeal of Harvard Law Review editor Ted Cruz.
Rumors swirl that Bachmann is pulling out of the race because of concerns that she might not win, or in anticipation of legal troubles stemming from her presidential campaign fundraising, but I think that she's exiting stage left because she's realized that she's now worse than a punchline. She's last year's model. She's irrelevant.
So whatever. I won't miss her. I'm sure she'll score a Fox News gig that lasts as long as it takes Roger Ailes that she's only a good broadcaster in the sense of How Not To Broadcast. And then? You know. Whatever.
(If you're not in the mood for words, BTW, you can always check out BuzzFeed's version of the story, which consists of one sentence, a video and a bunch of ads.)]]>
But I did read a Jack Reacher novel, the one in which he saves the Vice President, so if anyone wants to jaw about how a 400 page novel involving the veep detail of the Secret Service hardly once ever mentions the actual President or the rest of the Secret Service, hit me up!
Regular mildly obsessive news reading resumes tomorrow.]]>
Hilarious? Not hilarious.
Two things here: first, you can say that Weiner brought this on himself by reentering the political arena too soon. I disagree. This is petty schoolyard bullshit, making fun of his last name. Which is of course allowed (hi, my name's Brent Cox, niceta meetcha), but is not a measure of wit. And the fact that Wiener sent photos of his genitalia I guess makes it more sharp, but he'd get this treatment whether it's now or years from now. (FD: I have not chosen my candidate yet, and I have not ruled out Weiner.) I wouldn't mind if someone could transcend the horserace journalism and actually talk about the planks of the candidates.
Second, and most importantly, shame on both the NYDN and the NYP. Yes, part of their job is to come up with creative, fun, sometimes mean headlines, but I think a dick joke goes too far. (And it's not even a dick joke, it's a jerking off joke.) It's fine for the Internet, where porn creeps 'round every corner, but I'm not cool with it on every newsstand and every (outerborough) subway car, on the front page (or the wood, as it is known in the industry — see how easy that is?). It is a low point, or, as they say in crossword puzzles, a nadir.
In other words: save that shit for the scum merchants of Fleet Street, yo.]]>
The issue at hand is the general question, when is it OK for me to record something with this ubiquitous recording device in my pocket, and when is it OK for me to demand to not be recorded?
For example, if you're talking to a reporter, and you say, "Off the record," before you say something you do not want attributed to you, then that's like a magic amulet, right? The reporter is then forbidden from ever doing that?
Not so, according to the 1991 SCOTUS decision CohenVs. Cowles Media Co. As Bustillos puts it, "This 1991 decision essentially means that a promise of 'off the record' is legally binding, but it must be entered into by both parties in advance." In other words, if you say, "Off the record," and the reporter doesn't say something approximating, "Sure thing," then you are not off the record at all.
But Bustillos is not just talking journalism either. Instead, she takes a nice brisk walk around the topic, stopping at many interesting things to look at (as is her wont). It's a good informative read. Put the crappy news of the day aside for a second and go.]]>
So every couple weeks David Brooks will stub his toe on some obscure sociological paper that supports his thesis (as opposed to his conclusion), that the world is less David Brooks than it ever has been. (This time around the study considers the occurrences over time of certain words in Google's large database of scanned books, which you already heard of months ago.)
So first a couple paragraphs, maybe a quick joke to show them that David Brooks is indeed possessed of a sense of humor, and then run through the data, and finally some version of this paragraph:
So the story I'd like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked. The atomization and demoralization of society have led to certain forms of social breakdown, which government has tried to address, sometimes successfully and often impotently.
And then David Brooks goes for an ice cream, as a reward for a job well done. The story that David Brooks would like to tell is about some sort of social breakdown, a specific social breakdown, a new one, so not income/wealth inequality, institutional racism and intolerance, that general meanness of spirit that's out there, privatizing public works, monopolists milking consumers like cattle, none of those. No, the social breakdown David Brooks concerns himself with is more like "welfare moms," that type of thing.
David Brooks continues:
This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left.
Actually, it causes discomfort any way you look at it, David Brooks, but not the kind you're thinking of.]]>