BartCop Entertainment Archives - Friday, 28 September, 2007

Presents
Issue #1.02
of the new Los Angeles Free Press

Quote on cover from Mike Miliard: White hunters, black hearts - Scambaiting turns the tables on Internet con men. But when the clever pranks turn dangerous and degrading, where does the moral compass point? -

The Good News

STATEMENT OF THE REPUBLICAN MAYOR OF SAN DIEGO

Mayor Jerry Sanders on 9/20:

With me this afternoon is my wife, Rana

I am here this afternoon to announce that I will sign the resolution that the City Council passed yesterday directing the City Attorney to file a brief in support of gay marriage.

My plan, as has been reported publicly, was to veto that resolution, so I feel like I owe all San Diegans an explanation for this change of heart.

During the campaign two years ago, I announced that I did not support gay marriage and instead supported civil unions and domestic partnerships.

I have personally wrestled with that position ever since. My opinion on this issue has evolved significantly - as I think have the opinions of millions of Americans from all walks of life.

In order to be consistent with the position I took during the mayoral election, I intended to veto the Council resolution. As late as yesterday afternoon, that was my position.

The arrival of the resolution - to sign or veto - in my office late last night forced me to reflect and search my soul for the right thing to do.

I have decided to lead with my heart - to do what I think is right - and to take a stand on behalf of equality and social justice. The right thing for me to do is to sign this resolution.

For three decades, I have worked to bring enlightenment, justice and equality to all parts of our community.

As I reflected on the choices that I had before me last night, I just could not bring myself to tell an entire group of people in our community that they were less important, less worthy and less deserving of the rights and responsibilities of marriage -- than anyone else -- simply because of their sexual orientation.

A decision to veto this resolution would have been inconsistent with the values I have embraced over the past 30 years.

I do believe that times have changed. And with changing time, and new life experiences, come different opinions. I think that's natural, and certainly it is true in my case.

Two years ago, I believed that civil unions were a fair alternative. Those beliefs, in my case, have since changed.

The concept of a "separate but equal" institution is not something that I can support.

I acknowledge that not all members of our community will agree or perhaps even understand my decision today.

All I can offer them is that I am trying to do what I believe is right.

I have close family members and friends who are members of the gay and lesbian community. These folks include my daughter Lisa and her partner, as well as members of my personal staff.

I want for them the same thing that we all want for our loved ones - for each of them to find a mate whom they love deeply and who loves them back; someone with whom they can grow old together and share life's wondrous adventures.

And I want their relationships to be protected equally under the law. In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships - their very lives - were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana.

Thank you.

- Posted by Andrew Tobias

Recession Good for Mosquitoes

"Among the jobs to be lost in coming months are up to 12,000 positions at the giant mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. Like other mortgage companies, Countrywide is having a hard time these days palming risky loans off on sucker investors. This means that they can only make prudent loans, which translates into less business.

"Of course, some professions thrive in tough economic times. Business should be brisk for bankruptcy lawyers. And we will need auctioneers to help unload foreclosed properties.

"There will also be growth in certain 'niche' occupations, such as mosquito control technician. It seems that swimming pools behind abandoned homes in Southern California are turning green, a sign of mosquito infestation. That is a health hazard. Thus, local governments are hiring mosquito control technicians to fumigate."

- Froma Harrop: Green Not Always the Color of Money -

The Death of DRM
(Digital Rights Management:encryption to protect intellectual property from copyright infringement)

"eMusic.com, the number two player in the digital music market, will start selling audiobooks tomorrow, in an unprotected MP3 format (at 64 kbps) that will play on all devices. The announcement follows our report from last month on Random House Audio advising partners that it was evaluating a world in which it expected DRM to "ultimately disappear." Indeed, the NYT reports that RH Audio is contributing approximately 500 titles, or about 20 percent of its catalog, to eMusic's program. RH's audio publisher Madeline McIntosh says, 'We're very interested in testing this, but we didn't think it was appropriate to put all of our titles in a test program.' (Random will watermark their audio files and monitor file-sharing services for abuses.)

"The NYT notes, "EMusic's lack of piracy protection is the reason no major music label has signed on with it, and why only a few audiobook publishers have so far. But the site is enormously popular," with about 10 percent of the music download market. The willingness of some publishers to participate in this venture implies that some publishers may stand ready to do the same thing with Amazon."

- Publisher's Lunch -

Toilet of the Week

"The newest tourist attraction in Minneapolis is the airport bathroom made famous by Sen. Larry Craig's (R-ID) arrest. 'People have been going inside, taking pictures of the stall, taking pictures outside the bathroom door - man, it's been crazy,' said Royal Zino, who owns a shoeshine shop next to the bathroom."

- Center for American Progress Action Fund -

The Bad News

Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda Genocide, Cambodian Killing Fields

By Joshua Holland

According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces - al-Anbar and Karbala - were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.

In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal. Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years of the occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence.

The poll's findings are in line with the rolling estimate maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the Johns Hopkins' data, that stands at just over 1 million Iraqis killed as of this writing.

These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century -- the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. That's because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq -- the bloody criminal nightmare that the "reality-based community" has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation's last supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions, there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).

Here's the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.

Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism -- the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don't launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that's exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won't.

But there's more to it than that. The dominant narrative of Iraq is that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility. That's wrong morally -- we chose to go into Iraq despite the fact that public health NGOs warned in advance of the likelihood of 500,000 civilian deaths due to "collateral damage." It's also factually incorrect -- as Stony Brook University scholar Michael Schwartz noted a few months ago, the Johns-Hopkins study looked at who was responsible for the violent deaths it measured and found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known. According to Schwartz's number crunching, based on the Lancet data, coalition troops were responsible for at least 180,000 and as many as 330,000 violent deaths through the middle of last year. There's no compelling reason to think the share attributable to occupation forces has decreased significantly since then.

Like the earlier study in the Lancet -- one that relied on widely accepted methodology for its results -- this new research is already being dismissed out of hand. The strange thing is that common sense alone should be enough to conclude that the United States has killed a huge number of Iraqi civilians. After all, it's become conventional wisdom (based on several studies) that about 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare are civilians. We know that the military, in addition to deploying 500 missiles and bombs in the first six months of this year alone, has had trouble keeping up with the demand for bullets in the Iraqi theater. According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous (PDF):

[One news report] noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year, which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer.

1.5 billion rounds per year more bullets fired than can be manufactured. Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000 -- and is usually given as less than 20,000 -- that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around. Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it's somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.

If it weren't for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.

Recall that the stated reason for the invasion was to reduce the number of countries suspected of having an illicit WMD program from 36 to 35. Amid all the talk of troop deaths and the billions of dollars being thrown away in Iraq, it's important to remember that it is the Iraqis that are paying such a dear price for achieving that modest goal.

With a Congress frozen into inaction, all that remains to be seen is what the final death toll from the Iraq war will be. The sad truth is that we may never know the full scope of the carnage.

- AlterNet -

Satan Doesn't Want You To Know

What's the biggest reason autopsies are rarely performed nowadays? Liability. You see, were autopsies routine, their findings would call into glaring relief the frequency of misdiagnoses (or mistreatment) on the part of hospitals and emergency medicine providers. In other words, they'd definitively expose the mistakes modern medicine makes which sometimes end up harming or killing us. What does skipping the autopsies really mean to hospitals? Avoiding expensive malpractice lawsuits.

Google Smackdown of the Week

And the winner is "you are an idiot" by 5,200.

Don't Take Our Word For It

"There are in me the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe could be constructed. In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph for the whole world. Nothing is more important in my life than trying to discover these secrets."

- Ted Simon: Jupiter's Travels -

"Once the people begin to reason, all is lost."

- Voltaire -

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

- Alan Greenspan -

"If the definition of a 'Police State' is that we have to get permission from the government for everything we do, then my friends, we're nearly there. There are 300 million of us, and about 2 and a half million government workers and Armed Services. Does it seem right to you that 8% should be able to totally dominate the other 92% of the population? Wake up! Do your part!"

- Ron Paul -

"The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

- 1973 War Powers Act, section 2, paragraph c -

"Lawmakers, who were assured before the war that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, and many of whom voted to give this Administration a sweeping grant of authority to wage war based upon those assurances, have been placed in the uncomfortable position of wondering if they were misled. The media is ratcheting up the demand for answers: Could it be that the intelligence was wrong, or could it be that the facts were manipulated? These are very serious and grave questions, and they require immediate answers. We cannot - and must not - brush such questions aside. We owe the people of this country an answer. Every member of this body ought to be demanding answers."

- Senator Robert Byrd -

"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember."

- Oscar Levant -

"No paper wants to gratuitously offend the reader. Pity, because gratuitous offence, when performed with aplomb, is the funniest thing in the world. There's more unpretentious joie de vivre in a single issue of vintage-era Viz than most artists or singers manage in a lifetime. I'd like nothing better than to fill the rest of this page with an unnecessarily florid description of something utterly disgusting happening to a well-known public figure - an 850-word fantasy in which, say, David Miliband unexpectedly develops extreme and explosive diarrhea while entertaining a group of foreign dignitaries in a pod on the London Eye on the hottest day of the year, to take just one example. But I can't, because a tiny handful of you would complain.

"In my view, the delight such an unnecessary and puerile description would give to myself and others far outweighs the pain it would cause these oversensitive life-spoiling idiots. The offended people.

"I hate offended people. They come in two flavours - huffy and whiny - and it's hard to know which is worst. The huffy ones are self-important, narcissistic authoritarians in love with the sound of their own booming disapproval, while the whiny, sparrowlike ones are so annoying and sickly and ill-equipped for life on Earth you just want to smack them round the head until they stop crying and grow up. Combined, they're the very worst people on the planet - 20 times worse than child molesters, and I say that not because it's true (it isn't), but because it'll upset them unnecessarily, and these readers deserve to be upset unnecessarily, morning, noon and night, every sodding day, for the rest of their wheedling lives."

- Charlie Brooker: I hate offended people and I love offending them. They're the very worst people on the planet -

"No one gossips about other people's secret virtues."

- Bertrand Russell -

"Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness."

- Robertson Davies -

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

- Robert Frost -

"Alan Greenspan has come back from the tomb of history to correct the record. He did not make any mistakes in his eighteen-year tenure as Federal Reserve chairman. He did not endorse the regressive Bush tax cuts of 2001 that pumped up the federal deficits and aggravated inequalities. He did not cause the housing bubble that is now in collapse. He did not ignore the stock market bubble that subsequently melted away and cost investors $6 trillion. He did not say the Iraq War is 'largely about oil.'

"Check the record. These are all lies."

- William Greider: The Lies of Alan Greenspan -

"Causing the right amount of trouble is an art form."

- Judith Coche -

"To gain order and tranquility, not to win battles and provinces, is our goal. Our grand and glorious masterpiece is to live suitably."

- Michel de Montaigne -

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."

- Art Buchwald -

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."

- Eric Hoffer -

"The Bush regime is so hostile to the rights of labor that Bush's own National Labor Relations Board is refusing to obey our nations labor laws.

"The NLRB the agency responsible for protecting employee rights is flagrantly violating the bargaining rights of its own employees. Here's the story: In 2005, NLRB employees petitioned an administrative law authority for the right to organize themselves into a union bargaining unit within the labor agency. NLRB officials opposed this, but the authority ruled in favor of the employees.

"Having jumped through all the legal hoops and been certified, the union set out to bargain with NLRB management but the labor agency's top officials refused! The union went back to the authority, which investigated the situation and has now ruled that the NLRB is in violation of federal law. That should have been that, but Bush's hand-picked head of the labor rights agency, Ronald Meisburg, said to hell with labor rights. He is contemptuously refusing to bargain with the employees.

"Meisburg is pulling a stall tactic that corporate violators routinely use, hoping to outlast the unionizing effort. By defying the ruling, he is forcing the issue into federal courts a process that he smugly estimates will delay any bargaining past the expiration of his term in 2010.

"Will it surprise you to learn that the guy Bush chose to protect the rights of workers from corporate abuse has spent most of his career in service to corporate employers that seek to undermine workers rights?"

- Jim Hightower: Labor Law Lawbreaker -

"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2."

- Grabel's Law -

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."

- H. L. Mencken -

"Believe it can be done. When you believe something can be done, really believe, your mind will find the ways to do it. Believing a solution paves the way to solution."

- Dr. David Schwartz -

"If you ain't the lead dog, the view never changes."

- Lewis Grizzard -

"I wish people who have trouble communicating would just shut up."

- Tom Lehrer -

"Smaller than a grain of rice, smaller than a grain of barley, smaller than a mustard seed, smaller than a grain of millet, smaller even than the kernel of a grain of millet is the Self. This is the Self dwelling in my heart, greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than all the worlds."

- Chandogya Upanishad -

"Melancholy may enter your soul, and ambush your happiness; but it will prepare you for true joy. Melancholy drives out all other emotions and feelings, so the source of all goodness may occupy the whole house. It shakes the yellow leaves from the tree, allowing fresh leaves to grow. It pulls up old bodily pleasures by the roots, allowing divine spiritual pleasures to be planted. Melancholy takes many things from the soul, in order to bring better things in return."

- Rumi: Mathnawi -

"Charity is equal in importance to all the other commandments combined."

- Babylonian Talmud: Bava Bathra -