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Jumat, 30 April 2010

“In Defense Of That Scene in “The Matrix: Reloaded ... - Wesleyan Argus”

“In Defense Of That Scene in “The Matrix: Reloaded ... - Wesleyan Argus”

In Defense Of That Scene in “The Matrix: Reloaded ... - Wesleyan Argus

Posted: 30 Apr 2010 04:51 PM PDT

In Defense Of That Scene in "The Matrix: Reloaded" Where The Architect Explains the True Function of Zion and The One to Neo

By Rob Wohl , Editor-in-Chief

c/o fishbowl.pastiche.org

"The problem is choice" - Neo

"But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality...I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not a transcendental pill that allows some sort of fake, fast-food, religious experience, but a pill that would allow me to see not the reality behind the illusion but the reality of the illusion itself." – Slavoj Zizek

When I saw "The Matrix: Reloaded" as a freshman in high school, I hated it. I was right. I am not here to defend the movie itself. The "Matrix" sequels are truly god-awful: stupid scripts, mediocre acting, and worst of all, lame fucking fight scenes and ugly effects. And back in 2003, the Architect's speech at the climax of "Reloaded" was emblematic of all that was shitty about the franchise. Every negative review mentioned that turgid, overwritten speech as the nadir of a movie that collapsed under the weight of its own pretensions. A moment that was meant to totally blow our minds and cement the genius of the Wachowskis ended up a punchline. But the thing is, it's not that bad a scene. Well, it's bad from a filmic perspective. But it's an excellent primer on Neo-Marxist understandings of power and resistance.

Let's review what happens in the movie: Neo fights some folks, Trinity does some hacking (which I'm told is very realistic), they find the Keymaster (the franchise loves stupid names), and Neo arrives at "The Core," a place from which he can suppose liberate humanity from the machines. Instead he finds The Architect, the program that wrote The Matrix. The Architect explains that the entire resistance is part of the machines' plan and that Neo's function as The One is to choose a few individuals to rebuild Zion, which is on the brink of destruction.

This is all done in some of the most obfuscating language ever committed to celluloid, so the casual viewer may be excused if she doesn't really understand why the persistence of the human resistance is part of The Matrix. She would not be helped by Neo, who actually misinterprets what The Architect says. "The problem is choice," he says. But it isn't. The problem is rather a sort of natural human rebelliousness and skepticism, which leads a growing segment of the population to question the nature of their perceived reality, with unpredictable, destabilizing results. The Machines need Zion, the resistance, and the One as a sort of safety valve, a mechanism that allows discontent to escape the system rather than build up and undermine it. What's cool about this scene is how fundamentally accurate it is.

In The Matrix, as in our society, what we perceive to be a "natural" state of affairs is actually a scenario of symbolic fictions that conceals and reifies a structure of domination (in The Matrix, reality is structured by robots, whereas here it is structured by Capital, but the differences are not so extreme). Now, looking back on the first "Matrix" last weekend, I was interested by the ways in which it wasn't at all radical: it suggested that it would be possible to "free your mind," to perceive the structures of domination, to elevate yourself above "normal" people who remain trapped in an illusion. This is the ideology of countless counter-revolutionary movements: religious mysticism, libertarianism, Leninist Vanguardism, Randian Objectivism, and many anarchists. These ideologies offer ready-made answers to pretty much all of life's questions and promise to make their adherents enlightened beings who can impose their will on the remaining unenlightened "sheeple."

This sort of movement always fails, either by relying on individual (or small-scale) solutions to major collective problems or by reinstituting the same structures of domination with a new name attached. In "The Matrix," the resistance seems like this romantic band of libertarians, more interested in freeing their own minds than in structural reform. The Architect scene in "Reloaded" reveals that that's what they really are, and indeed that the impotent, escapist opposition and a mystical belief in mental liberation is integral to preserving mechanic hegemony. In the end, true liberation would not be achieved through exit into an "authentic" reality, but by exercising democratic control over The Matrix itself, just as workers should seize the means of production rather than destroy them. What would a democratic Matrix look like? The fact that no one can answer that question is precisely the point. "The Matrix: Reloaded" demonstrates how social change cannot be work of a messiah, and that the restructuring of reality must be a participatory process.

Not that that makes it worth watching.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
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Kamis, 29 April 2010

“Why doesn't Broadway love Enron? - The Guardian” plus 1 more

“Why doesn't Broadway love Enron? - The Guardian” plus 1 more

Why doesn't Broadway love Enron? - The Guardian

Posted: 29 Apr 2010 03:04 PM PDT

A scene from Enron at Minerva theatre, Chichester

Anti-American? ... The original British production of Lucy Prebble's Enron (2009). Photograph: Tristram Kenton

You know the cliche about domestic disputes? A man beats his wife, the neighbours call the police, a cop knocks at the door and the victim screams: shove off, none of your business. Sometimes I feel that way about English playwrights who tackle touchy American subjects. It's our dirty laundry; we'll get around to cleaning it. Someday.

Yes, we have much atone for. We're obese and xenophobic and we're poisoning the environment. Doesn't mean you lot have the right to dramatise it. Then along comes Enron, the ingenious and unexpectedly sympathetic docudrama written by Lucy Prebble and directed by Rupert Goold. In February, I lamented the fact that no American had thought of this first. After having seen and thoroughly enjoyed Enron's Broadway incarnation, I'm doubly jealous.

Not everyone feels the same. According to the useful review aggregator StageGrade, New York critics gave Enron a median grade of B, which includes an outright slam from Ben Brantley of the New York Times. Given the disproportionate influence the Times wields in this town, this could mean Goold's production will not earn back its $4m capitalisation and close in a few weeks if the box office doesn't pick up.

Given the hype that preceded Enron, the turn of events is surprising. But then, it should shock no one that British critics raved about the show, which uses expressionistic staging to chronicle the rise and fall of the Texas energy-trading giant. Of course you guys loved it; a bunch of amoral capitalists in Bush's home state bilk shareholders of billions. The house of cards comes crashing down in the shadow of September 11 and the whole mess presages the shady fiscal practices of the subprime bubble that nearly tanked the world economy. And what was our Securities and Exchange Commission doing about it? Wanking to ladyboy porn.

Despite Enron's relevance, its intelligence and its technical bravura, about half the Broadway critics found it either too obvious or too contrived. Brantley barely stifled his yawn over what he dismissed as lack of substance. "[T]his British-born exploration of smoke-and-mirror financial practices isn't much more than smoke and mirrors itself," he sniffed, rather too glibly.

Truthfully, Enron is, in style and content, starkly original by Broadway standards. The use of found text and video, the choreographing of stock-trader gestures to form a dance, the ambitious interweaving of psychological and sociological analysis to create a penetrating critique of a moment in history – all this is sadly rare on the Great White Way. As for lack of substance, the play offers a sweeping analysis of how all progress in human history has taken the form of an economic bubble: slavery, the railroad, the internet. That's not shallow.

I don't think critics were mixed on Enron because they perceived anything anti-American in its depiction of stock-market hucksters Jeffrey Skilling, Andy Fastow and others. I think it's more a case of critics who haven't the aesthetic sophistication to process postmodern dramaturgy or ideological ambiguity. Still, there will always be a market for Yank-bashing. If you're an American author and you want a gig at the Royal Court or buzz in Edinburgh, obey the three V's in portraying Americans: venal, vulgar, violent. You Brits will lap it up.

But here's the wonderful thing about Enron: it doesn't rely on caricature or stereotype. The final 10 minutes of the play are magnificent, as Skilling asserts that he's not really a villain and characterises human progress as the jagged, upward-ascending line of a financial graph. Guess what, he implicitly says about his crimes against economy, we're in it together. When it comes to the elaborate fictions that sustain our global marketplace, everyone's American.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Shadow Elite : Wall Street Profiteers - Capitalists or ... - Huffington Post (blog)

Posted: 29 Apr 2010 06:22 AM PDT

By Linda Keenan & Janine R. Wedel

"Only by engaging in irregular practices can the manager run a successful enterprise."

Does this quote describe the unspoken operating principle for profiteers of Goldman Sachs, and the rest of the disgraced financial industry? It could. But actually the quote is from economist Joseph Berliner, in his classic study of management methods not here in America, but in the Soviet Union.

For that Soviet-era manager, "success" meant meeting production targets, or, at least, appearing to meet them. Here in our "free market" economy, one might expect that being a successful manager would mean building a thriving company. But instead, success has come to be defined as how much an executive could rake in for himself and other well-placed insiders.

These supposed "capitalists" have actually gamed the system like ultra-savvy communist operators. Under communism, managers on fixed salaries were merely doing what was necessary to keep production going in an unworkable system. But on Wall Street, the goal was apparently plain greed. And over the past two decades, these "capitalists" have not only destroyed the financial lives of millions around the world, but also subverted the very free market principles they claim to support.

Co-author of this post, Janine Wedel, has spent most of her career as a social anthropologist, specializing in Eastern Europe, examining how people living under communism survived, how the most agile among them thrived, and how informal practices honed under communism helped shape the systems that emerged after it fell. They used informal networks, had a willingness to work around the rules, maintained loyalty to their close friends and associates, not to any official organization, hoarded vital information and carefully stage-managed their public face. In her new book, Shadow Elite, she has identified a similar modus operandi for a new kind of power broker that's emerged over the past 20 years in the U.S. and beyond. They push their personal agendas in both government, and, as we'll look at here, on Wall Street and in boardrooms across corporate America.

What was the personal agenda for a manager during the Cold War years? To please authorities. An entire language was developed under communism to describe the practice of creating fictions to do just that. Russians speak of ochkovtiratel'stvo, literally, to kick the dust into someone's eyes, or as we might say, pull the wool over someone's eyes. In the case of a factory operating under central planning, that meant anything from managers subtly readjusting figures to outright falsifying them to appease or fool their overseer. They took it as a given that false reporting - pripiski--or other shady practices was the norm.

Flash forward to the 1990's here in the U.S. Countless executives on Wall Street and across corporate America were engaging in their own version of ochkovtiratel'stvo, with devastating consequences. John Cassidy in the New Yorker traced a shift in executive behavior to the increasing use of stock options as part of pay packages. The idea sounded good on paper: stock options tied an executive's own personal fortune to his shareholders' fortunes through the stock price, making him more likely to act, as he should, in their interest. Right? Instead, as Cassidy says, "options give senior managers a strong incentive to mislead investors about the true condition of their companies."

The mission was to keep the stock surging, make sure quarterly earnings "beat expectations", even when internally, they didn't. Examples of pripiski - American-style - ranged from minor accounting dodges or massaging of those quarterly results to the massive fraud that took down Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and other big companies.

Whose eyes were they kicking dust into? The average shareholder. The new cable business news channels, which thrived on excitement, gave executives a powerful platform to sell their version of corporate reality to average investors. {Disclosure: Co-author Linda Keenan was a writer at CNN financial news during the dot com era.}

Wall Street assisted with their own kind of ochkovtiratel'stvo: deploying TV-ready, stock-touting "analysts" who seemed unbiased, even though conflict of interest was unavoidable: their employers, investment firms, were actually getting business (and other insider perks) from those companies the analysts were often promoting. All this allowed executives to construct their own financial "Potemkin villages", as the practice was called in Russia and the Soviet Union, fooling the public into thinking things are rosy by putting up what was really a flimsy facade. 

Though some Main Street investors might have benefited short-term from the hype and from these inflated stock prices, most didn't know when to sell, or have any inkling that they should sell, while many executives did. Cassidy cites this study, "Barons of Bankruptcy", by the Financial Times: from 1999 to the end of 2001, out of the 25 biggest business collapses, executives and directors still took in $3.3 billion in salary, bonuses, and stock/stock option sales.

Even when the stock did fall, companies could reprice the options lower, giving execs another yet another chance to strike gold. Executive pay expert Graef Chrystal told Cassidy: "then you have created ... an anti-gravity device, which guarantees that ... executives will get super rich."

Questionable (perhaps fraudulent) practices continued in the years that followed, after the bubble reinflated, this time a housing bubble, with profit-mad banks engaging in predatory lending, and pushing so-called "liar loans" that gave mortgages to people who had no documentation to prove they could pay.

Then the banks took that junk and turned it radioactive. They created exotic financial instruments that took on far too much risk without enough capital to back it up, products that looked "innovative" when housing markets were surging, and catastrophic when they plunged. Did Goldman Sachs aggressively market mortgage investments to clients at a time when they knew the housing sector was imploding? Executives hauled before Congress this week said no, but there's little doubt that in the financial sector as a whole, the true risk of mortgage-backed securities was very much hidden from investors and regulators. And the elite few just got richer and richer.

Arianna Huffington this week quoted Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf: "the financial sector seems to be a machine to transfer income and wealth from outsiders to insiders, while increasing the fragility of the economy as a whole." Then she added this: "When the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times is sounding like the second coming of Karl Marx, you know things have gotten way out of hand."

Indeed, the shadow players of the communist-era command economy--that is, those who called the shots--would not have been surprised by any of these shenanigans. They also had help when it came to negotiating with the state apparatus to get their best possible outcome: "pushers" - tolkachi- whose job it was to smooth relations with suppliers and state officials.

The tolkachi here in the U.S. include traditional lobbyists. Back in the dot com era, for instance, lobbyists fought off an accounting rule that would have forced companies to accurately reflect the value of the stock options they granted in their earnings statements. This rule could have been a barrier to some of the dangerous obfuscations and abuses that followed. More recently, hedge funds boosted their spending on lobbying seven-fold in just three years, hoping to keep their business largely secret and unregulated. And Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin said in March that the financial sector is spending $1.4 million a day on lobbying against financial reform.

But the tolkachi in America have evolved beyond mere lobbyist to include a new breed of power broker Janine identifies in her book as "flexians", players who move back and forth between state and private roles, pushing their own agenda even while ostensibly serving the public interest. These new power brokers specialize in bending both the rules of government (accountability) and those of the free market (competition), all the while branding their message for the media to suit their own agendas.

That description might include Robert Rubin, who moved back and forth from top government and corporate roles, opposing a key push to regulate derivatives when he was a public official, and then enjoying the fruits of that unregulated environment when he resumed his career as an executive. The former Treasury Secretary also tried to prevent a potential hit to his company's fortunes (Citigroup) by making a questionable phone call to a Treasury department acquaintance, seeking help for Enron.

He does his own version of ochkovtiratel'stvo for the media. In a Newsweek article late last year, for instance, Rubin counsels the public on economic recovery, and what went wrong. Though he had top jobs at Citigroup and Goldman, he describes his career in a most vague way: "many years involved in financial matters." Newsweek lists him as a former Treasury secretary, co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the Harvard Corporation, but no corporate title to be found.

Some of Rubin's former Goldman colleagues were deeply involved in the 2008 bailout - when once again tolkachi could be seen. Government officials, ex-bankers themselves, even mysterious "contractors" helped make deals for some companies but not others, leaving many to question how those decisions were made, and whose interests were being represented.

Much has been made of the failure of the free market in the financial calamity of the past few years, but what is free about a market that has been rigged by executives, insiders, government allies, lobbyists and all manner of influence-peddlers? It was rigged not just to vastly enrich the elite, but also to protect them from consequences of failure which true capitalism demands. Their conduct might make even the most wily opportunists under communism blush.  As President Obama put it last week, "a free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it." American profiteers have done grievous damage to their own free-market ideology, and, most importantly, the economic well-being of the entire world.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
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Rabu, 28 April 2010

“From Book to Box Office: 3 Classic Fictions Fit for ... - Associated Content” plus 3 more

“From Book to Box Office: 3 Classic Fictions Fit for ... - Associated Content” plus 3 more

From Book to Box Office: 3 Classic Fictions Fit for ... - Associated Content

Posted: 28 Apr 2010 10:19 AM PDT

Since the dawn of Hollywood, books have been turned into film. Hundreds of books have made the journey from novel to screenplay, from book to film, yet many more hundreds sit on the shelf, waiting to be brought to the silver screen.

A wealth of classic American literature remains untapped by screen writers for use in film. Only the most popular works of the great American writers have been turned into films. Here are a few books from Pulitzer Prize winning writers that have been overlooked when it comes to turning books into films.

Each book has a contemporary appeal in addition to being given original voice by writers Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Saul Bellow - three of the most renowned American novelists of the 20th century.

Flood - Robert Penn Warren

As a town awaits its demise in the form of a planned flood, a screen writer and native son, Brad Tolliver, arrives on assignment. Tolliver is to help director Yasha Jones concoct a screenplay based on the last days of the town.

Tolliver soon finds himself sucked into a deeper tale, one of murder, intrigue, and a convicted criminal, days away from being put to death, who refuses to receive absolution from the church.

The convict sits on death row refusing to repent of his crime.

Poised on the brink of permanent destruction, the town's people cannot understand how a man in his position can deny salvation freely offered.

The people of the town see themselves in the convict, though they wish they didn't. He is a metaphor that stands for all of them. This is why they hate him.

This is why Brad Tolliver also is drawn to the man on death row and why the story is so compelling. Somehow, everyone is on death row and everyone wants to be forgiven, except the guy who is actually going to die.

Flood is a gripping read with many inter-connections and revelations of plot and, beyond that, revelations of the human spirit. Instead of acting as a screen writer, Tolliver becomes an investigator working to uncover the facts of what really happened to the convict so that he can understand the man sitting in the cell, turning away forgiveness.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

ACO: The End of Time - SOUNZ

Posted: 28 Apr 2010 12:35 PM PDT

Olivier Messiaen completed his Quatuor pour la fin du temps in a prisoner of war camp where it had its first performance. This piece is considered by many to be one of the great greatest ensemble works of the twentieth century. It speaks of intense spirituality, ecstasy, apocalypse and throughout it Messiaen's love of bird song.

Performers on this occasion will be the New Zealand Chamber Soloists: Lara Hall (violin), Peter Scholes (clarinet), James Tennant (cello) and Katherine Austin (piano). Prior to the musical performance, Waikato University lecturer and composer Martin Lodge will give a presentation titled Messiaen's 'Quartet for the End of Time': facts and fictions.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Volvo S80 DRIVe: Torque of the town - Daily Telegraph

Posted: 28 Apr 2010 09:58 AM PDT

By Neil Lyndon
Published: 6:02PM BST 28 Apr 2010

The late Michel Foucault might have approved of the Volvo S80 DRIVe. That French philosophe and intellectual fancypants defined power as "a complex strategic situation in a given social setting" - a description which fogged students for decades until the S80 DRIVe came along and fulfilled it to perfection.

The S80 DRIVe is a big car in the classic Volvo mould (mobile living-room, armoured for security like a rhino, as style-conscious as an M & S cardigan) with an engine about the size of a motor mower's.

In any previous age, its 1.6-litre turbodiesel engine with 108bhp would have been thought a little less than adequate if it was driving a Matchbox toy.

Anybody who knows the first thing about cars would have scoffed at the idea that a car 4,851mm long and weighing 1,586kg could be propelled faster than a milk float by such a puny power plant.

"Bet that car puts on a howling performance in the traffic light grand prix," the saloon bar nitwits would have jeered. "When you put your foot down, it must feel as if you're towing Mont Blanc."

The quiet laughter you hear, however, is actually the sound of self-satisfaction among S80 DRIVe owners who are enjoying the pleasures of a large and comfortable car that returns astonishing fuel consumption around 60mpg and is, at the very same time, effortlessly capable of holding its place in flowing traffic, whether on motorways or country roads.

A top speed of almost 120mph and acceleration from 0-60mph in 11 seconds is all the performance that anybody would ever need who never watches Top Gear (that is, 97 per cent of the entire population and 99.9 per cent of women).

How is this miracle achieved? We return to Prof Foucault's opaque observations on power and its capacity to take different forms in different circumstances (if that is what the old dear was driving at).

Ever since Henry Ford was in short trousers, the car industry has been preoccupied with raising the power output of engines measured in brake horsepower (or propulsive force against inertia, as it might be termed).

This resulted in the production of streams of ever-faster cars overflowing with pointless powers that could not be legally brought into use anywhere except on racetracks and autobahns.

There is, however, another form of automotive power that goes by the name of torque. It is a complex topic in mechanical engineering but, in car terms, torque can best be thought of as pulling power.

It is by making the most of torque that the S80 DRIVe produces its gratifying performance. To say that the engine generates 240 Newton metres of torque may mean less to you than a formula for collateralised debt obligation but, in practice, it means that this S80 pulls effortlessly away from rest and can accelerate promptly even at low speeds. In other words, that little engine produces more than enough oomph to shift that mighty lump.

The S80 DRIVe is far from being the first car to take this approach. Vauxhall's Insignia Ecoflex, Ford's Mondeo Econetic and VW's Passat BlueMotion all share comparable power-optimisation technology and fuel-saving benefits.

But the Volvo is the one which advances this "complex strategy" to its highest art so far and, in the latest version of the S80 DRIVe, CO2 emissions have been reduced below 120g/km for the first time in such a large and luxurious car, placing it alongside little urban runabouts in Band C for Vehicle Excise Duty which costs just £35 a year.

Even if, therefore, the CO2 thesis on climate change should turn out to be the most bogus of all the ideologically driven fictions foisted on the world by the Sixties generation, it will still have made the world a better place because the legislation and social pressure that grew out of the global warming scare forced carmakers to come up with fuel-saving cars like the S80 DRIVe that are also a pleasure to drive. Their rethink on the nature of power was, unquestionably, determined by the social setting of our peculiar time.

Price (as tested): £25,763.83

Power: 108bhp

0-60mph: 11 seconds

Top speed: 118mph

Average fuel consumption: 57.7mpg

CO2 emissions: 119g/km

Insurance group: 18E

Rating: 4 stars

The Rivals

Vauxhall Insignia Ecoflex

Price (as tested): £21,515- £27,750

For: looks like a Jaguar Against: drives like a Vectra

Rating: 3 stars

VW Passat Bluemotion

Price: £20,900-£23,970

For: Passat is an ignorable name

Against: but BlueMotion is unthinkable

Rating: 4 stars

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Undeterred by factual reality, Birthers plot march on ... - DAILY KOS

Posted: 28 Apr 2010 04:29 AM PDT

Since the election of Obama, we have seen a tsunami of racist nutjobs all over the TV, at political events armed to the teeth, and holding their own protests as rallies, such as they have been, and entertaining us all with their illiterate signs.

We have teabaggers - I refuse to call them 'tea partiers' because I simply cannot respect what message they seem to have - emerge as a vocal if not terribly organized "force', and we have seen the rise of the Birthers, not necessarily all teabaggers, but the overlap must be massive.

A year and a half into the Obama presidency, these twits are STILL clinging to what has to be one of the bigger fictions of our times: the idea that Barack Obama somehow fooled federal election officials and (then) (somehow) won the election, tricking almost all Americans.

Except them, of course.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
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Selasa, 27 April 2010

“Oklahoma Legislators Override Anti-Life Veto of ... - Catholic Online” plus 3 more

“Oklahoma Legislators Override Anti-Life Veto of ... - Catholic Online” plus 3 more

Oklahoma Legislators Override Anti-Life Veto of ... - Catholic Online

Posted: 27 Apr 2010 04:18 PM PDT

The actions of the Oklahoma legislators points out the essential importance of the midterm elections in the United States. We need men and women who will not compromise on the fundamental human Right to Life to run for every vacant seat in the House and the Senate. Then we need to elect them to office. The potentially lethal power of an Executive Veto can be stopped. It can be done by a vote to override from courageous legislators.

The Oklahoma State Capitol Building.

OKLAHOMA CITY (Catholic Online) - On April 27, 2010, those men and women of conscience in the Oklahoma Senate did what every elected representative with a conscience should always do. They stood for Justice. They overrode the Unjust Veto of a Governor who failed to recognize the fundamental Human Right to Life.

In so doing, they also revealed the latest chapter in the real civil and human rights struggle of our age, the effort to protect our youngest neighbors in the womb from being killed by procured abortion. Procured abortion is always the wrongful killing of the innocent. This is not only a religious position; it is a human and a human rights position. Even if the current positive law still provides a modicum of legal protection for the killing, truth, science and a true understanding of justice is on the ascent.

These elected representatives also gave us a window through which we can view the importance of the upcoming National election.

Governor Brad Henry rejected the expressed will of the people of Oklahoma. He took his stand alongside all those in public office who have sided with the barbarians who continue to promote the lie that it is OK to kill the innocent. They are on the wrong side of history. He upheld the use of Police Power of the State to promote a fundamentally unjust act, killing the innocent. Medical Science has confirmed what our consciences and the Natural Law have long revealed, the child in the womb is our neighbor. It is always and everywhere wrong to kill our neighbors.

Intrauterine surgery and 4D sonogram technology reveals the truth about the humanity of our smallest neighbors. There are few voices left who are trying to argue that those little girls and boys are anything less than human persons. No, they try to justify the brutality of procured abortion based upon such contrived notions and legal fictions such as using a "right to privacy" and a "right to choice" to hide savagery. What other group of persons is allowed to be killed by another group of persons with more power - and then have that savage act protected by the positive law?

At issue in Oklahoma were two pieces of very just and appropriate legislation. One requires any woman in Oklahoma who is considering an abortion to first undergo an ultrasound and be given the medical facts concerning the child who is living and growing within her womb.  A fully informed consent is always required before major surgery, right? I guess not when the issue is abortion.

The other prohibits women from suing their physician after birth if he or she failed to give information which would have disclosed that the child had a disability. The obvious and commendable intent of this legislation is to prevent discrimination against children with disabilities. Everyone believes in that, right? I guess not when it comes to abortion.  

The majority of the elected legislators of Oklahoma passed the legislation, reflecting the will of the people who sent them to office. The Governor vetoed it. So the elected legislators overrode the veto. That means, in effect, the Bill now becomes law.

The Governor tried to justify his errant action by calling the legislation an unlawful intrusion into the privacy of the mother. Of course, the fundamental Right to Life of the children in the womb whose lives will be saved as a result of such reasonable legislation was of no concern to him. He also claimed that the legislation would be challenged in the Courts and that such a legal proceeding would waste taxpayer's money. You know how that argument goes. We live in an age where human persons have become commodities to be traded as property.

However, the word out of Oklahoma is good news. The trend is clear and the proponents of death on demand recognize the writing is on the wall. Oklahoma is not alone.

Nebraska recently passed legislation recognizing fetal pain as a consideration in late term abortions. Kansas legislators passed legislation requiring fuller disclosure to the mother concerning the truth about the child in her womb as well as what occurs during abortion. Another misguided Governor vetoed that measure on April 15. However, an effort is underway to override his veto.

Over twenty States have similar legislation pending which will increase the necessity of giving full and complete disclosure to the mother, require waiting periods or mandate the use of ultrasound technology. In addition the passage of the Nationalized Health Care Legislation has led to a flood of efforts to protect States from having to participate in "health care exchanges" which would use monies set aside for health care to kill children in the womb. They rightly refuse to call such feticide a health care service.

The actions of the Oklahoma legislators points out the essential importance of the midterm elections in the United States. We need men and women who will not compromise on the fundamental human Right to Life to run for every vacant seat in the House and the Senate. Then we need to elect them to office.

The potentially lethal power of an Executive Veto can be stopped. It can be done by a vote to override from courageous legislators. That is true whether that Executive resides in the Capital of Oklahoma or in Washington, D.C.   


- - -

Deacon Keith Fournier asks that you join with us and help in this vital mission by sending this article to your family, friends, and neighbors and adding our link (www.catholic.org) to your own website, blog or social network. Let us broadcast, we are PROUD TO BE CATHOLIC!




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1 Comments

  1. April 27th, 2010 5:41 pm

    God Bless the legislators that voted to preserve the sanctity of life! Surely their hearts were touched by Our Ladys call to know and believe that all life is precious and ordained by God!

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Champions League Comment: Bayern Munich And Ivica Olic ... - Goal.com

Posted: 27 Apr 2010 03:07 PM PDT

Bayern Munich, the first team to reach the Champions League final? Ivica Olic, challenging Lionel Messi for the Champions League top scorer award? A good feeling at the Allianz? Some of Europe's hottest property in top form? Imagine saying all that when Juergen Klinsmann was in charge. Yet here we are, just a year later, and FC Hollywood have become a blockbuster proposition.

The 3-0 win for the Germans at the Gerland against Lyon was flattering - to the hosts, that is. Bayern have hardly played an easier game all season, seven-goal horsing of Hannover included. Credit goes to Bayern's effortless possession play and not to mention the pantomimic sending-off of Lyon stalwart Cris for questioning the wisdom of a card-happy, po-faced Massimo Busacca.

Yet - and I'm ready to face all accusations of being a nit-picking killjoy - there is the sense that Bayern might be setting themselves up for a fall. It's precisely because they did not truly face opposition in this semi-final that they must worry about the final.

In the knockout stages, Bayern squeezed past Fiorentina in dubious circumstances before once again edging Manchester United. Defeating last season's losing finalists merits congratulation; to do so while they are stricken by injury, and by the narrowest of margins, is still gutsy, but speaks less of talent than it does of grit and, dare I say it, luck.


Hat Trick Hero - But can he repeat the feat in Madrid?

These qualities are necessary but not sufficient for top-level silverware. Inter and Barcelona both have it, but also something more. Bayern may yet find to their cost that, despite their undoubted progress and their new legion of continental admirers, they lack that little bit of class required. For all the industry of a Thomas Mueller there is the genius of a Messi waiting at the other side.

Still, there is hope. In Arjen Robben, as I argued earlier, there is perhaps the most decisive player on the continent. Bastian Schweinsteiger is reminding observers just why his name became famous in the first place. Above all, in Louis van Gaal there is a coach who, if not quite at the level of Jose Mourinho, remains one of Europe's most formidable managers. All it will take is for four, perhaps five such elements to collide on one night in Madrid to give Europe a shock it won't forget in a hurry. But can it happen?

Talking (Too Much) Point

Lyon's first semi-final appearance ended with a whimper in front of a Gerland crowd deserving more. Were some men to preside over such a failing they would not emerge for days. Yet after the match coach Claude Puel braved the press in the French manner: right away. In some countries, such as England and Spain - and to some extent Germany -  one does not speak to the coach until he is ready. In France, often the referee hasn't quite finished blowing his whistle before microphones are thrust into faces.

Perhaps, then, being rushed is an excuse for what Puel chose to state. "It's a shame not to have equalised," he said. "After Cris was sent off it was difficult: they controlled the game and made us run. We had chances to get back into the game and the scoreline is harsh compared to the players' investments."

Puel could perchance take a lesson from the Germans in the opposing dressing room before coming out with such ludicrous fictions: wenn Mann keine Ahnung hat, einfach mal Fresse halten. His words, surely, surely cannot ring true with the Lyon support. Puel brought them this far - something the likes of Le Guen, Houllier and Santini couldn't manage - but on the strength of this showing, and this analysis, can take them little further. What Les Gones would give for a Van Gaal!

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I wasn’t sent out of Speakers’ confab – Edo ... - Vanguard

Posted: 27 Apr 2010 11:25 AM PDT

[fivefilters.org: unable to retrieve full-text content]

A statement by his Senior Special Assistant (Media), Deacon Ralph Okhiria, said "there is no iota of truth in the said sponsored publica-tions which were fictions of the reporters' imagination who readily made themsel-ves willing tools in the ...

Top 5 Affordable Cellphones Companies for Seniors - Associated Content

Posted: 27 Apr 2010 09:16 AM PDT

For senior citizens, safety comes first. Having an easy to use cell phone that does not cost a lot on hand makes it much easier to get around without worry. It is something that is now even recommended. So finding the right cell phone company may get a little hard for some people, even with all of the companies we have scattering the US. So here are my top five picks of cell phones/cell phone companies that are best for senior citizens.

Number 5

Straight talk

www.Walmart.com

This is the newest prepaid phone to hit shelves lately. It is actually a great deal, if you are looking to have a plan minus all the snags that you get with a regular cell phone company. If a senior citizen were to have this cell phone, they would not have to worry about the phone being turned off in the middle of the month as long as they still have minutes or have bought the unlimited plan monthly card. The price ranges for these are 30 dollars for the regular minute plan that includes 1000 minutes/1000 texts/ and 30mb of internet usage. The nest plan up is 45 dollars for unlimited talk/txt/internet usage. The phones to go with these plans range in price and style from store to store, but online the selection is LG and Samsung ranging in price from 30-over a hundred dollars. This is a good choice for a senior citizen, since it has everything you may need. But it may be a bit pricey for some that is why it is number five on my list.

Number 4

Consumer cellular

www.Consumercellular.com

This is a cell phone company made specifically for seniors. It has great prices and okay plans. The plans for this phone are specifically made for the elderly and range from 10 dollars all the way to 60 dollars. Their 60 dollar plan is the best including 2000 minutes of airtime, and 10 cents for each additional minute. The phone prices are great too ranging from free to 40 dollars. Certain discounts apply for AARP costumers. This is a great cell phone company for those looking for an emergency only phone, or even a decent monthly prepaid plan. Still on the pricey side for a decent amount of minutes has this cell phone company at number four.

Number 3

Tracfone

www.Tracfone.com

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Senin, 26 April 2010

“Goldman Sachs Testimony: Why Congress Won't Do Diddly - TPMCafe (blog)” plus 3 more

“Goldman Sachs Testimony: Why Congress Won't Do Diddly - TPMCafe (blog)” plus 3 more

Goldman Sachs Testimony: Why Congress Won't Do Diddly - TPMCafe (blog)

Posted: 26 Apr 2010 05:03 PM PDT


This could be a week the boys at Goldman Sachs would like to forget, but it's more likely to be the equivalent of falling asleep on the beach - it'll sting for a few days, and their faces will be boiled lobster red, but in a week they'll be okay. Between the showdown in the senate, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will try to make the GOP walk the plank as they reject the Democrats financial reform proposal, and the oh so scary thought of the fifteen or twenty Goldman employees who are expected to testify tomorrow in front of Congress, you would think something might finally come out of all this that would really make a difference to the general public.

This ain't that kinda party.

In fact, it never is. I love my president to death, but he does not have the will to stick hot pokers up the collective asses of Wall Streets denziens until they scream out for mercy. For a nation that is obsessed with the truth, even as our lives are constructed mostly out of half truths and convenient fictions, it would simply be too much for the average American to process the kind of stream of consciousness confession this kind of torture might elicit, the kind of rambling harangue between tears that would reveal to the public how little connection there is between the rows of zeros they play with and the actual hard earned pensions and savings and mutual funds they represent, the kind of coughing, sputtering, agonized howl of foul, vile invective that would really show you how much they cared about your American Dream.


And even if he had the will, he couldn't do it, because no one does this in modern politics. Not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the Libertarians, not fanatical the Ron Paul acolytes - not even the overcounted, underprincipled Tea Baggers have the guts to take the country back to 1907, or 1870, or 1835, or 1793, or any one of the times in our nation's first 150 years when white Americans enjoyed everything on the Tea Party's bullshit wishlist - a limited and weak federal government, practically no taxes, and markets that were lightly regulated.

These were such great times, in fact, when there were no roads to speak of, patent medicines that killed or maimed people by the thousands, regular epidemics that wiped out hundreds of thousands, factories that tacked the value of lost limbs on the wall the way you see prices for a Big Mac at McDonald's, no libraries, few public colleges - the list could go on, but at the top of it were those oh so honorable Robber Barons like Vanderbilt and Gould and Sage, men who manipulated markets and cooked the books and renamed liabilities as assets like...

...well, like Goldman Sachs.

But so long as we are willing to wink at Wall Street when it tells us that 2+2=5, we deserve what we get. So long as we are willing to welcome the latest invention they've cooked up in the lab, because it helps us to get what we want today, even if we don't have the money for it, or the cash flow to pay it off, we deserve what we get. So long as we get weak in the knees while reading about multi-million dollar salaries and billions of dollars in bonuses for standing on top of OUR money, we deserve what we get. This is why Congress won't do diddly - because we aren't demanding anything more than a slap on the wrist to make it look good for the cameras. Until the SEC has the same powers the FBI has, or at the very least what the IRS has, we are just whistling Dixie.

I'll bet the folks in Greece are wishing they'd never heard of Goldman Sachs right about now.

One thing the "we don't need no regulation" Tea Baggers might want to consider - back in the good old days, when the Robber Barons ran the show on Wall Street, there were no bailouts from the government. They just failed, often without warning, stopping the entire economy in its tracks. If you would quit listening to Glen Beck and Michelle Malkin long enough to read some actual history instead of struggling so hard to grasp what the Constitution really says, maybe you would see this.

I'll be looking for you Tea Baggers in the Goldman Sachs cheering section - I imagine you'll be the ones who AREN'T wearing the $3000 suits.

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Sandra Bullock’s Sister Slams Reports That She Spent ... - Access Hollywood

Posted: 26 Apr 2010 02:04 PM PDT

LOS ANGELES, Calif. --

Sandra Bullock's sister, Gesine Bullock-Prado, is denying reports that she was with the Oscar-winning actress over the Easter weekend.

Gesine, who runs a bakery in Vermont, took to her blog, Confessions of a (Closet) Master Baker, setting the record straight about Sandra's whereabouts.

"Apparently I'm able to time travel because according to Star Magazine, radaronline.com and now my local Vermont favorite (and in this I'm being totally honest, it is my favorite) Seven Days, it's reported that my husband of eleven years and I took my sister to some inn (which shall remain nameless because they've gotten enough free publicity from lying up to now) for Easter dinner," she wrote last week.

"I know this isn't about pastry and it's not about running a bakery. But this story is about eating and I'm nothing if not deadly serious about eating. And I'm also deadly serious about my family, their privacy and even the most benign fictions printed about them. Usually I don't have the patience or the actual physical evidence to refute printed stupidity. But modern air travel is so cluttered with paper trails, I thought I'd share mine," she continued in the post, which also contained a copy of her flight itinerary.

"So to set the record completely straight, if the post on Easter about gorging my way through Chicago doesn't convince you to my whereabouts and only my whereabouts, then let my reservations on the lovely United Airlines be a true and honest testament to what I ate for Easter dinner and with whom, and it wasn't with my lovely family at some nameless Vermont inn I've never set eyes upon," Gesine wrote, referring to Sandra who has largely remained out of the public eye since infidelity allegations against husband Jesse James surfaced last month.

Gesine ended her blog post saying, "That night I ate alone and I ate airline food. And who the hell would lie about that?"

Copyright 2010 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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The Recently Deceased Alan Sillitoe's Greatest Hit: The ... - Associated Content

Posted: 26 Apr 2010 11:26 AM PDT

The 1958 Movie that Launched Albert Finney's Screen Career and the British "Angry Young Men" Genre

Alan Sillitoe, who died yesterday in London at the age of 82, published more than 50 books (including the 1995 autobiography Life Without Armour), but if remembered at all, is remembered for two early "angry young [working-class] men" fictions that were made into movies that launched the film careers of Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960) and Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1962, directed by Tony Richardson before "Tom Jones," which starred Finney, in 1963).*

"Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" won the Author's Club First Novel Award. The screen adaptation wasthe most commercially and critically successful of the British new wave/ angry young men flicks of the late 1950s and early 1960s and the one that made Albert Finney a star. The movie was produced by Tony Richardson, who had directed two John Osborne plays (Look Back In Anger, The Entertainer). It was directed by Karl Reisz (1926-2002; a Czech-born British director who has made relatively few films, but they have included the brilliant adaptations of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers as "Who'll Stop the Rain" and John Fowles's seemingly unfilmable The French Lieutenant's Woman from a novel adapted for the screen by Alan Sillitoe). In its day (the novel in 1958, the movie in 1960), "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" was regarded as realistic, and despite censoring, as shocking. I'll get back to that.

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Disastrous Computer Models Predictions From Limits to ... - Canada Free Press

Posted: 26 Apr 2010 05:00 AM PDT

An Unavoidable Truth

Disastrous Computer Models Predictions From Limits to Growth to Global Warming

 By Dr. Tim Ball  Monday, April 26, 2010

imageEvery time history repeats itself the price goes up. Anonymous

No matter what political committees try to absolve corruption of climate science of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they cannot hide the complete failure of the computer models to make a single accurate prediction.  Leaked emails from the CRU received media attention, but the emphasis must shift to the computer models. They gave the IPCC Reports far more credibility than they deserved by producing simple graphs and crude maps of a warmer world with increasingly, expanding and threatening red (hot) areas that avoided the need for scientific understanding.

What was more dramatic than the infamous hockey stick? The combination of the flat handle achieved by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period and the upturn of the blade in the 20th century with Phil Jones' undisclosed data was visually dramatic. The propagandists in Hollywood who produced Gore's movie understood this.

Computer climate models give unwarranted scientific credibility for people who don't understand them. As Pierre Gallois explained, "If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no-one dares criticize it." Dr David Frame, climate modeler at Oxford University said, "The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful." But climate models are not convenient fictions. They do not produce anything useful other than to deceive and scare the public. IPCC models are part of continuum of the exploitation of useless computer models to promote environmental extremism and political agendas. 

An Early Example of Political Policy Driven By Computer Output.

"Limits To Growth" was a 1972 report produced for The Club of Rome. It used grossly simplistic linear models to claim the world was on the verge of collapse. The central theme was a continuation of the idea about population capacity of the world that has gone on throughout written history. Plato and Aristotle discussed the ideal size for a city-state in the 3rd and 4th centuries BC, but Confucius preceded them in the 5th century with warnings about excessive growth. Predictions of population outgrowing resources were given a boost by the speculations of Thomas Malthus with his 1798 "An Essay on the Principle of Population."

"Limits To Growth" followed and built on Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb that claimed the world was already overpopulated and doomed.  "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail." 
Some brand Ehrlich's predictions among the most ridiculous on record. Consider just three, any one of which should raise flags about the author's credibility. 

  • The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
  • "Four billion people—including 65 million Americans—would perish from famine in the 1980s."
  • "In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."

Despite the ludicrous nature of these claims, they drew attention and promotion from environmentalists and people who saw the political potential of the fears his claims engendered. Not least among these was John Holdren, who co-authored a 1969 article with Ehrlich that claimed, "if the population control measures are not initiated immediately, and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come." Holdren is in a position as science Czar in the Obama White House to try and make this prophecy a reality.

"Holdren was a fully paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club. For example, in his 1971 Sierra Club book, Energy: A Crisis in Power, Holdren declared that, "it is fair to conclude that under almost any assumptions, the supplies of crude petroleum and natural gas are severely limited. The bulk of energy likely to flow from these sources may have been tapped within the lifetime of many of the present population." Because of this view, Holdren joined with Ehrlich and John Harte in a bet with economist Julian Simon that five metals would increase in price over ten years because of increasing scarcity. Simon easily won the bet. (Forbes Feb. 3, 2009)

Failures Fail To Destroy Credibility

Despite this, the credibility of these people remained unsullied and essentially unchallenged in the same way that the credibility of the CRU/IPCC does today. A significant reason was because they both used computer models that mystify and beguile most people, as Gallois observed.  However, beyond not understanding the mathematics was the public belief that the models produced accurate predictions of the future.  In fact, the Limits to Growth "World3" model was not intended to be predictive. "In this first simple world model, we are interested only in the broad behavior modes of the population-capital system." The "population-capital" phrase is telling because it links the catastrophic population predictions of Ehrlich with the economic system. It was a barely disguised attack upon the capitalist system. IPCC models do the same thing. Most think they are only about global temperature, but that is incorrect.  The final Reports produced by working Group II are based on the temperature predictions, "After confirming in the first volume on "The Physical Science Basis" that climate change is occurring now, mostly as a result of human activities, this volume illustrates the impacts of global warming already under way and the potential for adaptation to reduce the vulnerability to, and risks of, climate change."

These are blended into the influential Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM) that says population and economic growth measured by CO2 have caused temperature increase and the solution is to stop the economic growth and reduce the population.

Models of both groups are built on population projections and assume business as usual. Both are simplistic linear models based on virtually no data, with completely inadequate understanding of the mechanisms and inabilities to accommodate feedback. Every model prediction or projection of both groups was remarkably wrong, regardless of attempts at improvement. This is true for weather, climate, population and economic models. A similar record of failed predictions would doom any other area of research and policy. But money and politics combined with the use of computer models bestows a completely unjustified credibility. It's time their failures were exposed.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana

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