Equivocation Nation

work

2010-06-14T15:50:00.000+01:00

These guys are good:

http://amsterdamaanhetwerk.nl/

It's been a while...

2010-04-22T01:40:00.002+01:00

I've been getting into webdesign. This is my new site for webdesign stuff:

Ysbeer Media

And this is my new blog:

The decline and fall of pop

I worship at the altar of Brangelina

2008-04-16T22:14:00.000+01:00

I went for a drink with two old friends recently, and one of them asked me who I'd rather see the celebrity deathclock start on soonest, Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse? I didn't really have to think about it, I'd much rather have another Amy Winehouse album than a Britney album, so I marked miss Spears for Death. My other friend protested that caring about celebrities personal lives is for women and homosexuals.

I don't agree, it's pure performance art. What we think of as a celebrity's 'private' life is a gestalt entity consisting of their actual private life, the publicists' and agents' spin on their private lives, tabloid journalists idea of what will sell more copies and the public need for entertaining scandals. By the time you read about it, if it bears any resemblance to reality, somebody hasn't been doing their job. If you think that a magazine has any idea what Brad Pitt's private life is like, you're an idiot. It's an industry that involves hundreds of thousands of people building scandals out of the most mundane and unremarkable things.

'The Hollywood insider' (not the magazine) is the character that makes a lot of gossip journalism possible. These are usually failed celebrities themselves, and they can be either bitter or benevolent about it. They're the people who hang out at the parties and then sell their stories to the papers. The jilted lovers, the confidantes eager to write tell-all books, the gal pals who write the gushing blurbs about the dresses at the wedding, or the simplicity of the decor. Or they can be the people 'revealing' drug problems, eating disorders, etc. Usually anonymously, always for the stars' own benefit, of course. Seeing as they are betraying the confidences of their so-called friends, there is really no reason to take anything they say to heart.

Why are the lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous so compelling? It's not just the gossip, there's something archetypical going on here. The whole Brangelina thing has seriously religious overtones, for me at least. Brad is a bit like a sun god avatar, a blonde, smiling, good-natured actor, who marries Angelina Jolie, who always reminded me of Kali, the blood obsession, the tattoos, and she just looks like the pictures. Beautiful but deadly, and a mother. They've slid firmly into the part of my brain that keeps various religious cosmologies apart, probably because they spent a lot of time and money tapping into the same archetypes as those gods. The Greek pantheon is filled with jealousy, rage, adultery, murder, incest and rape. They realised that seeing the divine dragged through the mud is one of the great joys of life. Perfection is as boring as it gets.

I also can't enough of the ridiculous excess. If all the money and the fame doesn't create larger than life personalities, then what does? Having so much money you don't even know what to do with it anymore, can't be good for you, nor can being recognised on the street give you a humble disposition. I was spellbound watching "The Fabulous Life of Celebrity Pets". I can't see why anybody wouldn't want to watch a documentary on how to spend a middle management salary a day on a dog. It's the kind of lunacy that just makes me happy. If you don't like that attitude, feel free to be horrified that there's a dog that's richer, more famous and that has a better life than you, and not because it can talk or cured cancer in a whimsical laboratory accident. That is at least as valid a reason to keep watching.

If I ever become famous, my friends have my permission to sell any stories, real or imagined to the press. Though I prefer imagined, because I don't think there's anything I've done in the last ten years that qualifies as a scandal. I'm thinking something along these lines:

"He sat in the room, covered in coconut oil and wearing only lederhosen, forcing the midgets to dance with his whip, while he halfheartedly tried to strangle the swan. It was then that I realised that Hollywood had changed him."

In fact, let's make it contest. Whoever leaves the best interview snippet in the comments section along with his name and postal address, will get my copy of "The Man Who was Thursday" by G.K. Chesterton. Make your entry 100 words or less. Contest closes the 16th of May. I will not correspond with you about whether or not you've won. The winner will be announced on this blog on the 17th.

Reviews for march

2008-03-31T14:43:00.000+01:00

Kenzo Kitakata's Winter Sleep is apparently only the second of the hundred books he's written to be translated, and I can't say how happy I am that someone is going to those lengths to bring us modern Japanese authors besides Haruki Murakami. Kitakata is described on the jacket as the 'Don of hardboiled detective and mystery writing in Japan' and it does tend to remind me of 'Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World'. But Kitakata doesn't use a fairytale to represent the inner world. His main character is an ex-con artist philosopher and his lack of interest in money, social conventions and anything besides his art is neatly captured in the sparse language, which acts as a metaphor for his artistic pursuits and how they isolate him from society.

The artist secludes himself in a cabin in the mountains to paint without interruption, but an attractive older art dealer drops by and tries to get him to switch galleries. He's unconcerned with the piles of cash she brings whenever he lets her take a painting away, and she ruthlessly tries to manipulate him any way she can. The other woman is a young girl trying to become a painter herself. He becomes her lover and teacher and the foil for explaining Kitakata's artistic theory. The third main character is a mentally disabled murder with talent, who becomes obsessed with his paintings, who he teaches to paint, so he won't have to kill again. the characters dance around each other for a while, moving towards a not very happy ending. The artist needs to finish his masterpiece, and his two protogées need to become artists before the winter is over.

What I found most interesting about the book was the way in which artistic growth could be captured in the hardboiled scheme, it seemed a bit incongruous, but turned out to be a fantastic find. It also revealed why authors like Murakami are so fond of a pulp genre that's hardly used by anyone in the states and Europe anymore. Early translations of Spillane or Chandler must have looked like desert landscapes to the Japanese. A barebones mystery, dotted with references to alcohol, cigarettes and beautiful women, all centered on lonely and fundamentally self-destructing characters. But the Japanese probably never regarded it as genre fiction, I like to think they viewed it as a kind of philosophical zen poetry about these themes, with the actual mystery or detective story as completely inconsequential.

Katherine Dunn's Geek Love is apparently some kind of classic, having been nominated for a National Book Award in 1989. It details the family life of a Carnival proprietor, his wife and the freakish children they made experimenting with chemicals and radioactivity.

Just like the characters, this book's outward displays of unique weirdness really doesn't make for interesting insides. There are no interesting twists, no revealing descriptions, no fascinating characters, despite all the effort expended to make it into an engrossing macabre fairytale, it's really just a grotesque catalog of perfectly ordinary episodes, only ugly because they don't coalesce into anything more than that. For all your freak show needs, watch any episode of Carnivale, which manages to pull off everything Dunn wanted to do and more, sans the family relations angle.

Dana Vachon's Mergers and Acquisitions starts off like a fresh Brett Easton Ellis, but manages to stay quite lighthearted in tone, except for the incongruous suicidal girlfriend subplot. The main character is a slacker investment banker, who manages to work his contacts for a job at a rapidly disintegrating Wall street firm, while of course remaining somewhat aloof to the bizarre personalities and extreme temptations of life among the super wealthy idiots.

Most of the book is a somewhat entertaining farce about the main character's total lack of talent and surprising bad luck in his new job. His considerably dumber friend does better, because he's mistaken for a more senior and competent banker than he actually is, and because everyone has slept with his sister at some point. The whole thing isn't exactly biting satire like the cover blurbs would have you believe, what's missing is the dark underbelly Ellis and Jay McInerney always seem to find.

It's quite hard to write convincingly about a completely superficial world, but if you can't find anything substantial at all in the plot, it becomes almost impossible. The suicidal girlfriend is supposed to be that anchor, but Vachon just writes her as a mopey chick that wants to kill herself because her impotent father is raising another man's child as his own with his latest trophy wife. They grow apart and she dramatically attempts suicide, but lives, now alienated from him. He manages to suck-out and gets a lot of money and recognition for nothing, amidst various misadventures. I'd describe this book as a slightly more cynical version of 'the Secret of My Success', Micheal J. Fox's 1980's business comedy.

Maybe I just need to know the Wall street deal makers some of these people are supposedly based on, whose pathetic loneliness and desperation will certainly be enough to sue Vachon for the unflattering descriptions he provides. But there's no reason for me to care about super-rich jerks and the vapid, privileged hipsters they spawn otherwise.

We own the Night was competent and that's really all there is too it. Marky Mark and Robert Duvall are the cop father and son duo that try to rope black sheep club-managing brother Joaquin Phoenix into helping them catch some of the drug dealers hanging out in his Brooklyn nightspot. He refuses, and after his brother takes a bullet from a regular customer, he goes undercover to catch the assailant. He gets hurt and the purposely vague Eastern European escapes, then kills his father. The brothers reunite to catch him, Joaquin now a provisional cop planning to join the good fight as soon as family business is dealt with. He deals with it, taking up the gauntlet and finally admitting he loves his brother, who takes a desk job because he can't take working on the streets anymore, but losing his girlfriend because she just doesn't understand why he has to do this. The movie is supposed to be set in 1988, but the Blondie songs in the club sequences at the beginning are all from 1979-1982, which is my only quarrel with the movie. Nothing amazing, but well worth the trouble of going to see, solid acting all round.

Lars and the Real Girl is one of those bittersweet films from the Wes Anderson school of film making. There are the kooky characters presented with a lot of understatement, the social misfits trying to grow up, the tortured relationships between everybody, etc. The script is by one of the writers of six feet under and that shows, it's high quality, but a bit too episodic. The story centers on Lars, a 27-year old programmer with severe social anxieties, played surprisingly well by Ryan Gosling. He lives in a shed outside the family home where his older brother now lives with his pregnant wife. His brother's wife and all the other people in the small Alaskan town they live in are urging him to get a girlfriend, he's even being pursued by girl just a little bit less adorably awkward than he is. One night he snaps and orders a real doll over the internet, but he believes her to be an actual person. A kindly psychiatrist convinces everybody in the town to play along and soon 'Bianca' the wheelchair-bound half-Danish, Half-Brazilian Nurse is more popular in the town than Lars himself is. He begins to have fights with her, and is also begin to like the titular 'real girl' a lot more. Predictably, 'Bianca' isn't breathing one morning and at the funeral Lars finds comfort with the real girl. The big surprise for me in this movie was how well Ryan Gosling managed to play both Lars and 'Bianca', getting both the tics and mannerisms of the man and of the one-sided relationship with the doll absolutely perfect. And this from the guy who was in 'the Notebook', a saccharine tearjerker a movie like this is the insulin for. The balance between quirky comedy and drama was just off, though. It was a good film, but a bit more tension, uncomfortable weirdness and at least a mention of sex (those dolls are anatomically correct, after all) would have made it great.

Mad Men is the new show by the production team and one of the writers behind 'the Sopranos'. Apparently David Chase was so impressed by the pilot script he hired creator Matthew Weiner on the spot for the last season of his show. And it's clear why, Mad men doesn't have the Soprano's easily explained conceit -mobster character study through psychiatrist- but it does have the same appeal, a great cast struggling with superior scripts with multi-layered things to say about American Society. The show is set in 1960, and deals with the professional and private life of Don Draper, a creative director for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. His colleagues and city mistresses don't seem to know anything about his private life, and his wife doesn't seem to care about his job. The show is dedicated to being period specific and representing a 1960's microcosm that also explains where modern consumer society comes from. So there's a lot of smoking drinking and cheating on wives going on, absolutely charming racism and misogyny (Draper's wife sees a psychiatrist who calls him the following evening to tell him what she talked about) and gems of wisdom about the advertising business and some of the classic campaigns of the sixties. The famous 'lemon' volkswagen' campaign is ridiculed by Draper and colleagues. There's some fantastic lines in every episode but these from the second episode are just immortal:
"Have you ever been in love mister Draper?"
"Love doesn't exist. Love was invented by a man like me to sell nylons."
All said while knocking back an old-fashioned and chain smoking. BBC 2 is showing it on Tuesdays, there's no DVD yet, but there will be one soon.

Last but not least, I'll be reviewing a lifestyle/youth craze from the depths of urban despair in post-industrial France and Belgium.. I originally thought it would be some kind of music craze, but it doesn't have any signature songs, except this one, a remix of a cover of a French 80's classic by artist Yelle.

Predictably, they whole thing is already over six years old, being invented, or maybe co-opted by the manager of Parisian club MetroPolis. Tecktonik is a registered trademarked and has it's own line of products. The hairstyles and fashion are clearly defined, as is the dance.
This is what they look like....

The only workable definition of any kind of ethos behind it is no rebellion, no statements and no messages. The name reflects the clash of more Southern European (read : Metrosexual) types of dancing with more Northern European (read: Violently Heterosexual) styles. The movements are a representation of that tectonic shift when the continental plates hit each other. Style over substance. Thank god the beef is there, or it might seem anemic even by fad standards. Hardstyle and jumpstyle dancing enthusiasts are already using it as a self-defining exclusion. Tecktonik is gay, what they do is more acceptable.

The fact that I'm talking about what is essentially a trademarked youth culture concept, should chill you to the bone. It's not the kids who decide what's cool, even in the underground, it's a guy in a suit. It's only cool because it sells energy drinks and t-shirts. This is the one of the most bankrupt crazes I;ve ever seen so much so that there is no message, and the music is an afterthought. The Yelle video is basically an add for expansion into Northern Europe.

Fitna fails to stoke fires of Holy Wrath, Pre-millenial dispensationalists bitterly disappointed

2008-03-30T18:16:00.001+01:00

Geert Wilders' hardcore fan base was a bit disappointed with the film, some of them were quoted in the NRC as thinking he hadn't really expressed himself. No riots in Holland, some diplomatic kerfuffle, i.e. Jordan considering withdrawing it's ambassador and predominantly student protests. Also on the cover of the NRC is the fantastic news that Jihadist website Al-Ekhlaas (true devotion) is only somewhat sarcastically endorsing the message of the movie. Surely that wasn't part of the plan. Islamic public figures across the country are gearing up for the debates next week, which might actually do some good. Not to be outdone, professional ex-Muslim provocateur Ehsan Jami is now planning to release a cartoon depicting Mohammad as a pedophile.

Luckily, this also means that the Christian Democrats' plan to go out in a blaze of glory is ruined and they'll have to face up to the reality of seeing the 4th cabinet in seven years fail miserably in the nesxt two to three months. There was a distinct feel of the apocalypse junkies in the 'left behind' series to the government's pres releases these anxious weeks leading up to the release of the film. How they would have loved to rally the country behind the Christian values less than a third of the population believes in, only to be dramatically felled by Moorish Scimitars, happy in the knowledge that their place at the Lord's right hand is secure. All is not lost though, it took months of campaigning by concerned imams get the Middle East fired up about the Danish Cartoons, so there's still hope for that plan.

The streets running red with Blood is out, though. Dutch Muslims seem to be taking the whole thing in stride, more interested in the one thing that successive Dutch governments have claimed to want to initiate, an open dialog with the Muslim minority in the country about the role of their religion in society. It's oddly fitting that this should be accomplished by a right-wing opposition party's rejection of the principles in their holy book, and not by strenuously avoiding offending Muslims, as was the political paradigm. This might be the best thing to have happened in the debate since the sixties, or I could be proven wrong when I turn on the news in half an hour. Fingers crossed.....

Geert Wilders' 'Fitna' might harm Dutch Trade, his oponents have assured us.

2008-03-18T00:36:00.004Z

Dutch shockpol Geert Wilders has a new plan to disseminate his ideas about the Islam and Muslims in general. The film 'Fitna' taken from an Arabic word that can be translated as anarchy, or a test of faith, is definitely coming out this month, despite rather mild protests in the Arabic world and expertly managed fear-mongering by Christian coalition part CDA.

Wilders is a catholic politician who left major liberal party VVD in 2004 to form his own party, with a program apparently taken directly from the last three decades of Republican presidents in the United States, featuring such gems as smaller government, lower taxes and freedom of the individual, prompting political commentators to label his program as 'Reagonomics for Holland'.

The other main strand of his strategy is picking up the racist voting bloc that was disappointed with the failures of Pim Fortuyn's party after his death, and managing to get more death threats than Ayaan Hirsi Ali, after the death of Theo van Gogh, necessitating similar round the clock protection. Now he wants to make a film as well, reaching even more audiences with an outwardly reasonable argument that's going to be correctly assessed by the intended audiences, i.e. moderate muslims and non-muslims as having a vaguely objectionable subtext.

Because that's the main problem with Wilders' arguments against Muslims, he never continues along the same lines to pronounce the same verdict on other religious leanings. Of course the long standing suspicion that he is an Israeli agent might have something to do with this, or his catholic upbringing.

The Christian democratic party CDA has done everything in their power to make the release of the film a disaster. Wilders merely announced that he was making a film, then asked everyone, especially Dutch Muslims, to please remain calm. It's thanks to the prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs that Islamic protesters managed to burn a Dutch flag along with a Danish one. Thanks should also go to the left-liberal establishment and their various misinformed celebrities for organising a great deal of useless demonstrations. How come none of these bastards are willing to protest the parties actually in power at this time, but are always available to kick an opposition party when it's down?

Now his American provider has kicked him off their server under some vague 'objectionable content' regulation and Dutch bloggers Youtubers have slapped together a series of films where they're apologising for him. I don't agree with Wilders' politics, I think he's at best a demagogue, but that doesn't mean he can't do this. Freedom of speech is far to easy to defend if it's just the things you happen to agree with. I want to see that movie and form my own opinion, I'm not interested in left-liberal or christian-right censorship, both are patronising and ultimately a lot more damaging than anything the movie will stir up.

McCain's presidential airs in Iraq, Hillary's dogfight with Barrack

2008-03-17T18:11:00.005Z

While John McCain is taking an advance on Presidential diplomacy by visiting the war torn Iraqi countryside, the democratic race is as split as ever. McCain is in Iraq as a senator, but he's also taking some time off to spearhead one of his issues. The CNN footage of McCain walking from briefing to briefing with his coffee cup is priceless. He's not only managed to steal a march on the eventual democratic candidate in the Presidential race, but also manages to make President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner look like the Hollywood-style showboating it was. If you want to walk around in Iraq, you drink coffee and talk to the people on the ground. Everybody's waiting for the sniper bullet to hit him in the shoulder, so he can pull a Herzog.

Newt Gingrich has called for a saner, more realistic presidential election, he's not even thinking about committing to the race until October of this year. Statistically, it's not the money that's deciding in any election, as Gingrich is claiming, it's just the candidate's likability, which gets the votes and the money, at least eventually. Trying to find the research about this referenced in 'Freakonomics', I found this blog post where Gingrich answers questions, surprisingly eloquently and sane. But Gingrich is either going to get rudely disabused of his notions, or has the most dirty, underhanded trick in the history of the Republican party waiting or John McCain. Let's not forget that he was having an affair while trying to impeach Clinton for the Lewinsky thing, or that he was the author of that 'Contract with America' which is not half bad, i.e. I disagreed with less than half of it.

A recent poll by CNN states that Obama is the preferred candidate of Democrats in The United States. However, he only has a ten point lead in a poll that has a five point error margin, and consists of a suspect and rather small sample size. The same poll points to similar percentage of Democrats disagreeing with the superdelegate system. This is odd enough in itself, but especially in light of do-over primaries that might be needed to decide the candidate. I don't know what the point of this CNN poll was, exactly, but the message is clear, somebody needs to be a clear winner in this thing. Back room deals, bribery and caucus-rigging are going to be necessary for anyone to get the majority, but some kind of PR-blow needs to cover this effectively.

There's a good chance it'll be race-related as both sides have their problems with those issues. Bill is doing his best to nuance the calculated things he said in South Carolina, and Obama has had to make excuses for whatever that insane preacher said this time. This is not a religious disagreement, though it would probably be in Obama's interest to cast it that way. Rev. Wright is a social preacher in typical African-American tradition, except that he likes his conspiracy theories as well. Obama needed the association with the reverend when he wasn't black enough, but now he's '...like a caramel coloured Kennedy, you know some Vin Diesel, or the Rock kind of shit...' * the Reverend's speeches about the government giving everybody aids are a bit of an embarrassment.

But the real problem for everyone but McCain is the missing media coverage. Usually the National coverage of a presidential election falls into two acts. One or both of the parties declare the field open, the many candidates are on more or less equal footing, the wins and losses of the primaries weed out the nuts, then the boring, staid characters, the front runner and one or two also-rans last a bit longer, usually over some issue. The party conferences bring the candidate some new luster, rifts are healed etc. There's a short intermission, national organisations are built and re-built, the stage is set for the actual election, act two.

This first act is just lasting too long. Obama is in danger of peaking too early, handing Clinton a lot of votes that she can quietly amass in his slipstream as leader. Clinton is in danger of disappearing from the stage completely before the summer is out. The more the media tries to move on, the louder she'll have to scream about things that don't really matter. Instead of do-overs, the DNC should be thinking of moving the convention up before these things happen to either candidate.

* From an informal interview with Chad, 21, college student in an Amsterdam coffeeshop.

Hillary still alive, Nader joins the fray, McCain gets the nod.

2008-03-02T21:43:00.007Z

Hillary Clinton is still in the race for the democratic nomination after most projections declare her the winner in Texas and Ohio. That doesn't mean the Clinton campaign is back from the dead yet, these were must-win states, needed just to stay in the game. Obama still has the same lead and Hillary still needs a Carvillesque zinger. Clinton has the same problem this time around that George Bush Sr. had against her husband, the media cycle is running a lot faster than she expected and the other side is doing a much better job of presenting a consistent and appealing image.

Clinton was forced on the defensive by Barack Obama's delegate lead, while he has proven a master at magnanimously forgiving her for portraying him as 'all talk'. Most of the rumours about Obama that would have been useful to the Clinton campaign have been done to death, and are sliding off him like water off a duck's back. Only the Israel-Jewish conservative axis is still using his attending a madrassa and wanting to talk to the Palestinians as the 'first signs of your candidate's co-optation by the Islamo-fascist Junta'. Obama's only weak spot that will stick, is his relationship with Tony Rezko, tenuous though it may be, but since Matt Lauer dug up that picture of Hillary and Bill standing next to Rezko, she can't really exploit this, besides the fact that this would open up her campaign financing can of worms. There are more shady characters at the average Clinton fund-raiser than at the Hanoi Hilton in 1973.

The last thing an already divided democratic vote needed was the charming news that Ralph Nader and the green party are going to draw votes on the extreme left again. While the democratic nomination is not yet secured, there's no reason to worry about this too much, but whoever gets it will have to do a public appeal, urging people not to vote Nader and Nader himself to give up, for the sake of the country. What they're overlooking is the fact that a good win for Nader might finally motivate the Christian Conservatives to set up their own party. The Democrats might lose votes on the left, but imagine what a more right-wing movement would do to the Republicans. More and more polls are saying that the unusually high voter turnout expected in this election will prove once and again that the population of the United States of America is far more liberal than everyone thought. John McCain is a much more serious threat to the Democrats' voter base than Nader will ever be.

McCain got the nod, and Mike Huckabee is out of the race, but it's still by no means certain that John McCain will win the presidency. In an interview with dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, The always diplomatic Christopher Hitchens said; "Now McCain will be forced into some kind of unholy alliance with one of those Christian thugs.." Or not, E.J Dionne's columns in the Washington Post are markedly more positive about the Republican party's chances to rid itself of the undue influence of the Christian conservatives, finally returning to their fiscal conservative roots.

Ronald Brownstein's latest book, 'The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partizanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America' has a very interesting perspective on the last quarter century of developments in partisan politics. The Democrats were the first group to use the tactics used by the Conservative Christians today. In the late fifties they started to try and work the dixiecrats in the south out of the party by polarising public opinion and manipulating Democratic party politics. They succeeded with Lyndon B. Johnson's social democratic reforms, which where a sort of clarion call for the new left. The public shrugged and the following voter migration sowed the seeds for the extreme partisanship by making the Republicans more Christian and Conservative as the Democrats became more Liberal and Progressive. So really the Democrats are to blame for George W. Bush.

Reviews for this month

2008-02-28T14:01:00.003Z

I'm going to start doing monthly reviews of things I've read, seen, etc. This month's books;

Osamu Tezuka's Buddha is a bona fide comics masterpiece. I don't usually like a reading manga, the perversely Japanese subject matter, either incomprehensible, graphically violent or cloyingly sweet, or all three simultaneously, usually make it a grating and unrewarding experience, that can't be fixed by stylistic wizardry.

Tezuka is credited with inventing the 'big eyed' style of manga, but where other authors use it indiscriminately, he only uses it for effect, i.e. only beautiful, innocent and pure women are portrayed as such. Most of the other characters are drawn in a variety of styles, most of them looking more like early Disney characters. This is a very conscious choice, the majority of characters serve the purpose of stand-ins for readers with basic questions about Buddhism.

The story dictates what everything looks like, but not to the degree where it gets annoying. Backgrounds can be lush and detailed or spare and mostly blank depending on the effect Tezuka's looking for. The entire story is presented with incredibly sophisticated cinematic techniques, and all that bizarre manga symbolism is presented completely in context, and entirely understandable for once. It really makes clear how well these angles and facial expressions can work when wielded with some subtlety.

The story sticks quite closely to the life of Buddha, but without delving into superstitious magic or the always unhelpful zen paradox. It mostly points out the obvious reasons why the teachings where necessary at the time, why they were superior to dominant theology and why they're still relevant today. Tezuka goes to great lengths to cast a different perspective on any demons or gods that appear in the tale, preferring to point out the humanity of the characters and staying as far away from metaphysics as possible, presenting the Buddhist philosophy as a straight-forward answer to modern living.

Having tried to wrestle through the Tibetan book of the dead last month, I can't tell you how refreshing and enlightening this comic was. At around three thousand pages it looks imposing and complex, but it's actually as clear and unassuming a religious text as you'll find. No useless celestial hierarchies, no dead language jokes. Just a very entertaining look at why you really shouldn't be afraid of death.

Pierre Bayard's 'How to talk about books you haven't read' is pretty much the exact opposite. It is not, like the title suggests, the bluffer's guide to appearing literate and cultured, but rather a clever exploration of why it's more important to know how to discuss books, their relationship to each other and to you, than to actually read them all.

Bayard illustrates his points with recognisable anecdotes and examples from literature. His brief summaries of famous books are of course littered with inaccuracies that you guess must be there, but can't put your finger on, even if you've just read the book he's talking about. He reveals that he did this consciously towards the end of the book, to make the point that the unreliability of the human memory is the main reason you have to bluff about books you have read at least as much as abut those you haven't.

Even more controversial is his assertion that critics needn't read the books they review, that in fact it's usually better that they don't. My review of Buddha is case in point. I liked it so much that instead of coming up with a pithy one-liner or two, I ended up singing it's praises to the detriment of giving anyone a clear idea of whether or not they should read it. This onion av club review, though it only covers the first book of the eight, perhaps intentionally, is a lot clearer on what's good about it, and what isn't.

I actually read 'The Raw Shark texts' by Steven Hall some time ago, but I still think I should mention it. It's not perfect, but the concept and a lot of the quirky ideas in it are reason enough to read it. The protagonist is an amnesiac who's getting packages from his pre-amnesia self. His former self gives him the advise that piecing together his memories will probably lead to far more trouble than trying to live without the knowledge. Of course, it's irresistible for the hero to find out.

The reason he's an amnesiac is that he's being hunted by a 'conceptual shark', which has the entirety of information as a habitat. It's also being hunted by a self-replicating intelligence that's a hundred and fifty years old, and is continually trying to take over new bodies through hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, conditioning and old-fashioned education. The reason it's such a voracious entity is it's origin as a dying man's desire to live on in another body, multiplied by the need for all the bodies to synchronise information regularly, which only strengthens it's instinct for self-preservation through endless positive feedback.

And those are just two of the ideas Hall wants to get across, the rest of the book is littered with interesting number and language jokes. It's also the book's only major flaw. Hall needs every last scrap of realism and believability for the ideas, leaving none whatsoever for the main character or the villains, love interest and mentor. The prose alternates between fiery and compelling for the ideas and limp and uninspired for the relationships. But in proper sci-fi tradition, you probably won't care, the ideas are more than interesting enough.

As for movies, I've only watched three recent ones, but they were all quite good.

There will be Blood rightly deserved it's Oscar. Daniel Day Lewis stars as an early twentieth century oil baron with an all-consuming greed. His struggle to make enough money to never have anything to do with anyone else ever again is captivating to watch. Even though the film is almost three hours long, it flies by, from one scene pregnant with doom to the next. The finale is an awe-inspiring diatribe against his main antagonist, a delightfully oily and insane teenage preacher played by Paul Dano. It's quite a stylistic break with P.T. Anderson's previous films, especially because of the spaghetti western effects, like the almost unbearably slow tension building scenes, the spare, rugged and beautifully harsh backdrops as stand-ins for the characters inner lives and tight close-ups in the most dramatic moments, all in the service of what is basically a rather complex character study of an arch-capitalist in the tradition of Citizen Kane.

Ridley Scott does a gangster movie with Russel Crowe and Denzel Washington, and though it's good, it suffers from Scott's indecision on whether to follow the gangster movie template or make it a Ridley Scott thriller, ending up with something that's neither. If American gangster had been half an hour shorter, it would probably be the better for it. Based on a true story, Washington plays Frank Lucas, the black drug dealer that co-opted the Maffia into his own New York based empire. He manages to buy the drugs directly from the growers in Vietnam and has them shipped over to the U.S. in Body Bags. Russel Crowe is Richie Roberts, the officer trying to catch him, albeit considerably slower than in other movies. It takes Crowe more than half the movie to even figure out it's Frank Lucas he needs, giving Washington the time to employ his entire family in the business and be the hardworking businessman and lovable family man at the same time. Washington has a hard time trying to fit a Tony Soprano-esque character arc into 30 odd scenes. Russel Crowe is almost the standard dedicated cop with a messy personal life and doesn't really do anything but play that tired old cliché. The movie ends with Frank Lucas caught, but in the epilogue he still manages to finger every corrupt police officer in New York.

Charlie Wilson's War is exactly what I hoped it would be. A tight and interesting political satire by Aaron Sorkin with no possibility of him getting lost in some sprawling, dense forest of plots and counter-plots, seeing as it's all based on true events. Tom Hanks does a fabulous job as the titular character, the drinking, cocaine snorting and womanising representative for a Texan district, who is also a prominent member of the congress black ops committee, but it's Philip Seymour Hoffman's dour, rude and argumentative CIA agent that almost blows him off the screen. Julia Roberts fills a role perfect for her generally wooden acting as the right wing heiress that brings them together to arm and train the mujahedeen, who are fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. The movie ends with the acknowledgment that if the U.S. had spent as much money on rebuilding Afghanistan after their war, the U.S. wouldn't have been occupying it now. Excellent political satire based on true events that is, except for a few necessary character development moments, never cloyingly sentimental or overly simplistic about a complicated and multi-faceted historical development, which is still highly relevant.

Final Natalee Holloway update

2008-02-27T21:05:00.000Z

Avid readers might have noticed that the stream of news from this direction has dried up somewhat. I'm sorry for those who've come to rely on brand new Natalee Holloway snippets, but there's really nothing left. Yeah, Natalee's parents hired a sub, Joran is in a mental institution, etc. But the big story is over and it didn't amount to all that much in the end. If you're into Justice, you can take comfort in the fact that Joran van der Sloot won't have much of life, at least not for the next couple of years.

I'm still annoyed that I was able to scoop all these reputable news organisations with what were essentially on the fly translations of the news and the various special reports, they couldn't get somebody to translate some of this? Maybe I misjudged the scope of this story, but at least people on the internet were interested. I just expected better of them, I guess.

I stand by my assessment of the various 'experts' and their theories, usually about Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, they acted suspiciously, but so what? The only one that admitted to anything is Joran, even though this doesn't mean he'll hang for it. It's true I don't like Dr. Phil McGraw, though I do sometimes find his show entertaining. The main reason isn't that he interferes with media circus celebrity-nonsense cases like this one or Britney Spears or the custody battle for Anna Nicole Smith's baby, for instance. It's his inability to be honest about what he's doing, i.e. turning news and psycho therapy into entertainment and why's he's doing it, it's his job, that annoys me. He should at least take some responsibility for when it goes horribly wrong. Maybe being sued by Britney's family will bring forth a kind of public apology.

After all that talk of responsibility, it's my turn to apologise for not checking out or retracting the Lorenzo van Rijn story. But in my defense, I was just reporting what everybody else was reporting. I'd love to have had the resources or contacts to call Aruba and ask somebody there, but I don't, I barely have enough time to update a few times a month. but I'm more than willing to except responsibility in this matter, I strive to be factually correct, and if I'm not, you can call me on it.

Anyway, thanks to all the people who left comments, even ones I didn't agree with, that week was just great. I'm going back to writing longish essays about whatever, and maybe follow the primaries a bit more.

Mitt Quits, McCain reigns, Huck stuck.

2008-02-08T00:10:00.000Z

Mitt Romney quits the race for the presidency, after having spent a recorded 35 million dollars on his campaign. "I feel I have to now stand aside, for our party and for our country," the former Massachusetts governor told the shocked crowd. mitt Romney is suspending his campaign, which means he can hold on to his delegates until the Republican National Convention this summer. He did not, as the press was speculating say a significant amount of positive things about John McCain.

His decision leaves Mike Huckabee in a lurch, as to whether or not to quit the race as well, as previously requested by Romney. Romney apparently decided to not be the spoiler himself, and not, as was speculated as well, because he's thinking of his future in the party. McCain is expected to start a dialog with the conservative wing of the party, many of whom are adamantly opposed to McCain for voting against the two tax cuts by president Bush, his views on immigration and calling them "agents of intolerance".

Natalee Holloway Update 42: Daury Rodriguez hires lawyer, wants name cleared. Deepak and Satish Kalpoe suing Dr. Phil

2008-02-06T23:49:00.000Z

Daury Rodriguez, named as the accomplice in the dumping of Natalee Holloway's body by Joran van der Sloot is suing van der Sloot. 'We used to play soccer together. I wouldn't call him a friend, especially not now. I don't even have a boat." His lawyer Chris Lejuez, says van der Sloot's confession was very damaging to his client's reputation and that they want his name cleared of any connection with the case.

Deepak and Satish Kalpoe are able to sue Dr. Phil McGraw for using tape manipulation to suggest their guilt, a Los Angeles judge ruled today. Dr. Phil and CBS tried to halt the case by calling into question the legalities of suspects in a case to be tried in Aruba suing an American TV host. Dutch and American forensic experts have conclusively proven that McGraw 'doctored' the tapes.

2008 Super Tuesday: McCain Triumphant, religious vote split. Democratic vote torn between two lovers

2008-02-06T13:06:00.000Z

John McCain is riding high after his California win and seems to have managed to recapture the old Republican power base of fiscal conservatives, all his supposed moral failings have translated into the crumbs Romney and Huckabee are fighting over. They're only winning states they were going to win anyway, and are both failing to capture any new voting blocs. If McCain can capture the gulf coast as well as the North West, he has his nomination. Check out the NPR map.

CNN is providing a nice tally of yesterday's results. Full of upsets for Clinton, the democratic side is looking increasingly split. Clinton won California, but the Midwest is Obama country now. There doesn't seem to be a decisive winner in the South yet, Clinton losing key states like Alabama and Georgia, despite securing early endorsements. But it's still wide open, a decisive win in a big state in the next couple of weeks can boost either campaign.

Natalee Holloway Update 41: Andrew Hodges on Dutch TV, Deepak and Satish still involved. Lorenzo van R. believed to be 'Daury' by Native Arubans

2008-02-06T00:43:00.000Z

Andrew Hodges, the forensic psychiatrist who has been involved in the case since the beginning, has just espoused the theory that Deepak and Satish Kalpoe were responsible for raping Natalee together with Joran van der Sloot. "He is lying on that tape. I suspect the kalpoes are involved. They were cleaning their car obsessively after the disappearance, for one thing."

Meanwhile Dutch TV program Netwerk reported that the Arubans know who Joran's accomplice with the boat was, a certain Lorenzo R., his half-brother. Lorenzo R. is a known underworld figure on Aruba. He was arrested in November of last year in connection to an illegal marijuana plantation. Apparently they've kept quiet about this because Lorenzo's superiors in the Aruban underworld were not prepared to do without him. He is already being held for questioning by the police.

Hillary-Barrack or Obama-Clinton, Democrats playing safe no matter what., Republicans set to devour selves.

2008-02-05T22:36:00.000Z

Sorry to disappoint the people looking for more hot Natalee Holloway updates, but there's really nothing more to report. It looks like the story is being buried in the U.S. by the election coverage, which gives me an ample opportunity to give a last minute rundown of the situation according to me. It's not so strange that the Holloway story is disappearing, seeing as politics has never been sexier; A woman, A black guy and a Mormon? There's only one traditional looking candidate, but he's always good for a hot soundbite.

In my previous post about the primaries I was chuckling at the huge pack of Republicans popping up and how interesting the race would be for them. Unfortunately, Rudi's strategy didn't pan out and he had to leave. Well, everyone saw that one coming. Who the hell waits until Florida to start campaigning? Rudi blew it, and he never even realised the whole 9-11 thing was dead in the water as soon as he started.

Ron Paul is still hanging on, as all proper goofballs should. He has no hope in hell of coming away with any kind of bargaining power, though. Unlike Mike Huckabee, who's definitely trying to capture as big a piece of the conservative christian vote as possible, even though it's hard to say how this will translate to bargaining power.

Mitt Romney is fighting his weird cult-member image with business credentials and it seems to be working. There's a real possibility that he might capture the religious vote and if he doesn't, Mike is available as vice-president. It's gonna be a tough fight against McCain, the two are head to head, especially in California, which is only just waking up.

The bizarre turn around of the last few weeks is that the bulk of conservative commentators is turning on McCain for a variety of garbled reasons. This kind of infighting is more common on the left side of the political spectrum, and I'm really relishing it. Let's hope the general public in the U.S. realises the insanity in this and stops listening to those idiots. FOX news is not journalism.

Even better would be that they get together and set up a third party on the extreme right. It's about time and that would open up the possibility for a decent far left party as well. Some coalition politics would not only lively up congress and the house, but there would be room for a wider variety of viewpoints in cabinets, committees, etc. Just imagine, the U.S. a mature democracy where party affiliation is a reliable indication of policy decisions, and where personal charisma takes a back seat to voting record.

The democrats are not putting all their eggs in one basket, last week's mutual vice presidency admissions are quite obviously engineered by the DNC. They probably promised their delegates to whomever wanted a democratic win most.

Who's eventually going to emerge candidate for either party will be much easier to gauge tomorrow, but it we know it's going to break down into four scenarios.

-Obama versus McCain. One of the two nightmare scenarios for conservatives. No one to vote for, nothing to gain. McCain is fantastic at dirty tricks, but nothing has stuck to Obama yet and even if it did, by that point the image contrast between the two is going to be obvious. Obama is ridiculously dynamic by comparison, and he can throw so many old peccadiloes at McCain it's ridiculous. McCain doesn't have the same appeal, and certainly not with the voters they'll b fighting for, the conservatives.
EDGE:Barack Obama

-Clinton versus McCain. The other nightmare. This one will definitely be the most entertaining. The Clintons are at least as good as he is at burying their opponents under layers of accusations, but if McCain is still missing the vital christians, he won't stand a chance. Hillary could even steal them if she pitches it right. Like Ann Coulter promised, she'd campaign for Hillary before she'd call McCain anything less than 'uncomfortably close to the Antichrist'.
EDGE:Hillary Clinton

-Obama versus Romney. This one would just be weird. 'Change' versus 'Economy', White men and churchgoers who would actually go out and vote versus everybody else, most of whom wouldn't. By far the most polarising and uncomfortable presidential race, even for the candidates. There's no obvious winner in this one, and just might split the U.S. down the middle for the hundredth time. Neither has enough history or serious policy failures behind them, so it would be another image over issues race.
EDGE:Who knows?

-Clinton versus Romney. Hillary has this one in the bag, Romney's grasp on the electorate is too tenuous to stand up to Clinton's barrage of communication. She's running a highly focussed campaign, picking exactly the groups that she wants to reach, and reaching them perfectly. Romney's personal fortune is peanuts compared to what Clinton can get with a few vague promises to lobbyists. And the experience the Clintons have is going to make mincemeat of his business credentials, she might also try to steal the religious right away from him, if all the other voting blocs are secure.
EDGE:Hillary Clinton

Definite answers from the exit polls in four hours.

Natalee Holloway Update40: Peter R. De Vries will appear on Larry King, Inside edition. Van der Sloot at undisclosed location. Prosecutors biding time

2008-02-05T20:10:00.000Z

It's all quiet on the Joran front today. No new statements by the parties involved. Except for de Vries' production company, which let everyone know he's reached agreements with Larry King and Inside edition. Oprah is apparently out of the picture.

Joran van der Sloot has siad, thorugh his lawyers that he's talking to the police and is fully cooperating this time. They have been appraised of his location. Meanwhile, they're investigating who 'Daury' is and what he did exactly. If he confirms part of van der Sloot's confession, van der Sloot can be arrested in Holland.

The whole thing is dying down again, waiting for a trial. Most of the quality newspapers and state-sponsored TV programs have already used the case a launching pad for complaining about having to compete with commercial stations for the common denominator, due to the government's semi-privitisation initiatives. Or that the police and the prosecutors should have entrapped Joran himself, conveniently forgetting that van der Eem offered his services to the police first.

Van der Eem (34)gave an exclusive interview with de Telegraaf today where he claims to have been disgusted with van der Sloot, and that he hung up on him after van der Sloot called him in tears after the show last Sunday. Van der Eem, a father of two and a businessman, managed to convince Joran that he was a major drugdealer and that he had paid work for van der Sloot.

On last notable bizarre detail is the medical expert Dr. Ernst Stolz claiming that Natalee might have died due to a rare allergy to prostate fluid. It's an extremely rare condition with fewer than six reported cases a year in Europe, but it presents with the symptoms that van der Sloot described.

Natalee Holloway Update 39: ABC's 20/20 special report starts in half an hour. Rumours about de Vries cancelling Larry King and Oprah.

2008-02-05T02:04:00.000Z

Joran van der Sloot has now been formally named a suspect in the murder of Natalee Holloway. His statement to the effect that he did not know whether or not she was alive when her body was dumped means the prosecution can and will demand more severe punishments.

Gerard Spong, a prominent Dutch attorney, stated earlier today that there is a very real chance that van der Sloot may win the criminal case, but will be unable to win a civil suit brought by the surviving family members. Since there is an extradition treaty between the Netherlands and the United States, possible damages may be "..far more than he will ever be able to repay. The American system for awarding damages can have devastating results."

Peter R. De Vries is 'reconsidering' some of his American TV appearances. His production company Endemol is citing "completely ridiculous demands" regarding exclusivity of interviews, formats and availability. De Vries will definitely appear in Alabama, but all other engagements may be off. "I have enough to do here." De Vries declared in a statement. "I might just leave it, if they keep this up."

Natalee Holloway Update 38: Joran's lawyer: "Confession was a lie" Psychologist: "Joran might be a pathological liar" Lawyer is not 100% about Joran

2008-02-04T21:44:00.000Z

Joran's Dutch Lawyer, Bert de Rooij, is prevaricating about his guilt, the truth or lies in the taped confession. "Every time he releases a statement, we have to figure out if he's telling the truth or lying."

Hans Mos just declared that he will wait for Joran to come in, but not indefinitely. "The story fits the facts, Joran incriminates himself, so he is a suspect, but we will not arrest him on this evidence. he should come in, for his own good as well."

Natalee Holloway Update 37: Joran's lawyer offers a talk between him and the prosecutors, Makes weak excuses, Joran is addicted to gambling, in debt

2008-02-04T21:37:00.000Z

Joran's Dutch Lawyer is making excuses for Joran now. He's apparently a pathological liar and needed money for his gambling addiction, and this is why he told the 'lies' about Natalee's disappearance. De Vries has 'twisted' the evidence in his advantage.

Hans Mos and a Law psychologist have just joined the discussion and are not buying it. There argument is that the other evidence fits the story, and the main part that's interesting is the 'missing' part of the story between Ntalee dying and "Daury" showing up to dispose of the body.

Hans Mos has just claimed that the 'Daury' that appeared in the papers yesterday is a different one. The last names, beeped in the show, are different. Hans Mos has already contacted the 'real' Daury. He's hoping that Joran will help them with what actually happened this time.

Natalee Holloway Update 36: Joran's confession, Natalee dumped in Ocean, possibly Alive!Accomplice 'Daury'found.No arrests made.Prosecutors 'Cautious'

2008-02-04T17:22:00.000Z

This is a round up of the last few posts, it looks like the investigation is moving forward, but until something new pops up, we'll just have to wait. But here's the recap:

Joran van der Sloot, an earlier suspect was filmed with hidden cameras by Peter R. De Vries while in the car of a friend, Patrick van der Eem, who had offered his services to De Vries when he met van der Sloot. Van der Eem was paid about 25.000 euros for his part in the operation. Van der Eem previously offered his help free of charge to the police, yet they were legally bound not to entrap a former suspect.

Over the months of their acquaintance, van der Sloot began to trust van der Eem, who never brought up the case. After Joran returned from Aruba following his second arrest and release, the sting began in earnest. Van der Sloot told van der Eem that she died while they were engaging in sexual acts, describing her death in a way that resembles an epileptic fit.

An Aruban friend that van der Sloot described as 'Daury' helped him dispose of the body by dumping it in the ocean. During the TV show, a man named Daury, a former friend of van der Sloot's was found, but he can prove that he was in Holland at the time of Holloway's disappearance. Another friend of van der Sloot's, previously detained for questioning by the prosecution, Steve Gregory Croes, is now rumoured to be the one who helped van der Sloot.

Van der Sloot's confession makes it clear that Deepak and Satish Kalpoe are not implicated in the disappearance of Holloway at all. He describes them as 'Losers and Dupes' and brags about his sexual prowess in comparison to the brothers. Van der Sloot's father is implicated in various legal strategies and maneuvers, including instructing Joranj to stay silent, and smuggling a phone into his cell.

Van der Sloot believed himself to be untouchable by the prosecution and the police. "They're idiots. I played it so well. They have nothing on me." Van der Sloot also made numerous remarks to the effect that he was planning to make a lot of money from appearances on television, book deals, out of court settlements for defamation of character.

The days before the show aired, van der Sloot's lawyers denied that he was in trouble, but soon after a phone interview with the Pauw en Witteman television show where he claimed all of the things he said to van der Eem were menat to impress him, his lawyers released a statement to the effect that he should have kept his mouth shut.

Despite the case appearing solved to the general public, the Aruban justice department can not say with certainty when there will be arrests, and if van der Sloot can be convicted, and if so of what exactly. If Natalee Holloway was dead at the time of the dumping of the body, van der Sloot is only guilty of obstruction of Justice, disposing of a corpse and perjury.

Peter R. De Vries will be seen in all major American talk shows this week. Almost half of the Dutch population tuned in Yesterday evening for his documentary. ABC will be screening an edited version of this programme tonight.

Natalee Holloway Update 35: Joran's house searched. Peter R. De Vries calls for Joran 'to come clean' Arubans guarded at press conference.

2008-02-04T16:44:00.000Z

Joran van der Sloot's last known address, his house in Arnhem, has been searched at the request of the Aruban Justice department. Police have also searched his Grandmother's house where he was reportedly staying over the weekend. The apartment complex in Drachten where he is reported to be right now is being secured by a private security firm and the police. This just in... the apartment complex is not van der Sloot's location, the dutch news has just released an interview with the inhabitant of the apartment, it's all a misunderstanding due to the fact that his name is Johan.

Peter R. De Vries recently said in an interview; "Even if this all a lie....I don't think so. There is no one in the world you are going to impress with a story like that. It's going to be hard after lying for so long, to his parents, to everyone, but he has to come clean, now more than ever."

The press conference by the Aruban prosecutors was remarkably less optimistic than the interview with Hans Mos. "They are being cautious.." Lex Runderkamp, legal expert told the NOS journaal. "They can't convict him yet, and before they can arrest him they need more."

Natalee Holloway Update 34: Peter R. De Vries centre of Media Circus. Joran possibly still in hiding Press conference this afternoon

2008-02-04T12:02:00.000Z

Peter R. De Vries will be on Larry King on Wednesday, is still in talks with Oprah Winfrey and others. Yesterday's edition of his show had a record of 7 million viewers in Holland, almost half of the entire population of the country.

The appartment complex where Joran might be hiding is practically under siege by journalists. Local inhabitants have hired a security firm and police are standing by as well, even though it has not yet been confirmed that van der Sloot is residing there presently.

The car used in last night's hidden camera sting operation is for sale at a second hand car dealer, for 63.900 euros. It is unknown at this point if it still contains the elaborate camera set up that de Vries installed.

The press conference in Aruba is at 12.00 local time, which is 11.00 am in New York and 8.00 am in Los Angeles.

Natalee Holloway Update 33: Steve Gregory Croes, former suspect may be "Daury", pressconference by Arubans tonight..

2008-02-04T11:43:00.000Z

Steve Gregory Croes, who was also arrested two and a half years ago, but later released is currently suspected of being "Daury" by dutch newssite www.Fokkinel.com and VKmag, who earlier had the English transcript of the interview that Peter R. De Vries had with Hans Mos. There has been no confirmation of this rumour so far, by any other source.

Apparently there's a press conference later today by the Aruban Justice department at 12.00 am local time. They have been working quietly behind the scenes to secure an arrest voor van der Sloot before the story would break, but the judge denied their request, despite the taped confession, on the grounds that van der Sloot has been arrested and released twice before. He and others can be called in for questioning, but not against their will.

Natalee Holloway Update 32; Nothing more to report for today

2008-02-04T00:03:00.000Z

That's it for now. The late dutch news reports only that De Vries believes that the Aruban Justice department has enough to reopen the case, but that it will take a lot more work for Joran to be convicted.

The Aruban Prime Minister has said that Joran van der Sloot has caused 'untold damage' with his 'unbelievable and untruthful claims".

A legal expert (Lex Runderkamp) has just declared on the Dutch News that it's a very important legal distinction if Natalee was dead or Alive when she was dumped in the sea. If she was dead at the time, the person who dumped her body in the ocean is only guilty of a severe degree of grave robbing, but if she was alive, it's at least manslaughter. In any case, it's far from a done deal, legally.

Natalee Holloway Update 31 Breaking News, 'Daury' found, Joran in hiding in Drachten, Aruba disgusted at confession

2008-02-03T22:54:00.000Z

Daury has been Found, Check this link by Whatnow, if you read dutch. Amateur and professional photographers are stalking the location in Drachten where he is rumoured to be. The SBS 6 news team rang the bell and asked whether or not he was there. They received the reply: We can't say anything about that.

Arubans have responded with revulsion at Joran's confession. Virtually everyone on the island has an opinion, usually negative. They're most upset at what this has done to the island. "This has been horrible for the island." an inhabitant told SBS 6.

Natalee Holloway Update 30 Breaking News, Daury found, claims Joran lied...Joran in hiding, possibly already found..

2008-02-03T22:43:00.001Z

Whatnow, who commented on a previous post, gave this link, in dutch about The "Daury" Joran mentions. He claims to have been in Holland at the time of Natalee's diappearance. The school where he studied confirms this.

Natalee Holloway Update 29 De Vries presents the evidence to Hans Mos, the main prosecutor, he is impressed.

2008-02-03T22:24:00.000Z

The conversation that was on De Vries' website earlier is playing now. Hans Mos is surprised at his gall, and at the way he 'duped' Deepak and Satish. They are also talking about his lack of respect for Natalee, and women in general. Hans Mos says they are reopening the case in the light of this evidence. 'Joran is intelligent, so I don't think he's lying her."

The reason the case hasn't materialised before, is really a lack of physical evidence, no body only testimonies by liars.

Beth Twitty is invited by Peter R. De Vries to come to Holland. They're showing her arriving in Holland now. Seated in Peter's office they are showing her subtitled footage. She's obviously upset when she hears Joran talk about her daughter, especially the sexstuff. And she is crying when he talks about not feeling guilty.

"You've got it all...That son of a bitch."
"He doesn't seem to care for anything but himself, he wants to profit from it."
"He doesn't even care, he didn't even know if she was dead. They could have..dumped her alive."

She goes on...

"No remorse, no guilt. I always thought his life was already a living hell, but it's about to begin..it's about to begin. Look what they've done to Natalee, what they've done too a country..."
"To you..."
"To Natalee..That son of a bitch..they just disposed of her body... He knew who to call in this situation... how many others were there?"
"Is this enough?"
"This has to be it...(crying) When I first got to Aruba, I couldn't look at the ocean, I didn't know why....I know why now,"

Peter R. De Vries ends his documentary with a call for apologies for Natalee, her mother, Satish, Deepak and all the people of Aruba.

Natalee Holloway Update 28; Final Questions answered, why did he lie? Beth twitty distressed.

2008-02-03T22:12:00.000Z

More live translation and summary.

"How did you know she was dead?"
" She didn't move anymore..."
"And Daury, did he check?"
"Yeah, he stood over her and looked at her?"
"That's it? What if she was in coma?"
"Uh...I don't know."
"Why did you say they(The kalpoes) picked you up?"
"Misinformation."

They are laughing about Deepak and Satish for being duped. "Idiots, losers."
De Vries believes that since he wasn't picked up by Deepak or Satish, he might have been picked up by someone else...
De Vries is at the actual location where Natalee died, not where he said she died. In his statements he always picked a spot a few hundred feet to the left. The payphone he used to call "Daury" is only a few feet away..
There is a kind of lurid black and white reconstruction going on now.

Natalee Holloway Update 27; Joran might still be lying according to de Vries. He will not investigate"Daury" to not ruin the police's chances

2008-02-03T22:08:00.000Z

Joran is being pretty disingeneous in his confessions, dancing around the details of his accomplice, or accomplices. De Vries thinks he's holding back even more. Commercials now, final revelation coming up. Beth Twitty's reaction.

Natalee Holloway Update 26; Joran goes into more detail at van der Eem's request....Accomplice revealed, Daury (last name withheld)

2008-02-03T21:55:00.000Z

Joran calls Natalee a 'Whore'...'Her friend told me she had shotgun on me. She was fucking drunk. I wanted to take her to her Hotel. But she wanted to see sharks, man, I shit you not.."
"So those guys(the kalpoes) dropped you off?"
"So we were on the beach, I'm kissing her, fingering her, she's in my pants (sic). then she starts shaking, foam on her mouth."
"Like an epileptic attack?"
"I don't know..maybe."
"And then you called...what's his name?"
"Daury Yeah...He showed up after I called him."
"Did you try to..?"
"Yeah, I tried everything.."
"He showed up and..."
"Everything was fucked.."
"He told me he could help."
"I knew he had a boat nearby, he works for one of those banana guys.."
"So we carried her to his boat...and I went home...I dumped the shoes. he told me to just go to school the next day.."
" And you called him later."
"Yeah, we were both nervous, he said he just tipped her over the side."
"And teh Kalpoes?"
"Yeah, I fucked them a bit.... I got them to say they dropped us off. But I never told them shit..."
"So you were fingering her... and?"
"Yeah, I wanted her to give me a blowjob. And then she just died..man."

Natalee Holloway Update 25; Joran more 'relaxed' after confession. "She was just Dead... CPR did not work..."

2008-02-03T21:46:00.000Z

More live translation of the tapes... Sorry for the spelling, there is a lot going on.
"Aren't you scared he'll rat you out?"
"I've got something on him as well.."

Joran apparently fixed certain details and set up an alibi.

"He offered, I didn't ask him. He didn't know how big it was going to get,"
"And..."
"They haven't even questioned him..."
"How old is he? Your age?"
"No, 25.."
"How did he do it?"
"I don't know, he did it all."
"What is his name?"
"Daury.."
"Daury What?"
"Daury *******" (beeped)

Now Peter is talking about Joran's father's machinations. He apparently got him a phone while in prison. "He such an idiot, bought me a phone, but forgot to buy a lot of credit. There was only 10 guilders on it." This contradicts the story in his book.

Natalee Holloway Update 24; Joran believed himself to be invincible. Confesses to dumping the body, she died 'spontaneously'

2008-02-03T21:29:00.000Z

Joran believed himself to be completely safe from the prosecutors. Telling van der Eem he woul

"What happened to her?"
"Something happened there. I was lucky, the ocean is huge. I'm fucked if they find her. But It(the body)is gone now. they'll never find her now.'
'Did you swim out?'
'I know people there(Aruba) too. Someone helped me.. I'm not saying who.."
'Why would he do that for you?"
" I know him, have known him for years, he had a boat... I'll never name his name."
Joran claims that Natalee died in his arms, spontaneously, 'she looked normal.."
"This guy, that helped you. He's gold..."
"I'm going to help him financially."
"You didn't know she was a friend of the bushes."
"Yeah, those fuckers, she told me she was rich, but that I didn't know."
Joran van der Sloot concludes with.
"Of the two people here(Holland) you and Him(accomplice with boat)are the only ones I trust."

Peter R. de Vries and Patrick van der Eem now have the task of finding out who this accomplice is.....

Natalee Holloway Update 23; Joran knows something. Where the body is, who killed her, etc. Justice department 'idiots' says van der Sloot

2008-02-03T21:13:00.000Z

After his release Joran stayed on Aruba for a month. On the 9th of January he returns to Holland and makes an appointment with van der Eem. They outfitted van der Eem's range rover with three cameras and a 'track and tracer' system. So that de Vries and his producers can follow him everywhere.

Live Footage now. Joran is bragging about a fight he had with someone in the holiday inn in casino. His father has already arranged for a settlement. Joran is talking about his father 'arranging' his release.

'I didn't say shit. They have nothing on me anymore. Even if they find her body with my sperm in it, they can't do shit. they're fucking idiots." Joran is negative about the Aruban justice department. Claims that his father wanted the Pauw en Witteman interview to get higher damages. (the same episode with the wine throwing)

Joran Called the Officers who arrested him 'Putas' and is also criticising Deepak and Satish Kalpoe for not 'getting any chicks'.
Van der Eem jumps in and asks Joran about wether or not they're going to find her. "Where the fuck is she?"
"Never to be found."
"A higher power?"
"Yes, powers. I'm done with it. I'm just waiting for the claims."
Peter R. De Vries rushed over to the Pauw en Witteman for the episode. This is what he knew while the episode was going on.

Natalee Holloway Update 22; Patrick van der Eem's background and how he got the confession.

2008-02-03T20:57:00.000Z

Patrick van der Eem is being interviewed by Peter R. De Vries. Apparently he met Joran at the poker table in Arnhem, at a tournament. He called him 'Maton', Pidgin for Murderer, jokingly. He pretended to be his friend, won his trust. Patrick van der Eem claims that it wasn't hard to betray him. 'Her mother deserves an honest answer. He had this coming.'

He avoided talking about the case, and started communicating with De Vries. He started doing small-time criminal odd-jobs for van der Eem, who pretended to be a very big marijuanan dealer/grower.

Wednesday the 21st of November they prepared van der Eem's car for taping. Unfortunately, Joran was re-arrested before they could tape him. The department of Justice tried, but failed to crack Joran's cool. They had to let him go. But, as soon as there is new evidence, they are allowed to reopen.

Joran's release on the 7th of December has only made him bolder. But now, De Vries' cameras are watching everything. Footage is shown of Joran calling van der Eem and bragging about not saying anything in Aruban dialect.

Natalee Holloway Update 21; Peter's reconstruction of events.

2008-02-03T20:46:00.000Z

Joran met Natalee at the blackjack table. Joran and Deepak and Satish went to the casino/bar were Joran drank a jello-shot out of her belly button. She leaves with Joran, Satish and Deepak. Her friends ask her to get out of the car. She refuses and is never seen again.

When Joran, Deepak and Satish are arrested a week later, they were probably instructed by Joran's father, a judge in training. Their original story was that they dropped her off at the Holiday inn.

According to De Vries, this story is 'liars-logic' Why would you lie about this, unless you know that you can't be proven wrong? After this Joran claimed that Deepak picked him up at the beach, where he left Natalee, because she was unwilling to go. Deepak declared that this didn't happen.

Joran apparently left his shoes at the beach, according to him. Peter says this is a telling lie. His shoes were only a few feet from where he supposedly left. Unless something else happened to the shoes.

Natalee Holloway Update 20; Peter R. De Vries Slams Joran's book!! Joran knows exactly what happened!!! Confession coming up live on tape!!!

2008-02-03T20:33:00.000Z

Peter R. De Vries is upset about Joran van der Sloot's book. He claims that Joran is lying, has been lying all along. The introduction to his book Joran wrote that he won't find peace until the case is solved. De Vries sneers and is telling the viewers that he has been doubting Joran's statements since the beginning, and this is why he has set up the hiddencamera action.

Patrick van der Eem claims to have been his friend the last few years, played poker with him, and bought him marijuana (legal in Holland.) They showed a bit of the footage they caught, and then cut to commercial. Patrick van der Eem recieved abot 5000 euros per month for five months. Next one coming up.

Natalee Holloway Update 19; Peter R. De Vries Staring Now!! Joran's Confession Live!!!

2008-02-03T20:06:00.000Z

Joran's Confession of leaving Natalie on the beach and dumped her body in the ocean. Patrick van der Eem, Peter R. De Vries' operative has more than ten separate confessions, he never rescinded anything. Peter R. De Vries believes that he was not joking, and has been lying all along.

Natalee Holloway Update 18; Still Going Live in 20 minutes with Peter R. De Vries!!!!! Joran Confesses all!!!

2008-02-03T20:04:00.000Z

Keep checking this space, it's about to get interesting!

Natalee Holloway Update 17; Going Live in 30 minutes with Peter R. De Vries!!!!! Spoilers for ABC's Monday Special!!!!

2008-02-03T19:37:00.000Z

In 45 Minutes I'm going live again. But here's a quick roundup of the day's Holloway related events. Dutch Tabloid De Telegraaf Reported this morning that They've tracked down the guy responsible for tricking Joran into his confession on tape for Peter R. De Vries.

Joran van der Sloot is apparently in Hiding somewhere, leaving his grandmother's house in a hurry this morning. Joran's lawyer Told the media that he didn't think last night's call to Pauw en Witteman was 'not a smart move'.

Joran's parents have released a statement, declaring that their son is not in hiding and is not being arrested for anything. The Aruban Justice department is waiting for approval to arrest him, sources in the department told de Telegraaf.

Natalee Holloway Update 16: Going Live tomorrow at 21.30 Amsterdam time for The dutch Peter R. De Vries episode On sunday!!! Must -Read!!!!

2008-02-02T21:48:00.000Z

The headline says it all. Check back here tomorrow for Live summary/translation of the Peter R. De Vries documentary on the death of Natalee Holloway. Natalee iss definitely dead. The Arubans might reopen the case. Joran van der Sloot apparently confesses. Though he has already taken this back in public. New Evidence, new post on Sunday.

Natalee Holloway Update 15:Peter R. responds to Joran on Dutch TV. Chris Cuomo comments on tapes

2008-02-02T21:39:00.000Z

Peter R. De Vries was just forced (he says) to comment on Joran's previous comments. Last night van der Sloot declared the whole confession caught on tape to be a kind of joke on his part. De Vries responded, saying only; 'He shouldn't have said that.'

Chris Cuomo commented briefly on saying Peter R. de Vries' tapes. 'This might be reason enough for the Aruban Justice department to reopen the case. But we All know it's hard to get a conviction in a homicide case.'

Natalee Holloway Update 14: Joran returns to Pauw en Witeman, claims to have lied in confession, Peter Cuomo flying to Holland

2008-02-01T23:42:00.000Z

Joran just claimed in the same Pauw en Witteman show that featured Peter R. De Vries yesterday and was the stage for their earlier wine-based frackas, that the confession that de Vries obtained was a lie, that he was just telling the story he thought his 'acquaintance' wanted to hear.

Joran's American lawyers have already responded to the allegations of confession saying that it was obtained by an Aruban employee of de Vries, who was handsomely rewarded for winning Joran's trust and betraying him.

RTL Boulevard reported earlier this evening that the speculation is that Joran may have just helped get rid of the body. They also spoke to an ABC producer that claims that they will see 20-25 million viewers, that Peter R. De Vries' narration of the events will be cut and replaced that ABC anchor Peter Cuomo is flying to Holland for an interview with Peter to replace some of the footage.

Natalee Holloway Update 13; Spooky music etc. Joran lied in various American TV interviews.

2008-02-01T17:18:00.000Z

God, what a disappointment. Just a bunch of rehashed crap. Yeah, so Joran lied in the ABC interview, so what? Looks like there's nothing good 'till sunday.

Natalee Holloway Update 12; Arubans divided over Joran's possible guilt. SBS 6 special about Holloway case being solved by Peter R. De Vries

2008-02-01T17:10:00.000Z

The Arubans are apparently only interested in returning to normality. They are divided over whether or not Joran is guilty, but mostly they want the whole thing to go away.

De Vries has stated that he will not know peace until Sunday. The show has been sold to ABC for an astronomical figure. They will air the episode on the following Monday. So far there has been precious little new stuff, it's all mostly recapping etc.

Natalee Holloway Update 11; Psychologist says, Joran is psychotic or innocent. "Joran might have no conscience whatsoever" Wine incident is telling.

2008-02-01T17:06:00.000Z

Joran has always denied everything, he even published a book. A noted psychologist syas that Joran may well be completely insane or completely innocent, in light of his behaviour yesterday.

Joran claims to have lied about leaving Natalee alone that night, but did not kill her or hide her body. Lying was a way of 'avoiding trouble', but 'apologies were in order', said van der Sloot in an earlier interview.

Natalee Holloway Update 10; Joran spotted in Disco, drinking unconcerned. De Vries stays silent.

2008-02-01T17:00:00.000Z

Joran was drinking last night in a Disco in Arnhem. Neighbours can't find him. The DJ at the disco talked to him and took a picture with him. He appeared 'relaxed and cool' according to the witnesses. He replied no comment to questions about the case.

Peter R. de Vries still refuses to comment. He said that he doesn't know why Joran is partying. 'Joran can party if he wants.' is all the crime reporter was willing to say. he also refuses to comment on the Aruban Justice department's statement that Joran has confessed.

Natalee Holloway Update 9; Special report starting Interview with possible witnesses to the confession

2008-02-01T16:35:00.000Z

SBS 6 unveils that they have an interview with two guys who spoke to Joran about the case last night in a disco in Arnhem. Aruban justice department confirms Natalee is dead. This is what their promo just said. The show is on in ten minutes. Watch this space.

Natalee Holloway Update 8; Bandwagon time

2008-02-01T16:19:00.000Z

My friend and long time collaborator Alex van Ommen has just interpreted this whole media circus as clarion call for the blogging revolution and I can't agree more. Just sitting here and reporting the stuff in the dutch media is beating the crap out of the rest of the world's media.

I'm not saying that this is better coverage, but I don't see why they don't have somebody doing this at some location that's a bit more popular. Well that's it for now. Live updates at six Amsterdam time in 20 minutes.

Natalee Holloway Update 7; Leaked transcript verified. Interview at 18.00 Amsterdam time with possible witnesses.

2008-02-01T15:44:00.000Z

The leaked transcript of Peter r. de Vries' conversation with Hans Mos, chief prosecutor in the holloway case is genuine, the prosecutor's office confirms today.
SBS 6 claims to have a special report, including an interview with the men in this picture, one of whom may have been a witness to Joran van der Sloot's confession.

Image courtesy of ANP/Nu.nl

Natalee Holloway Update 6:Van der Sloot confession confirmed by Ministry of Justice. SBS 6 special report tonight at 18.00 Amsterdam time. Live Update

2008-02-01T14:59:00.000Z

The Aruban prosecutors have released a statement regarding Joran van der Sloot's confession. It is confirmed that he has confessed to something, it is unknown if this the murder of Natalee Holloway.

TV channel SBS 6 has stated that they will air a special report with new witnesses to the confession tonight at six. I'll be updating live at that time.

Natalee Holloway Update 5;Van der Sloot's lawyers have not seen new evidence, Arubans still in conference, De Vries likely to have solved case

2008-02-01T13:59:00.000Z

In Greta von Susteren's On the Wire, Joe Tacopina, Joran van der Sloot's lawyer, has revealed that neither he nor Rosemary Arnold has seen the new evidence. Tacopina went on to decry the Aruban Justice department's behaviour, stating that they 'are acting like clowns'.

Sources in Aruba reveal that the justice department, prosecution lawyers and government officials have been in conference since last night and still have not issued further statements.

Dutch legal expert Theo de Roos claims that de Vries' budget for individual cases with a large media attention value exceed the police budget by ridiculous ammounts. 'The police has the disadvantage that they have to prioritise.' Mr. De Roos stated earlier today.

De Vries is wel known in Holland for being instrumental in absolving the suspects in the Putten Murder Case and the conviction of Louis H. for the murder of his girlfriend's two children, as well as the revelations about Prince Friso's fiancée Mabel Wisse-Smit's criminal associations.

Natalee Holloway Update 4;Van der Sloot's lawyer claims no new evidence in de vries' documentary, rights sold to ABC

2008-02-01T13:09:00.000Z

Joran van der Sloot's counsel, Rosemary Arnold, claimed that he will not be prosecuted on the basis of de Vries' evidence. The Aruban justice department has not arrested anyone, nor have they found the body. They're sticking to the story that de Vries has been a great help and that they've re-opened the case.

They've also released a statement saying Joran has not made a so-called 'hard confession' to their knowledge. They would be referring to the confession that de Vries has on tape. De Vries has refused to comment on the leaked transcript of his converstaion with the Aruban justice department.

American broadcaster ABC has bought the show for an undisclosed figure from producers Endemol.

Natalee Holloway Update 3: Drug-Suicide rumours resurface. Van der Sloot confessess. Natalee's death accidental

2008-02-01T01:15:00.000Z

It's 2.30 am here now. SBS 6 just broke the news that Van der Sloot did confess to witnessing Natalee's death, he claims it was an accident. This confirms the earlier rumours. Allegedly, van der Sloot saw her overdosing and panicked. The whole U.S. media is waking up, but no one seems to be able to get Peter R. De Vries talking. I don't think I will be doing this again tomorrow, but it sure was fun. Missing-white-girl-media-circus, you stole my heart.

Natalee Holloway update 2;Peter R. de Vries will reveal all on Sunday. Joran van der Sloot allegedly confesses to accidental death.Beth Twitty footage

2008-01-31T23:42:00.000Z

Peter R. De Vries just appeared on the same talk show (Pauw and Witteman) with the infamous wine incident, but was remarkably tight lipped, sticking to the story that he released earlier and refusing to 'accuse or acquit anyone' at this point. He has stated that there is no reason to believe that Natalee is alive.

The Aruban Authourities have not found a body, but the rumour is that Joran van der Sloot has confessed, to something at least. Other rumours state that it might have been an accident.

De Vries stated that it was the use of spectacular hidden camera footage that provided the break through and that he might have known more during his last appearance on the talk show with van der Sloot and his parents. His questions provoked van der Sloot so much on this occasion that the then former suspect threw a glass of red wine in his face.

Pauw en Witteman also showed a clip of de Vries revealing the information to Holloway's mother, Beth Twitty. She appeared upset but composed, exclaiming; 'Look what they've done. Look what those animals have done. What they've done to her...'
Even after the clip, de Vries refused to reveal more.

Both the hosts, Jeroen Pauw and Paul Witteman criticised de Vries for holding back and used various leading questions to get an answer out of him. De Vries was steadfast in saying he doesn't intend to reveal more until his programme scheduled for Sunday.

Translation;
This is the place in Aruba where Natalee Holloway disappeared without a trace. Almost no one believed that this mystery would ever be solved. But we have the solution. We discovered, in the course of blood curdling hidden camera operation, what happened to Natalee, and who did it. An extremely shocking documentary that will be world news on sunday, when it is broadcast by SBS 6. Make sure you are an eyewitness to the most exciting, most revealing documentary I have ever made.

Holloway update; Peter R. De Vries refuses to say anything. Joran van der Sloot allegedly confesses. Natalee definitively Dead. Beth Twitty in Holland

2008-01-31T21:50:00.000Z

Dutch TV channel SBS 6 just reported that there are strong rumours that Joran van der Sloot just confessed to the murder. Neighbours in Arnhem, where Van der Sloot studies law haven't seen him at all the last few weeks.

The Aruban Justice department is reporting that arrests will be made soon and apparently de Vries managed to get a hidden camera confession out of van der Sloot. The rumour is that van der Sloot claims it was an accident.

De Vries definitively stated that Natalee Holloway is dead and that he knows how she died and what happened to the body. Natalee's mother, Beth Twitty is reportedly flying back to the U.S. shortly.

Dutch TV sleuth claims to have solved Holloway case

2008-01-31T17:54:00.000Z

I responded to your many demands (1) and have started commenting on Dutch stuff over here; http://watjespolemiek.blogspot.com/. As for the hottest news as of 5 minutes ago, it's Dutch TV-presenter/crime reporter Peter R. De Vries, who just revealed that he's solved the Natalee Holloway case. He's not telling anyone who did it until his program runs on Sunday, though. I assume he's brokering the deal with the U.S. right now, which would make for some excellent viewing pleasure.

Here's the news as broken by his own website. The Aruban Justice department has given the response that de Vries' help was instrumental in breaking the case. Apparently, Natalee Holloway's mother has been informed and is in Holland now.

This is the last incident before this one were former (now possibly current?) suspect Joran van der Sloot throws a glass of wine at the reporter after a talk show, in wich he accuses van der Sloot of holding back vital information.

Anyway, De Vries' promises to reveal all next Sunday, and on American TV shortly after.

International Banking Conspiracy

2008-01-16T02:51:00.000Z

"Politics is the shadow cast by big business over society." This is probably truer today than when John Dewey wrote it. Why the pessimism you ask? I watched another one of those internet exclusive conspiracy movies. This one. Don't bother watching the whole thing, here's the recap: Ten minutes of stock footage labeled 'war' interspersed with George Carlin and Bill Hicks routines give way to a frank discussion (read: garbled agitprop) of the historicity of Jesus Christ. Jesus is a tribute band to the solar messiah idea that's a lot older than 2000 years and the bible is filled with mystical astrology. All true, but a more compelling argument wouldn't contain so many factual errors and be a lot funnier, like QI tackled the subject.

Act two details the requisite 9-11 conspiracy. These are problematic by any standards of good journalism, but I'm game. It was an awfully convenient pretext for war in the middle east. But the third act was genuinely interesting, and apparently only slightly overblown. The U.S. federal Reserve Bank is privately owned, by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, somewhat prominent families.

This I didn't know. And there's a lot of current conspiracy books about it. This one, or this one, etc. There was plenty of opposition at the time, Charles Lindbergh weighed in with this at the bill's second run through congress in 1913, with a new name;

"This is the Aldrich bill in disguise…The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill…The banks have been granted the special privilege of distributing the money, and they charge as much as they wish…This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed. The system is private...There should be no legal tender other than that issued by the government…The People are the Government. Therefore the Government should, as the Constitution provides, regulate the value of money." (Congressional Record, 1913-12-22)

The only current politician who has this on the agenda is Ron Paul, hence the return to the gold standard. If you didn't have a soft spot for the guy before...

The filmmakers then go to town with the liberal horror story, starring total control as the ultimate evil. Even going as far as 'they will barcode our children'. Which they will. This in reference to rfid chips. This school district wants to use them to 'monitor' children. Gordon Brown would like to use them to keep track of prisoners. It is rather guileless of them to just suppose no one notices how ominous this all sounds, very Orwellian and biblical, even. Mark of the beast, etc. Of course Britain has plenty of experts who are already foaming at the mouth, but politely point out that it probably won't work as advertised. And this after the whole massive government leak of supposedly secure data. If there is some kind of revolt against this, I might end up on the same side as the Christians for once.

Naomi Klein is moving in pretty much the same direction in her latest book, which has the added bonus of being well-researched. I've only just started, but it guarantees to be a thoroughly depressing read. And here's the short film she did as promotion with Alfonso Cuarón.

Nelson W. Aldrich, the architect behind the federal reserve act famously said; The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent." Consent obviously. It shouldn't come as a surprise that 90% of the world's population has neither the time nor the patience to be masters of their own destiny. All that self-determination is useless to them. The only people that will even mind are a diverse collection of fools, traitors and criminals and I am happy to count myself among their number, right up until the moment the beatings start. Rest assured I will name names.

As you can probably tell, I'm a whole lot less worried about this these days than I would have been a couple of years ago. It's just that conspiracy theorists have far too much faith in the ability of totalitarian governments to control people. Human societies tend towards greater freedoms in the long run, not because of any noble ideals, but because it's impossible to ass-hole proof any system involving human beings. Grant Morrison said it best in the Invisibles:"They can't win. Chaos always creeps in. They can cover the whole world with cameras, but they can't stop the guys in the control room from wanking when they should be watching you." Random mismanagement and incompetence will destroy any utopia or distopia within a reasonable time span. One need only look back and see the ruins of past empires, all relegated to the dust of history.

A Confederacy of Dunces

2008-01-14T00:08:00.000Z

I used to wonder why these primaries mattered. Since considerably less people vote than in the U.S. elections proper, it didn't seem like a good way to figure out which of your candidates would win the election. That's because that isn't the point. After reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, I had a much better idea of how this whole process is supposed to play out and how it can be stolen by political pros with some knowledge of the system.

Not all of the primaries are proper elections. A good deal of them are like Iowa, which is a caucus, just a formal show of hands among the party's voters in the state, usually the local party heads and however else shows up. You could call a caucus on any issue as well, nationally or in that state, usually to force candidates to debate fringe issues that wouldn't adress if they could avoid them.New Hampshire was the first real primary, and as such, has slightly more realistic results compared to a caucus.

The real point of these primaries is an ongoing opinion poll/rallying cry/cash call/platform negotiation depending on where your weakness is. You might have to win a couple of primaries just to get noticed, or to secure better financial backing or to convince a popular politician to endorse you in his home state and nab crucial votes that way. This means you're pretty much going to have to compromise at some point. Once the primaries are over, you go to your party's convention with a potential piece of the vote and any delegates you won in the primaries. The party has a large number of delegates themselves which they will throw behind a candidate for whatever arbitrary reason or sleazy back room deal. These days the Democrats have opted for the same model as the Republicans, announcing the party candidate long before the convention, so that the convention becomes a formality and merely ratifies the candidate.

This is mostly because of the televised chaos of the 1968 and 1972 conventions. In the HST book, guaranteed front runner Ed Muskie does things the old-fashioned way. He secures endorsements from every Democrat in the country that's not running themselves and specifically from Richard J. Daley, the union-maffia connected Chicago mayor and de facto head of the Democratic party. This is the power base that got Roosevelt and Kennedy elected and seemed like the smart choice. But he burns out long before the primaries end and the front runner from that point on is George McGovern. McGovern is technically just left of the center but is also the only one appealing to the youth vote and other progressives, Vietnam veterans and feminists.

Not coincidentally, George McGovern was heavily involved in reforming the convention rules after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 made the nomination of Hubert Humphrey possible, despite him never winning a single primary. All kinds of unheard of national caucuses were being voted on, the delegates needed to be representative of the population for the first time in U.S. history and there were at least two distinct blocs besides McGovern. The Daley group of party cadre types and traditional Democratic constituencies and George Wallace's ancient racist Democratic vote, believed to be the only way to win the south. McGovern beat them all, by using the rules he came up with to full effect, only to be run into the ground by the Nixon Machine a few months later.

The current democratic race is a good deal less interesting, seeing as we'll never know who played it best until one of the candidates walks out of the secret negotiations smiling for the press. It is developing along similar lines in terms of voting blocs, though. Hilary Clinton is obviously backed by the old party system (different, but the same), but does well with badly-informed progressives. Barrack Obama has the left of the centre and most of the fickle youth/progressive vote this time. John Edwards might appeal to anyone, but has no chance, except for another vice-presidency ticket if he gets enough bargaining power. He does have a decent chance of carrying the south, but this has been such a Republican stronghold since the Reagan years, there's really no point to that. The other candidates don't really matter, and never did. Mike Gravel's campaign has the stench of death worse than Joe Biden had and Dennis Kucinich is never going anywhere, despite his fantastic outrage at being kicked out of the NBC debate. The sad thing is, while in America he's a dangerously insane lefty, in Europe he would be a remarkably dull social democrat with 20 year old ideas.

Hillary is demonstrably left/liberal on every issue, but will probably be the most bought- and-paid-for president in the history of the United States. She also doesn't seem like a likely candidate to reduce the absurd powers of the executive office in her term. Obama, though less beholden to business interests will probably fuck up the negotiations at some point, and have to accept the VP nomination or try again 2012 or 2016, at which point he'll be considerably more corrupt than he is now. There is also virtually no comprehensive data concerning his voting record, seeing as he's only been in office two years, half of which was spent campaigning for the presidency.

On the Republican side, things are a lot more entertaining even though they're well aware that they need a miracle to win the election.

Rudy Giuliani still hasn't realised that America needs a president, not a mayor. But after the elections will probably get the bipartisan nod and become the new head of FEMA (I have my fingers crossed, he might actually be good at that.)
Ron Paul is this year's charming oddball whose internet presence is vastly overestimated as real world votes, though his return of the gold standard plan is completely insane in execution, it does bring up the uncomfortable fact of the semi-private ownership of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, a staple of post 9-11 conspiracy thinking and genuinely chilling fact.
Mitt Romney's appeal is largely based on his Mormon hair and teeth. I forgot who said it, but someone mentioned that if it came out that he was a cannibal, most people would just shrug and go with their gut anyway. He's trying to appeal to the religious right, which will never generate the same turnout as for Bush, no matter how much of his personal fortune he spends, Utah is the only state that's in the bag.
Mike Huckabee has that 'aw shucks' thing going for him and of course the lame Chuck Norris endorsement, but he's counting on the same voter base as Romney and is more likely to get it, but not before throwing half of it to McCain. He's also the out of touch senior citizen in this campaign, somewhat more earnest and predictably naff than the others.
John McCain will probably win the nomination if he keeps his cool after Super Tuesday, which would make him by far the most reasonable candidate to vote for in the general election.

Rest assured that the always dependable American public will be galvanised by the excitement to turn out in droves, unless of course they 'have a thing to do' on election day, which will make it difficult to reach anything resembling a mandate. But if 2004's 64% is topped, this might be the first election since 1972 in which more than half of the country actually wants the president they get. They wanted Nixon, though.

Messy desk, Messy mind.

2007-12-29T01:00:00.000Z

I had a bunch of ideas this last year that I wrote down, sometimes even found movies for, before I realised they didn't work. Sometimes it was just a stupid idea, sometimes it didn't fit the blog format, sometimes it just took a couple of weeks to get the right angle. Anyway, this is just to clean up.

Mascu-Nazis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculism made me think this might be an interesting story, but it mostly looks like Feminism for Mysoginists, so it's useless in concept and execution. I still think it might be a good idea, but why talk about a disproportionate amount of physical labour, conscription and things like that? Maybe I'm more old-fashioned than I thought, but that's just whining. There is nothing you can change about biological realities, but that's not what equality is about.
There are a lot of this issues that actually matter, though. But doing that properly is more of an essay length piece at least and would have to have a title like 'Every woman is a rapist; Why women's rights are heteronormative oppression' I'm just too leery of this whole men's rights thing just yet. You could very well end up like those fathers for justice cunts and make a reasonable point and then shit all over it by beating up ex-wives. So here's Mr.Mom (not the Micheal Keaton flick)

KID SCARE!

I thought the paedophilia witch hunt gearing up in the U.S. and the vagaries of the American Justice system would make a good post. Especially Megan's law. Also, the shocking lack of basic statistical knowledge that these people have. Your child is much more likely to be abused by someone it knows quite well, that you simply don't suspect. So hunting for sex offenders in your neighbourhood is a bad idea. Especially if you take the incredibly loose description of sex offense that some states have into account. There really is no justice in lynching someone with a public urination offense, and your children will have to be left with a babysitter while you're there anyway. Somehow I was going to fit the prisoner's dilemma into this, and how people tend to mistrust strangers for all the wrong reasons. But mostly, this was an excuse to use the fantastic Brass Eye episode 'Paedogeddon' as illustration.

Full episode here, part 2, part3.

What would the internet be without Japan?

This was an excuse for that trailer, but at first I thought I might do something about homosexuality in Japan. I looked up Yaoi, after some article about/by Furries used the term and a found another Japanese concept to wonder at. The Japanese apparently think homosexuality is a fairy tale. In women's manga, homosexual relationships are not problematic or unacceptable. Because it's a crazy women's realm where reason doesn't matter. The movie Gohatto sprang to mind. And Jonathan Ross's interview with Hard gay, Japan's first gay comedian popped up as well.

Interestingly enough, Hard gay uses the same technique for forcing people to do good that some Indian collection agencies use, i.e. shaming people with sexually ambivalent characters. In India it's eunuchs that are sent out to businesses that are late paying bills and chanting and dancing in front of the stores. All of this might become a post at some point, I just never reached that point.

That's it for the dramatic parade of failed ideas and crooked reasoning

Comics beat Movies every time

2007-12-28T22:59:00.000Z

When a friend of mine had to read Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns for a literary theory class, he complained that while the themes of vigilantism, fascism, the media and how these subjects are related to each other were accurately and interestingly portrayed, Frank Miller drew ugly human beings and this detracted from the enjoyment.

I was much too happy that somebody else besides me had read it to argue that this isn't the point. There's plenty to complain about in his writing, especially if you're familiar with the rest of his oeuvre. The oddly non-homosexual Spartans in 300, the plot of Martha Washington goes to War is the plot of Atlas shrugged, etc. He's definitely to the right of the political spectrum, but in that 'Give me Liberty or give me death' kind of way that only Americans really take seriously.

He is a fantastic artist though, and that has nothing to do with what his characters look like. If you are going to read comics, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics:The Invisible Art is essential. The artist can draw the script pretty much any way he wants to. That's like having a movie with an unlimited budget. Except better, because unlike movies, There's really no need to pace it, unless you want to. These bits from that book should give you an idea of the possibilities.

Frank Miller isn't a great artist because his art is pretty, it's great because it tells the story in an incomparably fantastic way. This is what a 60-year old Batman looks like when he can't stand the guilt anymore and has to put the costume on.

Comic fans know that this the real measure of a great comic artist, because they collectively shot themselves in the foot in the 90's drooling over virtually unscripted issues full of tits and guns and muscles bigger than humanly possible. In 1990 Marvel's top artists decided that they didn't need the company anymore and left to start their own publishing company, Image. They spent so much time in love with all the sudden money and fame, most of them barely finished 3 issues a year, almost killing their own retail market and putting thousands of comic book stores out of business.

"As the Image creators chatted on the phone with one another and dallied over Page 3, a chain reaction had begun that some speculate was responsible for virtually destroying the direct market in comics. Retailers invested heavily in Image issues that failed to ship on time, which meant the retailers could not recoup their investment on schedule. Due to the required lead time for orders, retailers had, in some cases, ordered second and third issues of Image titles by the time they learned that the first issue had not shipped on time. The problem was further multiplied by the variant covers and high-priced bagged and foil-covered editions with which Image shamelessly pandered to speculator interests. The money invested could not be regained until the tardy issues finally arrived in stores and found buyers. When issues arrived so late that fan interest had waned, retailers found themselves stuck with titles that were no longer hot. Even so, they were not quick to learn their lesson. "The Pitt, for example, was consistently late every issue," said Valentino, "but every time he [Dale Keown] solicited orders, it sold.""

- From this incredibly detailed article in The Comics Journal

Most Image comics were full of pointless deaths by characters that were introduced last issue wedged into carbon copies of Marvel and DC plots from the 60's but with 'an edge'. They just rotted your brain. No matter how bad it got, you could always defend the X-men by saying it was an elaborate metaphor for racism. This was just indefensible except for vague aesthetic concerns.

Alan Moore's Watchmen, which does what DKR does, but better and a hundred other things as well, is now being adapted by Zach Snyder, the director of Dawn of the Dead (2004) and 300 (Yes, a Frank miller adaptation). Unlike most other Alan Moore adaptations like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or From Hell which are unrelentingly awful, this one could be but a minor fiasco like V for Vendetta. Zach Snyder did an excellent job of reproducing 300 as a film, and any criticism should be leveled at Miller. If he does the same for Watchmen, he'll end up with a 9 and a half hour movie that will cost half a billion, so corners will be cut. The question is which ones?

Alan Moore won't care. The reclusive, vegetarian magician/author has stated that anything he owns the rights to will never be filmed as far as he's concerned. He's just released the latest volume of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Black Dossier, which is already being slammed by internet critics as being an impossible dense and unreadable forest of literary and historical references. I can't see what they're complaining about, it's another complex, engrossing story, that's guaranteed not to be turned into a shitty movie.

-Mad props to Edwin Demper for bringing a copy back from the States. Read his blog or perish, never knowing why.

Will no one rid us of these turbulent thespians?

2007-12-24T16:04:00.000Z

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The world was shocked just before Christmas by a beautiful piece of easily misunderstood or misconstrued reasoning by leading armchair intellectual and movie star Will Smith.

Smith (39), the star of such venerable classics as Wild Wild West and the Legend of Bagger Vance is probably not convinced that intention is the correct way to asses whether or not acts are moral or immoral. What he was probably trying to say in a ham fisted sound bite is that a villain is never a villain in his own mind.

But the really telling part of the quote is Mr. Smith's plans for the re-education of people that don't agree with him. A short course of reprogramming would have cured Adolf, so he could spend the rest of his life helping handicapped puppys or some nonsense like that. It would be an easier world if everyone just believed in the same thing, I couldn't agree more. But it would also be a pointless, boring stale world.

More importantly, when are people going to stop taking actors and actresses seriously? I'm sure Will Smith didn't mean it like that, but like so many Hollywood natives, he spent his all his formative years working at becoming rich and famous, at which point the requisite group of sycophants applauded him for his wit, beauty, etc, everything except the hard work. If you get that treatment, instead of higher education, is it any wonder you end up believing you've just come up with a novel new approach to the problem of Good and Evil?

Brand loyalty

2007-11-24T00:16:00.000Z

I was at the cash register in a bookstore when they asked me if I was interested in getting a customer loyalty card. I hadn't been exposed to the term in person yet, and my face instinctively broke out in a rictus snarl. I didn't think of the proper response until I left, which is of course to ask about the punishment for disloyalty. perhaps a "D" for disloyalty on the forehead. I would turn to the shareholders and exclaim: "A fair mark, my Lords."

The term branding is not a coincidence. Marketeers think of you as cattle, and who can blame them? That is what you get when you behave like a herd. It's not you showing off what you own, it's them.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It's a bit too easy to deride advertising in any form when it obviously pays for so much. The entire entertainment industry is dependent on it. But it's not like you are powerless to defend yourself against this system. They are desperate for your money and there's no reason you shouldn't treat them like the overeager suitor they are.

Every company in the world would love to know what you will buy. Market research for toys is an ongoing torture chamber for the big toy companies, who honestly have no idea how to get children to buy something, unless they actually want it. If the movie industry was smart enough to realise that they have the same problem the music industry still has, they would implement the same solution. It really isn't that complicated anyway.

Big Corporations also care what you think, because it's profitable to do so. P.R. damage equals serious losses in their books, so don't hesitate to vote with your wallet. We have the luxury to make these choices now, so why shouldn't we? Unethical practices disappear quite quickly when sales suffer. It's far from perfect, most companies just shift the slave labour to a vendor, but they won't be able to keep that up forever.

The real advantage of multinationals being the only world wide organisations that will set policy in the future, is that they are a lot more vulnerable to checks and balances than a national government with a set term in office. They will rule a world where they are dependent on a fickle consumer with constantly changing needs and allegiances, who will turn on the corporations like rabid wolverines whenever they don't get what they want.

But I love foie gras, in spite of what they have to do to those geese to get it. Sometimes cruelty is just tastier. I don't see a problem with anesthatising piglets for castration, but if it doesn't happen, I won't stop eating pork. The weak link in that positive consumer-driven future is that people are easily satisfied idiots. Democracy did not work as advertised either. Realistically, don't give up the samosas made from ground-up Chinese fetuses, but demand that it consist of at least 90% unwanted children.

There is no Golden Age

2007-11-22T02:14:00.000Z

The BBC has a new documentary series dealing with British Science Fiction and it's broader socio-cultural impact. The first episode of the Martians and Us deals with the concept of Evolution as used by H.G. Wells in the Time Machine and War of the worlds, and all the writers that followed in his footsteps. This one is about J.G. Ballard, though.

The first episode also reviews the Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, later filmed as the Village of the Damned. A perfect example of why science fiction can run circles around fantasy. It exemplifies 1960's parent's fears. Now that they could afford a better education for their children, they ended up with smart-assed kids. A little bit too smart even. They keenly felt, like their parents had, that their generation's era was over and that their replacements would tear everything they believed in to shreds. Not that they aren't experiencing something similar right now. All of the kids in the world chatting with pedophiles from space, their parents still unable to get bonzibuddy from their computers.

Fantasy on the other hand, never really gets beyond good v.s. evil as a plot, and overblown nostalgia as a unifying theme. Constantly hankering back to a past that never was, a charming bucolic fantasy. It's no coincidence that the hero is always a lowly farm lad, thrust into the hustle and bustle of things through some magic agency. No writer has managed to surpass J.R.R. Tolkien's initial idea in any significant way. Even in the book itself, every character is longing for the past or some of it's trappings. Ancient objects, battles thousands of years in the past, long lost loves, homes that don't exist anymore.

According to recently deceased author Robert Jordan, "....Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing." - CNN chat December 2000
In other words, in Fantasy, Men are Men, Women are Women, Good is Good and Evil is Evil, no nuance required.

Arthur C. Clarke ends the Martians and Us episode by stating that the purpose of Science fiction is to map out all possible futures, so that we can pick the one we want. Clarke is widely respected, not just for excellent novels, but for some actual science as well. For instance, he suggested that geostationary satellites would be ideal for global communication in 1945. To me, this pretty much sums up the difference between the two genres.

So why is it that there is such wide-spread contempt in literary circles for Science Fiction, but escapist sword and sorcery is a main stay of bestseller lists? It's a little better in cinema, but that's mostly due to Star Wars. Before that film, Science Fiction was guaranteed b-movie fodder.

The answer is both simple and disquieting. Fantasy demands nothing from it's viewers, they are transported to a simplified world full of whimsy and presented with a morality play with a happy end. Science Fiction presents complicated concepts and a deep abiding pessimism about humanity's motives and competence, post-apocalyptic wastelands, police states and the generally deleterious effects of technology on society, often foregoing even tying up loose ends in the final act.

It is Science Fiction's nature that it is frequently overtaken by real science, and the futures that we imagined in the past begin to look charmingly naive to cynical modern eyes. Fantasy is beholden to no standards of accuracy whatsoever, not even those of historical fiction. Both genres have horrible writing in books and ridiculously bad films. But, where badly executed Science Fiction has the underlying ideas that it is trying to communicate, bad Fantasy has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Everything you like is gay

2007-11-18T22:15:00.000Z

The one scene in Herman Wouk's Don't stop the Carnival that has always stuck in my brain is when the main character is forced to spend his anniversary dinner listening to his daughter's new boyfriend's theory about the homosexuality of Balzac. Considering the kind of books Balzac wrote, he is astonished that anyone would write something like this about him.

"Klug shrugged and smiled, his good humor restored. 'The Satyriasis was a familiar pattern. Overcompensation, plus a flight from self-knowledge.'
'It's an interesting idea, anyhow,' Norman said. 'Balzac must be the only one left.'
Klug's smile faded into a tolerant, pitying look. He said to Norman smoothing his hair, 'There's always resistance to these discoveries. Read A passion in the Desert again. And Louis Lambert.'"

The essence of literary criticism from most people's perspective is to prove that what you think of an author is wrong. That it is obvious looking through his work that he/she is homosexual, fascist, had a domineering mother, etc. I don't know if I disagree with this idea. Since Derrida's expulsion from the philosophy departments, he has been happily adopted as a caulking agent to patch up any and all theoretical holes between feminist/queer theory and 'straight' literary criticism.

It's not that I don't think this kind of research can't create interesting results, but why should I care about an author's homosexuality? A friend of mine once told me a particularly awful author he had introduced me to was gay, I think in an attempt to make him a little more salonfähig. (You might guess his name if I told you that his pseudonym is the name of the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls.)

Not coincidentally, I hate Hemingway and because of this purely subjective point of view, I can authoritatively state that the idea of him as a great writer is bullshit. I can't stand the choppy torrent of declarative sentences, especially when you realise it's not even trying to pare down to a kind of sparse simple beauty. He took his direction from the Toronto star style guide, i.e. a business writing book that discourages one from using long words and passive sentences.

The only good thing to come out of his fame are all the people trying to write like him and failing, ending up with short, punchy novels that were mostly written by people who could write about their character's inner life. Hemingway's imitators are only great to the extent that they aren't like him.

Zelda Fitzgerald didn't like him, called him "bogus" and "phoney as a rubber cheque", and that happens to be exactly what I think. The supposed homosexuality is just a foil for those people that believe that what he wrote down is just the tip of the iceberg. Who really wants to read a bunch of childish stories about "tough guys", how much they hate homosexuals and their mothers? It comes as no surprise to me that his best book, is filled with writers like Joyce, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, the one with biggest balls of them all.

Does it make Bambi any less of a saccharine saga that it's author probably also wrote Josephine Mutzenbacher, erotic classic and the inspiration for dozens of 1970's German sex comedies? Why does writing always have to be about the author's sexuality? If you've read any of the post preceding this one, you will know that it's mostly wank. You're forgiven for thinking I type this with one hand, I probably should.

I've never kipled

2007-10-29T22:59:00.000Z

What with things and all, this entry is a little late.

So to get to the point, what's wrong with the whole neo-colonialism situation today? The Bretton woods twins, the IMF and the World Bank. Neither of which is really supposed to be involved in developing countries anyway. They were specifically constructed to dispense rebuilding money to Europe after the second world war and more or less replace the gold standard as a regulatory influence on exchange rates.

But the whole system was tilted in the favour of the United States. "One dollar, One vote" doesn't even have a semblance of fairness. This leaves war-torn Europe with some pocket money to get the whole reconstruction under way and gave the Americans ample opportunities to pick over imperial carcasses.

In the fifties and sixties, like every other supranational organisation, the twins became tools in the fight against communism. You've all heard about propping up right wing regimes, and this is how they used to do it, collectively. There was good reason to, post-Stalinist communist regimes were outperforming the U.S. Not that they made anything useful or valuable, but still.

In the 1970's the oil crisis and the war in Vietnam were enough to make Nixon decide to simply unilaterally leave the system so he could devaluate the dollar, a common strategy afterwards. Neo-liberalism was on the rise and Keynesian state-intervention seemed like a recipe for disaster now. But what about the twins? What could they be used for now?

Well, developing countries could benefit from forced privatisation and arbitrary cash infusions, of course. No matter that the same measures when applied to first world nations just tend to dismantle civil society, it will work even better when there is less money. Western companies are much better equipped to administer to former national industries.

Or how about another IMF brainwave? Remove trade barriers in conjunction with the GATT, now WTO, and export the entirety of your production, so another country can process the raw materials more efficiently and turn you into a resource pump? The WTO is, of course, basically an ethical organisation, as the following clip from The Yes Men will prove.

It shouldn't come as surprise that developing countries are deeper in debt now, than they ever were under colonialism. After all, you wouldn't do something like this to a place you owned.

Debt-relief is the new hobbyhorse of International development. If we could only fix these countries massive debts to us, we wouldn't need to keep lending them money. So, we should give them money now. Not that the standard of living hasn't improved in developing countries, but they can't afford it themselves, and the better it gets, the more we'll have to pump in there to keep it that way. It's the very definition of unsustainable.

So, instead of an organisation which funds governments based on whether or not they've embraced Reaganomics, why not invest in local companies interested in economic growth and let them be taxed by a government that has to actually govern? The main revenue stream of a third world government doesn't have to be an international organisation whose only purpose is to intervene on behalf of the United States and Europe. Andrew Mwenda, a Zambian journalist living in Kenya, is proposing to stop all foreign aid and replace it with targeted investments in African industries.

But thank god, the plight of starving peoples hasn't gone unnoticed by celebrities, who as we all know have a keen grasp of the socio-economic history of the world.

Oprah is personally responsible for this fantastic project. A handful of disadvantaged girls get i-pods and a first class education, everybody else in Soweto can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, like Oprah did.

The World Bank and the IMF have over a trillion dollars between the two of them. That's enough to repay all third world debts. So why don't they? Corrupt charities and useless multi-million dollar projects collude in keeping a lot of people working that would otherwise be unemployed.

Capitalism leading to economic growth is no cure-all. Human rights and the environment are usually the first to suffer. But it is the only recipe we know of to improve living standards in a sustainable way, that has proven to be successful. Let's not forget that any delays in industrialisation a country might have, the quicker it can implement state-of-the-art technology. It's not pretty, but it'll work.

White man's burden

2007-10-09T19:23:00.000+01:00

I've always been lukewarm about charities in general. Whether it's starving baby animals or humans, disenfranchised Chinese people or Africans, something about the way these organisations present themselves annoys me. It's only been compounded over the years by the corruption scandals that institutions like the world bank or the IMF are involved in.

I believe this is partly due to our misconceptions about what it meant to have colonies. People often think that the West has been stealing resources from it's colonies all along, and are in fact still doing it now. But even at the height of colonialism, no European country imported anything but gold and valuables from it's colonies. Every country in Europe was pretty much self-sufficient when it came to coal, metals, food, and they mostly traded with each other, i.e. massive coal exports from England. The only country that imported resources on a large scale was Japan, which didn't have any colonies. Wholesale import of fruit and grain is a post-war phenomenon. Even the few resources unavailable in Europe, like cotton, rubber and phosphorus were synthesised when the First World War strangled supply lines.
(P. Yates, Forty Years of Foreign Trade, London 1959)

Nor is it true that colonies were needed as a market for the motherland's products. It's a rare piece of backwards reasoning. Just because a large percentage of the products exported to the colonies come from the motherland, doesn't mean that it was a significant market for the colonisers, in most European countries in the nineteenth century, exports to their own colonies accounted for less than a tenth of production. Economic growth averaging between 5 and ten percent a year in most of the nineteenth century, this is a completely negligable part of production in general.

Economic historian Paul Bairoch has proven that there is a negative correlation between economic growth and the colonisation of other countries in his book Economics and world history; Myths and paradoxes. Belgium had the fastest growing economy in Europe when it acquired the Congo, but fell back almost immediately and has been in the middle of the pack ever since. England and France are still powerful despite their colonies. In fact, they didn't even begin colonising until after their respective industrial revolutions. A colony is actually a gigantic financial sinkhole and western economies have benefited immensely from decolonisation. And the colonies themselves have a bunch of infrastructure and traumas that can be turned into work ethic.

Nobody who's seen the success of India and China these last few years still believes that former colonies are kept poor because of their economic relationship with the Western world. It's not that they trade with the West too much, they don't trade enough.

The guilt about colonialism has created an entire industry. I wouldn't be talking about it if I didn't think it sucked. Tomorrow, part two; "I've never kipled, or how I stopped caring about brown people and found Jesus."

Fear the Reaper

2007-10-04T22:53:00.000+01:00

The fabled plateau of Leng, Atlantis, the island of Dr. Moreau, all of these fantastic creepy places that just don't cut it anymore these days. The creepy abandoned house, the mysterious castle, even the old factory or warehouse can't get to you anymore, not really.

We first tried to replace the mysterious island/continent with planets, light years away. We were just putting it further out. Even the planets in our own solar system are boring compared with how horrible we thought they'd be. Mars' canals are just geological features. The more we know about the world, the less we seem to fear.

The focus shifted from swarthy Europeans and demonic dog-men to atomic monsters and cosmic creatures during the cold war, so much so that even ol' gipper was convinced. We moved in towards serial killers, strange inbred hicks and virtual reality. But even those have become boring.

Even pedophiles aren't scary anymore. A veritable glut of pederast villains in high-budget Hollywood thrillers and even some straight forward "I'm a pedophile, but can't help it."-sob-stories have reduced the last horrifying fear to a ridiculously ordinary affair. Doughy, pig-eyed men (or Micheal Jackson) that seem made for the phrase; 'The banality of evil.'

We've evolved from being scared of everything that goes 'bump' in the night, through the whole gamut of irrational, primordial, symbolic, rational, bizarre and ultimately totally ordinary fears. From the uncontrollable lusts of the wolf man to the cold, unfeeling alien probe, we've managed to explore hairy, sweaty puberty through to the realisation that science isn't necessarily a good thing.

And that's why there is no possible decent ending for Lost. It's not just the fact that it's too popular to end, there is no possible way that it can end in anything but a horrible disappointment. There really is no good horror left, because there is nothing outside of ourselves left to be scared of. Chuck Palahniuk does a decent job of trying to scare you with everyday objects in Haunted, and the news tries it's best with the terrorists, but all the movies are about cheap shock effects.

Just a bunch of random images about death and pain and a clever editing trick. Fast cuts and unexpected sounds are the cinematic equivalent of someone running up and saying boo in your face.There's still death, and fear itself, but unsurprisingly, these usually don't make for good movies.

Army of Lovers

2007-09-30T20:57:00.000+01:00

If only Haddaway had read Die Liebe und wie sich Leidenschaft Erklart by Bas Kast, a German journalist that tries to explain everything that science knows about Love. It's a fascinating book, in that it manages to strip away all the layers of poetry and anecdotal evidence to prove that it is a horrible debilitating mental illness.

MRI scans show the same kind of activity in the brain as starving people and drug addicts have. I can't find a good picture, but trust me it looks like those "your brain on drugs" T-shirts from the late eighties. After casually mentioning bizarre subjects like biological warfare between sperm themselves, he moves on to what is the central idea; Love is pretty much the same as any other form of madness. A mix of evolutionary pressures, behavioral psychological quirks and brain chemistry imbalances.

The U.S. army apparently considered it as a weapon quite recently. The Idea was that an irresistible homosexual attraction among enemy soldiers would be a blow to morale. How the times have changed. The Theban commander Gorgidas created "the army of lovers" a.k.a. the Theban Band in 378 b.c., expecting them to be better fighters than the average because of their love for each other.
Like these guys, but less camp.

Love is a destructive force. It turns you into a gibbering idiot, more than willing to trade your dignity and freedom for snippets of attention from a fantasy figure that only exists in your own brain anyway. You can live a long and healthy life with a pet as well.

There's no reason to expect that your fulfillment as a human being depends on anybody else. The whole notion of Romantic Love is aggressively marketed as the solution to all your problems. When was the last time you saw a film or TV show or read a book that didn't have it as at least a subplot? A cynic might even say that it's the new opiate of the masses. I wouldn't say that, of course, but then I'm a Romantic.

Disposable Pigs

2007-09-21T14:17:00.000+01:00

Feminism's fundaments are shaking a bit. The ridiculous infighting that's been going on for years still hasn't lead anywhere or proved anything. Christian women have been claiming that women are happier as housewives. New scientific research is looking into the bizarre new field of gender differences. Looks like men really are better at reading maps.

There really is a fundamental difference between men's brains and women's. Marianne Legato claims that the testosterone bombardment that male fetuses endure in the womb changes the set-up of their brains irrevocably and is responsible for not wanting to talk about relationships, never asking for directions, leaving the toilet seat up and all the other old chestnuts female comedians are so fond of. Her book sounds like a 'hilarious' tip from Oprah's book club, but is actually quite interesting.

Oddly enough, this whole field of study also has an explanation for why there are so few female geniuses. Various tests have proven that women score better on intelligence tests than men, on average.But this is mainly because almost every women in the class scored a little above or below the average result, with very little variation at all. The male students scored in the entire possible range, with a lot more students with perfect scores and a lot more students with the lowest possible score.

That weird Y-chromosome is the only possible culprit. It's mostly filled with crap, which is why there are more men in jail, and more male Nobel prize winners. In evolutionary terms men are useless after sex and they are perfect for all kinds of weird genes that would only get in the way of taking care of babies. Desmond Morris, of Naked Ape fame, even believes that the male lifestyle is perfect for Nobel prize winners. The borderline autism needed to become the best in a given subject and then destroy it and rebuild it from the ground up doesn't go well with being a responsible adult, it seems.

Men seem tragically doomed in every way. There really is no need for them to do any of the things they do. The fact that inventing a printing press also incidentally helps the survival of genes is a testament to Nature's monomaniacal dedication to a single principle.

Late-breaking news; Men are useful for something besides pickle jars. Scientists have been stumped about human longevity for years. Human lifespans are longer than those of other mammals, even taking our cushy lifestyle into consideration. All the other Mammals have a so-called 'wall of death' after female menopause. Human societies, based primarily on the transfer of information from one generation to the next, have a long history of pairing older men with younger women. This is a bizarre tactic for most other animals, for whom the elderly are far from viable. This self-imposed selection process has bred longevity into the human race, ensuring the survival of human beings of both sexes well after the female menopause. So dirty old men are the key element to their own survival. You've got to love Nature, every time you think you know what culture is, it stretches the boundaries again.

War paint

2007-09-15T02:13:00.000+01:00

Last month, most of the Dutch magazines had labels on all of their photos that had been manipulated with Photoshop. This was part of a campaign to make people aware of the unrealistic beauty ideal portrayed in the media. It started with a documentary by Sunny Bergman and has now moved towards suing the cosmetics and fashion industry.

What exactly they hope to achieve with this is unclear. A kind of perpetually sexless society where everyone just wears burlap sacks? A realistic beauty ideal? What the hell does that even mean? Aren't ideals quintessentially unrealistic? Isn't the whole beauty ideal a sham anyway? Look at the enormous range of porn available. Call it fetish or niche, but it proves that there is no uniform taste.

Except for one thing; fertility. That's actually what make-up is all about. Apparently, it's a way to fake fertility cues in the face, like red, full lips, dewy doe-eyes, etc. The perfect camouflage for a woman who doesn't want to be out of step with a world full of fertile women in magazines. Long legs, big breasts and long, lustrous hair, all useful attributes for a potential mate; Fast, plenty of food for offspring, good diet and grooming.

Women are the ones who insist on unrealistic representations. Any woman can and will give you an accurate rating of all the other women she knows. Women spend a lot of time criticising each other and now the system of criticism they built. Fashion magazines are filled with beautiful women, yet men seem remarkably reluctant to read them. "10 ways to throw up without your man noticing." might have something to do with it.

Men don't notice the difference when you've gained five pounds, they're hard pressed to notice you've gained ten. Or lost that amount, for that matter. So, is it the industry's fault for marketing to women's fears and insecurities? Maybe, but mostly it's women's own fault for caring so much about other people's opinions, especially if they're coming from an advertisement.

Food fetishism

2007-08-31T22:50:00.000+01:00

We all love cooking shows, don't we? But I spend a lot more time getting my food from the paper hat caste than making bread from scratch. And I know I'm not alone in this. So why is it that part of my brain wants to watch back-to-back foie gras battles and another part can't say no to greasy burgers?

Maybe it's because of the elaborate food-guilt-fear-of-death complex the health mafia have been pushing. Don't just think of yourself or the cows that are already dead, think of the children. Despite your best reasoning, you just want whatever delivers the most fat and protein the quickest. Besides, dieting makes you fat. If this seems ridiculous, just ask anyone who's ever been on one. If you eat less than you eat now, all you do is train your body to make do with less food. If instead, you excersise more, you'll lose weight. (Geoffrey Cannon and Hetty Eintzig, "Dieting makes you Fat" London, 1983.)Why, if this is true, do people still subject themselves to it? Perhaps because we feel more comfortable with masochism than with excersise.

But it's gone a lot further than that. Everywhere you look you'll run across yoghurt-like products that claim to help digestion by importing a bacterial culture into your intestines. This is patently ridiculous, considering that these bacteria have to travel through your stomach and survive the acid and all the other defense mechanisms before they get there. Chances are slim that any will live to tell the tale. They don't tell you that these bacteria are native to your intestinal tract anyway, and considering their method of reproduction, this is like bringing coal to Newcastle. One might even suggest that this is why it's so hard to disprove the claims. Nevertheless, the wealth of qualifiers in for instance Danone's research has an air of a reversed burden of proof. And, in case you were wondering, all the names are trademarks, not real scientific classifications. L. Casei defensis indeed. Another product you're better of stuffing up your ass.

Additives are mostly beneficial, frozen vegetables are as nutritious as fresh ones, all the meat you eat has been rotting for a few days, so you can digest it, the macrobiotic brown rice diet will kill you, Chinese restaurants regularly serve you six-month-old meat, etc, etc. The only conclusion you can draw is that now that smoking, drinking, sex and drugs are all "problems", food is the next thing to get regulated to death in effort to save people from themselves. As usual, no effort is made to look at real problems or reliable scientific conclusions, everything is left to rhetoric playing on fear. Who really gives a fuck which country has the thinnest children anyway? What do you want? A cookie?

I actually know why I don't go out of my way to improve the quality of my food, aside from the fact that it doesn't seem to matter. It just feels too much like excersise, and the best food is in your starving mind anyway.

Jesus has a brand new bag

2007-08-20T01:52:00.000+01:00

One more religious post, because they got my ire up again and I don't have any wood to chop. I first became acquainted with the cheesy, but warm atmosphere of christian youth groups when I was about eight. I had a great time in a christian tent doing all kinds of handcrafts and singing songs for about a week, while my dad tried to win a sailing competition. Apparently I told my parents that Jesus was the captain of my life now. I have to applaud my parents for their self-restraint. If one of my kids said something like that, I don't know what I would do. One day, as the competition wrapped up, they were suddenly gone and I was in charge of my own spiritual well-being again.

It wasn't until years later that I had the misfortune of running into someone who for some reason thought I would love to hear some awesome christian music. I've forgotten this person's name, but I'll never forget the glib nebbish stylings of DC Talk;

I do kind of blame them for making fuddy-duddy christian record execs realise that Jesus-themed prog-rock wasn't really doing it for kids anymore, and that they had to conspicuously ape whatever style was in, without ever compromising the same old message of useful conformity, disguised as 'totally out there' rebellion.

CNN-reporter Christiane Amanpour's God's Warriors special report has been running this clip as a preview and it scares the bejesus out of me. Reject popular culture and embrace the fun-loving spirit of the Nuremberg rallies, it seems. After Jesus Camp, I hoped teenagers could at least still be counted on to be disgusted by their parents' beliefs, but apparently this is what they're doing now. It's painful to see them use the same techniques for ridiculously out of proportion drama that goths and rap artists use, and still ask them to reject popular culture. It already is popular culture, or virtually indistinguishable from it.

Unfortunately, Ted Haggard's appearances at future battle cry rallies have been discontinued. Thank god we don't have to see his sweaty self-loathing on TV for a while, at least until he forms a new church. He can even claim to be 'cured' now. Looking at the list of televangelists that have strayed in the past, I can't help feeling that it might be more masculine to actively campaign for gay rights. There is a thin line between love and hate, and I'd rather have people thinking I fight for gay rights so aggressively because I secretly want to beat them up. I can just see myself getting caught with a dead gay teenager in the trunk of my car, my massive sideburns and pompadour collapsing into a sweaty mess under the interrogation lamps. Screaming in front of TV cameras about the velvet mafia colluding with the christian right. It was a pink wing conspiracy.

Taking this into account, I wonder how long Ron Luce will last before he's caught naked, oiled and coked up in a pile of teenagers trying to "suck the poison out of him". Luckily, he's got a backup.
* "We will respect the authorities placed in our lives, even though some may not live as honorably as they should."
* "We refuse to be led by those who are morally bankrupt."
Smells like a fresh, young loophole to me.

The cool graphics can't hide the fact that this is christian fascism on the rise, and the more power they get, the bigger the persecution complex. Check out NormalBobSmith.com for some printable flyers you can distribute in your own community. You kids reading this blog are the future of the world, and it is your responsibility to mock these people mercilessly. Also, all adults are tools, obey only me.

Shades of Xenu

2007-08-08T15:06:00.000+01:00

The United states of America has a long history of religious sects incorporating ideas like manifest destiny and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness into their belief system and casting the continent in the role of promised land. This produces a lot of unintended hilarity. Without a couple thousand years of being the fabric of society, these new religions tend to sound as utterly insane as they are. If your only criterium for membership is faith, i.e. gullibility there's really no limit on how dumb your origin story can be. And you can't use the 'tradition excuse', except in the U.S. where tradition can mean anything you've been doing for over a year.

I thought it was just scientologists that added an extra layer of sci-fi, but apparently the Mormons had to jazz up their own origin story at some point.

I love Elohim's 'come to bed' eyes. How could a mere mortal resist? I'm pleasantly surprised by how much more random stuff apparently applies to the Mormons. A couple of years ago, I got to see the temple they opened in Zoetermeer. It's an impressive building that for some reason doesn't really communicate the whole 'church' idea. Here's a side view and this is the entrance. It'd be fine for a palace of justice or something, but a church?

I can't really find any good interior shots, so my description will have to do. Plastic, fake wood and some of the most tasteless pictures of Jesus ever airbrushed. Some of the highlights were the giant plastic oxen supporting the baptismal font, the eternal marriage chamber with mirrors on opposing walls, for that spooky visual effect that will really make you think about how you and your family are an indivisible unit that will live in polygamous bliss on star-base Kola, and the fantastic multi-coloured shag carpets, which made me think of a 1970's Hilton in Bangkok.

The interior was a bit of a slap in the face considering they advertised the use of the best local craftsmen and materials. I doubt there are craftsmen in any developed country who would consider that their best work.

Maybe a lack of taste comes with the territory. They believed the Malaysian carpet dealer when he said his family had been working on this carpet for five thousand years, waiting for a temple to be built. Say what you will about the non-stop child molestation, at least the Catholics actually get good artists when they need to decorate.It's no less gaudy and ridiculous, but at least they had the sense to do it on a massive scale.

Incidentally, the Mormon video led me to this set of videos,
For catholics; How to convert Mormons, a fascinating glimpse into the minds of a group of people trying to use unfamiliar tools like logic and facts to try to convince people that their bizarre assumptions are superior to the Mormons'. This is exactly why liberals can't convince these people, they're just too critical of their own motives and reasoning to ever stand a chance against this kind of monumental self-deception.

Don't abort that Baby

2007-08-01T23:33:00.000+01:00

Everybody's already heard Steven J. Levitt's argument for abortion made in Freakonomics, but I just read another interesting one in Gödel, Escher, Bach; An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Apparently Hofstadter believes the debate to be a an isomorphism problem. It isn't completely correct to describe DNA as the same information that makes up an individual. In biological parlance; It is impossible to separate the genotype from it's chemical context and still expect it to result in a complete phenotype. It doesn't really contain instructions for building an organism, but a set of infinitely complicated triggers for even more byzantine processes, that with the help of a vast array of chemicals nowhere in the code might result in a human being in certain cases.

So the debate is once again shown to be a construct of overeager demagogues simplifying complex situations and railing against or for arbitrary rules. It should make you a lot less anxious about dooming any potential offspring when you masturbate.

Thank god I learned about the legal implications of onanism by watching Legally Blonde. Apparently you could be sued by your semen for willful abandonment. (Unsurprisingly, typing in the terms legally blonde and masturbation on Youtube didn't get me the clip I was looking for.)

To round off, the best example of the same argument in the other direction is a Ray Bradbury story(It's name escapes me, but is probably a wholly unrelated Shakespeare quote, as is his wont to do.), wherein children can be aborted to the age of eight and live in mortal fear of incurring their parents' displeasure.

The main character's self absorbed parents finally get tired of him running around and rationalise their decision to kill him with a pithy; "This is a lot better in the long run, we should never have had a kid, we're just not those kinds of people."
I couldn't agree more.

Bay of Pigs

2007-07-15T22:39:00.000+01:00

I saw "Transformers" last week and even though I knew it would be horrible, some part of me hoped Michael Bay had hired a good screenwriter for once. All I wanted was something I could endure, but it just never materialised. Ridiculous juvenile gags about robots showering snooty FBI agents with oil from conveniently placed groin-gaskets, a completely superfluous story that bears no resemblance to the cartoon, stupidly designed robots and Peter Cullen phoning in all his lines from better episodes of the cartoon. Leave it to Bay to make a movie more 2-dimensional than the cartoon that inspired it.

All the comics, cartoons and TV-shows you loved are already slated to be chopped up in the Hollywood grinder. If you're lucky, someone with a sense of taste will take an interest and make something out of it. Usually, a committee of faceless producers, directors and screenwriters will try to make bland, easily digestible sludge. You can blame them, but it's really your fault.

Mea Culpa, mea maxima culpa. I've seen Armageddon, I've seen Pearl Harbor and I now I've done it again. This is the last time I'm giving Michael Bay my money.

The Onion thoughtfully provided all of us with a list of ten other directors to lavish your loathing on. I agree with all of them, except for Steve Oedekerk. I just really liked Kung Pow, for which I can not in all good conscience apologise.

The Curd Reich

2007-07-05T14:09:00.000+01:00

I just read Popco by Scarlett Thomas. It was one of those books that keep you on the edge of your seat, not because you care about the characters or the plot, but because you think you might if it just gets a little better. I usually stop reading books if they haven't gotten my attention by page 100, but this one of those rare occasions where I kept giving it the benefit of the doubt. Needless to say, I was sorely disappointed.

The main character works for a toy company, but is conflicted about the toy industry and marketing to children in general. She is selected for a weird company retreat where she is subjected to the kind of lateral thinking seminars that would probably bore me in real life as well. She keeps on remembering her fantastic childhood with her grandparents, both excellent mathematicians. This is the vaguely interesting part of the narrative, full of just enough references to Gödel and Erdös to make me want to keep reading.

But there's not nearly as much fun mathematics for humanities people as in for instance "The man who loved only numbers" by Paul Hoffman. Then all of the math is revealed to lead only to cryptography and cryptanalysis, which just so happens to be the subject of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, coincidentally also a better book. It's usually a bad sign, if a book reminds you of other, better books.

All that crypto-babble leads to the macguffin, a necklace with a weird inscription, given to the main character by her grandfather, which, if deciphered will lead to a useful deus ex machina treasure. Luckily the present day plot manages to throw up a little low-level intrigue and a pallid, effete vegan love-interest for our main character at this point.

It turns out, he and a group of other people in the company have been plotting to destroy capitalism from the inside out all along and now they want to recruit her! Thank god she's got a whole bunch of cryptography knowledge and a hidden treasure! The whole thing devolves into a lengthy J'accuse addressed to the corporate world and then an infantile revenge fantasy, which would make even hardened anti-globalists blush. That's right, go ahead and ruin the world's economic infrastructure, that'll help the environment.

That stupid ending ruined an otherwise luke-warm excersise in mediocrity. It reminded me of Angela Carter's "Nights at the Circus", too many subjects cursorily dealt with by a chaotic and thoroughly unsystematic mind, hell-bent on making a hazy point about 'important things'. But where Angela Carter manages to come within an inch of coherence, Scarlett Thomas finally drops the pretense of literature in favor of a blatant agitprop. I don't think we have anything to fear from real-life vegans, though. Their low mineral, low protein diets usually leave them too exhausted to do more than complain.

The Green Carnation

2007-07-05T14:05:00.000+01:00

When I was about twelve years old, I was at a theatre with my parents and various other people for one of those parties with family members and friends of your parents you've never seen before and will never see again. In the entrance hall was a modern art exhibition with some burnt plastic dolls arranged in a pile.

Thinking I was being clever, I said to one of the adults that I could have made that sculpture. This older man was probably a maecenas of some sorts, because he replied that this might be true, but could I have thought of it? I was unable to think of any answer to this and had to bask in the benevolent smile of the victor. 'Touché, child. I win again.', his eyes seemed to say. I was humiliated and didn't speak to anyone for the rest of the evening.

I knew he was wrong somehow, but I didn't know how exactly. It wasn't until years later that I realised what the problem was. Creativity is not the same thing as art. The Greeks separated art and craft into two categories and a truly great piece involved some of both. There has to be some craftsmanship involved, or it's just an idea. There is nothing special about those. Everyone has them all the time.
The opinion I came up with originally is what the average person has been saying since Picasso started doing things out of perspective. I forget where, but someone wrote that "just as art was becoming accessible to the masses, it became incomprehensible to them." They probably imagined droves of enlightened miners signing Marcel Duchamp's name to urinals the world over. The latest generation of performance artists seem to favor pissing in it, whenever they see it hanging on the wall. The erosion of the concept of art has now led to "outsider art" and 3 year old boys making abstract paintings. All this made possible by a gullible audience, greedy dealers and complicit critics. This 12-year-old is apparently a vandal and not an artist.

In Robert Hichens' book The Green Carnation (pdf), which was used as evidence against Oscar Wilde in his 'gross indecency' trial, the main characters, Wilde and Lord Douglas are constantly discussing the ideas of the aesthetic movement, personified by the carnation Wilde wears in his lapel. It's painted green in an attempt to force nature to adapt to it's beautiful artificiality. 'He believed that Art showed the way to Nature and worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth.' The book is full of epigrams about Art, but none of them seem to apply anymore. The whole concept was synonymous with beauty, now it just means concept.

These days it's all about how much theory you know. Not that this is a bad thing, it just means that anyone smart enough, automatically becomes an artist or a critic. The borders between Art, commerce and entertainment have become completely irrelevant. For all the people who use Art as a means of self expression, millions more have never been to a museum or care much about what goes on there. And that's never going to change. Art, with a capital A will always be an elitist activity, especially now that you need to have an education to understand it at all.

But craftsmanship has made a big comeback. In films for the last fifty years or so, in television for the last ten. They're both so technically complex and expensive that it's just not worth the trouble not to take pains. And the pay-off has been fantastic. Now, we've even seen the kinds of complex ideas that made Art so incomprehensible in the first place.

Sadly, technology marches on and the cheaper it gets to film something the more crap will scuttle out of the woodwork. Home video shows were the first wave and reality TV was the second. I shudder to think what the Internet will hath wrought soon.

Skin Deep

2007-06-26T22:22:00.000+01:00

I just watched "Are you hot? The search for America's Sexiest People" and after trying to second guess the judges and laughing at the behind the scenes' footage of people crying because they were judged too harshly, my brain started working and ruined the fun.

Just as I was really getting into Lorenzo Lamas' frame of mind when he points a laser at barely conceivable flaws in a pretty girls skin, I remembered one of those statistical studies; Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman, 'Attractive faces are only average', in Psychological Science (1990), p.115-121.

The set-up in their test was to grab a random set of fifteen black and white pictures of either men or women and show them to test-subjects of the opposite sex. The subjects would rate the pictures on how attractive the people in them were.

One of the pictures was a grayscale composite of the others, i.e. if you put all the pictures in a raster and assigned a value between white and black for every pixel, you'd only have to take the average of all the values to come up with the 'average' picture. This picture was consistently ranked the most attractive.As John Erler explains in this bit about Roman beauty standards, this might well be how we perceive beauty as human beings anyway.

But the herd of homogenous himbo's and the gaggle of garrulous guttersnipes that manage to claw themselves to the top of the celebrity pile manage a neat bit of regression to the average in more fields than one. Scientology triumphs there for a reason.

Juvenal's satires gave us 'Mens sana in corpore sano.' A useful phrase for sadistic gym teachers to torture their hapless students with. What it actually says is;'Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano.' ,which means something like: 'Wouldn't it be great if there was a healthy mind in a healthy body'. Juvenal's snipe at the vogue for physical exercise in first century Rome.

I've always equated the average with intense boredom and I know I'm not alone in this. The most beautiful thing I saw this week were two hideous people on the train kissing messily and without the slightest hint of shame in the seat opposite mine. It was at least as endearing as it was nauseating. I hope they have intelligent children.

Hindsight

2007-06-15T00:07:00.000+01:00

I was reading this article on the onion av club and suddenly became tired with the whole business of critiquing popular culture. It's a kind of melancholy that afflicts the coveted 18 to 40 demographic these days. A clever friend of mine (I can't find any of his papers online, but maybe somebody knows what this entailed.) once said that we were living in an age of instant nostalgia.

It makes a lot of sense to keep cannibalising previous decades rather than define this one. They did it in previous decades as well. It's no coincidence that Blue Velvet looks like it was made in the fifties. Nor was the reappearance of the Woodstock festival in the nineties a charming cosmic accident. It's not like culture moves in a half a Kondratieff cycle though. The mundane and much more likely explanation is thirty years is a decent amount of time for a teenager to grow up into a captain of entertainment industry and write a love letter to his favourite fad.

But all these information age tools have turned all of us into critics. We're living in an increasingly self reflexive world, constantly looking back. A classical metaphor like Orpheus looking back at Eurydice springs to mind. We can't help but look back even though we know she'd just behind us, and we kill her with preemptive nostalgia. If we'd only waited a few more years, she would have come out of the underworld unscathed.

This isn't doing me much good. Nor is it working for anybody else really. I'm only 25, which means I'm far too young to not recognise any of the bands on MTV. I doubt most 18-year olds have any idea either. A band is launched, make a video and seem to disappear immediately. Only to be remembered a few weeks later. I'm guessing that hurts the record industry more than illegal downloads.

I'm worried I'm helping create a barren, featureless pop culture landscape. Me and everyone else trying to sprout opinions, but finding no footholds, no purchase, while we try to claw our way to the top of the irony mountain, unaware that it's already falling over, ready to crush us under the weight of our own opinions.

Goldilocks

2007-06-04T09:41:00.000+01:00

The classical feminist viewpoint about veils is that they are by definition an alienating identity-erasing scourge. They signify these women as some man's property and all that this implies.

When the whole French debate broke loose last year, the brand new idea (for me at least) that veils were in some way empowering to wear, reared it's ugly head. That, like so many other feminist core issues this was essentially about a woman's right to choose. Apparently, it's just as bad to deny women the right to wear the veil as it is to force them. Cue exploding heads.

This year, there's a whole new feminist wave starting to swell. Ariel Levy just wrote female chauvinist pigs, in which she expounds the view that some women have gone too far in their quest for self-empowerment.

Specifically, she argues that they've mistaken sexual power for the be-all and end-all of liberation, only leaving themselves open to consumer culture's faux-empowerment. It does seem likely that after justice, truth, beauty and the concept of revolution, empowerment can now be sold as a commodity. So that's why it always looks like so much fun.

So, to sum up; Women acting like whores is not cool, neither is women acting like nuns.
As a man, I can't say either side is appealing to me, so this time I am going for a compromise. I want my porridge just hot enough.

Net Worth

2007-05-29T23:31:00.000+01:00

I've been reading pointlesswasteoftime.com for a couple of years. Funny stuff, but David Wong should stay away from debating issues with common sense. It inevitably leads to boring, pragmatic solutions to problems that don't really concern that many people, nor should they.
This article is case in point. It describes a well known problem, atheists becoming as dogmatic and humourless as the knee jerk christian defense squad. You already know where he's going and how it's all going to try and heal the world a little. Boring.

I also strongly disagree with the notion that everyone believes that human life is valuable. I for one don't. It's a massive conceit for a human being to say to other human beings that he himself and everybody listening to him is just great. That in fact, we should celebrate our reproductive process and the people that invariable pile up as a result of this, because they are beautiful and unique snowflakes.

It's all a bit strange seeing as he also wrote this article on how it is physically impossible to care about people you don't know. Just generalising your hope for the well-being of your friends and family to the whole of humanity because you don't want to be seen as a dick is no way to live.

Human life has no intrinsic value. It has relative value for you and if you could quantify the good that a particular human life does for the whole of humanity, you could even come up with a pretty good relative value to the world. The world of human beings that is.

Alternate history buffs tend to point out that killing Hitler as a child doesn't necessarily mean you make the world a better place. This book by Stephen Fry is the only one that springs to mind just now, but it's interesting to consider that if you can't conclusively state that killing Hitler would make the world a better place, how can you say that letting for instance, your eventual children live won't spell doom for someone or even some race of people. And that's, once again, just from our perspective. Just think of all the species we know we caused the extinction of.

Yet, even though its impossible to say how much a human life is worth, we guesstimate on a daily basis. Sure, you'll say, but not where it concerns life and death. Sadly this isn't true. Some people have even done it knowingly. It's called abortion. The pro-abortion side is definitely saying that the life of the mother is more valuable than the life of the potential child.
But there's no way of knowing that for sure. Chaos theory was made for situations like this and it pretty much comes up with the only half decent answer, which is "depends".

The Christians aren't exactly blameless here though. Even though they reckon that all life is valuable, they obviously value Christian lives over others. You can dress it up as a free will vs. determination question, but what it boils down to is they should focus on stopping Christian abortions, mainly. It's kind of a cruel charade if your life was saved by abortion protesters and then you go to hell anyway because your parents just never follow through with anything.

The whole debate is much longer and more complicated than that of course. What I'm really getting at is that instead of being all reasonable and ending your plea with a "can't we all just get along" friendship move, why not hold both sides in contempt for their lazy thinking and hypocrisy?

Fuck the whales, let's save ourselves

2007-05-28T22:22:00.000+01:00

I was actually trying to write something else, but I had to get this out of the way. Last year I re-read what was one of my favourite books when I was a teenager, Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein. I was a bit annoyed to discover that it's actually an incest pamphlet. Even every possible form of justifiable incest can't cover 600 pages, so the hero is also immortal (because of all the incest).

There is one bit of information that worked its way into my consciousness through the years though. In one lengthy note from the notebooks the protagonist accumulates over the years, he describes the trouble with environmentalists.

The problem is their insistence on the difference between for instance, a human dam and a beaver dam. Human dams are despicable, but beaver dams are completely natural. It betrays something deeper. Environmentalists are wallowing in the deepest depths of self-loathing and they want you to join them there.

Tell me you don't feel a rush of anger after the twinge of guilt when you see one of those commercials for a dying spotted leopard, staring at you with big, sad leopard-kitten eyes. Frankly, I already have enough to care about without a bunch of patronising patchouli-heads nagging me about dying animals.

There's a new breed of hippies on the block, though. They have a broad support base and a much more realistic reason for wanting us all to save energy and all that hassle. Self-preservation is something I can really relate to.

Just three months ago, I knew we were doomed. Now, it looks like everyone is talking about it. that doesn't mean that anything is happening, but it's better than nothing. And multinationals seem to be interested in making this the next big economic boom. I can't think of a better way to get it done soon.

So there you have it, hope for the future, in this day and age. Who would have thought?

P.S. Gore is tackling blatant media manipulation in his next book, ominously titled the Assault on Reason. If it's anywhere near as successful as his last attempt at changing the world, we might be looking at a happier, healthier world soon. I can't wait for someone to summarise the boring, unwatchable movie for me!

I've been working on a new kind of cynicism

2007-05-28T21:46:00.000+01:00

They say it's a typically adolescent defense mechanism, but nothing beats cynicism when combined with earnest caring people. It's one of those moods/philosophies that yearn for an audience.

But I am getting tired of ceaselessly carping just for the heck of it. I have resolved to beautify my cynicism. Out with the black, in with the pink. It never really was very gothy, all self pity/-loathing and suicidal leanings transmuted by the dark wings of the angel of death into the mixed metaphors and whiny content of teenage depression poetry.
Nor was it the cold, clammy hands of death, take no prisoners, youth is wasted on the young, experience-based misanthropy of the old.

It has to be new, exciting and fresh. Filled with a certain piquant bile that will refresh and delight as it scars and maims. 'My, you certainly are being cynical about some fashionable things today.' they'll say, admiringly. If I do meet Diogenes in the Elysian fields after my undoubtedly glamorous death, I want him to weep at the grace, beauty and conspicuous ease with which I surpassed his efforts.

But my cynicism will not be a cold, hard, cruel thing made of brittle belletrist bon-mots, a souffle of sotto voce sagacities. No, it will not be devoid of Substance. Its richness and depth will astound you, layers of deep understanding alternating with benevolent humour, slashed with an acidic aftertaste, just right to bring out all the sugary goodness at its heart.

No, it will be a palace, a bejeweled hall, adorned with exquisite chinoiserie and other treasures of the orient. An ashen garden of glass trees and platinum roses glinting with menace and malevolence in a cold, unforgiving sun.

All right, so maybe it will be a cold, hard, cruel place, but never a thing. Rather a universe. Come all, you with black hearts and teeth and talons. All of you can come and live there.

Looking back over these last paragraphs, it seems I haven't outgrown the poetry just yet. But I promise it will improve.

Jumping through hoops

2007-05-20T23:04:00.000+01:00

I spent last Saturday at my sister's sorority's brother and sister day. After the requisite drinks we were herded towards a leisure centre. An odd looking tiny lady gave us an hour long laughing lesson, which was absolutely wonderful. Ten minutes of laughing, then ten minutes of meditation.

I was a bit surprised at how few people laughed. My little brother couldn't manage a chuckle even, and my sister had to be tickled. Most of my meditation was about this. Maybe it was because i was still sleepy, but I didn't feel the slightest bit embarrassed about rotflmaopimptime.

This is a bit odd, because I usually feel somewhat embarrassed about everything I've ever done. I did get that familiar feeling when the next activity was announced. We would be instructed in the new dance craze sweeping the nation. It's called jumpstyle and is probably the stupidest, most blatantly manufactured fad I've ever had the misfortune of being embroiled in.

This Classic song is what started it off or maybe this one. Now they're doing the national anthem. The cold, dead look in these people's eyes isn't an affectation, they really are that stupid.

Last year it was politicians debating in rap-battle format in a misguided attempt to win the youth vote and this year we get to see it all over again with this. As someone who can be described as a "youth", I'm appalled even at the suggestion they might do it. As for the "youths" who might like it, they don't vote.

Just as I was bracing myself for the worst, it was spoofed. Thank god for comedians. Now, if they do it, they'll look stupid. Let's hope they're as scared of that as I am.

Fame is the new currency

2007-05-15T11:31:00.000+01:00

Its time to re-evaluate Paris Hilton. First of all, no one that stupid would survive taking a shower every day. If she really had the sub-normal IQ she pretends to have, she'd have won a Darwin award years ago. It's a common dating strategy among women to pretend to be more stupid than they really are. This would be to make men feel less insecure. But it's not just a dating strategy, its a way of life for millions of people. I never even considered it until I saw a BBC documentary about it, but its a remarkably successful way to live your life. Ignorance is Bliss.
Paris is just trying to get everyone to notice her and its working. George W. Bush does something similar and seems to work for him too.
But unlike Bush, Paris Hilton gets everything she wants. Fame and Money. She's already raked in 7 million bucks this year. You have to admire that entrepreneurial guile she has.

Paychecks

2007-05-14T10:28:00.000+01:00

This is my favourite unintentionally funny trailer. The first thirty seconds are completely hilarious and then it goes on to overemphasise its pedigree, with a lot of shots of a confused Ben Affleck. I completely forgot about that and was seduced by the concept and the afore mentioned pedigree. Also, Affleck was a little less of a walking punchline back then.
You've got to marvel at the trailer guy, he manages to convey contempt for the audience, the studio's anxiety over this thing probably bombing and Ben Affleck's stupidity while still making you want to see the movie.
I've seen a couple more trailers like this, but not a single one of them is so blatantly grasping at straws. Introduce concept, Introduce star; He's the best at this concept..yadda yadda yadda see the movie!

Amor vincit Omnia

2007-05-12T11:15:00.000+01:00

George Carlin said it best; Fuck the Children. He's right, they do get entirely too much attention. especially considering what's done in their name. No violence or nudity on TV, no plots, no characters before 9 0'clock. Their advocates want to live in a disneyfied world where no one ever feels bad and they're remarkably willing to give up individual rights to get it.

The current South African government's slogan is Ubuntu, which translates to something like togetherness, community. This kind of slogan would do well in Europe or the U.S. right now. Communism used to have the state as highest ideal and current christian-democratic thinking is moving in the same direction. Family values, the children's best interest is nothing more than a patronising system of keeping up appearances.

If your neighbours believe you are a good person, then you must be. The extreme end of this reasoning leads to a world of homogenised opinions and casual thought control. The current whipping boy is the video game industry. God forbid that they release a game with violence. What will happen to children exposed to this filth? They will become kill crazy maniacs, there's no doubt about it.

It's the constant violence in the media that's making us scared, but it's not turning us into murderers. You can conclusively demonstrate to a five year old the difference between fantasy and reality, but nobody seems to want that responsibility. Some people would rather live in a world were things like this didn't happen. Surprisingly enough no one seems to want to talk about the falling crime rates. Those don't sell newspapers.

I admit, it's partially my fault. I thrill to tales of murder and rape, greed and corruption. Practically beating my chest, wailing "O tempora, O mores!" My favourite villain is the corrupt or incompetent politician. Especially the 'Family Values' types. I can't wait to feel that old rush of righteous anger when they get caught in flagrante with a doe-eyed page.

In Marisha Pessl's 'Special topics in Calamity Physics' the heroine is constantly awkwardly quoting academic books, real and fake. By the far the most intriguing is this one;
"Leontyne Bennett skillfully dissected in 'The Commonwealth of Lost Vanities'(1969) Virgil's renowned quotation 'Love conquers all.'For centuries upon centuries we have been misinterpreting this famed trio of words. The uninformed masses breathlessly hold up this dwarfish phrase as a justification for snogging in public squares, abandoning wives, cuckolding husbands, for the escalating divorce rate, for swards of bastard children begging for handouts in the Whitechapel and Aldgate tube stations - when in fact, there is nothing remotely encouraging or cheerful about this oft-quoted phrase. The Latin poet wrote 'Amor vincit omnia' or 'Love conquers all'. He did not write, 'Love frees all' or 'liberates' all, and therein lies the first degree of our flagrant misunderstanding. Conquer: to defeat, subjugate, massacre, cream, make mincemeat out of. Surely this cannot be a positive thing. And then he wrote, 'conquers all' - not exclusively the unpleasant things, destitution, assassination, burglary, but all, including pleasure, peace, common sense, liberty and self-determination. And thus we may appreciate that Virgil's words are not encouragement, but rather a caveat, a cue to evade, shirk, elude the feeling at all costs, else we risk the massacre of the things we hold most dear, including ones sense of self"

This corresponds neatly to my issue with these fearful parents. Their love or more accurately their fear for the life of their children is destroying the concepts of individuality and personal responsibility and since it's effecting me personally (Forty a day smoker, unrepentant)I'm getting up on my high horse and condemning it.

Self-preservation evidenced by an overprotective attitudes towards one's own offspring, fear of death, loneliness and lust. God is Love, people.

Dog eats Dr. Phil's homework

2007-05-09T12:24:00.000+01:00

During a recent bout of unemployment I became familiar with Dr. Phil's eponymous daytime TV show. Unsurprisingly, it becomes grating on repeated viewing. Instead of seeing an earnest southern psychiatrist quip about cute relationship problems, one is confronted with blatantly prepped guests blandly mulling their way towards Phil's cookie-cutter answers to severe psychological problems. A little disclaimer at the end and Phil's assertion that he will get them help from a therapist in their home town is meant to soothe the skeptics.

If you can stand the platitudes and glaringly obvious statements by the host, you will be rewarded with 45 minutes of pure schadenfreude. Phil competently wraps up years of simmering issues in the allotted time and ends with a folksy admonition reminiscent of Jerry Springer's catchphrase; 'Until next time take care of yourselves and each other.' That is essentially what this show is, Springer with less sleaze and more pop psychology.

Phil has made numerous mentions of doing his homework on the show. By this, he means that he has reviewed the guest/patient's file, their statements, their possible condition and has prepared some tailor-made advice.

However, when blithely commenting on social issues Phil fails to stick to this principle. When the first round of recriminations started after the Virginia Tech shootings, Phil bolted for the blame-game bandwagon on Larry King.

"And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me -- common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that. We're going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose. "

Dr. Phil should stay away from analysing the mass consciousness on talks shows without checking the statistics first. He's clearly no worse than the average pundit, but providing easy answers to complex problems works infinitely better when the worst that can happen is that a fat woman stays desperately unhappy. Supporting a tissue of lies that exists only to vilify youth culture because its incomprehensible to people over thirty is stupid at best.

Where it comes from

2007-05-09T12:16:00.000+01:00

Knock, knock! Who's there, in th' other
devil's name? Faith, here's an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O,come in, equivocator.

William Shakespeare - Macbeth Act II, Scene III