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Oh hell, MTV plays what certainly looks like a bad public relations stunt replete with silly hair and some acting that makes the WWF look Shakespearean and the next thing you know the internets are all blowing up because Barack Obama called Kanye West a jackass.

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by Tom Farmer

Life in the Wrong Lane: Why Journalists Go in When Everyone Else Wants Out by Greg Dobbs is a vivid time-travel dispatch from the heyday of big-iron network TV news.
iUniverse, 205pp

“Sadat has been shot. If you can get to Cairo, do it.”

Breathes there a real reporter who would not thrill to this flash, sent June 6, 1981 by ABC News to its forces across Europe? Got to ice that dinner date, honey. Here’s another chance to narrate history… and spend a fresh bucket of money.

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THE DEPROLIFERATOR — In a previous post, I wrote about how the Obama administration should borrow a page from master framers like George Lakoff and Drew Westen. It should present its disarmament initiatives as honoring the man who’s a latter-day saint to many — Ronald Reagan — by realizing his dream of a world free of nuclear weapons.

And make no mistake, as Paul Boyer writes in an Arms Control Today review of a new book, Reagan’s Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World From Nuclear Disaster, according to authors Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson. . .

Above all else, Reagan was a man of peace whose unwavering objective, rooted in his personal history and reinforced by his brush with death in 1981, was a world free of nuclear weapons. Full story »

It was a back and forth affair between the icons of punk and the tragic legends of Southern Rock. In the end, The Sex Pistols put on a final surge to defeat Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Results: #10 The Sex Pistols 48%; Lynyrd Skynyrd 36%; Little Feat 9%; Supergrass 3%; Judas Priest 3%; Alice in Chains 0%.

S&R’s contest to name the greatest band of all time shifts now to the Hollywood Bowl Region, where one of the single most popular and influential artists in history puts his legacy on the line against a pod that represents perhaps more critical acclaim than any other in the tournament. Yes, folks, this is a thinking fan’s dream pod. Full story »

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“Take a walk with me,” I said.

My students, some twenty-one freshmen, followed me into the hallway. “We’re going to take a walk around the building,” I told them. “I want you to just notice things.”

With my cowboy boots clicking on the tile floors, I moseyed down the hall with the pack of students behind me.

Some of them chit-chatted with each other. Almost all of them wondered what the heck we were doing: If this class was Composition and Critical Thinking, why were we going for a stroll? Full story »

Last week, I was in our town’s largest grocery store when my son asked if I would buy him a toy.

“I don’t have any money for toys today,” I said.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because I’m not lucky,” I said. “Besides, you have enough toys to start you own Kmart. Why do you need another toy?”

“I need another toy so I won’t scream,” he said. “If I scream, you won’t like it. Mommy doesn‘t.”

“I don’t understand. Do you want toys or ice cream? Joey, I don’t have money to just throw away. I‘ve never had money to throw away. Well, once I did, and it involves ice cream. You did just say ice cream, right?” Full story »

Part 3…God’s own medicine

The Obama administration rescinded the Bush administration’s quixotic order to eradicate poppy fields in Afghanistan. Judging by hectare cultivation numbers and harvest yields, the plan was either never fully implemented or failed miserably. At the very least, farmers in Afghanistan are no longer being punished for trying to make a living. Like Bush, the Obama administration wants to reform Afghan agriculture and move it away from poppy cultivation. Unfortunately, these plans are still “being finalized”. To understand the problems inherent in the administration’s plans and possible futures for Afghan agriculture we need to examine Afghanistan’s situation, the opium poppy, and the history of opium cultivation.

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by Joseph Domino

There is perhaps no topic in America where we talk out of two sides of our mouths more than Education. Education is in crisis at all levels, but at the college and university level it cries out and no one seems to be listening. Everyone says education is important but our standards continue to drop and we fall behind other countries. Faculty, the hearts and souls of universities, are being relegated to “operating costs” which are forever scrutinized for reduction. The adjunct system, around a long time, provides that cost control, and it has slowly been eroding opportunities for full-time professors and the salaries and benefits that accompany that status.

When adjunct faculty handle a full-time course load plus work other part-time jobs to make ends meet it compromises the quality of their instruction which affects students. Full story »

Part  2…hatin’ the player, not the game

The Senate is prepared to discuss the problem of Afghan corruption at length. It must be all the marble and parliamentary silly-talk that makes these men immune to irony, because portions of the report’s section entitled “The Scope of Corruption” sound like a description of American politics if the reader mad-libs a little. The Senate is very worried about the scope of corruption from the drug trade in Afghanistan. It forgets, in its rush to explain how horrid Afghanistan is, that it already admitted to setting the stage for this very situation when the U.S. invaded in 2001. Or maybe the Honorable Senators think that they weren’t there, cheering on “the good war”…that they had no responsibility to oversee the comedy of errors that led us to this point they feel so compelled to decry. In any case, the Senators know evil when they see it. And they’re not afraid to dedicate three paragraphs to giving Ahmed Wali Karzai the Billy Carter treatment.

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Results: In our latest match-up we saw an upset that perhaps wasn’t such an upset, especially once voters took into account the full history of Fleetwood Mac instead of just the better-known ’70s popular successes. In the end, Mac picked up a little momentum at the end and nipped The Byrds in one of our closest contests to date. The numbers: Fleetwood Mac 34%; #7 The Byrds 31%; The Velvet Underground 13%; XTC 13%; INXS 9%; The Guess Who 0%. Fleetwood Mac advances to the Great 48.

We now step over to the Budokan region, where our search for the greatest band of all time gets a little eclectic. Full story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Ever wonder why Mohamed ElBaradei, retiring director-general of a wonkish international agency like the International Atomic Agency (IAEA), was forced to play Secret Agent Man during his tenure while the IAEA aped Interpol? After all, as conceived in 1956, the three pillars of the IAEA’s mission were nuclear verification and security, safety, and technology transfer.

Just as I was wondering at what point the IAEA went on the offensive, the answer appeared in an assessment of ElBaradei’s two terms. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a publication from whose title many instinctively recoil. But its origins, in fact, lay in how the scientists and engineers who had worked on the Manhattan Project recoiled from what they had wrought. Andreas Persbo and Mark Hibbs wrote the article in question, The ElBaradei legacy. Full story »

So now there’s talk among the higher reaches of the Labour government to put together some sort of commission, or study group, to look into whether the Special Relationship has been damaged by the Libyan prisoner fiasco. Given that the government, and the Labour party, have acted dishonourably throughout this whole affair, this takes more than a little cheek, but it’s what we expect from a government and party led by Gordon Brown, who, if anything, is proving to be a duplicitous and mendacious as his predecessor—but whose sights are set considerably lower. Blair wanted to run the world (and, indeed, still does)—Brown just wants to stop the weekly explosions that have characterized his government since he became Prime Minister two years ago.

But it’s the Special Relationship that’s of interest here. We were, I admit, somewhat surprised to learn, when we arrived on these shores eleven years ago, that this was still a major concern. We thought this was something that Churchill and Roosevelt had during that last good war, but had died a slow death from attrition. Certainly we weren’t giving it a lot of thought when we moved here. But it was surprising, still, to discover that it’s taken very seriously here.
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According to Fortune Magazine, the largest American company in 2009 was Exxon Mobil Its total revenues were $442.85 billion. Second was Wal-Mart, with total revenues of $405.61 billion. Rounding out the top 10 were Chevron ($263.16 billion), ConocoPhillips ($230.76 billion), General Electric ($183.21 billion), General Motors ($148.98 billion), Ford Motor ($146.28 billion), AT&T ($124.03 billion), Hewlett-Packard ($118.36 billion), and Valero Energy ($118.30 billion).

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world. Full story »

“The culture wars are over,” says journalist Charles Pierce, “and the idiots have won.”

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

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Part 1…lying sidelong on a divan in the Senate cloakroom

That John Kerry and his Senate Foreign Relations Committee are a regular bunch of cards. Their Aug. 10 report, “Afghanistan’s Narco War: Breaking the Link Between Drug Traffickers and Insurgents”, is funnier than a barrel of drunk monkeys. It opens with the statement: “At the end of March when President Obama fulfilled his pledge to make the war in Afghanistan a higher priority, he cast the U.S. role more narrowly than the previous administration: Defeat Al Quaeda and eliminate its safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To accomplish these twin tasks, however, the President is making a practical commitment to Afghanistan that is far greater than his predecessor—more troops, more civilians, and more money.”

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Results: Surprisingly, the anticipated controversy never developed, as Janis Joplin dispatched one of the strongest pods of competitors we’ve seen so far. The numbers: #8 Janis Joplin 47%; Stevie Ray Vaughan 34%; Bob Seger/Silver Bullet Band 6%; Paul McCartney/Wings 6%; Catherine Wheel 3%; MC5/Wayne Kramer 3%. Janis moves on to the Great 48.

Up next in our quest for the greatest band of all time, a band of jangle-pop innovators faces off with a couple of the most popular bands ever (and a couple of the most influential bands ever). Full story »

• EPA Office of the Inspector General recommends EPA enforce Clean Water Act
• Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote
• New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion
• Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes
• First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational
• Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Last week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the EPA’s internal monitoring organization, the Office of the Inspector General, found that the EPA’s current approach to controlling excess nutrient deposition into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River was not working. Full story »

What do you see?