TalkLeft has the gory details.
I loathe that woman.
by John Cole| 47 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture
TalkLeft has the gory details.
I loathe that woman.
by John Cole| 27 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Humorous, Popular Culture
This is too much:
US President George Bush is to host White House talks on British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.
Cohen, 35, creator of Ali G, has infuriated the Kazakhstan government with his portrayal of Borat, a bumbling Kazakh TV presenter.
And now a movie of Borat’s adventures in the US has caused a diplomatic incident.
The opening scene, which shows Borat lustily kissing his sister goodbye and setting off for America in a car pulled by a horse, had audiences in stitches when it was first shown last week.
But the film, which has just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, has prompted a swift reaction from the Kazakhstan government, which is launching a PR blitz in the States.
Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev is to fly to the US to meet President Bush in the coming weeks and on the agenda will be his country’s image.
President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy “educational” TV spots and print advertisements about the “real Kazakhstan” in a bid to save the country’s reputation before the film is released in the US in November.
In other news, Toronto protestors last year threatened to boycott Blockbuster if they carried the tenth anniversary edition of Canadian Bacon. Or maybe I just made that up.
From The “You Can’t Make This Shit Up” DepartmentPost + Comments (27)
This post is in: Politics, Popular Culture, Republican Stupidity, Science & Technology, General Stupidity
When certain right-to-life groups stated they were against letting Terri Schiavo die, they meant it, and they continue to attempt to breathe life into her (and more importantly, the issue), grasping at anything they can find to prove that yes, indeed, Terri Schiavo was but one more CAT scan from going for a walk. The latest attempt is spearheaded by Dean Esmay, and unlike past, more notable resurrections, this time it is those performing the resurrection coming out of the cave, and without the grand ideas.
To spare you the time of reading the whole post, Dean says the following:
1.) He was the victim in the Schiavo affair:
In the next day or two I got trackbacks from obscenity-shrieking asshats hurling nothing but epithets at me. Because the medical examiner had basically determined that Terry was blind and deaf at the moment of her death (after more than a week with no food or water, as I recall).
Those are just samples. I was then, and am now, simply stunned at the fierceness of absolute conviction from those who disagreed with me. For some (not all by any means) seemed to need to do more than disagree with me. Terry’s parents, siblings, and childhood friends needed to be denounced as 100% wrong, and Michael Schiavo had to be lauded as 100% right, period. To suggest anything to the contrary was simply evil. Or, at best, boneheaded: anti-science, anti-rational, anti-humanist, anti-everything-good.
To state that the medical examiner “basically determined that Terry was blind and deaf at the moment of her death” is, like it or not, anti-science, anti-rational, and, to boot, assinine. She wasn’t ‘basically’ blind. She was completely and totally blind. In fact, the term is ‘cortical blindness,’ and was discussed in detail in that tricksy autopsy with all those technical terms. Take it away, Will Saletan:
According to Terri Schiavo’s autopsy report, her “lateral geniculate nucleus (visual) demonstrated transneuronal degeneration with gliosis.” Or, as the medical examiner put it in plainer English, “Her vision centers of her brain were dead. Therefore, Mrs. Schiavo had what’s called cortical blindness. She was blind, could not see.”
That isn’t what Schiavo’s parents, pro-lifers, and congressional Republicans told us all these years. They said videos showed her eyes following people and objects. “In the video footage, which you can actually see on the Web site today, she certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist declared three months ago as he spearheaded a congressional invasion of the case.
Using small words- Terri Schiavo could have had 32 eyeballs and she still would be blind. Not ‘bascially’ blind- full fledged, constant darkness, no sight, see no evil, blind.
2.) Terri Schiavo might have lived, had she been given a wafer thin mint or a zolpidem:
And you know, I wouldn’t have written about it again, except in the last week two stories in the news came to my attention. #1 is anecdotal but nonetheless powerful. #2 is more than anecdotal, and is in fact deeply disturbing in its implications. Here they are:
1) Mental Activity Seen in a Brain Gravely Injured
2) Reborn
I again say: #1 is anecdotal but somewhat disturbing.
#2, by comparison, is shattering. Give them some zolpidem, and some of them suddenly come alive? Even if it’s only a few?
But you were certain. You knew it all, didn’t you?
“But Dean, only a few respond to zolpidem treatment! So what?!?”
Yeah. Okay. So in the last year, how many people had their feeding tubes withdrawn when zolpidem therapy might have saved them? 2? 10? 100? Let’s say it was 100 worldwide at best.
The problem with Dean and others is that all coma patients = Terri Schiavo. But they don’t. Terri Schiavo was an extreme case in which her brain matter had essentially liquefied. Tossing up anecdotal evidence and medical breakthroughs in other unrelated and dissimilar cases does not change the fact that at the time of her death, her brain weighed less than half a normal human brain, and that it had been decimated by her tragedy to the point that she would have never recovered. That other individuals with less damage and different types of damage have recovered or might recover does not change Terri’s sad condition, and never will.
That will remain a truth no matter how many times you try to pretend her case is the same as other, more recent cases. The reason people were vehement about Terri Schiavo’s condition is because they were right, knew they were right, and the autopsy proved them absolutely right- not just ‘basically’ right.
So please quit pretending otherwise.
by Tim F| 151 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, General Stupidity
Quick hits:
* Joe Gandelman evenhandedly looks at the basic problems behind ABC’s decisionmaking. [Update] Matt Stoller also takes a whack at it.
* Scholastic runs away from its partnership with the film.
* ABC is considering pulling the film altogether. Think that is a good idea? Call them.
* The Clinton camp goes on offense.
* [Update] Rightwingers James Taranto and Seth Liebsohn (scroll to the bottom) recognize that people who opposed the Reagan miniseries cannot credibly support fictionalizing 9/11.
More? Fill in the latest in the comments.
Mendacious Mockumentary Mania Mortifies Mickey Mouse Media MogulsPost + Comments (151)
by Tim F| 346 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, General Stupidity
Let’s say off the bat that somebody will get fired for this. After ABC has to eat its $30 million investment they might sack whoever decided to aggressively promote a fictionalization of the events leading to 9/11, written by a known conservative activist and promoted exclusively to rightwing blogs and allied news outlets like Rush Limbaugh and NewsMax. Sensible managers would cut loose the genius who decided to chase the evaporating FOX News demographic and influence an election with blatantly untrue efforts to shift the blame for 9/11 to a previous administration. Glenn Greenwald has a thorough rundown, of course, and via Glenn I will take this opportunity to wholly agree with Mark Coffey at Decision ’08:
Again, the partisan aspect interests me not at all; this is 9/11, and ‘reasonably accurate’ isn’t good enough. Either go completely fiction or stick to the facts. This sounds an awful lot like the Dan Rather excuse for the National Guard fiasco (that the essence of the story was true, even if the details were fabricated), and I’m not interested in this sort of clever parsing of words.
I understand the need to do composite scenes and characters in media with a limited duration, but this is going a bit far. I’ll probably still watch it, but my enthusiasm has dimmed considerably.
The hype around the Reagan docudrama always struck me as incredibly inane given the nature of the “offenses” and the overall relevance to our modern political scene. It seems inarguably true that whatever your political standing defacing the memory of 9/11 is far uglier than any damage done by dramatizing the life of Ronald Reagan. Tell ABC that it is time to pull the show:
ThinkProgress page
Contact ABC directly
***Update***
Editor & Publisher reviews the film. The “drama” in “docudrama” apparently consists of indicting Clinton for things that never happened, and glossing over anything that might make the current president look bad.
If ABC really thinks that this is a “dramatization” (their current defense) then why have they distributed study guides to over 10,000 students? You don’t ask students to study made-up history. Somebody honestly thought that they could get away with rewriting the history of the most traumatic even in recent American history. Nauseating.
by John Cole| 72 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture
This sucks:
Television personality and environmentalist Steve Irwin has died from a stingray wound while filming off north Queensland.
Friends believe he may have died instantly when struck by a stingray as he filmed a sequence for his eight-year-old daughter Bindi’s new TV series.
Irwin’s friend of 20 years, Ferre De Deyne said Irwin had been struck by the stingray while filming. “The stingray just happened to be swimming around and out of the blue whacked his tail at him,” he said.
“It is absolutely tragic. I have dived so many times with stingrays and they are usually very placid things,” he said.
Known worldwide as the Crocodile Hunter, 44-year-old Irwin was famous for his enthusiasm for wildlife and his catchcry “Crikey!”Z
It will seem shitty of me to say this, but anyone who didn’t see something like this coming is blind. Well, maybe not seeing him die from a stingray tail to the chest, but something along the lines of an animal attack. I always loved the show, but in the back of my mind during episodewas that I felt doing this sort of thing with a wife and children was supremely irresponsible.
by John Cole| 15 Comments
This post is in: Popular Culture, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
If, in the future, anyone ever simply comments ‘Who cares? Talk about something important!’ I will simply direct you to this post.