From The Morgue

Over at Kung-Fu Monkey, John Rogers makes the kind of astute observation that will soon become conventional blogosphere wisdom:

…the Cheney Administration has discovered… the “exploit” within the United States Government… The exploit is shame.

Worth reading, because he’s right, and you can be damn sure that every government everywhere is watching how they make this work. They have no shame, and that makes them invulnerable. It’s that simple. Audacity wins every time.
(Did I mention John Rogers of KFMonkey was the writer of the Transformers movie I hassled yesterday? Well now you know, anyway. Also: total D&D geek. Nice one, Rogers.)
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Seem to be getting into a stoush with the Fundy Post related to Monday’s post on the Left and Islam. Make of it what you will.

I love your United States of America! With your Albert Einstein and your Rosa Parks and your Michael Jordan and your HBO! Hell yeah!
I was reluctant to join Pearce for the Transformers movie, so he called my bluff and said he’d pay for the tickets. So that was how I marked July 4. It wasn’t so inappropriate – the truck dude is all Red, White and Blue, and there are rockets red glaring and bombs bursting in the air and such.
Anyway, if you’ve listened to the rather amazed chatter, you’ve already heard that the Transformers movie isn’t so bad. This is true. It is quite entertaining. It may be the second-best movie based on an 80s toy franchise.* I can confirm that it has some snappy dialogue, an acceptable teen-romance angle, neat comedy, and giant robots blowing up lots of stuff. I can also confirm that it makes not the remotest bit of sense and takes place in an alternate universe where they siphoned all the common sense out of everyone and then burned it to make endless, beautiful sunsets.
(There is also an entire plotline, about a quarter of the movie, that should have been cut. It mostly involves a sexy Aussie genius not eating donuts while Dick Cheney orders scientists about, and its about as much fun as that sounds.)
But aside from all that, I just want to say this about the director Michael Bay: he gets everything wrong. Everything. In some future time, his work will be studied as a masterclass in failure. Dude just can’t tell a story using words and images, which is kind of a problem. It is frequently impossible to understand what is happening – where the characters are, what they are doing, where they are moving and why. One “dramatic” chase scene went:
*mid-shot of teenager running*
*mid-shot of robot moving*
*mid-shot of teenager running*
*long shot of sunset*
*mid-shot of robot moving*
Huh? What? Who’s chasing who now? The fight scenes are even worse. Everything is shot in mid-range with this frustrating roving camera and cuts every second (literally, every single second). It’s just metal bits wrangling other metal bits at insanely high speed, and then an explosion or someone running through the frame screaming. On and on and on.
And as for those iconic robots themselves, the franchise heroes – only one of them gets any kind of decent reveal, and that’s within the first five minutes of the movie. The first appearances of all the rest are just dull. A lot of the time they just turn up in frame and a-ha! He’s a truck! Cutaway now!
As cinematic storytelling, it is an unmitigated disaster. There is no value or meaning in the sequence of images, there is no way to transform the cuts you see into a coherent scene without thinking hard and using clues in dialogue or inferring backwards from outcomes. The dude can’t direct AT ALL.
So, my recommendation: don’t see it, unless you really like transforming robots, or Pearce buys your ticket. It isn’t bad – Ebert gave it three stars, even – but, man, I’ve only been home 30 minutes and already the whole experience is evaporating like mist in the morning. Just not worth it.
* Frank Langella as Skeletor. Just sayin’.

Over on El Reg, a grumpy former UK bomb disposal operator points out that the vehicles used in the terror attacks in London and Glasgow were horribly amateurish and basically ineffectual. “Frankly, if this kind of thing is the only backlash the West experiences for Iraq, we’ve got off pretty much scot-free…” (courtesy scimon)
I guess I find it hard to be impressed by this whole thing. The tube attacks two years ago were horrible and worthy of attention, but international headlines over cars with gas cylinders in seems a bit overwrought to me.
Or as Warren Ellis so witheringly put it:

Scottish terrorists trying to kill an airport with a Volvo. Bet they were from Govan.

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Today I played ultimate, had Dim Sum, worked on Sekret Projects #1 and #2, read several academic articles, did a sudoku, sent some overdue emails, and felt bemused that yesterday’s entry written by the internet got more readers than the day before’s entry written by, er, me. Maybe I should let the internet write more often?

Today I will make the internet blog for me. I will enter my gmail spam folder, take out the 5th, 15th and 25th emails, and use the 3rd word from the end in each in an “I feel lucky” google query. Then I shall cut and paste a blog entry from where google takes me.
Raise the Food Stamp Program’s Minimum Benefit to $25 a Month
The Food Stamp Program’s minimum benefit should be increased to $25 per month and adjusted in the future based on the annual change in the cost of living. The new costs estimate is $3.5 billion over 10 years. About $2 billion of this cost is linked directly to the benefit increase and annual adjustment. Because such a change would likely attract new participants to the program (especially seniors), we estimate an additional cost of $1.5 billion as a result of increased participation among currently eligible non-participant households.
Rationale: The Food Stamp Program’s existing benefit allotments are inadequate. The minimum benefit level is of particular concern. It currently stands at only $10 per month and has not seen an increase since the 1970s! Simply put, $10 does not stretch as far as it did when the minimum benefit level was set 30 years ago, and a significant increase is long overdue.
Thank you internet. Now I sleep.

Prominent NZ lefty Chris Trotter, in a recent book review, mentions as a deeply troublesome issue the left cosying up to fundamentalist Islam while vociferously rejecting Christianity.
While not denying this is an issue and something we on the left would do well to keep in mind, I think the explanation is easily found. (And it isn’t “the left is riddled with hypocrisy”, either.)
The answer is this: intercultural oppression trumps intracultural oppression.
The left’s general position on intracultural oppression is to give the oppressed support and tools and get the hell out of the way while they fix it themselves. Islamic fundamentalists oppressing Islamic women, for example, is ultimately not a problem we have any right to solve – all we can do is support Islamic women and let them do the job.
The left, by which we mean the Western political left, is rightly far more concerned with the intercultural crisis, the “clash of civilisations” being pursued so eagerly by the Western political right. Defusing and opposing this crisis is a much higher priority than engaging with the many sins of fundamentalist Islam on its own terms.
Pointing out the sins of fundamentalist Islam to we on the left should give us pause, and it is right to acknowledge that there are massive inconsistencies between the worldviews of Islam and any given instance of “the left”. But it should also reinforce our commitment to setting aside these differences for the time being, as we engage in a more important battle.
Or, rephrased: we in the West have to take the log out of our own eye before we have any right to point at the splinters in theirs. Where the log is oppression, and the splinters are also oppression. I’ve never liked that aphorism. A log in the eye would be kind of painful and I’m sure we’d be way more keen to get rid of it than to help anyone else with splinter-removal. And how the heck could we do something as delicate as using tweezers to remove splinters when we have in our eye a big ol’ log? (…perhaps it isn’t such a bad metaphor after all…)
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The new terrorist activity in the UK is kinda worrying, suggesting that they are in for a long IRA-style campaign of infrequent and small but vicious attacks. I await the evidence in support of claims that the attacks are linked to any large conspiracy of terror (Al-Qaeda or any other major network). The timing for just after Gordon Brown’s ascension to Prime Minister is clearly a signal that Brown is held to account just as much as Blair for the UK’s sins (supposed and real).
Lots of people visited yesterday the blog entry I wrote about barmy conspiracy-theorist rent-a-quoter David Capitanchik, suggesting he has been wheeled out by the UK media to make some ridiculous pronouncement or other. And people have googled his name, and found my post on Capitanchik. Because it is at the top of the google rankings for his name. Ah, I love that feeling.

Last night, I took a night off from the work (man, so much of the work) and watched the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice. A few weeks ago, we watched Becoming Jane which is about Jane Austen’s conjectured true love story*. It’s all been a bit Jane Austen lately.
Which is good, actually. I enjoy the screen adaptations of her work much more than I enjoyed slogging through P&P itself as a 17-year old**, or Northanger Abbey as a 16-year old. I was really expecting to enjoy them both, but I didn’t. Maybe with a decade-and-a-half of distance I’d find them more enjoyable? Perhaps. In any case, the movies make for good watching.
Salon has a great article about the whole Austen revival (which, it claims, is a resurgent ‘second wave’ after the initial wet-Colin-Firth revival of the mid-90s, although poor old Colin does appear to be the central figure in this revival as well). It’s a neat little piece which tries to draw connections between the frocks and true love fantasies of the current wave and the sometimes-acidic cynicism of Miss Austen herself. I would have you peruse it for yourself.
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Washington Post in doing journalism shock! A four-part investigative series exposing Dick Cheney’s hidden coup of the US government. Absolutely incredible stuff. For a taster, check out these ten things you should know from parts one and two.
This is seriously big-deal stuff. Check it out.
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That was your friday linky.
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* Watched at the Lighthouse. The camera got tangled just as the film was coming to an end. The cinema plied us with free wine and chocolate for fifteen minutes while they fixed it, then the lights darkened, and the film continued – to show a single reaction shot of Anne Hathaway. Then, credits. Heh.
** In my single-sex boys school, extending an invitation to walk with the words “shall we take a turn about the room” was all the rage. (Not really.)

There comes a time in a God’s life when being an exiled King of France just isn’t quite enough in and of itself, and you start desiring to settle yourself down with a counterpart, a God-Queen if you will. And so it has come to pass. And thus, Leon Verrall is engaged. (Sorry, ladies.)
You might wish to show your support for the newlygaged by means of worship. There will never be a better time.
Hmm. I guess I oughta start saving for the plane fare then. Ha ha ha etc.
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Also: the new 7COTS is out soon.

Man, the new Doctor Who season is rocking my world rather a lot.
Unbelievers are instructed to watch the episode ‘Blink’. (Yes, Ben, this means you.)
Roll on episode 13.

Another person in my circle of friends took his own life this weekend. It would be a misrepresentation to call him a friend; he wasn’t. He was a good friend of good friends, but only an acquaintance for me. The news upset me anyway, as it should.
I think about suicide in New Zealand often. The rate at which our citizens, particularly our young men, commit suicide is a warning siren. It is a clear signal of deep-seated problems within our society. We are failing in some essential task. Something is not right.
It wasn’t always like this. The rate at which our young men kill themselves has climbed astronomically in the last century. Today’s most vulnerable age band, 15-24, had a suicide rate of about 5 per 100,000 from the 1920s through to the 1970s. Then it started to climb. In the mid-80s it skyrocketed into the 20-per range, and by the 90s it had peaked around 27-per. This was over a fivefold increase in our suicide rate for this band. Since that peak numbers have declined, but still remain around the 20-per mark.
A massive increase. What happened? What went wrong?
New Zealand made a lot of changes in the 80s. The New Right experiment that began here with the fourth Labour government in 1984 was a huge political upheaval that altered the very foundation of New Zealand identity. For over a decade, massive changes were wrought upon this country, changes that are still being worked through today. In the process, we were made into the world’s most perfect example of a vision so vividly expressed by Thatcher in 1987: in New Zealand, there was to be no such thing as society.
I think – (no, that’s isn’t right, this isn’t a carefully considered thesis, this is instinct) – I feel that this is where things went wrong. The more we dismantled our society, the more our young men killed themselves. It’s such a tempting equation. When we made the Rational Economic Actor the basis for our public life, how could anything but chaos possibly follow?
But that’s too simple. There’s more, much more, going on here. New Zealand’s culture of social isolation, our iconic Man Alone with a frontiersman fear of weakness. The mental illness that runs through our communities like an underground stream. The cultural slippage as English and Irish and Maori became lost in the murk of New Zealand’s unformed identity with little but stoicism and the All Blacks to invest with meaning. No matter how much I’d like to lay the blame on the rise of a political ideology I oppose, it would be foolish to do so. This is in no way simple.
All these thoughts. Then, periodically, I hear that someone I know has ended his or her own life, and it all becomes suddenly illuminated. But the light comes from the wrong angle, throwing strange shadows, and it’s impossible to see anything well enough to understand it. Just get confused. All I can make out is where I started, so that’s what I think, over and over: something is very wrong in our society.
And I wonder what I am doing to help make it right.
(NZ suicide trends data is here.)
(Rest in peace, James.)

Cal is using Pledgebank to muster some fellow-feeling in reducing consumption:

I will not buy ‘things’ I do not need, between 1 July and 1 August 2007 but only if 4 other local people will do the same.

In the details she says signees can decide what “need” means, and gives some examples of what she’s interpreting it as. The pledge page is here.
I commend this pledge to you. Consider it. It’s a chance to show capitalism and its marketing minions who’s really in charge of your spending behaviour.