IT'S HERE.  OH MY GOD IT'S HERE.

"From the visionary Writer/Director Joone, [sic on the comma] comes the long awaited and highly anticipated sequel to Digital Playground's "Pirates".  Superstar Jesse Jane (Registered) [why?] returns as the irresistible [sic...holy crap, this is hilarious] Jules--the seductive pirate hunter who leads an all-star cast that includes the world's hottest, most beautiful girls.  {Blah blah listing pornstars}.  Ready with swords drawn high, Evan Stone, Tommy Gunn, and Stephen St. Croix reprise their groundbreaking roles from the original.  'Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge' is an epic adventure that showcases 11 of the most passionate sex scenes, breathtaking fight scenes, intense orgies and over 600 amazing special effects!"  Sadly, the Tommy Gunn above has nothing to do with the James Gunn of the following: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOGWz1ONUIg (PS How do I make this a link?)

Oh, and "Over 8 Hours ["of," presumably] Edge-Of-Yer-Seat Adventure!"

Get it?  Because pirates say "yer."

Ahahaha, and finally: Movie: 138 Minutes....Extended Sex Scenes: 162 Minutes.  That's 24 extra minutes of Edge-Of-Yer-Climax Adventure!  Man am I excited.  Apparently this movie cost over $10 million dollars.  Divide that by, say, max 15 girls and 2.5 hours, that's like $270,000 per hour to have sex.

That's all I have to say about that.

So today I thought I had locked my backpack and clothes in BK Entryway F, and felt very fortunate to find Dean Hicks in the Dining Hall.   I asked him to key me in so I could grab my stuff.  He walks me up the ramp and pulls open the door, because apparently the door closest to the Cross Campus gate locks, but the one at the top of the ramp doesn't.  Because that makes sense.  And, to quote the man who is looking out for my academic future, "The joy I received at witnessing your moment of revelation had a worth that far surpassed the labor required of me to reach this point."  Okay, so that's not really what he said, but honestly it's not that far off.

In closing, we need to really get more people reading this thing.  Not because it's that good (although it is) but because otherwise we're just...talking to ourselves.

Je remercie donc mes correspondants de l'Est, The "O", de m'avoir gentiment filé le tuyau.

Avertissement : Les images qui vont suivre comportent des scène choquantes...

Lançons nous : Patrick Devedjian se précipite pour participer à la chenille, Xavier Bertrand applaudit à tout rompre, et Morano la murène se lance dans un espèce de mano à mano, limite gang bang avec des militants...et tout se finit par une démonstration pataude de rock entre le Patrick et la Nadine...Consternant vous dis-je

Mes réflexions du jour.

Campus des jeunes de l'UMP : Heu comment peut ont être jeune et à l'UMP, moi cela me semble franchement incompatible. Je vois pas, non je vois pas du tout. Qu'est ce qui peut attirer un djeune à l'UMP aujourd'hui ? Plus tard je dis pas, mais à 20 ans, qu'est ce qui peut les attirer - c'est un vrai mystère. Help me ! A part les étudiants en fac de droit décus par l'UNI je ne vois pas.

Faut célébrer et faire la fête.

Alors là cela me ramène à Microsoft France. Il fût un temps ou tout était prétexte à "célebration", la sortie d'un nouveau produit, une belle affaire signée, l'arrivée d'un marmot, une promotion...On bossait dur mais on se lâchait dur. C'était cool !

Puis d'autres dirigeants, d'autres temps aussi, sont arrivés et l'ambiance s'est gentiment plombée. Jusqu'à ce que cela devienne boulot boulot, schlag schlag...Jusqu'au jour ou dans un des nombreux comités qui repeignent la girafe ou se grattent le nombril remontent l'Idée " on a perdu le goût de la fête il faut célébrer "...A vos rangs fixe, il fallait célébrer et tout de suite. Quand une affaire était gagnée, un produit sortait...le message retombait en pluie fine : "Tu as pensé à célébrer"...bref on célébrait et on a célébré comme un exercice obligatoire...

"Tu fais quoi ce soir ?"

" Fait chier, je dois participer à la célébration de truc, on va encore s'emmerder" mais bon j'suis obligé d'y aller y'aura le grand chef"

On s'est tapé des discours lénifiant, des applaudissements mous et des pots avec pas assez de champagne. Dans les grandes occases on voyait les membres du CD se trémousser sur des pistes, en faire des tonnes, essayer de blaguer, dire "c'est cool", "qu'est ce qu'on s'amuse", "c'est génial", "on célèbre"... mais quand le naturel n'est pas là ça tourne vite au ridicule.

D'ailleurs le jour on je me suis retrouvé en rupture totale, c'est quand, lors d'un compagny meeting annuel (français) en 2006, censé être le point d'orgue de la saison de célébration, on nous a donné comme cadeau le droit de voir les Bronzé III en avant-première. Quel navet !

Je me souviens il y avait clairement 2 groupes dans la salle, ceux qui riaient aux éclats et les consternés....je ne sais pas combien il reste de consternés encore lol

Essayez d'appeler à l'Agence du Revenu du Canada sans savoir PAR COEUR ou sans avoir avec vous votre déclaration d'impôts!

Maudite gang d'imbéciles de crétins!  En plus, il faut faire face à la petite voix morne de merde avant de pouvoir savoir qu'il leur faut notre date de naissance, notre numéro d'assurance sociale et le montant déclaré l'année dernière...

Voulez-vous que je vous faxe mes empreintes digitales et une photocopie de la couleur de mes sous-vêtements aussi?

"C'est pour votre sécurité" qu'ils nous dirons...C'EST UN MAUVAIS SYSTÈME!

Oh et n'appelez pas au 1-800-O-Canada pour demander des informations...ils vous donneront le numéro de téléphone sans plus.

Her court case nonesense is probably better eviscerated by someone who actually knows something of the law, but I want to take a whack at her claim that, oh yes, she does read the newspapers...or as she put it:

CAMERON: Well, what do you read?

PALIN: I read the same things that other people across the country read, including the “New York Times” and the “Wall Street Journal” and “The Economist” and some of these publications that we’ve recently even been interviewed through up there in Alaska.

Oh yeah?

Think Progress has already questioned the probability of Palin reading The Economist.  But the idiocy goes deeper than the mere likelihood that Palin was simply parroting a list of approved elite-friendly titles a leader of the free world would be expected to read.

Think about this with an eye toward real life.  In Palin you have a governor of a state who also happens to have five children still at home.  She is a moderately busy person.

She also has a certain media list she needs to monitor. She has a direct political and governance interest in reading local newspapers, especially that or those of record for her state; she would also, being a skilled thoroughly modern politician, have her eye and ear on local political TV and radio.

She is also a human animal, subject to the same physical constraints that anyone with this basic biology must face.  In this context, that means she is subject to the same limits on reading speed that anyone faces.  The reading speed for comprehension has a range of 200-400 words per minute; skimming can be accomplished at rates as fast as 700 words per minute.

So let's confront The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.  What follows is a mix of real data and inferences; the idea is to get a broad sense of the scale of the task Palin has set herself without spending half a day on the analysis.  It's a first order "does this make sense" pass, nothing more.

On average the Journal is 96 pages long. A single broadsheet page of a newspaper, even in its modern, slightly shrunken form, can deliver roughly 3,000 words (actually more -- the page used for this number is the Times' op-ed, which typically runs three - four pieces c. 800 word pieces with some art).   Clearly art (in the newspaper sense) and advertising cut into the news hole available for words -- and lets be conservative here too; say only one quarter of the average issue actually contains words to be read.

That would leave someone reading the WSJ cover to cover with something like 24*3000= 72,000 words to take in.  Give it another hair cut to acknowledge the ongoing constraints of print journalism.  So two national newspapers today could offer a dedicated reader 100,000 words (and quite possibly much more).  At 400 words per minute -- fast for comprehension, slow for skimming, that many words would occupy someone for 250 minutes, or just over four hours every day.

Give it another haircut.  Throw out half the paper. Sarah Palin does not need to read the company news pages of the Journal or the New York Region report in the Times.  We're still talking two hours (and we haven't even touched the drag on the day that The Economist hits her in-tray.

In other words...all this is nonsense.  Palin does not read these papers in any meaningful way. Nor should she, in fact.

She's the governor of Alaska, not of New York.  She needs to read her local stuff, and her staff should be flagging what she needs to get from the national media; certainly it would make sense if someone in Juneau prepared a digest of stories relevant to state-state issues and those national ones that impinge on her decision-space.

Palin could have said something like this during the Couric interview; she could have made this basic point to Fox -- that she stays up on the information most relevant to her job, and relies on her staff to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.  The moment would have passed unnoticed.

Instead, she committed herself to an impossibility; that she as governor and mother still finds the time to read the papers for several hours per day.

Two last points:  First:  Once again we see in Palin someone willing to lie at any moment to reinforce the image she or her handlers think she needs to display.  I know that what you have just read is overkill -- but there is something about the contempt in which Palin and her keepers hold their audience that makes me want to stomp each moment of stupidity until its cries "uncle."

Second:  The running scream of this blog is that simple quantification exercises are essential for making sense of the world around us.  Journalists and everyone need to count.  I know that Fox News is not a journalistic enterprise; it's Pravda with better graphics.  But as I hope the above back of the envelope exercise suggests, it would help the rest of us a great deal if we turned the niggling feeling, "but-does-it-make-sense," into a reflex animated by a habit of quantification, approximation and inquiry.  Here the lesson endeth.

Image:  Johnny Automatic Children Reading Newspaper.  Source:  Clker.com.

(headline shamelessly stolen from Brad DeLong.)

Voilà à quoi ressemble la réponse vidéo (enfin une — j'espère pour les zélateurs anti-art...) à Culture en péril, trouvé via Christian Rioux (ça sert à ça aussi de s'abonner au fil de syndication des blogues idéologiquement antipathiques!).

Voyez le biais complètement ridicule (ainsi que la musique de fond) qui oppose (entre autres) des images du dernier film d'Astérix et Obélix avec Stéphane Rousseau pour symboliser les « artisses » à des images symbolisant nos services, comme celle très hilarante d'une voiture de police devant le musée d'art contemporain.

L'art d'être complètement maladroit. Tant artistiquement, idéologiquement, conceptuellement, esthétiquement, etc.

прежде я потериался, а вчера себя нашёл
(ну я это думаю...)
я перестал о себе всегда ещё и ещё думать
я перестал днём мечтать
и я начал видить других, дорогих людей опиать
теперь могу я смотреть снова прямо на жизнь
мои глаза сегодня не закрыты
да, я рад что я проснулся.

Смешной сон ? Знаю, очень.
Кажется мне, лучше смешной чем грустный...

Case in point: Couric's "gotcha" question regarding Henry Kissinger:

Couric: You met yesterday with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is for direct diplomacy with both Iran and Syria. Do you believe the U.S. should negotiate with leaders like President Assad and Ahmadinejad?

Palin: I think, with Ahmadinejad, personally, he is not one to negotiate with. You can't just sit down with him with no preconditions being met. Barack Obama is so off-base in his proclamation that he would meet with some of these leaders around our world who would seek to destroy America and that, and without preconditions being met. That's beyond naïve. And it's beyond bad judgment.

Couric: Are you saying Henry Kissinger …

Palin: It's dangerous.

Couric: … is naïve for supporting that?

Palin: I've never heard Henry Kissinger say, "Yeah, I'll meet with these leaders without preconditions being met." Diplomacy is about doing a lot of background work first and shoring up allies and positions and figuring out what sanctions perhaps could be implemented if things weren't gonna go right. That's part of diplomacy.

Okay, let's do the fact check.  Was Couric right?

No.  The first "perky" anchor in major network history got it wrong.

Henry Kissinger has never called for direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions:

ABC News' Kirit Radia Reports: Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger came to the defense of longtime friend Sen. John McCain following Friday's presidential debate saying he "would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level."

"Senator McCain is right. I would not recommend the next President of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the Presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Senator John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality," Kissinger said in statement issued by the McCain campaign.

During the debate, Obama pointed to Kissinger to defend his position because the former secretary of state supports direct talks with high-level Iranians without preconditions. Kissinger does not, however, support the U.S. president personally engaging in those talks, a point which McCain sought to drive home during the debate.

If Couric wanted to ask Sarah Palin whether it would be appropriate to send a high level US official other than the President of the United States, it was her duty as the one asking the questions to make her question clear.  Given the obvious fact that it is a PRESIDENTIAL precondition-free negotiation with rogue regime leaders (thanks to Barack Obama's idiotic position), Sarah Palin had every reason to assume that was what Couric was talking about.

So if anyone should be ridiculed, it should be Katie Couric - who was so eager to catch Palin in a "gotcha" question she botched her own trap - instead of Sarah Palin.

Monsieur Le Président dans le plus style shadoks
[dailymotion id=k5ybxfLHbcItQTLEwV]

Quand la minute est nécessaire de Monsieur Le Président

Quand Gérald Dahan piège Sarko en imitant Palmade

Quand Nicolas Sarkozy piège la France entière (et Claire Chazal)

Pour la plus triste, j'avais prévenu ;-(

Just thought it interesting that the NPR news bulletin just completed (9 p.m. edt) included the following three items:

1.  Bush presiding over the unsuccessful meeting on the bailout.
2.  Bush signing the ADA Amendments bill,  a bipartisan, industry/activist collaboration extending ADA protections to, e.g., folks w. epilepsy or cancer.  His father, who signed the original ADA bill, was present.
3.  Met with Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the middle east peace process, and any prospects for its advance in the last lame duck weeks of the Bush administration (sound familiar?)

I'm am no fan of Bush, certainly the worst President of my lifetime (Einsenhower-now), and without doubt a contender for the title of all time worst.  But even this incurious and lazy man managed to attend to three quite diverse and substantial pieces of business in one day.

Meanwhile John McCain can't debate and think about finance at the same time?

He wants to run away from that desperate battlefield in Oxford, Mississippi?

Please.

This isn't a President -in -waiting.  This is a guy who wants to be called "Mr. President" with none of the hard stuff attached.

Image:  I. Pryanishnikov, "French Retreat From Russia, 1812," 1874. Source, Wikimedia Commons.

Saul Alinsky dedicates his book, "Rules for Radicals" to Lucifer.

"Thirteen years after Alinsky died, some of his former students hired Barack Obama to a $13,000 a year job as a community organizer in South Chicago. In a few years he became very proficient in the Alinsky Method of community organizing and became an instructor and teacher of the Alinsky Method to other community organizers."

Wikipedia

From a Citizen Wells article:

I would like to add some insight into this behaviour by the Obama camp. As many of you are aware, Obama visited Kenya in 2006 and helped his cousin Raila Odinga campaign. Odinga campaigned as a member of the ODM party. One of the strategies of the ODM party, taken directly from one of their leaked documents, is this:

"The age issue

Our core supporters are essentially young people who are angry about the domination of Kibaki politics by frail septuagenarians.

Billboards and leaflets ridiculing the old people in the Kibaki team; contrast this with billboards of Hon Raila with young people- the promise of a buoyant future."

Sound familiar?

Read more here:

http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/obama-odm-action-plan-odm-document-january-20-2008-obama-campaign-mirrors-raila-odinga-campaign-ridicule-old-people-ethnic-tensions-violence/

Obama quotes:

"I want you argue with them and get in their face,"

"like a spy behind enemy lines,"

"organize black folks"

Saul Alinsky quotes:

"laugh at the enemy"

"Ridicule,is man's most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."

"Rub raw the resentments of the people; search out controversy and issues."

"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

The Investors Business Daily has an article that reveals how Obama has implemented Saul Alinsky's rules in his campaign:
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=306977141583041

If the tactics of Obama and his thugs concern you, visit:

http://obamaimpeachment.org

I'm not so childish as to play such a game, but the invitation did make me think about the list of reasons we have been given to credit Governor Palin with a grasp of international affairs.  One of the most repeated talking points is that Alaska is a border state -- and not just with the mild, friendly 51st state, Canada, (Joking, all you folks up north.  Really...just joking), but with the erstwhile evil empire itself, Russia, née USSR.

In fact, the common line has been that the threat of the great Bear is so imminent you can see Russia from Alaskan soil....as in fact you can.

Just as I was digging through the wonders of Google Maps and Wikipedia to nail down just what bits of Russia you can see from what bits of Alaska, I came across this article posted yesterday in Slate.  Its author, Nina Shen Rastogi, confirms the commonly known fact (if you read the right kind of thrillers) that the island of Little Diomede, a little piece of offshore Alaska, is all of 2.5 miles or so from Big Diomede, which is Russian territory.

Taking out my handy horizon calculator, I find that the distance an averagely tall human can see at sea level is just under 4.4. kilometers, or about 2.75 miles.  So yes, by gum, you can see Russia from Alaska.  (Rastogi  reports that if you are willing to do a bit of hill/ice climbing, you can even catch a glimpse of  the Russian mainland from St. Lawrence Island in the middle of the Bering Sea.  This, of course, assumes you happen to have caught the view on one of the miraculous, unexpected, non-foggy days in that bleak ocean.

Now, here is where I go a bit overboard, to ask, has Sarah Palin ever actually seen Russia from her home state?  Wasilla? -- Nope; not a chance.  You've got most of the state serving as a buffer to protect the Palin little ones from the threat from Siberia.  The Governor's residence in Juneau? You can't even see  Hoonah from there, much less the Russian Bear.  Anchorage?  Same as Wasilla, basically; lots of tundra between the northern metropolis and any angry heirs to the glories of the Romanovs.

So has Sarah Palin laid eyes on Russia from US territory?  You can't actually ask her, of course,  But in my trolling of the web for reports on her governship, I've never seen any mention that she has travelled to the incredibly remote Diomedes, nor the almost equally back-of-the-beyond St. Lawrence.  She has been careful to avoid saying that she herself has done any of this eyeballing that is supposed to convey deep understanding of international affairs.  So my bet is no.

Does this matter?  Of course not.  It does not take the near certainty that she's never actually viewed one wretched rock or another to recognize that Palin knows nothing about Russian affairs by virtue of her family's experience trying to land salmon before they swim to the wrong side of the strait.  This is just an exercise in meticulous reductio ad absurdam.

Image: Alfred Wierusz-Kowalsk, "Attacked by Wolves," 1880.  Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Besides, if she reallly knew what she were talking about, she'd note that we are once again entering the season when it becomes possible -- with care -- to walk from Russia to these United States.  Eternal vigilance, folks -- eternal vigilance.

10 minutes

Description

This object lesson uses a little “magic” to teach kids to give their worries and their problems to God.

Materials Needed

• About four foot of rope
• Scissors

Preparation Needed

Practice, practice, practice

Procedure

Use the following script (or modify to suit your needs):

• (Tie the rope into a knot using steps one and two on the chart below, and as you tie, say:)
• “Sometimes when something really bad happens, I get a knot in my stomach. Does that ever happen to any of you?”
• (Tie the rope into a second knot using steps three and four on the chart below, and as you tie, say:)
• “Sometimes when I’m really afraid, I also get a knot in my stomach. Does that ever happen to any of you?”
• (Using the scissors, cut the rope near the knot as shown in step five on the chart below, and as you cut, say:)
• “Sometimes there are people who cut me down and make fun of me, and that doesn’t feel very good. Has that ever happened to any of you?”
• (Grab the long ends of the rope as shown in step six on the chart below. (Or have a child grab the ends.) Just before you pull the ends, say:)
• “Well, God knows exactly how you feel during those times. He knows about the knots, and He knows about the cut downs. He doesn’t want you to feel that way, and the great thing is that He can take away the knots. He can make you feel okay again after the cut downs.”
• (Yank the ends quickly and sharply as shown in step seven on the chart below. This will cause the knot to pop free, leaving the rope seemingly intact.)
• “Isn’t that amazing! The knot’s gone! God took it away, and He can take away your knots, too! All you have to do is pray to him whenever you feel the knot in your stomach, whenever you are worried or afraid or whenever someone cuts you down.”
• “God wants to help you with your problems!”
• (You can do the trick again if you want. Sometimes it’s even more impressive the second time around.)

If this was another country, boy a number of people would be on the ban wagon to denounce and ridicule them -- in a heartbeat!  Try and tell me I'm wrong.

What is the cause for the mistreatment of our food?? All because one - people can treat the animal like they are nothing; and two - because they get upset.  (Are freakn' serious?!) If you treat an animal in such a manner, what actually stops one from treating you like an animal?? Make sense.  That fine line I keep talking about - exists here too. 

And whatever happened to the plant that ended up having all the recalls done on the meat products?? Where is the follow-up to that? A case of more millions of dollars on what could have been prevented - but wasn't.  We are so lazy and damn hypocritical --- on a lot of issues.

AP Exclusive: Video shows workers abusing pigs

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080917/ap_on_re_us/abused_pigs

So far press attention is focusing on the Bridge to Nowhere deceit that has been part of the New Improved Palin marketing campaign since day one -- and more power to that story, as it strikes to the twin cores of the GOP claim on this election:  that John McCain and Sarah Palin are honest, incorruptible; and that they are agents of change primed to upset business as usual.  Begging for money, lying about it, and then keeping the cash once the project is cancelled doesn't do wonders for such an image.

But just to make sure we don't lose sight of the larger picture, which is that  Palin has been a disaster at each level of government she has so far attained -- and hence that her choice by John McCain represents a truly telling indication of what a McCain administration might do to the American people.  It ain't pretty.

Today's demonstration of that claim comes from Palin's mismanagement of the one significant public works performed in Wasilla, AK, during her tenure as mayor.

As that frothing pinko rag, The Wall Street Journal has reported, Palin's administration championed the construction of a roughly 15 million dollar sports complex for the town.  The project itself was mismanaged, with rookie errors like failing to complete the purchase of the land needed for the complex before the project began. (Perhaps Palin should have described herself with this edited line:  "What's the difference between a sheep to be shorn and a small town mayor?  Lipstick..."  Just sayin...)

That's bad enough -- are you sure you want to let this kind of incompetence loose on America again? (In case you've blessedly erased the memory, let me just repeat, "Heck of a job, Brownie....")

But the real sting in the tail comes from the financial consequences for the good citizens of Wasilla that their former mayor is now leaving far, far behind.

When Palin took over as mayor, Wasilla had no long term debt.  When she left, it had accumulated almost 20 million bucks of loans that the town will be paying off for years.*

To understand what that means in the context of a national campaign, all it takes is a little arithmetic.

For example:  One way to look at government debts as something other than just the raw number of the total is to do the simple calculation of how much that debt works out to be for each resident of the jurisdiction paying for a spending spree.

We know how many people live in Wasilla -- just under 6,000 at the time Palin stepped down and left her luckless fellow citizens with the bill.  We can thus count her debt not as a total that is hard to place in context, but in units we can compare across the country:  debt per person in the jurisdiction -- or roughly $3,600 per Wasilla resident in Palin debt.

Now take that number onto the national stage. By this measure, if Palin/McCain were to achieve a budgetary debacle at the federal level only as bad as that then-Mayor Palin managed for her home town, the total new debt our country would owe (much of it to the Bank of China, most likely) would come to 308 million people times $3,600.

That adds up to $1,108,800,000,000 or more than one trillion dollars.

We're real money, even by the standards set in the last eight years of GOP misrule.

And that's not all:  there's another way to think of the numbers that make Palin's performance look even worse:

Calculate the accumulated debt as a multiple of the annual budget of the jurisdiction.

In her last year as mayor, Wasilla spent about 5.8 million dollars in non capital expenditures (up 50% from the time she took over, BTW).   Twenty million is roughly 3.3 times that total.

Now take it to the federal level:   The proposed budget for FY 2009 totals 2.65 trillion in discretionary spending (omitting Social Security, Medicare and interest on debt already accumulated).  Multiply that by 3.2 and you get a number in the 9 trillion dollar range.  Even if you cut out military spending from the discretionary total, you still are left with a number that multiplies out on the Palin scale to around 4 trillion.  Ouch.

All of which to say is that while the media is beginning to focus (at last) on the question of whether you can trust  John McCain, his running mate and his campaign say, they might want to pay some attention to another line of inquiry.

Trust them?  Hell--can we afford them?

Image:  German banknotes from the hyperinflation of 1922-1923.  Source:  Wikimedia Commons.

En temps de guerre, il est courant de feindre une attaque à la frontière d'un pays, pour attaquer massivement à la frontière opposée: la diversion ainsi créée permet de diviser la résistance éventuelle en l'occupant ailleurs et d'ouvrir un nouveau front.

Des techniques risquées mais qui ont fait leurs preuves sur le terrain. En communication, c'est du pareil au même.
Une personnalité a commis une gaffe ou est au coeur d'une affaire difficile, il est d'usage d'alimenter les médias avec une autre information même dérisoire, parfois aussi choquante mais au final contrôlable.
Une sorte d'os à ronger pour les journalistes et les éventuels moutons qui la lisent.

Après la théorie, la pratique:

Morano au feu:
[dailymotion id=k3CmAYqcRcSE0fJWcA]

Morano à le feu pour son contre-feu:
[dailymotion id=k4aVfFx0KUvqLWL6Ba]

Morin attaqué sur ses mensonges par omission:
[dailymotion id=kEyFFKC1gwQGAgL1qM]

Morin fait une diversion dangereuse en jouant la vierge effarouchée:
[dailymotion id=k1JWCvQPyGM8T0LaAO]

réactions au contre-feu
[dailymotion id=k5Lv7pQHnmslOLL7fO]
Et oui parfois, l'usage du contre-feu implique qu'on puisse passer pour une bille, une grosse bille voire un boulet...

puis y succèderont d'autres intervenants comme Xavier Bertrand, le gentil gars des caméras cachés fidèle au slogan: "plus c'est gros plus ça passe!"
[dailymotion id=k6eh8oy8Rxlk37L7w3]

ou Hortefeux (voir ici), Fillon (voir ici) et même Laurence Parisot qui en profite pour intégrer son propre contre-feu, et faire oublier ainsi sa gaffe sur le RSA transformé dans sa bouche en RAS devant le parterre des PDG du Medef.
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Trop c'est trop, c'est Parisot
Aller un nouveau buzz a eclaté depuis hier soir, pour faire tenter de faire oublier tous ces soucis et il nous vient d'outre-atlantique avec le Taser offert aux intellectuels de la sécurité en France: La Police Municipale! (voir ici le niveau de recrutement)

Pub Taser :
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Pour des âmes non-sensibles, voilà ce que devient le Taser employé par des fous doublés d'incompétents, au Canada ici:
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NB: Les amateurs de séries TV américaines auront reconnu l'emploi de la voix française du personnage de Gibbs (Mark Hammon) dans NCIS. Une voix rauque et virile pour faire sérieux. Forcément.

A qui profite le crime? A l'industriel qui fabrique le Taser. Merci l'UMP.

Heureusement les contre-feux fonctionnent de moins en moins bien sur des gens informés par Internet par exemple et sur des vrais opposants à la politique en place. Coup de chapeau à Corine Lepage, qui elle se bouge contrairement aux pantins du PS, et propose ni plus ni moins un "référendum d'initiative populaire" contre le fichier EDVIGE qui va au-delà de l'actuel fichier des RG.

Et quoi de mieux que la rumeur du mariage du dauphin du roi, Jean Sarkozy, avec la fille héritière des Magasins Darty, Jessica Sebaoun, pour noyer totalement le poisson? Le Ridicule n'a jamais tué...

Pour nous, vous êtes un bon comédien

Nous vous verrions dans une pièce d'Aristophane

Dans le rôle de Socrate.

That is:  I did something I do for the kind of sick thrill you get passing a wreck on the highway -- checking out Megan McCardle's self parody of a blog over at The Atlantic Monthly's site. (the lack of link is deliberate; I don't like to link to things I don't recommend.  If you are curious, there is this thing called Google that can probably get you where you want to go.)

There I find she recommends, in near ecstatic terms a new site called Culture 11,* (huh?) promoted as a conservative version of Slate, which launched yesterday. ( McCardle's praise --"Full disclosure:  I'm fairly close to its editorial staff.  Fuller disclosure:  it's still pretty awesome." -- gives you a bit of a sense of why I am loathe to send the unwary over to wallow in such prose.)

So, in the John Cole school of reading this stuff so you don't have to, I actually went over to check out this new haven of thought and letters.  There, I searched every last article they have up so far, all twenty seven as of the time of writing this.  There were some notable howlers -- see Conor Friedersdorf's Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism for a hilarious account of, among other things, the dilemma of a conservative on a blind date confronted by a woman who may or may not accept "basic conservative and libertarian truths."

(Again: fair warning.  Leave aside the argument such as it is.  You have to be willing to stomach sentences like "As a dating dilemma, this is easily solved.  Ask her questions!"  There.  Proceed at your own risk.  Tom Wolfe, conservative though he surely is, knows style and its absence.  He would equally surely wince at the asserted claim of kinship.)

And so on...but really, the point of this post is not simply that someone, somewhere is saying something stupid on the internet.  Rather, it is to point out one reason why conservative claims of intellectual authority have worn so thin.

They ignore science.  There is no science at Culture 11 at all.  Not as a category; not squeezed into headings like "Education" or "Ideas."  The one article under the heading "Technology" provides an interesting brief against the privatization of city services, but basically includes no actual explanation of the technological problem under review -- how to design and build a city-provided wifi network.

Other than that, nothing.  And it's not that there is a dearth of science and public life stories of interest within the context of conservative politics, after all.  Just today, the Republican National Convention platform committee published their document, which calls for a complete ban on embryonic stem cell research.  That might be worth a comment, no?

How about the argument between the parties about the appropriate resource and technological response to the problem of the US energy mix and supply?

What about some hard thinking about the numbers behind and the moral values inherent in the McCain campaign's health policy advisor's statement that the emergency room counts as insurance for the uninsured?

I am not suggesting that I expect anyone from that side of aisle to write stuff I agree with.  I'm not even expecting them to make good cases for the points of view I'm guessing they'll adopt.  But these are in fact big, obvious issues that matter not just to a scientific community, but to the public at large in the midst of deciding who should be our next president.

And yet, the entire site is designed, at least for now, to suggest that questions with a scientific or technical core don't rise to the level of significance worthy of a conservative intelligentsia's attention.  By contrast, Slate has a whole section devoted to health and science, two editors devoted to the care and feeding of that section and about a post a day, sometimes more, to keep the site populated.  I'm not saying I love all their stuff (though when they publish a former student, I do).  But they cover the story; they do so in an opinionated way, writing as public intellectuals. They take this stuff seriously.

I suppose I am picking on a brand new publication, the brain child of a plucky band of brothers (of both genders) rushing into the breach of the defenses of the liberal media.  But it still seems to me both striking and telling that a set of would-be leaders of right-wing public intellectualism would find nothing in science to engage.

I do not think that they achieve such lofty unconcern simply because doing science is hard, though it is, nor that writing well about science is hard, for all that I have scars to remind me that just how hard.

Rather, it is because, IMHO of course, in the broadest sense, it is much harder to spin science than it is, say, the consequences of impotent bellicosity over Georgia.

To put it another way, one near and dear to Boston Celtics fans:  I think the right dodges science when it can because it can't handle the truth.

You may take all this as the official announcement, rather than the earlier leaks, that Inverse Square is back from vacation.

*This link provided because even though I think the site is basically worthless, it seems to me hard to write a post about a web-location without pointing to it.  A foolish consistency and all that...