from websites to gun sights

The Guardian reports that US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot at public meeting in Arizona. The report also says

[Sarah] Palin had published a "target map" on her website using images of gun sights to identify 20 House Democrats, including Giffords, for backing the new health care law. more ...

not bothered by parallels

The big new Christmas movie, James Cameron's Avatar, which opened yesterday, has some striking green themes.

There's deforestation: a truly massive tree gets destroyed. There's a threatened indigenous people: the home of the Na'vi tribe gets obliterated. And there's a new-agey idea that that there's a mutual thing going on between the people living in forest and the forest itself and there may even be scientific evidence (Sigourney Weaver tells us) of electro-magnetic impulses that allows the forest to act like a brain, communicating between its many constituent elements.

The baddies of the piece, of course, don't have such a sophisticated brain. What the US military has is muscle - a massive arsenal of weaponry which it aims to use ( 'shock and awe') to get the 'savages' moving out of an area where there they have discovered a very precious mineral called - yes! - 'unobtanium'.

This raises an interesting question. I assume you can't have a successful blockbuster movie that's anti-American. So there must be plenty of people watching this movie who aren't remotely bothered by the parallels suggested by the storyline.

Update: in this interview Cameron refers to the themes of imperialism and biodiversity and attacks the way America has 'had eight years of the oil lobbyists running the country'. But he points out that anti-imperialism is American too. 'You can take it back to the origins of America in a fight of rebels against an imperial dominating force.' Except the rebels in question were hardly fighting on behalf of indigenous people. more ...

ever decreasing circles

The US Department of Defense, or DOD, consumes more energy than Bangladesh and Bangladesh has a population of 162 million. Yet one of the major roles of the US military is to protect US energy supplies.

Let's think this through: if the military wasn't quite so large, the country wouldn't need quite so much energy, which would mean the military wouldn't have to be quite so large, which would mean ... more ...

cognitive dissonance

Fewer Americans See Solid Evidence of Global Warming more ...

ho hum

The Journal of Consumer Research has investigated the attitudes of Hummer owners and discovers that they

employ the ideology of American foundational myths, such as the "rugged individual," and the "boundless frontier" to construct themselves as moral protagonists. They often believe they represent a bastion again anti-American discourses evoked by their critics. more ...

lightbulbs and sex

Last night the author and environmentalist Bill McKibben got to tell American comedian Stephen Colbert about the 350.org campaign.

McKibben said, 'It's past the point where we can make the math work one lightbulb at a time.'

'It's all over,' said Colbert, 'We should all have end-of-the-world sex.'

McKibben later tweets that he thinks he survived with at least 40% of his dignity intact. Video. more ...

upbeat's downside

In her new book, Bright-Sided, the American author Barbara Ehrenreich blames positive thinking for causing the economic downturn. more ...

it never happens

In Where I Was From, her book on California, Joan Didion debunks the Golden State's myth of rugged individualism and shows how greatly its economy has benefited from state subsidies from Washington.

In today's Independent Malcolm Gladwell goes further in unpicking the American Dream. He says America isn't the place to get rich. Not unless, that is, you're rich already.

'Once you are rich in America you stay rich... but if you are at the bottom it just never happens, statistically, it never happens that people make it. And that's very different from western European counties.' more ...

model answer

'We have never successfully modelled the transition from euphoria to fear.' Alan Greenspan more ...

the top 20

Dot Earth reports that the Pew Research Center polled 1,503 American adults and found that global warming came bottom of the 20 issues surveyed.

The list in order of priority: the economy, jobs, terrorism, Social Security, education, energy, Medicare, health care, deficit reduction, health insurance, helping the poor, crime, moral decline, military, tax cuts, environment, immigration, lobbyists, trade policy, global warming. more ...

in two words

Newsweek has a feature on art and culture in the Bush era. The list of works the magazine thinks best catches the era runs: 'Battlestar Galactica', ‘American Idol’, Jeff Koons’s ‘Hanging Heart’, Jonathan Franzen's ‘The Corrections’, ‘Black Hawk Down’, ‘Borat’, Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’, Caryl Churchill's ‘Far Away’ and Rick Warren's 'The Purpose-Driven Life'.

One movie blogger writes,

'I don't know what "one work" I'd pick to represent the Bush years, but I do know which phrase I would select. It isn't "axis of evil," or "weapons of mass destruction" or "mission accomplished" or even "with us or against us." It's another Bush quote, a response to the implicit question of what Americans should do after 9/11. He responded: "Go shopping."' more ...

stoned

W, Oliver Stone's movie about George W. Bush, opened in the UK today. It runs two hours and 11 minutes. (Extended trailer. W meets Laura here.) There are plenty of personal insights about Dad, Laura, Jeb, Texas, Iraq, oil, beer and baseball. But most revealing of all (about Stone and Bush), there isn't a single reference to climate change. more ...

today's two elections

The Newsweek cover story says the rest of the world sees today's election more clearly than Americans do. 'In the United States, the pundits framed campaign '08 much as they framed the last election, and the one before. It was a small, almost local obsession with the horse race, with battleground states ... Outside of the United States, the election played large and transformational: a 21st-century man with whom the whole world can identify versus an old cold-warrior out of synch with the complex political and economic crises of our age. The election, it seemed, had morphed into a meta-election. If at home, especially as the election neared its end, Obama seemed to be playing down his blackness, his intellect, his eliteness and his progressive ideas, these were the qualities that more and more drew the rest of the world to him.'


more ...

ordinary joe

Playwright David Edgar weighs the dramatic impact of a new character, Joe the Plumber, in the third presidential debate. (Also, Steve Coll on this post-modern fable.) more ...

that executive experience in full

Jason Jones interviews the current Wasilla mayor, Dianne Keller, for The Daily Show.

Jason Jones: Do you think being a small-town Mayor prepares you to be president of the United States?
Mayor Dianne Keller: An unequivocal yes.
JJ: How?
Mayor: How?
JJ: Let's say you have a problem with the fire department? What would you do?
Mayor: The city of Wasilla doesn't manage the fire department.
JJ: Ok, fine. Let's say there's something wrong with the school system?
Mayor: We don't do the school system.
JJ: Just pick any social service.
Mayor: We don't do social services in Wasilla...
JJ: Um, what do you do?
Mayor: What do we do in Wasilla?
JJ: Take me through the Mayor of Wasilla's day.
Mayor: (nod, nod, nod), Just different, different things on different days...um, well Mondays at 10 o'clock we always have a staff meeting, and then, um, um, (long pause) every Thursday is a check-signing day, so I sign all the checks for the city of Wasilla--pay the bills...

HT for link and transcript: Crunchy Chicken more ...

drrrrrrrrrill, baby, drrrrrrrrrill

Tina Fey asked the Saturday Night Live writer assigned to the Sarah Palin sketches to script in lots of words with Rs in them. 'She loves those Rs," Fey said. "William Ayerrrrrrrrrs and terrrrrorrrrists - I think she thinks there's oil in those Rs, she's digging deep.' more ...

return of the parrot

John Cleese says, 'I used to think Michael Palin was the funniest Palin on earth.'

But now he says there's a Palin in another parrot sketch.

Cleese says, 'Monty Python could have written this.' more ...

aristotle in the usa

Hendrik Hertzberg:

If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own. One can only hope that the tragedy will be his alone, and not the nation’s. more ...

the ad ABC won't run

They'll take an ad from Chevron, but not this:

The solution to our climate crisis seems simple. Repower America with wind and solar. End our dependence on foreign oil. A stronger economy. So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy? Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy. Lobbyists, ads, even scandals. All to increase their profits, while America suffers. Breaking big oil's lock on our government ... Now that's change. We're the American people and we approve this message. more ...

purge

'Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.' Michael Pollan

Quoted this week by Elizabeth Kolbert in Turf War. more ...