Super-sized con man

Kudos to Radley Balko for doing a little digging into actor/director Morgan Spurlock, the man responsible for Super Size Me, which won Spurlock the documentary director's prize at Sundance. Balko's main revelation is that Spurlock has a track record of making money (not only on MTV, but earlier with a website) by paying people to eat gross things (e.g. a jar of mayonnaise, dog feces). So I suppose that it's progress of sorts that this time Spurlock was putting his own health on the line by eating like a freak.

For more criticism of Spurlock's movie, see Tech Central Station. Also worth looking into: The Competitive Enterprise Institute's adjunct fellow Soso Whaley also did her own version of Spurlock's experiment and apparently lost ten pounds.

Something political

So anyway, in that USA Today article about The Day After Tomorrow, former Vice President Al Gore sees this as an opportunity for political action:

Former vice president Al Gore has rallied behind the film and plans a series of town hall meetings to discuss global warming. [...]

"The movie is fiction, of course," Gore tells USA TODAY. "And it's important we separate fact from fiction. But it raises an extremely serious issue. We do face a climate crisis. It should be seen as a genuine global emergency."

Gore says that he and environmental groups see Tomorrow as a chance to discuss an issue the public has long ignored.

"People are going to walk out of the movie, and they're going to talk about this issue one way or the other," he says. "I see it as an opportunity to join with the scientific community to set the record straight."

I'm going to address the following comments to the handful of people who think this is a perfectly sensible springboard for Al Gore to be using. Let us suppose for a moment that another former Veep, take Dan Quayle for example, had used the impending release of Armageddon to argue for massively-increased government funding in the search for near-earth objects. Or had used the impending release of Independence Day to announce a series of public meetings into the importance of funding SETI projects. A tsunami of scorn and ridicule would have inundated the news cycle for the better part of a week.

Indeed, I think that Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day and Day After Tomorrow would have been at the forefront of belittling the Veep, proclaiming "It's just entertainment." And yet he thinks that Day After Tomorrow has "a message."

Note for the future: Directors like to say their movie has "a message" until they start catching a lot of flak, after which the movie reverts to "just entertainment." Got it?

The Day After Tomorrow

Wednesday's USA Today covered the political tussles swirling about the impending release of The Day After Tomorrow, the utterly-implausible environmental catastrophe movie. The article pretty readily concedes the impossibilty of what the movie depicts, an onslaught of disaster that unfolds over the course of days rather than decades. This is something that my friends and I were poking fun at weeks ago; specifically: how does one create movie terror from the onset of an ice age?

Say you have your basic glacier. It moves maybe a few inches an hour when it's really hauling ass. You can put a crowd of movie extras in front of the glacier, screaming their heads off, but in less than a minute all the extras are going to realize the glacier isn't doing anything and will switch to casually discussing lunch plans.

So apparently the movie creators figured the only way to make the film compelling was to make everything a thousand to ten thousand times faster. With that kind of license I could write a horror/disaster script about almost anything. Rust, for example. Only most of the moviegoing public will know, "The whole pretense of that new Rust movie is utterly absurd. Why should I waste my time?" I could point out to them that my special effects showing whole cities corroding and falling down are really compelling, but I still don't think they'd pay to see my movie. And yet I'm sure that folks by the millions are going to plunk down eight bucks each for The Day After Tomorrow, and come out mumbling, "I had no idea that stuff could happen!" Barnum loved such people.

Kerry quotes i

I'm starting to have some fun going over news stories of Kerry campaign stops and speeches. Take this one, which has this tidbit in it:

Kerry added that ensuring "that no young American soldier ever has to fight and die because of our dependence on foreign oil" should be "the great project for our generation."

Some questions for John Kerry: Is it your opinion then, Senator Kerry, that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would not have been undertaken if we were energy-independent? Or are you referring to the liberation of Kuwait? Do you think that if neither Gulf War had happened, Iraq would have attacked Israel with nuclear weapons by now?

I think that these are very interesting questions!

The Chalabi raid

As you probably know, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi's home and offices were raided May 20th. A Coalition spokesperson told journalists that U.S. Forces did not participate. There is but the thinnest patina of credibility to that claim, but more importantly this almost certainly was carried out with the full knowledge and approval of Paul Bremer.

Now I am not certain whether or not we should have thrown in with Chalabi from the get-go, like the Pentagon wanted. He seems a little kooky at times, a little shady at other times. Certainly the State Department seems to hate his guts, and has long evidenced a desire to destroy the man. But this stuff coming out now from "unnamed intelligence sources" saying that Chalabi was passing sensitive information to the Iranians strikes me as a steaming pile of crap. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! The State Department is loaded with nattering nincompoops who can't wait until their next opportunity to visit Tehran and snuggle up with their cuddly mullah friends. To fault Chalabi for having his own Iranian contacts is absurd, and to suggest that he's "passing sensitive information" is just a smear. How do I know? Come on! If the United States had hard evidence that he was really passing sensitive information, then the man would be under arrest (by uniformed American soldiers this time) and Don Rumsfeld would be announcing that fact. It's as simple as that.

I'll add one more thing: To raid Chalabi's home while Muqtada al-Sadr is still waddling around free speaks volumes to the common Iraqi about the relative value of being a "friend" or "enemy" of the Americans. Apparently, America humiliates its friends but negotiates with its enemies. How inspiring.

Sloppy newspapers, Part II

The New York Times:

An article on Monday about the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that ended school segregation misstated a word in a paraphrase from President Bush, who attended a ceremony in Topeka, Kan. He called for a continuing battle to end racial inequality — not equality.

Jayson Blair may be gone, but a number of his peers seem to still be there.

Shouldn't they be protecting some wildlife?

In case you thought the Sierra Club was chiefly concerned with trees and critters, you might want to check out this press release this week, in which the Sierra Club announced they've filed suit against a federal judicial appointment made by President Bush. Their aim is nothing less than to undo the appointment of the judge to his position.

The Sierra Club is trying to say that Judge William Pryor was appointed unconstitutionally to the Eleventh Circuit Court, inasmuch as the recess appointment was made during a time that the Sierra Club does not agree was a Senate recess. If that is really true, I find it remarkable that not one of the forty-plus Senators who were filibustering the nomination proceedings realized it!

But of course the Sierra Club is not really concerned about the technical definition of what is and is not a Senate "recess." And if the Sierra Club were really that interested in seeing to it that Judge Pryor went through a normal nominations process, maybe they should have lobbied the Senate to secure a floor vote on his nomination during the ten months that this was pending business.

Impressive

According to The Sun British troops, ambushed and outnumbered five to one, rallied and killed 35 of the enemy in a bayonet charge:

Outnumbered British soldiers killed 35 Iraqi attackers in the Army’s first bayonet charge since the Falklands War 22 years ago.

The fearless Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders stormed rebel positions after being ambushed and pinned down.

Despite being outnumbered five to one, they suffered only three minor wounds in the hand-to-hand fighting near the city of Amara.

The battle erupted after Land Rovers carrying 20 Argylls came under attack on a highway.

Here's the link to the full story. I am mightily impressed, but speaking as one who has walked 2 Para's battlefield at Darwin and also climbed Mount Harriet, I have found no cause whatsoever to think that the British Infantry is anything less than world-class.

Maybe he'll storm the mosque in those humongous boots

Kiss bass player Gene Simmons earns a special place in my heart for standing up for Western civilization in this news item. A little flavor here:

"Extremism believes that it's okay to strap bombs on to your children and send them to paradise and whatever else and to behead people"
[...]
Simmons also warned that the West was under threat, and that the Untited Nations didn’t work, adding the West must "speak softly and carry a big stick".

Of course, pointing out the shortcomings of women-oppressing, intolerant midieval tyrannies provoked howls of protest from Australian muslims (both of them, I guess). Not that they're availing themselves of the opportunity to live in the places Simmons describes.

Dumping and more dumping

In the last two weeks, the Milwaukee Metropolitain Sewerage District has dumped -- get this -- one and a half billion gallons of untreated wastewater and sewage into Milwaukee's waterways and Lake Michigan. The best way I know of to visualize that large a quantity is to imagine taking the US Bank Center (formerly the First Wisconsin building), filling it from bottom to top with wastewater and sewage, dumping it into the lake, and repeating that about ten times.

Just to be clear, my position is that the $3 billion Deep Tunnel Project was a phenomenal misallocation of resources. Milwaukee's fundamental problem continues to be the fact that their system channels rainwater runoff into the same lines that carry human waste. Most communities have segregated lines (one set for runoff, another for poop). Milwaukee though is just going to keep dumping and dumping wastewater until that fundamental problem is remedied.

Why, then, was the Deep Tunnel ever built? I honestly don't know, but my guess is that Milwaukee's City Government probably figured it was a way to build a partial solution while sticking the federal government and/or surrounding communities with a huge part of the bill. Whereas if they actually buckle down and start a project to segregate their sewers, they probably have to come up with all the money themselves. Again I do not know this. I am guessing.

if you can believe two different, contradictory things in the same month...

... it must be an election year. When did Bob Woodward's book come out? Just weeks ago, right? Bush got attacked at that time over one of the book's claims, where he supposedly made a pact with the Saudis to drive down oil prices for the 2004 election year. This was based solely on a claim from Prince Bandar, but it was repeated and reported nonetheless.

Well, I guess that's ancient history, because now Bush is being attacked for inaction on oil prices. According to one report now, the Democrats want him to draw from the strategic petroleum reserve.

Normally this would be an occasion to call for increasing domestic production or strengthening conservation efforts, but this being an election year we'll only get band-aids that neither request sacrifice nor solve underlying problems.

The papers are getting careless

The Daily Mirror in the U.K. published photographs of British troops urinating on Iraqi prisoners. The Boston Globe published a view of a picture wherein American soldiers were sexually abusing an Iraqi woman. In both cases, it was quickly established that these depictions were simply fakes. But only after publication, of course. Only after the damage was done.

The Mirror at least found the grace to sack its editor. The Globe apologized, but laid primary blame at the feet of an inflammatory Boston City Councilor, whose claims the paper was reporting on in passing along the picture.

Iraqi Chemical Munition

I have already heard one CNN newscast mischaracterize the 155mm sarin shell as predating the first Gulf War. As Blaster's Blog explains, this is a careless misinterpretation of what the Army has actually stated. Furthermore, I don't know of any source that actually thinks Iraq had binary "mix in flight" artillery shells during the Iran-Iraq War or during the campaigns against the Kurds. All those chemicals were either deployed by agricultural-type sprayers or from warheads that had to be mixed on the battlefield -- which is to say they were comparatively primitive, and also low shelf-life.

There are other remarkable things about this discovery. A "binary munition" is a level of artillery shell production which I had not heard anyone in the Bush Administration claim for Saddam's regime. Indeed, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative and other sources, the Iraqi regime was cajoled in 1995 into admitting development of binary artillery shells only after the UN uncovered some documents, but even then Iraq only admitted to making prototypes (i.e. saying they never got into regular production). Even if that's true, right there you have pretty strong evidence of a chemical weapons program that was continuing to advance during the sanctions and inspections years.

I suppose one cannot ignore the possibility that the shell was dragged in by terrorists from another country during the last year. The problem with that theory though is that there's no point in doing that unless the insurgent knows that he is smuggling in something special: a chemical round (Iraq is already brimming with ordinary explosive rounds). In which case, wouldn't such a person know how to use the round to get the mixing and dispersal to work? Not much use smuggling the thing all the way from Syria, Iran, or wherever without knowing that trick, is there?


[Postscript:: I've added to and edited this post Fri 21 May]

North Korea, revisited

It's been a few weeks since that huge North Korean rail accident. Here's a very interesting news report on that, claiming that a dozen Syrian technicians died in the disaster because one of the trains happened to be carrying missile components that the Syrians were purchasing from the North Koreans. I admit, though, to be rather unfamiliar with the "World Tribune," and don't know how confident to be in it as a source.

An unexpected break

A poorly-done movie trailer and tepid reviews soured my expectations for the movie Troy, so when friends said they were still determined to go, we went forth grimly. Perhaps lowered expectations were the key to enjoying our first "summer 2004" movie.

From the trailer, we were worried that the dialog would be clumsy. It was actually okay, and moved things along. We were worried that there'd be too much "jiggle-cam" during the fights, preventing any greater conceptualization of what was going on. There was blessedly little of that. I kept thinking that Brad Pitt would be a lousy hero. He turned out to be a fine warrior, and his pretty-boy looks merely underscored his "touched by the gods" origins.

Your anchors for the movie in terms of gripping, well-played characters: (a) Peter O'Toole as King Priam, (b) Sean Bean as Odysseus, and especially (c) Eric Bana as Hector.

Some minor gripes:

• The sun kept coming up in the morning over the ocean, i.e. west. This is assuming that Troy is in fact in the East and the Greeks came from the West, as the opening map of the Mediterranean indicated. The moon, for its part, seems to hang around whereever it dang well pleases -- including on the northern horizon.
  
• Achilles sure does a lot of moping around. Worse than a Beverly Hills teenager, except he might actually kill you if you don't give him the keys to the chariot.
  
• The "humming/moaning woman on the soundtrack," made prominent in Gladiator, gets overused in this movie. The device gets downright distracting at times.
  
• The special effects guys didn't seem to put much thought into how they'd render the invasion fleet on their computers. The processor-perfect inter-boat spacing as far as the eye could perceive came off as more fake than a fuzzy matte still would have been.
  

The Summer of Woe -- 2001

As another summer movie season is just getting underway, there's a moment to reflect on a still-recent low-water mark. Quite probably the worst summer movie season of my adult lifetime occurred in 2001. I bailed out early after being burned by Jurassic Park III, but my good friends stuck it out through some memorably awful fare. The rest is history: The 9/11 terrorist attacks, stock markets foundering, the recession deepens, friends lose jobs and capital. (While it's tempting to blame Bush or Clinton, the INS, or federal law enforcement, the truly savvy understand that Hollywood was to blame!)

Big disappointments of The Summer of Woe:

• Jurassic Park III
  
• Planet of the Apes
  
• Pearl Harbor
  
• A.I.
  
• Rollerball
  

Some other movies that summer:

• The Mummy Returns
  
• Rush Hour 2
  
• Shrek
  
• American Pie 2
  
• Tomb Raider
  

You know it's spring in Milwaukee when...

....the Milwaukee Metropolitain Sewage District is dumping millions upon millions of gallons of untreated wastewater into Lake Michigan. This, despite the three billion (with a 'B') dollar Deep Tunnel Project that was supposed to make such dumping a once-a-century occasion. Instead, the billions were spent, and the mind-boggling pollution continues. Indeed, Milwaukee doesn't even need a heavy downpour for the District to start dumping (just a typical slow-moving spring front), nor will the District even wait for the Tunnel to be full. Friday's dumping started when the Tunnel was only half-full!

Audrey Seiler

Seiler, in case you've forgotten already, is the University of Wisconsin student who made herself infamous by disappearing for a few days and subsequently claiming to have been abducted. Her abduction claims fell completely apart when store surveillance photography showed her purchasing the props (e.g. duct tape) for her abduction tale during the time she was missing. Prosecutors allege that Seiler was trying to regain the attentions of an ex-boyfriend.

Anyway, a friend of mine observed today that "Madison's faked abductions are down one hundred percent since Ms. Seiler left town!"

To which a coworker of his deadpanned, "Well you know, most fake abductions go unreported."

The Economy

You know, it certainly is a nice thing to worry about whether you're getting a raise and how much it might be. Nice, that is, as compared to the times 18 to 36 months ago when you were thinking about the bare minimum amount of money that you and your wife could live on, should one or the other lose his job.

Yeah, his job, since the wife is in one of those extremely stable occupations (think funeral homes) that isn't subject to the normal business cycle. So I would've been the one canned, you can be sure.

But it didn't happen, and business has picked up. Picked up so much that this fiscal year might just be the division's first profitable one.... ever. And that's something that the company as a whole could really use to dress up next year's annual report and outlook.

So anyway, we've already had our annual reviews. Two weeks ago now. And everyone's walking around on eggshells and scarcely breathing, wondering when the other shoe -- the shoe that maybe has some extra cash in it -- is going to drop. One pay period in May has already gone by with nary a peep on this topic, and in May everyone is technically on whatever their "new" wage is supposed to be. So whenever the raises or absence thereof get sprung on us, that's all retroactive.

And whenever we get the news, everyone will want to know things like, "What was the range?" and "How was this decision arrived at?" People with years of experience observing this process have given up trying to guess it out in advance. Will the company reward the remaining employees for sticking it out through two years of aggressive downsizing and cost cutting? Will the sudden upswing in sales and productivity be noticed? Or is that all deferred in the name of ongoing budget restraints and the fact that "you haven't turned a net profit yet?"

Will employees who were awarded stock options in the past continue to receive stock options? I sure hope so.

But this all brings me to an as-yet little-observed phenomenon, since most people's capacity for attentiveness to national matters has been swallowed up by Abu Ghraib's amateur pornography ring. And that is inflation. For the year to date, if I read this right, inflation has been heating up at a core (annualized) rate of about three percent. If you don't toss in the seasonal fudges and you also leave in the very real rising energy costs, it's more like five percent. So if I don't see a raise up around four percent, I don't figure I'm making much progress this year. Because while the company is giving, stingily-like, with the one hand, it is most definitely taking every February when the insurance premiums go up and big hunks are passed down unto us. So the annual pay raise has to first cancel what are essentially the February pay cuts. "Cost sharing measures," if you enjoy hanging out with the people in HR.

And this scarcely begins to address my increases in skills and productivity over the past year. My job duties are expanding at a double-digit clip; shouldn't my compensation? Kindly fill my duffel with large-denomination currency, please.

Dennis Miller on our latest war

Dennis Miller has a ready-made response for those who worry that the invasion of Afghanistan and (especially) Iraq were "distractions" from the pursuit of Bin Laden:

"I wish there was a country called al Qaeda and we could have started the war there, but there wasn't. And Hussein and his punk sons were just unlucky enough to draw the Wonka ticket in the a**hole lottery."

Made me chuckle anyway.

Just throwing this out there...

The top headline in today's Capital Times (Madison, WI):

"Canadian praises his health care"

Well, they finally found one! That is big news! An online version of the article can be viewed here for now. Basically it's about a Big Canadian Labor Boss whipping up some locals at the "Labor Temple" to rally around not managing your own health care situation and instead having a single-payer system rule all.

But fundamentally, the headline just struck me as unintentionally funny. Like it belonged in The Onion rather than on the Cap Times. Slow news day, anyone?