Michael Scheuer, the founding head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, on George Tenet :
Of course, it's good to finally have Tenet's side of the Iraq and 9/11 stories. But whatever his book says, he was not much of a CIA chief. Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush -- denigrating good intelligence to sate the former's cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter's Wilsonian militarism. Sadly but fittingly, "At the Center of the Storm" is likely to remind us that sometimes what lies at the center of a storm is a deafening silence
This is not a joke. Here are the Top 10 Secrets They Don't Want You to Know About the Debates.
(10.) They aren't debates!
"A debate is a head-to-head, spontaneous, structured argument over the merits of an issue," Rice says. "Under the ridiculous 32-page contract that reads like the rules for the Miss America Pageant, there will be no candidate-to-candidate questions, no rebuttal to your opponent's points, no cross questions or cross answers, no rebuttals, no follow-up questions -- that's not a debate, that's a news conference."
(9.) The debates were hijacked from the truly independent League of Women Voters in 1986.
"The League of Women Voters ran these debates with an iron hand as open, transparent, non-partisan events from 1976 to 1984," Rice says. "The men running the major campaigns ended their control when the League defiantly included John Anderson and Ross Perot, and used tough moderators and formats the parties didn't like. The parties snatched the debates from the League and formed the Commission on Presidential Debates -- the CPD -- in 1986."
I was just watching on DVD the TV series "Jeeves and Wooster" based on the P.G. Wodehouse stories. Two thumbs up for the series, and two thumbs up to Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry for good performances.
It reminded me of the excellent British comedies - "Yes, Minister"/"Yes, Prime Minister" and "Tandoori Nights" - that ran on Indian TV years ago
An excellent article in the New Yorker on Vaman Ghiya, antique smuggler.
Early one morning in June, 2003, two dozen police officers drew their guns and prepared to raid a stately three-story brick-and-concrete home on a corner lot in Everest Colony, a quiet residential neighborhood on the outskirts of the Indian city of Jaipur. Several khaki-clad officers scaled the imposing stone wall surrounding the house, disarmed a guard, and opened the gate. Under the gaze of a security camera, the rest of the team filed silently onto the property. The raid was the culmination of a yearlong investigation and months of surveillance, during which officers had posed as vagrants and fruit peddlers. They had timed the strike for dawn, hoping to startle the inhabitants.
The officers called out, “Open the door!” and banged on the locked front entrance. They waited, but no one came. Then someone spotted smoke billowing from a third-floor window. The superintendent of police, Anand Shrivastava, ordered his men to break down the door. They ran upstairs to the master bedroom, where they found the owner, Vaman Narayan Ghiya, standing in his pajamas, hurriedly throwing documents into an improvised fire on the floor.
“How dare you?” Ghiya shouted. “How could you enter my house?” He cursed at the officers who rushed to restrain him, struggling and shouting, “You cannot touch me!”
Ray Bradbury has clarified that Fahrenheit 451 is actually not about censorship.
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
“Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television’s effect on substance in the news. The front page of that day’s L.A. Times reported on the weekend box-office receipts for the third in the Spider-Man series of movies, seeming to prove his point.
“Useless,” Bradbury says. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.” He bristles when others tell him what his stories mean, and once walked out of a class at UCLA where students insisted his book was about government censorship. He’s now bucking the widespread conventional wisdom with a video clip on his Web site (http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html), titled “Bradbury on censorship/television.”
As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’... This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”
He says the culprit in Fahrenheit 451 is not the state — it is the people. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in which the government uses television screens to indoctrinate citizens, Bradbury envisioned television as an opiate. In the book, Bradbury refers to televisions as “walls” and its actors as “family,” a truth evident to anyone who has heard a recap of network shows in which a fan refers to the characters by first name, as if they were relatives or friends.
Yes, yes. I can totally see it. I can totally see the piece in The Onion.
"Fahrenheit 451" not about censorship, "Moby Dick" not about whale
Can anyone prove that "Moby Dick" is about a whale? Was there really a whale at all? Can we really trust this fellow we have never met before, who would have us call him "Ishmael"? Are we going to fall for that one? No, no, no and no. No, I say. No.