The Bible Thief

This one was impossible to resist, via the Lefsetz Letter. A reader responds to a post concerning the pros and cons of the Kindle (mostly the pros, actually):

“My Kindle was stolen off my seat on a United flight back from London to LA two months ago. Went to the restroom, came back, gone! Theft at 35,000 ft. I reported it stolen to United (we decided not to search everyone on the plane!), but I left the account on to see what happened next. A week later, I got a notice from Amazon that a book had been purchased on my Kindle acct. What did the thief buy??

The Bible, Old AND New Testament, only $0.99 (public domain)…”

Good Cop and Bad Cop Mix It Up Again, Pt. 2

[Good Cop sits on the edge of her bed at a Motel Six somewhere in the Midwest, twirling her ponytail and talking on her phone. Bad Cop, dressed undercover as a hoodlum with a doo rag and a clip-on skull-and-crossbones earring, leans back on his bench on the D train passing through Bensonhurst, talking to Good Cop on his cell. He has a bad connection and talks loudly, oblivious to his fellow passengers]

 

 

 

Good Cop: We’re tanking.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: So is everything in the world.

 

 

 

Good Cop: We’re getting a third the hits we got over the summer.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: The center will not hold. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

 

 

 

Good Cop: I think we should go global.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: Like the depression?

 

 

 

Good Cop: Nobody here is going out anymore. Your live music theory only holds up for so long. If nobody is going out then we’re irrelevant. You follow?

 

 

 

Bad Cop: You think it’s better somewhere else? Good fucking luck finding a bar that’s open, that hasn’t been foreclosed on yet.

 

 

 

Good Cop: Maybe we should revisit the political slant we started out with. It is an election year, after all.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: We still haven’t officially endorsed anybody.

 

 

 

Good Cop [withering sarcasm]: Like Lucid Culture is going to endorse…Ron Paul.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: Hey, don’t dis my boy Ron!

 

 

 

Good Cop: We should spend more time on London, Paris, you know, where good things are happening.

 

 

 

Bad Cop [in a broad British accent]: And I suppose you’ll be taking the QE2?

 

 

 

Good Cop: You know what I mean. Otherwise you’ll be writing for an audience of one. Did you ever read Le Chaos et la Nuit?

 

 

 

Bad Cop: Creo que si. Just kidding.

 

 

 

Good Cop: That’s French. Montherlant, famous novelist from the thirties and forties. It’s about a guy slowly losing it, writing rightwing editorials that nobody will ever read.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: Now what on earth prompted that analogy?

 

 

 

Good Cop: Not to dis your boy Ron, but…

 

 

 

Bad Cop [threatening]: Hey, I mean it. Basta.

 

 

 

Good Cop: OK, OK. But we need to branch out. People aren’t going to shows.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: People aren’t buying cds. Or anything at the supermarket that’s not on sale. Although people are still drinking. Maybe we could review beer?

 

 

 

Good Cop: Yeah right. There are more beer blogs than there are breweries. Besides, I don’t drink beer.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: I am fully aware of that [belches].  So what are you doing? Moving to Prague? Oh yeah, that’s so 1998. How about Philly? Portland? Bridgeport?

 

 

 

Good Cop: What I’m saying is that we’ve got to expand our audience, stop being be so New York-centric. This is cyberspace, remember? The Ukraine, the Galapagos islands are right next door.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: Sure thing, Paris Hilton. What’s up with you, did you find my stash?

 

 

 

Good Cop: I don’t smoke pot. You know that. I also want you to break out that alltime top 666 list, that’ll force you to put up a new post every day even if it’s just a single song. Lists are huge, they generate tons of hits.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: I know, the 20 hottest chicks on tv.

 

 

 

Good Cop [exasperated]: Dude, zip it.

 

 

 

Bad Cop:  The 20 hottest porn videos on youtube?

 

 

 

Good Cop: How about the top 20 times McCain has flip-flopped on an issue…

 

 

 

Bad Cop: The top 20 times Obama has flip-flopped on an issue.

 

 

 

Good Cop: See, now you’re thinking. What I’m saying is, let’s get out of the box, let’s make the site more fun. Right now we’re just appealing to one small and rapidly shrinking segment of the population. I think the whole concept of what this was supposed to be in the beginning is starting to make a lot more sense.

 

 

 

Bad Cop: Throw a whole lot of shit against the wall and…

 

 

 

Good Cop: No! But let’s make things fresh and exciting again, huh? I feel like this is starting to become like a clique thing, the thing you hate the very most and I don’t want that either. Remember how psyched you were in the first weeks of Lucid Culture?

 

 

 

Bad Cop: Yeah, when we were getting four hits a day and three of them were you on your blackberry.

 

 

 

Good Cop: I’m also going to shake up the live music calendar. More descriptive, less wordy. OK with you?

 

 

 

Bad Cop: What, the job wearing you down? Maybe we should trade places. You go out and deal with all the assholes and see all the shows and I’ll stay home and surf the web.

 

 

 

Good Cop: No thank you. Maybe when I get back to town to stay I’ll join you sometime.

 

 

 

Bad Cop [pulls a flask from under his arm, opens it and takes a swig] : Good, then I’ll have a designated driver.

 

 

 

 

Viper Odds & Ends

Just shot through Cockburn’s most recent article at Counterpunch. Along with a rather fascinating look at eugenics, immigration policy, Zyklon B & the El Paso delousing facilities that later became the model for Nazi death camps, there is a fantastic article by MIT prof Richard Lindzen he quotes at length on the interstices between science, advocacy groups, and public policy:

The interaction of science, advocacy and politics in both the global warming and eugenics cases share a number of characterisics:

Powerful advocacy groups claiming to represent both science and the public in the name of morality and superior wisdom.Simplistic depictions of the underlying science so as to facilitate widespread ‘understanding.’

Events’, real or contrived, interpreted in such a manner as to promote a sense of urgency in the public at large. Scientists flattered by public attention and deferent to ‘political will’ and
popular assessment of virtue.

Significant numbers of scientists eager to produce the science demanded by the ‘public.’

Given the automatic tendency of our educated elites to form advocacy groups, the above interactions would appear to have a certain inevitability, and the advantages of advocacy groups over individual scientists in communicating with the public will inevitably give advocacy groups an opportunity to dominate the presentation of the science.

While I have issues with Cockburn’s position on global warming, I think the above applies to just about every biological discipline which can result in public policy – most notably, health policy. The public will always be unaware that ‘consensus’ is not something built by scientists, but by advocacy groups with underlying motivations [or by industries with profit motivations]. In fact there are very few areas of science in which there is ‘consensus’ – and the history of science [at least as seen through Kuhn] is based precisely on the breaking of accepted scientific paradigms. We all need to keep this in mind when faced with other current idiocies like ‘global bird flu pandemic’, etc.
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In other news, my favorite Hasbara troll, dcoronata, made a lovely appearance today, trotting out some of his greatest hits:

What country was that? (3+ / 0-)
Recommended by:redcardphreek, Doughnutman, MBNYC
If you know your history, the area was a British protectorate, previously a part of the Ottoman Empire.

There was no previous country in history, that went by the name of Palestine.

Right, so it’s fine that a bunch of Europeans came in, stole the land from the hundreds of thousands of people living there & then instituted policies of ethnic cleansing that continue to this day… Just so that’s settled…

In that diary though, mattes linked to a very interesting article I hadn’t seen before on the Mizrahi rejection of Zionism. Very good read & completely blasts the myth of the great Arab expulsion of Jews after the creation of Israel.

Anyhow – have at it vipes.