For a Few Dollars More

Perhaps you found it bothersome when the New York Times instituted a paywall to control the amount of content people were able to see for free.

Well, another entity has jumped on the bandwagon and started charging for web content: The entire country of Slovakia.

Interestingly, Slovakia with a population of only 5.7 million people, probably doesn't have that many more citizens than the New York Times has readers. Before anyone starts worrying that this sort of thing might happen in the United States, bear in mind that that smallness is precisely what makes this sort of thing possible. The paywall covers nine media sources and in a country that small, that's really all they've got.

If anything, I view this as a cautionary tale of what can happen to consumers when there is insufficient competition in the marketplace. Every company certainly wants to make money, quite literally at the expense of their customers. But ultimately, every company is restrained by their competitors. There's no way they can keep in business if they're unable to offer services that are slightly cheaper than the next guy.

What Took Them So Long?

Two days after the death of Bin Laden, The Walt Disney Company has trademarked the phrase SEAL Team 6.

Insert cartoon jokes here....

Seriously though, this sort of thing could give a new layer of meaning to classic cartoons. Consider how Bambi might have turned out if he'd spent the rest of the movie training to hunt down the man that killed his mother?

Gayin' Up the Kids

I'm really not a big fan of the show "Glee" having watched it exactly almost once. It just does nothing for me.

To be honest, I've always thought of high school as being "that terrible four years of your life that prepares you for every other terrible thing that will ever happen to you". So I'm really not that interested in revisiting it.

That said, as disinterested as I am in the show, I'm far less impressed by the idiocy on the right. Mary Elizabeth Williams takes a look:

During the segment, which aired after last week's Lady Gaga-themed "Born This Way" episode, host Damali Keith kicked off by comparing the show's gay themes to "product placement" -- you know, the kind that leaves "everyone in the theater thirsty for that particular brand." Yes, that's how it happens, America. One day your teenage son is banging the head cheerleader. The next, he hears a few bars of Chris Colfer's seductive warbling, and wham! Suddenly he's "thirsty" for that particular "brand." Of penis. Homosexuality – it's exactly like walking past a Cinnabon.

So profoundly dumb. So profoundly, profoundly, profoundly dumb. Sadly though, it's not limited to the Right. The Left is just as quick to assume that the average American can't possibly make up their own mind in the face of a relentless media barrage. Simply substitute "menthol cigarettes" for "homosexuality" and you've got a pretty strong match.

A Brief History of Graffiti

It's available here.

But is graffiti art or vandalism? I personally think that the answer is 'yes'. However, I do have to agree that it isn't merely vandalism. From the piece:

But if it’s true that “Art in the Streets” paints a phenomenon as charged and multidimensional as graffiti in the standard monochromatic hue of rebel deification, it’s also true that graffiti is a phenomenon major institutions like MOCA ought to be taking on. After all, if graffiti really were nothing more than vandalism, it would neither be so attractive nor so objectionable to so many people.  Nike hasn’t sponsored any exhibitions devoted to the art of smashing mailboxes. MOCA has yet to show any interest in celebrating the cultural achievements of people who let their dogs shit on your lawn. For 40 years now, graffiti has been delighting its adherents, enraging its foes, and most of all, persisting, foreshadowing other aspects of our culture, expanding its scope.

Truth, Justice and the (Insert Country Name Here) Way

Bit of Sue Bait here.

Well, this is certainly interesting...

I see that Superman has renounced his American citizenship. Conservatives react here.

Not to ruin the story (SPOILER ALERT), but his reasoning is fairly valid. He wished to go to Tehran to support the protesters. The Iranian government said that they would view this as an act of war by the United States. He felt constrained by being seen as an instrument of American foreign policy and well...Now he's a citizen of somewhere or another.

Or not. Who knows?

What's interesting of course is that this raises a bevy of questions for his poor, hard-working alter ego; Clark Kent. Undoubtedly, Super Man (even given his now stateless existence), has always wished to follow the laws of the land. This becomes difficult when one considers that he is the ultimate undocumented worker. While it's possible that his father Jor-El had the presence of mind to fill out the proper forms before shooting his baby at Earth strapped to a rocket, I would suspect that with his home planet exploding and everything, he probably had other things on his mind.

Superman may have had at least felt morally justified working in the country. After all, he came here as a small child and certainly had no say over the matter. Furthermore, he's quite certainly been a productive member of his adopted country, even if he never did get around to tackling the troubling matter of producing a birth certificate. I can imagine he must have felt that he was as American as anyone else (definitely as much as the student mentioned in this edition of the Morning Blog. ). But having renounced his citizenship, what now? In all good conscience, will he be able to continue laboring on as Clark Kent? Will he be able to justify his continued theft of American jobs from our troubled journalism industry?

One thing I'm certain of: Given that it will be a trifle difficult to retrieve any documents or records from Krypton (planet ending explosions make record keeping just dreadful), I can't imagine that he'll go through the herculean task of applying to become a legal worker in the United States, an effort that in even the best of circumstances, can take years to complete. Frankly, that's the sort of struggle even the Man of Steel can't be expected to undertake. Far easier, to go punch a comet that's hurtling towards the Earth.

Murder Math

Slate takes a long, hard look at the SCIENCE behind slasher movies, runs the numbers and determines the mathematical formula that predicts their body counts:

B = 2n+12(Z-R)+2c+2S+3

B =

Approximate onscreen body count

n = The number of the installment in the series

Z = Zombie factor (i.e., is the film directed by rock-‘n-schlock auteur Rob Zombie? 1 for yes, 0 for no)

R = Is the film part of a reboot? (1 for yes, 0 for no)

c = The number of colons in the title

S = Does the film take place in outer space? (1 for yes, 0 for no)

But is it applicable to Jane Austen movies? We'll simply have to see.

Coming Soon to a Chalkboard Near You!

The New York Times provides a programming guide for the proposed Glenn Beck channel.

I'm glad they'll be giving Chuck Norris some work. I think he's being wasted in a cop show though. He really deserves a talk show. Might I suggest the working title "Kickin' It with Chuck"?

For a Few Dollars More

Felix Salmon takes a look at the New York Times curious decision to implement a $40 million paywall. His anyalysis: Huh?

What does all this mean for the New York Times Company? I can’t see how it’s good. The paywall is certainly being set high enough that a lot of regular readers will not subscribe. These are readers who would normally link to the NYT from their blogs, who would tweet NYT articles, who would post those articles on Facebook, and so on. As a result, not only will traffic from these readers decline, but so will all their referral traffic, too. The NYT makes more than $300 million a year in digital ad revenue, so even a modest decline in pageviews, relative to what the site could have generated sans paywall, can mean many millions of dollars foregone. On top of that, the paywall itself cost somewhere over $40 million to develop

.

Against all that, how much revenue will the paywall bring in? A very large number of the paper’s most loyal readers are already print subscribers, and get access to the website at no extra cost. So the new revenues from the paywall will only come from people who read the website a lot but who don’t subscribe in print.

How many of those people are there? Emily Bell reckons that the number of people who’ll even hit the paywall in the first place is only about 5% of the NYT’s 33 million or so unique visitors. That’s 1.6 million people — compare the 1.3 million people who already subscribe to the paper on Sundays. The former is not a perfect superset of the latter, of course, but there’s a big overlap; let’s say that realistically the NYT is going after a universe of no more than 800,000 people that it’s going to ask to subscribe. And let’s be generous and say that 15% of them do so, paying an average of $200 per year apiece. That’s extra revenues of $24 million per year.

$24 million is a minuscule amount for the New York Times company as a whole; it’s dwarfed not only by total revenues but even by those total digital advertising revenues of more than $300 million a year. This is what counts as a major strategic move within the NYT?

Such a strange, strange decision in so many ways. I can appreciate that they're trying desperately to generate revenue. But when faced with stiff competition, is it sensible to make yourself less competitive by dramatically raising your prices? And yes, going from free to $200 a year constitutes a dramatic price hike.

Beyond that, you have to marvel at what they'll presumptively be losing: an enormous, dedicated and completely free advertising service. People like me that routinely link to 10 or 15 articles a day and refer however many readers their way, are simply going to dry up. Though traveling to the New York Times via a blog or twitter feed will not as it turns out, count against a readers monthly ration of articles, you still have to consider that people who put together the links just won't bother with the expense. If even five small scale bloggers such as myself forgo linking to the Times, I would assume that conservatively, that translates into at least a thousand lost page views for them per day. That's a pretty big hit for them to consider when they're trying to attract advertising dollars.

Salmon concludes:

For the time being, though, I just can’t see how this move makes any kind of financial sense for the NYT. The upside is limited; the downside is that it ceases to be the paper of record for the world. Who would take that bet?

Hey Ladies!

Just in time for Women's History Month, al Qaeda has put out a brand new glossy magazine just for you!

Yes. It has helpful tips for maintaining your complexion. And marrying the mujahideen of your dreams!

Quote of the Day

David Simon, creator of "The Wire" on the arrest of acttress Felicia "Snoop" Pearson:

In an essay published two years ago in Time magazine, the writers of The Wire made the argument that we believe the war on drugs has devolved into a war on the underclass, that in places like West and East Baltimore, where the drug economy is now the only factory still hiring and where the educational system is so crippled that the vast majority of children are trained only for the corners, a legal campaign to imprison our most vulnerable and damaged citizens is little more than amoral. And we said then that if asked to serve on any jury considering a non-violent drug offense, we would move to nullify that jury's verdict and vote to acquit. Regardless of the defendant, I still believe such a course of action would be just in any case in which drug offenses—absent proof of violent acts—are alleged.

Both our Constitution and our common law guarantee that we will be judged by our peers.  But in truth, there are now two Americas, politically and economically distinct. I, for one, do not qualify as a peer to Felicia Pearson. The opportunities and experiences of her life do not correspond in any way with my own, and her America is different from my own. I am therefore ill-equipped to be her judge in this matter.

Been Kicking This About a Bit

It's been sitting in my to-do file in my bookmarks folder. Finally got the time to look over this article and comment on it.

Remember the days before the tiger blood fueled insanity that is Charlie Sheen? Remember when the only thing we had to warn our children of was the madness of Mel Gibson? Well, Vanity Fair naturally has an article up about the Road Warrior himself.

Honestly, in light of the Sheen-scapades it's frankly a bit sad.

Personally, I think that Charlie Sheen said some almost unspeakably dumb things. And then a smart person told him that he could take those dumb things viral. And now the B+ star of a mediocre television program is probably going to be carpet bombing our lives with t-shirts and mugs that say "WINNING!!" until the apocalypse.

Unlike Sheen's catchphrase, in the case of Gibson, I do not expect "Raped by a Pack of Niggers" to be appearing on t-shirts anytime soon.

It's a bit jarring when compared. I really think that what you have is an honest to God breakdown versus one that though it might have started out honestly, rapidly became a rather clever PR and marketing move.

I don''t think that I'm arguing that Gibson deserves any sympathy for his reprehensible quotes. I just point out that they are legitimately reprehensible. Unlike Sheen, I think that though abhorrent, they are at least, not stage managed.

Wow. Fail.

Didn't think it was possible, but here's Bill O'Reily looking like a sensible, not-crazy person if only by comparison.



Seriously? People still listen to this guy? I know his ratings are dropping sharply but can they possibly drop fast enough? This is just embarrassing.

UPDATE: Watching this for a second time, I have to say this: This is an inter-network pwn. O'Reily is laying a smack down.

Smut, Smut and Smut

Say what you will about the ethics or morality of the porn industry. I'm not really interested in having that debate right now. However as this longish New York article reveals, the industry is pretty interesting to say the least! Granted, you have business lunches that go like this:

Marc Randazza, a San Diego–based First Amendment lawyer who represents porn companies and sued Manwin in November, citing pirated content on Spankwire, remains unconvinced by Manwin’s conversion to solid corporate citizen. “I guess they’re trying to come to the surface,” he says, “but I still think they have a toxic business model.” We are sitting at a cluster of slot machines in the Venetian and discussing the woes of Porn Valley, as the traditional bricks-and-mortar, L.A.-based industry is known. For all the work-from-home opportunities afforded by the new universe of micro-smut, professional porn continues to hold an allure. A few minutes into our conversation, a middle-aged guy in a plaid shirt walks hesitantly toward us, leering at our trade-show lanyards printed with the logo bang bros. Almost shyly, he asks, “How would I get into that?”

“You mean become a performer?” Randazza asks.

The man nods.

Randazza looks at him wearily, like he gets this all the time. “Honestly,” Randazza says, “the gay side’s where all the money is. There might be 30 straight guys who can make a living at it, but if you’re willing to get fucked in the ass, I can get you five grand right now.”

The man’s smile quavers, and he backs away.

But that's to be expected. I'm sure the same thing happens to bankers all the time.

What's really interesting is the nature of the people behind the scenes. They truly are the "Geek Kings of Smut". It's simply unfathomable to me that a huge amount of the filth available over the internet is there because of a Foosball league.

Beyond that, the issues facing the industry are emblematic of challenges being faced by all media in the internet age. How do you gather revenue for content that is available for free? I would suggest that firms like the New York Times take a long, hard (sorry I know it's a pun), look at the business models being utilized by successful internet porn companies. If they can figure out a way to offer free content while still gathering paying subscribers, then it's definitely something traditional media companies should investigate. The salvation of the Grey Lady may very well be a tarted up co-ed.

Out Foxed

Connor Friedersdorf asks an intelligent question: Do Liberals really want their own version of Fox News?

The right and the left aren't mirrors of one another. The strengths and flaws of both sides are different, as are the people who make up the ideological coalitions. For this reason, I very much doubt that the left is capable of building its own talk radio empire or Fox style news channel even if it wanted to do so. But I want to explain at greater length why liberals shouldn't envy the right for its blowhards.

Alongside their benefits, let's examine the costs.

These are inseparable from the success of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's status as the right's most popular entertainer. Foremost is the echo chamber effect: a bubble where the Iraq War was always going swimmingly, patriotism seemed to require support for torture, and the Bush Administration's domestic agenda never lacked for defenders happy to obscure the manifold ways that it violated even the principles of conservatism. The conservative media isn't wholly responsible for 8 years of Republican rule that left the right exceptionally unhappy. But it acted as a consistent enabler of policies that did long term damage to the country and brought about an electoral flameout that handed progressives their biggest opportunity in years. 

Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and friends have also succeeded in dumbing down the right's ideas. How could it be otherwise when they traffic in absurd conspiracy theories that many prominent conservatives are afraid to directly contradict? If you only trust right-leaning media sources – that is true of many conservatives – who is pushing back against the notion that Barack Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist, or that all liberals are power-hungry statists bent on spreading tyranny as their preferred end? Perhaps there are instances when these sorts of lies produce a short term political advantage. In the long run, it is never worth the extra distance put between the right and an accurate grasp of reality.

It's a strong argument and one that I agree with quite a bit. What you see in the relationship between Conservative thought and Fox News is a clash of interests. It is in the interests of Conservatives to provide pragmatic alternatives to Liberal programs, in line with their ideology. It is in the interest of Fox to get ratings and advertisement sales.

Unfortunately in this clash, entertainment has clearly won out over sensible politics. Would the Left really want to saddle themselves with the same albatross? He concludes:

The antidote for Fox News isn't Keith Olbermann. It's Jon Stewart. It isn't a new left-leaning host who turns Glenn Beck-style destructive absurdity to different ideological ends – it's someone who effectively demosntrates the absudity of blowhards.

Stuff was Said

I'm beginning to wonder if I even need to bother with the State of the Union. And for that matter, should anyone?

Connor Friedersdorf compares coverage of the SOTU to an aged married couple going through the sexual motions and raises the point:

Here's another funny thing about the media. Pitch an obscure story to an editor at USA Today. Likely as not he'll get on the Google, and if he finds the New York Times wrote about the same thing 5 weeks before in a little read blog item, your story idea is no good to him. But the State of the Union! It is guaranteed that every newspaper in America will editorialize on it... and every newspaper still editorializes on it.

Why? 

His alternate vision for a State of the Union address is available here.

So Long and Thanks for all the Yelling

"Wingnuts" author, John Avlon; takes a look at Olbermann's departure (hopefully to soon be followed by Glenn Beck. I can dream, can't I?):

Olbermann was the highest profile opinion anchor of the left and he used his pulpit at times in a mirror image of the professional polarizers on the right. When he attacked Democrats, it was for being too centrist, never for being too radical—echoing the RINO-hunting arguments from the right. One of his last attacks was against retiring Senator Joe Lieberman, who received a resounding “good riddance” despite actions such as shepherding the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell through the Senate. Olbermann also often let his moral outrage drag him into immoral invective, the mirror image of Wingnut gutterball politics from the right, as when he called Scott Brown “a racist, homophobic, promoter of violence against women” on air the night before the special election in Massachusetts. He called Michelle Malkin “a mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it." I had the odd badge of honor of being named one of the “worst persons in the world,” and got a repeat when the postpartisan group No Labels was named one of the worst in the world late last year. These are just blips on his list of pitchfork and torch greatest hits, which he would have gone red in the face condemning if they came from conservative opinion anchors and were directed at the liberal activist class.

Certainly, I would not argue that Olbermann is as bad as Beck. Mostly because I find some small common ground with him. However, that's sort of like saying that "Cancer isn't as bad as the Black Plague". Both Olbermann and Beck are sorely guilty of pushing partisan bile into politics for their own self-aggrandizement. They're symptomatic of a political philosophy that seems to boil down to "Attack". 

Common Sense

Roger Ailes, President of Fox News:

“I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually,” Mr. Ailes said. “You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that.”

Fox News is often accused by critics of crossing the line with hosts like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

But Mr. Ailes accused liberals of using the same overheated rhetoric, and he defended Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, for a map that depicted cross hairs over the district of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was one of the 20 people shot on Saturday.

“We looked at the Internet and the first thing we found in 2007, the Democrat Party had a targeted map with targets on it for the Palin district,” Mr. Ailes said. “These maps have been used for for years that I know of. I have two pictures of myself with a bull’s-eye on my head.”

He added, “Both sides are wrong, but they both do it.”

In Which Your Author Discusses SMUT! SMUT! SMUT!

There's a lengthy essay about pornography over at the Atlantic. It's long but I think worth reading.

When a 13-year-old girl can sit in math class, hide her Hello Kitty smart phone behind her textbook, and pull up such an extreme video in less time than it would take her to text a vote for her favorite American Idol contestant, we’ve certainly reached some kind of new societal landmark. It’s important, however, to distinguish between what has changed and what hasn’t. 

When I first read that paragraph, alarm bells went off in my head. "Oh no," I thought, "Please don't be another diatribe about the need to protect the children! And please don't rant on for four pages!" Fortunately however, this is not the gist of the piece. Rather, it's an examination of what the vast availability of pornography and it's themes says about sexuality, male sexuality in particular.

I find the piece to be rather even handed to be honest and I went into it with the presumption that it would be filled with fire and brimstone and debased and abused women. The crux of the authors argument is probably summed up in this paragraph:

Porn’s new pervasiveness and influence on the culture at large haven’t necessarily introduced anything new into our sexual repertoire: humans, after all, have been having sex—weird, debased, and otherwise—for quite a while. But pervasive hard-core porn has allowed many people to flirt openly with practices that may have always been desired, but had been deeply buried under social restraint. Take anal sex: in a 1992 study that surveyed sexual behaviors, published by the University of Chicago, 20 percent of women ages 25 to 29 reported having anal sex. In a study published in October 2010 by the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, the instances of anal sex reported by women in the same age cohort had more than doubled, to 46 percent. The practice has even made its way into the younger female demographic: the Indiana study shows 20 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds have had anal sex at least once.

Though I think it's a bit of a leap to assume that this is purely driven by the availability of porn, I think it's important to note that a judgment isn't being passed here. Whether anal is becoming the new oral is really nobody's business. Frankly, if it's making the people engaging in it happy (and given the numbers, I'm assuming that it does), then I'm all for it. Have at it kids! I would in fact say that if porn actually is responsible for these statistics then it should be congratulated inasmuch as it's presumptively helping people to approach their partners about their sexual desires honestly.

But what shall we make of the role of women in pornography who are frequently presented in positions of degradation, humiliation or servility? What does this say of the (generally but not always) male viewer?

Hard-core porn, which is what Internet porn largely traffics in, is undoubtedly extreme. But how is sex, as a human experience, anything less than extreme? Not the kind of sex (or lack thereof) that occurs in marriages that double as domestic gulags. Or what 30-somethings do to each other in the second year of their “serious relationship.” But the sex that occurs in between relationships—or overlaps with relationships—where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist: the raw, unpracticed sort. If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life, she’s often thinking of this kind of sex, and while it may be the best sex in her life, it’s not the sex she wants to have throughout her life—or more accurately, it’s not the sex she’d have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life. The manner in which one physically, and emotionally, contorts oneself for sex simply takes sex outside the realm of ordinary human experiences and places it in the extreme, often beyond our control. “Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness,” Susan Sontag wrote in Styles of Radical Will. Yes, it’s a natural, human function, and one from which both partners can derive enormous pleasure, but it is also one largely driven by brute male desire and therefore not at all free of violent, even cruel, urges. 

At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as “emotional ambivalence”—the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal. 

I don't know that that's necessarily accurate.  It's quite possible that I'm arguing against it instinctively simply because I'm a man and I think a fairly decent one, who becomes understandably uncomfortable when adjectives like 'aggressive', 'hostile' and 'humiliating' get thrown around to describe my love life.

That said, I will agree that men have often have higher amounts of aggression than women, sexually and otherwise. I would pose that this is probably hard-wired into us as evolutionarily useful.

However, the author notes that women may consider the sex they have between relationships "where the buffers of intimacy or familiarity do not exist; the raw, unpracticed sort.", the best sex of their lives (it's a generalization but at least it's one that someone else is making). The article though, seems to assume that less insight can be attained from what women do rather than from what men watch. Personally, I think that little to no accurate insight on a woman's sexuality can be gleaned from a single sweaty night in a motel room, particularly when placed in the context of not being something they want to do within the bounds of an extended relationship. That said, I would argue that watching a 30 second video clip even repeatedly, generally falls into the same category (obsessive viewing is of course another matter). I would also argue that for the vast majority of men, what they watch is not something that they have any intention of ever actually doing or even proposing, particularly within the bounds of a serious relationship. In this way, though pornography clearly has a sexual role as a masturbatory aid, for most men it's in fact divorced from actual sex in real life.

So what does porn say about male sexuality? I would say that when compared to what people are actually doing, rather than viewing, not all that much.

Well, This is Frustrating

I would like very much to use this post as an attack against Oliver Stone for being a propagandist and not your run of the mill "Buy Glutco Brand Cooking Lard" propagandist, but one who has seen fit to present the depredations of pretty awful people though rosy colored glasses.

Specifically, I'm speaking of his film "South of the Border", a delightful hagiography to Venezuela's own ghost whisper, Hugo Chavez.

Here's the rub: I have not seen the movie. I previously had no intention of ever seeing the movie. I truly do not want to subject myself to the insane screechings of a man that runs about the country, digging up the corpses of national heroes for political points when he isn't forcing the economy into an economic oubliette.

Frankly, I'm perfectly content reading a film review written by those die-hard conservative reactionaries at the Village Voice and calling it a day:

And yet Stone raises the specter of media manipulation when it suits him, devoting a whole section of the film to sympathetically presenting Chávez's argument that during the failed coup attempt of 2002, the Venezuelan media were so in the tank for his political opponents that they edited footage of rioting in the streets to make it look as if Chávez's supporters instigated a fire fight. The construction of false realities for political gain is the subject of much of Stone's own work—so why is he content to take each leader's practiced-for-the-camera spiel at face value, never pushing for information or conducting interviews on any deeper level than a photo op? South of the Border's subjects are masters at cooking bullshit, and Stone just eats it up.

The thing is this: Chavez is really, truly awful. Never mind the fact that he's destroying the financial life of Venezuela but everything shows that he intends to carry on doing it for the rest of is life. The Economist comments on events surrounding the recent legislative election in which his party lost heavily:

He has used the final three months of the outgoing assembly, in which he has an overwhelming majority, to render irrelevant the incoming legislature, due to be sworn in on January 5th. The centrepiece of this effort is an enabling law which grants the government the power to rule by decree for the next 18 months.

The assembly’s other functions have been curtailed too. Under a swiftly approved reform of its internal rules, the legislature will now meet as little as four days a month. All parliamentary commissions will be controlled by the government, and speeches to the assembly on any given topic will be limited to a total of 15 minutes per member. Debates will only be transmitted by government television channels, allowing the authorities to gag dissident voices.

In addition, assembly members will henceforth be barred from swapping parties on pain of losing their seat—a measure which suggests that Mr Chávez doubts the loyalty of some of his own supporters. Meanwhile some of the opposition members face judicial persecution. One of their number, José Sánchez, a former police commander, has been sentenced to 19 years in jail for his supposed involvement in a murder, even though the constitution grants assembly members legal immunity.

The new assembly was due to appoint several supreme-court justices to replace those due to retire. Such appointments require a two-thirds majority, and thus would have involved an agreement with the opposition. To circumvent the need for that, the outgoing assembly rushed through the naming of nine new justices (and 32 stand-ins). All are chavista loyalists, and four are retiring assembly members.

I would love...LOVE to hear Oliver Stone's take on this. I would love for him to explain how this has all just been twisted by the American media. Love to. I would love to hear him defend the positions he took with the film but...Well, I simply haven't seen it. Unfortunately, this sort of obligates me towards viewing the damn thing. I can't attack something that I haven't watched or read myself.

You want to know the worst thing about Chavez? Because of him, my Netflix account is going to get all screwed up. I'm going to have to see this moronic screed and next thing you know, my "Films You'll Love" suggestions will be completely out of whack.

Retraction

Well, this pretty embarrassing...

The other day, I wrote about an article over at the Guardian UK concerning Wikileaks. Specifically, the article was about Cuba banning Michael Moore's film "Sicko" because it made the country's health care appear so magically fantastic that it might have sparked riots amongst the majority of Cubans who relied on substandard care.

My post is here.

Well, today in the Guardian...

Whatever else WikiLeaks may have revealed, one fact has been repeatedly confirmed: the US government under George Bush really loathed the documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.

After a leaked cable from US diplomats in Havana falsely claimed Cuba had banned Moore's documentary Sicko – when in fact it was shown on state television – another cable reveals US officials flying into a panic after hearing a rumour that a New Zealand cabinet minister was hosting a screening of Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11

I apologize for reporting something that has emerged as untrue. I maintain that Michael Moore is a mere propagandist. However, my previous post has turned out to be both inappropriate and inaccurate.

Bit of egg on my face, to say the least.