Current Events on the News - A New Beginning

[Thorngrub]

Imagine the mayhem caused in that country were I, Phil, and skvor to head on over there for this. I, for one, will demand they sing "Fernando" !

[Kensterberg]

mary said:

It's about time there was some real news in the world:

Plans for ABBA museum unveiled in Sweden
By MATTIAS KAREN, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 1 minute ago
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - An ABBA museum dedicated to the music, clothing and history of the legendary Swedish pop group and its four members will open in Stockholm in 2008, organizers said Tuesday.

The interactive museum will feature original outfits and instruments used by the group, handwritten song lyrics, a display of different awards, and "all other things we can think of and find," said Ulf Westman, an event consultant who is spearheading the project with his wife Ewa Wigenheim-Westman.

The museum will also feature a studio where visitors can record their own ABBA songs, and an interactive experience that "will recreate the feeling of being at Wembley stadium and seeing ABBA live with 50,000 others," Westman said.

Organizers are still searching for a suitable location for the museum, but said it will open somewhere in central Stockholm during 2008.

Wigenheim-Westman said the idea was inspired by the Beatles museum in London, but that it took nearly two years to convince the former ABBA members — Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Faltskog and Anni-Frid Reuss — that it was a good idea.

"It is nice that someone feels compelled to take on our musical history," the four members said in a joint statement. "We think this will be a fun and swinging museum to visit."

The band members will donate the material for the exhibits, but will otherwise not be involved in the project, which will be funded by company sponsors, Westman said.

Stockholm's mayor Kristina Axen Olin said the museum — which is expected to draw 500,000 visitors a year — will make the Swedish capital a more popular tourist attraction for the millions of ABBA fans around the world.

"As a Stockholmer, this is what you have been missing," Axen Ohlin said at a news conference to unveil the plan. "We are convinced that this is important both for Stockholm citizens and for marketing the city."

ABBA is one of the most successful bands in history, having sold more than 370 million albums. While the group has not performed together since 1982, it continues to sell nearly 3 million records a year and the musical "Mamma Mia!" — written by Andersson and Ulvaeus and based on the group's hits — has been seen by more than 27 million people around the world.

***

That sound you hear is Phil scrambling to get tickets to Stockholm

Cheers,
M

We need to take up a collection to ensure that Phil is there for the opening. They will search guests for firearms, right?

[Thorngrub]

THe only "firearm" Phil will be sportin' cannot really be removed, can it -?

[phil]

Not to worry ...

I've been shooting blanks for more than ten years now ...


That sound you hear is Phil scrambling to get tickets to Stockholm


I'd love to go to Stockholm ... but there is no way in hell
I'm ever setting foot in a *&?**% Abba Museum !!

[RocDoc]

_{Sorry I missed that, Roc}The New Rules


While the Trib steadfastly ignored it, news of Malachi Ritscher's self-immolation spread virally anyway.
By Michael Miner

November 24, 2006

A GOOGLE SEARCH for Malachi Ritscher came up with more than 120,000 hits this week, but the only mention of him in the Tribune remained the brief paid death notice published November 12. It described Ritscher, 52, as someone "active in Chicago's avant-garde/experimental jazz scene as a recording engineer, fan and sometime-musician" and as someone who "loved his country; hated this war; and was not afraid to act on his convictions."

On Friday, November 3, shortly before 7 AM, in sight of rush hour traffic and a video camera set on a tripod a few feet from the Flame of the Millennium sculpture near the Kennedy Expressway's Ohio Street off-ramp, Ritscher doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. A sign found by his body said THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

The Tribune ignored the death. The Sun-Times published a brief news story the next morning, and on November 7, with the body still not identified, Richard Roeper cited the death in a column on suicide and the media. "The unwritten [media] policy -- which has been backed by research studies -- " he wrote, "says that if we make a big deal out of suicide stories, there's an increased likelihood of copycat episodes." He questioned this policy. "Some suicide-prevention groups say a hush-hush policy only reinforces the stigma surrounding suicide. I tend to agree. . . . It makes no sense to pretend suicide is a rare and scandalous thing." In this country, he went on, there's a suicide somewhere every 18 minutes.

Yes, but without the stigma how many more suicides might there be? A stigma isn't necessarily a bad thing, and the unwritten media policy isn't stupid. But the online reaction to Ritscher's death made it seem quaint, even perverse.

By November 7 people who knew Ritscher were pretty certain who'd died. Peter Margasak posted their conclusion on his Reader blog that day, and the body was definitively identified a day later. Roeper then wrote a second column in which he said there were two schools of thought -- that Ritscher was a martyr and that he was mentally ill -- and they might not be mutually exclusive. But "if he thought setting himself on fire and ending his life in Chicago would change anyone's mind about the war in Iraq, his last gesture on this planet was his saddest and his most futile."

And from the Tribune, nothing. An editor who might have explained the paper's silence didn't get back to me.

This isn't the first time I've watched the mainstream media ignore a matter that's galvanized the Internet. I doubt it'll be the last. Two years ago, when Alan Keyes was running for the U.S. Senate as the champion of old-fashioned biblical morality, the topic the MSM didn't know what to do with was the lesbianism of his daughter, who wrote candidly of her private life in a flimsily camouflaged online diary. This month's elections brought a more modest example of decorum-induced paralysis: as I observed last week in Hot Type, the blogosphere chewed over the Democrats' conquest of the Senate while the home pages of leading papers kept saying Virginia was too close to call.

I don't suggest that the MSM throw out their values, but they're not just shunning cheap gossip and stuff that's nobody's business. A new way of conducting the public conversation is thriving without them. Fortunately for the MSM, it's early. When they ignore a story, people still notice and care.

"Why is this not making national news?" wondered "jazzlover" on Margasak's blog on November 8. "He immolated himself, iraq being one of the causes given? That is not something to be buried in a small local indie paper. I'm going to post this article around on the web."

A few minutes later "Kirsten Major" said in a blog post that a friend had forwarded Margasak's story to her in New York City and she was going to forward it to others -- "but this really deserves national pickup." Other voices chimed in.

"JASONGS": "The fact that the mainstream media hasn't made mention of the action(s) of this obviously sensitive and intelligent man, merely lends `support' to the frustration that he, and many like him, feel with regard to the circumstances of our world today."

"Biltmore": "I do think that his message needs to be heard on National News. . . . Let's not let his message get buried under bullshit stories about celebrities and fashion designers, or other bullshit fluf."

Ritscher left behind on his Web site a long obituary he'd written himself and an even longer "mission statement." The Indymedia collective posted the statement along with its own comment that when Buddhist monks immolated themselves to protest the Vietnam war, "the whole world watched as these martyrs for peace went up in flames." When Ritscher died the same way, "the local media just wrote this off as another unfortunate case of mental illness."

Ritscher said in his statement that he'd lived "a wonderful life, both full and full of wonder. I have experienced love and the joy and heartache of raising a child." (In the obituary he described himself and his son as estranged.) He told the world he was leaving behind, "Since in our self-obsessed culture words seldom match the deed, writing a mission statement would seem questionable. So judge me by my actions."

He went on, "If God watches the sparrow fall, you notice that it continues to drop, even to its death. Face the truth folks, God doesn't care, that's not what God is or does. . . . It is time to let go of primitive and magical beliefs, and enter the age of personal responsibility. . . . My position is that I only get one death, I want it to be a good one. . . . I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country. I will not participate in your charade -- my conscience will not allow me to be a part of your crusade. There might be some who say `it's a coward's way out' -- that opinion is so idiotic that it requires no response. From my point of view, I am opening a new door."

The discussion of Ritscher's death spread to other blogs, to the e-zine Pitchfork, to France's staid old Le Monde. But even someone who read only Margasak's blog was swept up in a torrent of argument over life and death, war and peace, sacrifice and self-indulgence. Inevitably some posters weren't impressed, such as "tim," who called the suicide a "very stupid act" and wondered where Ritscher was when Saddam Hussein was leading a reign of terror in Iraq. Not so inevitably, Ritscher's family weighed in. First, a brother and a sister mourned him; then someone identifying herself as "Ritscher Woman" called him "mentally ill and selfish" and advised taking the death for what it was -- a "cry of anger and a painful look at depression and unmedicated mental illness. It was not beautiful. It was not peaceful. He has left lives in ruin. . . . Any further memorialization of this cruel act is nonsense."

"Anon," who would later identify himself as a former stepson, wrote in to say that Malachi Ritscher had been born Mark Ritscher, but after his wife divorced him "due to his constant physical and mental abuse," he'd appropriated the name of their son. Wrote Anon, "The man was no saint. And I will not let him become one." Ritscher's brother Paul then returned to say that after the divorce Ritscher was denied contact with his son, and that as an adult the son turned his back on him. "My brother was deeply hurt, a pain that he carried the rest of his all too short life."

At that point the estranged son, the original Malachi Ritscher, was heard from. "Paul," he began, "of all the people on this world: I know my father. How dare you presume to know anything about our relationship! Where were you during the intervening time? Did you live with and love a schizophrenic for 35 years? Did you EVER come by for dinner? Did you ever even contact me on purpose? NO!"

If Ritscher's violent death wasn't leading the world any closer to peace, it was inspiring an incrementally and collectively assembled saga with the complexity and fury of a novel -- neither private nor evanescent, a new kind of new journalism. And old journalism needs to figure out what to make of it.

I got an e-mail from Joe Germuska, a DJ at Northwestern University's WNUR. He knew Ritscher a little and was puzzled by the lack of coverage. "There are a lot of people who are feeling that it is strange that it hasn't been covered more," he wrote, "but maybe they are all delusional and it really doesn't qualify as news." Was Ritscher's cause the reason? "It doesn't seem like the anti-war movement gets much press coverage in any way," Germuska reflected. Or was it the way he died? "If no one notices, then is it possible that he gave his life for naught? People do not believe that all suicides are newsworthy, but this one was designed to evoke a response."

And it did.

_{www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/hottype/061124/}

The subtexts of how this affected so many people within and without his circles of influence was fascinating...look up Margaszak's blog at this site.
If it interests you. But I was blown away.

[kmc]

Again, I am glad it did not get the coverage so many people thought he should get.

[kmc]

This, I am dismayed to say, is spot on.

The N-Word
Unmentionable lessons of the midterm aftermath.

By Diane McWhorter
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006, at 6:29 PM ET

Warning: This article contains the word Nazi.

There's been something weird about the denouement of the midterm elections, starting with the pronounced absence of Democratic triumphalism. The prevailing mood has been stunned relief rather than glee, and nobody seems eager to delve too deeply into what exactly it was about George W. Bush that the voters so roundly rejected. Put another way, what were the sins included under the shorthand summary for the president's failures, "Iraq"?

For some reason, I keep thinking about an observation Eleanor Roosevelt made in an unpublished interview conducted in May of 1940, as the German Wehrmacht swept across France. She expressed dismay that a "great many Americans" would look with favor on a Hitler victory in Europe and be greatly attracted to fascism. Why? "Simply because we are a people who tend to admire things that work," she said. So, were the voters last month protesting Bush's policies—or were they complaining that he had not made those policies work? If Operation Iraqi Freedom had not been such an unqualified catastrophe, how long would the public have assented to the programs that accompanied the "war on terror": the legalization of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the unauthorized surveillance of law-abiding Americans, the unilateral exercise of executive power, and the Bush team's avowed prerogative to "create our own reality"?

Mrs. Roosevelt's example notwithstanding, polite discussion of that question does not contain any derivative of the words fascism, propaganda, or dictatorship. God forbid Nazi or Hitler. The extent to which it is verboten to bring up Nazi Germany has now become a jape. "Can't pols just have little Post-its on their microphones reminding them not to compare anything to the Nazis?" Maureen Dowd wrote in the Times recently, after yet another off-message senator was taken to the woodshed. The ban applies equally to the arena of intellectual debate, such that even the wild and woolly Internet has a Godwin's Law to describe the cred-killing effect of dropping the N-bomb. So, even though it is a truism that we learn by analogy, even though the Bush administration unapologetically practices the reality-eschewing art of propaganda—with procured "journalists," its own "news" pipeline at Fox, leader-centric ("war president") stagecraft, the classic Big Lie MO of, say, draft avoiders smearing war heroes as unpatriotic—we are not permitted to draw any comparisons to the über-propagandists of the previous century. That prohibition is reiterated in the coy caution with which I introduce the topic here.

The taboo is itself a precept of the propaganda state. Usually its enforcers profess a politically correct motive: the exceptionalism of genocidal Jewish victimhood. Thus, poor Sen. Richard Durbin, the Democrat from Illinois, found himself apologizing to the Anti-Defamation League after Republicans jumped all over him for invoking Nazi Germany to describe the conditions at Guantanamo. And so by allowing the issue to be defined by the unique suffering of the Jews, we ignore the Holocaust's more universal hallmark: the banal ordinariness of the citizens who perpetrated it. The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today's America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It's that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.

In America, the word fascism itself has something of the quality of a joke—with its vague, '60s sense of meaning "anything we don't like." But because I've been reading Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler; Richard Rubinstein's explanation of the Holocaust, The Cunning of History; and various studies of the Third Reich for a book in progress, I've acquired a vivid picture of the real thing. (Before I continue, please insert here whatever disclaimers it takes to stop yourself from listing the ways in which we are not like Nazi Germany.)

The most literal shock of recognition was the repulsively callous arrogance of the term "shock and awe." (The Iraqi people were supposed to pause and be impressed by our bombs before being incinerated/liberated by them?) Airstrikes as propaganda had been the invention of the German Luftwaffe, whose signature work, the terror-bombing Blitz of England, did not awe the British people into submission, either. Then there were subtler reverberations. When Bush's brain trust pushed through its executive-enhancing stratagems, I happened to be reading about brilliant German legal theoretician Carl Schmitt, who codified Hitler's führerprincip into law. (In the Balkans of cyberspace, I discovered, lurked an excellent article by Alan Wolfe detailing how Schmitt's theories also predicted the salt-the-ground political tactics of the Karl Rove conservatives.) When the administration established a class of nonpersons known as the "unlawful enemy combatant," I flashed on how the Nazis legalized their treatment of the Jews simply by rendering them stateless. And then in 2004, the Republicans threatened to override Senate rules and abolish the filibuster in order to thwart the Democrats' stand against Bush's most extremist nominees for federal judgeships. This "nuclear option" (so named by Trent Lott in acknowledgment of his party's willingness to destroy the Congress in order to save the country) struck me as a functional analog of the Enabling Act of 1933, which consolidated the German government under Chancellor Hitler and effectively dissolved the Reichstag as a parliamentary body.

Alas, West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd made the same connection. When he cited the Enabling Act to admonish his colleagues across the aisle, they hit back with indignation and ridicule and, for good measure, jeered him for having joined the filibuster (led by Lott's hero Strom Thurmond) against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But that ultimately averted A-bomb proved to be minor compared with the more precise reiteration of the Enabling Act to come. The official name of that 1933 National Socialist masterstroke was the "Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich," and the distress warranting its transfer of dictatorial power to Hitler was the state crisis provoked by the Reichstag fire the month before. And so it was under the open-ended emergency created by 9/11 that Bush's Military Commissions Act, passed in September, gave the president authority to designate anyone he so deemed, citizen or no, an 'unlawful enemy combatant' and, habeas corpus having been nullified, send noncitizens away indefinitely.

In an interview on MSNBC the day the bill was signed, Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor at George Washington University, declared the date one of the most infamous in the history of the republic, and amazed at the "national yawn" greeting this "huge sea change for our democracy." Where was the public consternation about this reversal of our founding principles? That interested me more than the brazen coup of the administration—which Carl Schmitt might argue was a categorical imperative. Why had the decent people of the country mounted no serious protest even against something as on-its-face objectionable as the bill's sanction of torture?

Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a recent speech to an American audience, summarized (in a different context) the formula by which social evil gains mass acceptance: vilification of an enemy (file under fear-mongering) and habituation to incremental barbarities. Evidence of America's proficiency at this dual process is no more distant than the era of Southern apartheid, even if our own state-sponsored racism was a psycho-sociopolitical genocidal purgatory as opposed to a final solution. While we may prefer to believe that the Good German institutions capitulated to Hitler under the black boot of the SS, current scholarship confirms that Nazification, like segregation in America, was largely voluntary, even in the free press.

The Bush-era fourth estate has come up short not only against the Big Lie of "fair and balanced" news but also against its equally cunning cousin: the Small Inaccuracy used to repudiate the damaging larger truth. CBS crumbled under the administration's mau-mauers over Memogate, while Newsweek managed to withstand the hazing it took for its Koran-in-the-toilet item—which, like the substance of Dan Rather's offending report on Bush's National Guard career, was not only accurate; it was old news. But why didn't the national media go on the offensive and re-educate the government, and the public, about the inevitable if regrettable price of a free press? Mistakes will be made in the proverbial first draft of history, and holding reporters to a standard of perfection would inhibit them from performing the vigilance crucial to our democratic system. The media had become so habituated to the paralysis of self-censorship that it took a fake newsman to diagnose their Stockholm syndrome, and when Stephen Colbert acidly chided the journalists along with the president at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April, the audience was not amused.

The ways our free press has served the powers it was supposed to afflict range from the belabored (Judith Miller's WMD "scoops" in the Times), to the grandiose (Tom Friedman's op-ed manifestos for a new political species: the pro-war-if-it-works liberal), to the perverse (Christopher Hitchens's flogging, in Slate, of a left-wing fifth column so much worse than the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton complex). My favorite editorial pledge of allegiance was a syndicated column by Kathleen Parker welcoming the ministrations of Bush's domestic spies because, hey, she wasn't conducting any phone business more controversial than making appointments to get her highlights done.

We have become such "good Americans" that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it "enemy combatant" or "illegal immigrant." Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott Horton, for daring to defy Godwin's Law. Perhaps (to switch totalitarian metaphors) we are in the midst of a little intellectual Prague Spring.

Of course, that democratic interlude met a swift and terrible end. If the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush's competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time, make it work.

[Kensterberg]

Kenny, I just read that article at Slate.com, and thought about posting it over here, too. Just brilliant analysis, IMO. I agree with the author on pretty much every point.

[kmc]

Yeah, this kind of stuff is why Slate is a daily must read.

[RocDoc]

Fuck, you MUST be kidding.
You're not the least bit uncomfortable with the embarassing generalities and untruths in that piece?
Blowhard overpoliticized overgeneralizing with retroactive 20:20 vision where even then they still don't even wish to get it's pieces right.

_{The most literal shock of recognition was the repulsively callous arrogance of the term "shock and awe." (The Iraqi people were supposed to pause and be impressed by our bombs before being incinerated/liberated by them?) Airstrikes as propaganda had been the invention of the German Luftwaffe, whose signature work, the terror-bombing Blitz of England, did not awe the British people into submission, either.}

The people of Iraq, the common people, were then the targets? With the intent to 'shock and awe them? Yeh.
Excellent parallel!! Hee-hee.
Whoa. Thoroughly moronic attempted spin, that's what that is.
And THAT was 'The most literal shock of recognition' to this writer, like she said??
No. Just plz fuck off with this backslapping 'we were SO right' -shit.

_{If Operation Iraqi Freedom had not been such an unqualified catastrophe, how long would the public have assented to the programs that accompanied the "war on terror": the legalization of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the unauthorized surveillance of law-abiding Americans, the unilateral exercise of executive power, and the Bush team's avowed prerogative to "create our own reality"?}

Yes the 'war''s a fucking disaster. Yes. Given. Absolutely.
The real question (and a far more challenging one) still should have been 'how long would the public have assented to those programs' if the catastrophe had been furthered to include another couple three four quick WTC/Madrid/London subway-type of attacks...our liberal folk would say 'Never!', correct?

Oh and for the fact that it seems that no sort of panic peddling 'hysterics' could possibly penetrate their limbic systems because they've divined the knowledge that 'No, they're NOT coming after us again. No amount of percieved threat is worth that!'

Unmoveable and unflappable. Constipated in fact.

And you here all nod sagely 'Uh-hmmmmm. Bravo.'

Bullshit.

[kmc]

We were so right. And you were so wrong. Stings, doesn't it?

[skvorisdeadsorta]

It's not that simple, kMc, and quite frankly who the fuck cares if you were right. Having that argument over who's wrong or who's right is just semantical non-sense given the fact that people are being obliterated over there while everyone else is pointing fingers on who called what. Who the fuck cares, dude.

[rockysigman]

RocDoc, the problem that I see is that you still seem to be insisting that the war in Iraq has something to do with the "War on Terror" and with 9/11. It doesn't. It never has. It's been shown repeatedly.

The WTC/London/Madrid attacks were not committed by Saddam Hussein. Why is that so hard to accept?

[skvorisdeadsorta]

Let's call Iraq what it really is: Our government was so confused by the 9/11 attacks that they figured that the American people wouldn't stand for them doing nothing. Ok. So we go to Afghanistan, throw some bombs around, kill people, but in the process we keep the status quo in the process. It didn't exactly show that 'Merica is still tough so we decided to invade a country that we had already kicked the shit out of thinking it would be a piece of cake. It hasn't been and it wasn't and it never will be.

For some reason, people still think that our government is organized and efficient and it's not. It never has been and it never will be. It's a Republic set up for elites.

[phil]

GOP lawmaker: Saddam linked to 9/11

N.C. representative says 'evidence is clear'

Wednesday, June 29, 2005; Posted: 9:12 a.m. EDT (13:12 GMT)

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A Republican congressman from North Carolina told CNN on Wednesday that the "evidence is clear" that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.

"Saddam Hussein and people like him were very much involved in 9/11," Rep. Robin Hayes said.

Told no investigation had ever found evidence to link Saddam and 9/11, Hayes responded, "I'm sorry, but you must have looked in the wrong places."

Hayes, the vice chairman of the House subcommittee on terrorism, said legislators have access to evidence others do not.