Tag Archives: Amy Winehouse

July 31, 2011 · 7:12 pm

The Debt Ceiling Crisis and Wag the Dog

Everybody remembers Wag the Dog, right?  1997, Robert de Niro, Dustin Hoffman.  A fictional president gets caught touching up a very underage girl and his public relations team swings into action to create a fake war and divert the public’s attention until after the election.  In the book,

Kirsten Dunst as a Fleeing Albanian

the President was Bush 41 and it was all about the war in Iraq, but films take liberties.  Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s a bad thing.

Anyway, pretty much nobody denies that the press is used to distract the public from certain issues that powerful people might find embarrassing.  I wrote a couple of days ago about how the Huffington Post, for no apparent reason, removed the words “we’re going to hurt some people” from a story about a group of Republicans talking about the debt ceiling debate.  If those words were involved in the debate, it could be bad for Republicans.  Another example is from 2004, how the New York Times knew about the warrantless wiretapping in October, but delayed the story until after November because (they actually said this) it might have “negatively impacted” the election.  That is, Kerry might have won.

I suspect something like that is going on with this Debt Ceiling Crisis.  Newspaper headlines have been about nothing else for the last two weeks, with a slight break when Amy Winehouse died because, whatever else is happening in the world, celebrities die and the news media loves it when they do.  The massacre in Norway was kind of hard to avoid, too.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had any detailed updates on what’s happening in Syria, Yemen or even Libya.  Haven’t heard much about Bradley Manning or Julian Assange for awhile, either.  Of course, there’s no change in the Bradley Manning case (still hasn’t had a trial) and Assange is also going through some legal maneuvers which can make for a dry news story, but still.  I don’t know that what they are trying to hide has to do with any of those stories, or whether there is some other big financial or sexual scandal they are trying to hide, but I strongly suspect they are hiding something.

It’s just too much ink on one issue for too long for it to be otherwise.

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July 23, 2011 · 10:03 pm

A Big Day for Death

Well, a busy day in the news, like every day, but no one particular thing I want to write about, so let us tiptoe through the headlines and see what they say.  It was a big day for death.  Nguyen Cao

Amy Should Have Gone to Rehab, I Say, Oh, Oh, Oh

Ky was 80 and his death announcement only surprised me because I assumed he’d died years ago.  He was president of Viet Nam in the mid 60s, about the time that LBJ was lying to congress and the American people about the Gulf of Tonkin incident (you did know that was a lie, right?  The government actually admitted to that little whopper, sometime in the late 70s or 80s.  Nobody noticed.), which got the U.S. into Viet Nam and caused the deaths of millions.

Then there was Amy Winehouse, and the announcement of her death shocked  and saddened me, but only for a second.  It’s sad, but we all kind of knew it was coming.  They haven’t officially said it was a drug overdose yet, but that would fit the pattern.  She was 27.  Do you know which other singers died at the precise age of 27?

  • Kurt Cobain
  • Janis Joplin
  • Jimi Hendrix
  • Jim Morrison
  • Brian Jones
  • Robert Johnson

Thanks to Stephanie Sarkis at the Huffington Post for the list.  So, kids, if you want to be a rock star, wait until you’re 28.  That simple.

They’ve got a suspect in custody in the horrible bombing and shooting incident in Oslo, in which more than 80 people, mostly kids at a camp, have died.  He’s an extreme right-winger, white supremacist type.  I hate Norwegian Nazis.

From China, a story that seriously bums me out.  One of these fancy new high speed trains got struck by lightning, went off the rails (and partially off a bridge), killing at least 11 people.  I’m bummed because I’m a big advocate of high speed rail, I think  it is the future of travel on Earth.  I hope this doesn’t set us back too much, but it might not be a bad thing if it slowed things up a little, just for the sake of higher standards.

And, down in the Emirates somewhere, an Arabic oil gazillionaire spent about 20 million euros on a giant sand sculpture of his name, big enough to be seen from space.  Big enough to be seen from space.  That is really weird.  Aliens are going to visit our planet someday and they will just naturally assume that its name is Hamad.  That will be very embarrassing.

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