As I am watching Maury around lunch hour, the channel suddenly cut right in the middle of the show, not even waiting for a commercial break, to show a breaking news. I expect the news should be that important as to cut right in just when Maury was about to show an interesting clip (on hindsight, anything is more important than Maury scandals and shocking expose’s, after all). So as I was expecting something grand and breaking like some huge international disaster, or an accident of unheard of proportions, or an urgent speech of national importance, or… (ok, so I’m bored). It was worse then all of those. Combined. Propostion 8 has been struck down, and all the sinful horrors and terrible wickedness broke loose from hell (no less from the very seventh level itself, without a doubt). What happened? Oh sorry, I’m reading again too much into this. So, Prop 8 of California was struck down, but its lifting was delayed ’til next week. No big deal to me. But the news channel apparently thinks it to be, and so are other local channels, that everybody started covering it and giving special reports on it. So the question is, who do they think their audience is that they think would care enough about this, enough to interrupt the very unboring regular afternoon programs? Whatever, I’m one of them. But then it isn’t a big issue to me, so I was just disappointed that it isn’t bigger, or rather, that I don’t see it as big enough.
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This news story was just so particularly depressing. To summarize, about ten people part of a humanitarian aid group were executed with no fuss by the Taliban, no doubt, because they say those people were proselytizing. The fact is that this group really has no agenda other than to help poor people in Afghanistan. They gave free dental care, eye operations and such, at no cost but their life’s worth of a very successful career in the outside world. They were from diverse religions and nationalities and strictly humanitarian. Reading this detailed account by the sole survivor makes this news even more depressing. I am not outraged, just depressed like oh god why did you allow these kinds of heartlessness in this world. But certainly, these killings will stir up extremely intense passions and boil some pot of water. It is with great difficulty and a heavy heart that I look objectively at this and other news related to their story and try to pick out sensationalism from real reporting, like picking out a needle from a burning haystack. What I could see is that the exclusivity of this AP report was capitalized and clearly milked for all its public worth. I can see also that they make detailed and nuanced reporting about who are the bad guys, the barbarian bastards, but I’m afraid these details won’t reach through to the general public who are only concerned with the overall picture, that is, that the Taliban are devil savages. Any uncritical people will scan this news story and only see that all the Afghan people, or more likely all the Middle Easterners, or even more likely all the Muslims, are like these hopeless, murderer dogs beyond salvation. But I would also bet the many, many Afghans feel exactly the same way, especially those villages and tribes the aid group helped. Afghan is a very misleading term, because it connotes that Afghanistan is one big nation when in fact “Afghans” themselves, for the most part, identify themselves first by their tribes and ethnicity. And so their different tribes are almost as foreign to each other as Americans are foreign to them; rival tribes hate each other to the very guts more than they do ‘real’ foreigners. Seeing them in such a way, I couldn’t be angry to any Afghan at all; they already have so much hate from each other and the world.
What would be anyone’s first reaction when seeing this picture? Oh, that cold blooded murderer-monster. The shooter is a South Vietnamese general Nguyen Ngoc Loan. This was a very iconic picture in the Vietnam war that served to galvanize American public opposition to the Vietnam quagmire. Ultimately, this picture helped ended the war, to whatever ends.
The story behind is that the man being shot is a captain of Vietcong squads sent to South Vietnamese cities behind American lines to terrorize/demoralize South Vietnamese population. If part of their purpose is to kill police officers’ families and relatives, I don’t know, but that is what just happened. Now the South Vietnamese forces plucked this guy out fresh and red-handed from the crime scene, which is a ditch containing 34 bound and shot bodies of police officers and their families. Some of those were relatives of General Loan’s deputy and close friend. Loan, being the hot head warrior and leader as he was, promptly executed/shot/murdered this person (who is Vietcong Captain Bay Lop by the way).
I’m not supporting Loan’s action here, but knowing the context behind this, could at least put some humanity to this brutal picture. Knowing the story behind wouldn’t alleviate the horror, but would alleviate the outrage. A picture may tell a thousand words, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are all true and that is all there is to it. This picture didn’t say that Loan personally pushed for more hospitals in war torn South Vietnam, his dedication in putting civilians away from harm, and animosity against soldiers who dress in civilian clothes while doing war-related actions. Even the AP photographer who took this picture and later win Pulitzer for it, Eddie Adams, deeply regretted taking this picture. In his words, 2 men were killed in this picture; General Loan killed the Vietcong agent, and he killed General Loan with this shot. He forever “killed” the character of General Loan in the eyes of world media. After the war Loan fled to America where he died hounded as a war criminal. For the rest of Gen. Loan’s life Eddie Addams would always keep in touch with him and try to make amends to him. Here is his eulogy at Loan’s death.
See, pictures, and now videos, say a million billion words, but we shouldn’t fall to the illusion that they are all there is to them. They could give a false sense of showing more than what they are showing. This caused the mess I’m referring to in this blog. Pictures couldn’t be any truer than any of the thousand words making them up.
I have been following this season of America’s Got Talent. This is the first time I’m following this popular TV program on NBC. Truthfully, it’s quite entertaining and interesting to me. It’s pull for me is its variety of acts, not just solely focusing on singing and dancing, as what talent in TV always means. Of course I have nothing to against singers and dancers, it’s just that it can be refreshing to see other kinds of acts on TV. But truthfully, again, I just feel that there’s a disproportionate amount of singers, especially singers, that go far up the contest. What I’m saying is, singers have a big, big advantage over other acts. Indeed, there are lots of non-singing acts that are crappy and aren’t considered talent at all. But there thankfully are some outstanding acts that are jaw-droppingly amazing, top of their specialized art, executed with a stratospheric high degree of skill, and eliminated – thanks to (almost half of) the limited spots available for the next round given to singers. I’m not insulting singers here, they can also be jaw-droppingly amazing, top of their specialized art, executed with a stratospheric high degree of skill, but the thing for me is, there are so many of them, that you could see which singer is better than which, so there’s no point passing a good singer to the next round if there is a better singer. Especially young, handsome, rather cute, male singers, they are so lucky they have so much going for them, I think. In an effort to assuage a little the dissatisfaction inside me with the singer-dominated results, I have come up with my own little hypothesis why, call me a gross stereotype for all I care: there is a huge population of girls watching this show; not that they make up a bigger part of the audience, but they are mostly the active voter-texters. With the show heavily dependent on mobile phone texters, of course the results are gonna be skewed to the part of the population that have mobile phones and are active participators of such things, not necessarily reflecting the opinion of the population that just has a TV and tunes into AGT. Please tell me I’m wrong in thinking this, show me, prove to me, make me repent my ways. Otherwise, anyway, in the end, this show is about and for, in the words of the judge Howie, mainstream ‘middle America’. Let me rephrase that as for “plain, old, average, vanilla white America” – which I am part of, ahaha.
Alas, something interesting and hotly controversial to blog about! I’m talking about Chelsea Clinton’s upcoming wedding!!!
I don’t know why we should be interested, but since all major news outlet are headlining the event, I suppose we should be! It won’t be covered if it’s not important, right?! I have some theories why her wedding is justifiably important! There are a lot of very, very VIP’s attending the event! Her about-to-be husband is mysterious, handsome and rich! She has a huge, grand, elegant dream wedding! Some news story reported that her wedding’s huge scale could jeopardize someone else’s wedding taking place the same day nearby! Finally, she is the daughter of a former president! So that makes her FORMER first daughter! Or maybe it’s just because there is a such huge, huge demand for something, anything, everything to do with her upcoming wedding!! But in the first place, where did the huge, huge demand for the coverage of her marriage come from?! Also from the media!!! It’s all a grandiosely diabolical cycle where the media first whips up our appetite for Chelsea’s wedding, and when we have nothing else good to do, watch her wedding preparations on mainstream news on air, click on news about her, and read about her on newspapers – just because it’s there!!! (Since anything they put up there must be important!) This could also be the reasons why we care so much about Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Prince Harry!
For all the bad rep Fox news gets, I think its coverage of the Arizona “Immigration Law” tonight is not that so twisted as so many would have one believe. The court had its decision tonight and many of the Arizona bills’ controversial laws were blocked, temporarily delayed. Fox presented the news fairly and I hardly find bias in their reporting, though I wouldn’t be sure of that since I didn’t watch other channels. (Why do all the news channels have to play at the same time, and even play the same news story the same time their competitors do?)
What’s interesting is that in their question-and-answer part, the commentary part, they had an interviewee at their table from an organization that opposes the Arizona immigration law, a liberal, if you want. Then they throw questions at him from some personalities that support the enforcement of the bill and unhappy with the court decision, right-wingers, I suppose. There are some hot potato questions thrown to the table, and their guest answered them deftly. It is some kind of a debate, with this liberal doing the rebuttal. Interestingly, he is always given the last word.
Also, when they had these clips of their guy interviewing people in the streets about this law, they showed the protesters in LA and Arizona, and some people speaking in Spanish, all against the law and rejoicing at the verdict. As for the people at the other side of the fence, which I’m sure there are some out there, they didn’t have video clips for them. They also mentioned that they tried to interview the author of the controversial bill, Sen. Pearce I think, but couldn’t get his side. They showed the clips of them chasing after his entourage while he is walking out from the building when the verdict was announced.
This doesn’t seem to me to be the hell-bent rightist, elitist news corporation that only knows to “shut up! Shut up! turn off the mike!! cut it! cut it!”
So it roared to life in the media world and slowly quickly worked its way up almost headlines, this controversy, about the planned mosque at the 9/11 WTC site. I linked to its news story in my first ever blog, if anyone remembers, as my example of media sensationalism. But now that sensationalism is real. That website I’ve linked to obviously is a little right-nut leaning, as you can see from its first sentences that made a humongous generalization (if the bold red colors all over are not clue enough). Also, I subscribe to a rightist-tea party-ist newsletters to my email, and so that’s where I got that site.
and now the issue is threatening to -depending on whoever you interview- be the symbol of Islam’s triumphant domination of American liberty and freedom; or be the symbol of the ever-enduring American ideal of freedom, liberty and equality to all creeds, faiths and races; or be a new mosque built in lower Manhattan. So far from looking at all the reasonable angles of the sizzling plate, I think all sides have very, very valid points. On one hand building a mosque near the former WTC site could be very insensitive to the tragic memory of 9/11. Wounds are still so fresh, and, let’s face it, so many people are opposed to it. If the other side says that putting a mosque there would be a symbol of healing, the very fact that people are hostile to the idea, in fact very violent about it, says so much about how much healing has already happened, I mean not happened. That article I posted gave a very convincing argument, that even after 60 or 70 years, putting up a Japanese war memorial on Pearl Harbor or a German cultural center beside Auschwitz is, right now, unthinkable. Some people just have to see reality as it is and move on.
On the other hand, who says it is Islam that hijacked planes and destroyed down WTC? Supporters of the mosque construction and many liberals insists that those terrorists are not Muslims, they are nut jobs. Islam hasn’t got no nothing to do with those terrorists, and those terrorists only used Islam as an excuse for their radical, foreign-hating, wacko agenda. Why are real Muslims being punished for something they’ve got nothing to do? Ultimately, it is the issue of who is guilty. In the case of no Japanese centers at Pearl Harbor and German centers at Auschwitz, the respective nationalities admitted their guilt. In this case, I would think it is different, because it is a faith that is at stake. Backing down on this issue would say that yeah, Islam *could* have something to do with 9/11.
So far as I see from the media, the coverage on both sides have been fair, at least by respectable mainstream news outlets, not like the simplistic coverage in the link I put above. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, but I’m already placing my bet on the mosque not being built. A safe $10 bet, anyone?
There was this recent racism hullabaloo in the US Department of Agriculture about a certain USDA director – okay, black, female, mid-high level government bureaucrat – being accused as an inside-and-outside racist hypocrite. Well I don’t know which multitudes of people are doing the accusing, but the incriminating video clip of her speech first appeared at biggovernment.com, which by its name slightly, just slightly smells of partisanship. Nevertheless the issue ballooned, caught the attention of the White House and from up there okayed the decision to ask for her resignation (read: kicked her out) from wherever she is, be it from her bureaucrat office chair or bureaucrat car seat, which incidentally she was.
I cannot overstate the outrage and even stronger counter-outrage in the wake of this purely political mess. It turns out the statement in question is in a light-hearted speech about an experience decades ago AND how she learned from it. Not from a secret anti-white, black power, mass rally militant protest inside USDA. Apparently a self-patriotic nitwit who first posted the said clipping didn’t hear or deliberately maliciously cut out the how she learned from it part.
I’m not blogging about it to join in the mindless reactionary fervor. I want to say that headliners like this spread like wildfire in the media, taking up valuable news space, time and resources for important things. And it’s all year round. Also surprising is that the almighty White House was moved by such a petty and insignificant footnote news. This brings to mind modern history’s very infamous ‘beer summit’ at the White House. And the huge, highly controversial Harry Sen. Reid’s Obama race remarks. And of course the great, history-altering, decade-defining Sen. Trent Lott’s Strom Thurmond 100th birthday party comment.
I just went to the websites of both CNN and Fox news, and seeing them side by side, I really get very, very mixed emotions. Looking at Fox news I get the feeling of like anger, urgency and focus. On CNN I sense the energies of coldness, trying to cover everything and triviality. Very different flavors, but does information have flavors? Does news has to have colors? To make it interesting and readable, yes. But to base your opinions and beliefs? Certainly not. I think news, especially about politics, are supposed to be boring, repetitive and been like that since time immemorial. I stand by the saying in my first post, that news is old things happening to new people. Too many good news and it will be called propaganda. Too many bad news, and it will be called – I call it populist. People just basically read what they want to read and hear what they want to hear. So the media would have to sell what they think the people want to buy. Those in the media industry would have to cater to that reality or they would have closed down long ago.
I give up reading news, and watching TV news, or at least not watching until the end.
“Hello, Hi. We just want to ask you, do you believe in God?”*Nod*”Are you Christian? What Christian are you? Catholic?” “Yea, yea Catholic” “Let me ask you, have you heard of the ‘bride of God’??”
Huh? Then they asked me if they can read to me a verse from the book of Revelations. The guy popped up a Bible and showed some hand-underlined verses that refers to the “bride of God”. They showed me a lot more and enlightened me that the name of the wife of God is Jerusalem, that there had always been a Christian goddess, that the Catholic Church or Protestant or Mormon or Jehova’s Witnesses or any other churches can’t save me, that the true church can only come from heaven, that man-made holidays like Christmas and Sundays are the devil’s, that their cell no. is ugghhh… These, um, faithful ambushed me in the middle of the road at dark when I was alone – inside Santa Monica College, an American college, an AMERICAN COLLEGE, bastions of liberalism, democrats and everything unholy.
Though I’m totally indifferent to anything to do with religion, I stopped out of curiosity and ingrained loyalty to the traditions I grew up in. See, I can’t stand them bashing everything I grew up in, and I know some Catholic doctrines, canons and history, ingrained or forced fed to me in my 10+ years of Catholic schooling, so I debated a little with them just for the fun of it. See, I just have to teach these heretics a lesson. See, I just have this itch to put a stake through them and burn them, as what all heretics deserve. See, I also have my own survey questionnaire that needs to be filled for a class and they would be good survey takers after I show interest to them.
They are using primitive forms of scare tactics, I imagine, tactics which are still in very much use today. Hello to “Steve Poizner, another liberal Sacramento politician.”
