The RCJ provides RSS
feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving
our readers a convenient
portal through which to stay abreast of world
events and issues. Use the links provided. The
following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage
(scroll both columns to the right).
ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance"-AVAILABLE
NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM
AMAZON.COM.Use
this link.
CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.
Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry
Western Crime Novel
I am
offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle
Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal
syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming
community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The
perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal
property of individuals whose assets have been
inventoried in advance and distributed through a
vast system of illegal commerce.
It is a ripping good
yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was
designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of
creative works being produced in 1950, when the
story is set. Richard
Padilla has done his usually brilliant
work in capturing the look and feel of a certain
type of crime fiction being produced in that era.
The whole thing has the feel of those black & white
films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the
writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard,
whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.
EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY
If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.
Amazon is the largest,
but far from the only digital publisher. You can
find similar treasure troves at
NOOK Press(the
Barnes & Noble site),Lulu,
and others.
MEDIA
MEDIA: The Trump-Maher Romance
LITTLE PEOPLE ON THE LITTLE SCREEN
Donald Trump was born to be a
joke. Bill Maher has had to work at it, but through his
association with Trump, he is getting there.
By RAR
I
Used to Like Bill Maher.
It seems impossible to
me now, but I used to really enjoy Friday nights watching
HBO. Me and my mistress-concubine-owner and
mother of my children, to whom I have long been married but cannot call
my wife, still start Friday evenings with Maher, before
continuing into a night of Fear.net slash
and gore. Don’t ask me why, we find this entertaining. Or at least we
used to.
The woman whose name
may never be mentioned still finds Maher amusing, but I have found him
less so over time. He has become a hater, specifically a hater of
Muslims, as if that is a monolithic group, and in becoming openly so he
has revealed his true self.
One of my
personal deficits is an inability to forgive a person of their
shortcomings, once they have been revealed. I live with this perception
that people are who they are, and they don’t change from that. You are
cooked, and once recognized will never be seen any other way again.
As people mature, from
say fifteen to thirty years of age, they may get better at hiding who
they really are, but by around age sixty the gloves come off and people
begin to feel like they may as well let it all hang out. Old people lose
the will or the ability to govern their biases, or their willingness to
voice them aloud.
Bill Maher is old. Like the now cloying thumpety-thump theme of
his HBO show, “Real Time with Bill Maher”,
the erstwhile Mort Sahl of his own imagination has become soggy in the
shorts.
(Continued here
from the front page)
It has only been recently, in my
perception, that anyone has ever taken the former standup comedian
turned B-movie actor seriously. People didn’t take him seriously as a
political commentator – and some, including Maher himself, now think of
him as that – nor as a standup comedian turned B-movie actor.
I have no idea how Maher went from a
role in the jaw-droppingly awful Sandra Locke
vehicle Rat Boy, which was a divorce settlement project
done from Clint Eastwood’s account, to
landing Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central in 1993. He was
probably loitering in the halls at the advent of the new cable channel
and just got lucky. He hosted a low-cost entertainment product that
presented celebrity types to discuss policy issues, a concept which at
the time seemed ludicrous and just for laughs, though now has become the
television norm.
Though I share many of Maher’s
liberal views, and like to laugh as much as the next guy, I never
watched Politically Incorrect, which went to ABC in 1997. I just
never found Maher nor his cast of Ann Coulters and Ben Afflecks
interesting enough to sacrifice the time to watch.
Maher’s story started to become more
intriguing after his show was dropped by ABC when sponsors began shying
away from Maher’s statements on the 9-11 debacle. He reacted to
President George W. Bush’s accusations that the 9-11 bombers had been
“cowards”, with Maher saying - "We have been the cowards. Lobbing
cruise missiles from two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying
in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it.
Not cowardly. "
Were there ever to be a biopic made
of Maher’s career – and the only thing that would encourage such a
venture would be some truly cataclysmic event at the end of his life to
give it a third act anyone would care to see – it would be one of those
9-11 stories. Maher was apparently changed by 9-11, which from
this viewer’s perspective precipitated his steady decline into darkness.
Like a Paddy Chayefsky character, no one would care, but he is on
television.
Exhibits to support this thesis:
The 2011-2013 HBO
seasons of his show have featured a repeated theme that we should
use whatever it takes, including illegal drone attacks, to kill our
Muslim enemies everywhere in the world. Maher is paranoid about
container traffic into the Port of Los Angeles, which is relatively
near to where he lives. The Libertarian Maher carries a handgun,
because he openly admits to being scared, apparently of people in
general.
In 2007, Maher ejected
a group of “9-11 Truthers” from the
audience of his show for their disruptive attempts to bring
attention to the probability that the destruction of the World Trade
Centers and attack on the Pentagon were part of an elaborate
conspiracy to create exactly the anti-Muslim sentiment Maher is now
peddling, big time.
Maher produced a
mean-spirited, if correct, comic documentary called
Religulous, which was a
take-down of religion. Even those such as myself that agreed with
the premise, that religious beliefs are at the root of many of our
societal problems, found the execution of the film too shoddy to
endorse. It tended to reveal Maher’s disregard for the spiritual
comfort of his fellow man, however misguided.
Along those lines,
Maher has two memberships that call his character into question: 1)
he is on the board of directors of the animal-rights group
PETA, which is a “terrorist
organization” internal to the U.S.; and, 2) he is a 57-year old
bachelor, never married, and without children. I say this on the
basis that people who choose not to have children probably
don’t like people, or don’t like themselves, which may be the same
thing. Those same people usually explode at such an accusation, but
then balanced people who are okay with people don’t usually have any
reason to explode. In fact, people who don’t love other
people love their pets, and so of course you have the
misanthrope Maher and PETA. PETA, which got its start defending
research monkeys, takes in stray pets, but as they “oppose the
no-kill rule” (and who knew there was one of those) they euthanize
85 percent of the animals they take in. Otherwise, they are the
Humane Society with an aggressive marketing strategy that includes
public displays of nudity and aggressive attacks against purchasers
of animal skins. The organization’s many detractors would wonder
what it is they are raising funds for beyond the enrichment of their
administrative body, led by the innately abrasive
Ingrid Newkirk. The transference of
affection one senses in these peoples’ attachments to their pets
would be striking, but I would need to see some photographs of
Newkirk wrestling with puppies to believe it. I’ll accept that Maher
has no human contact, particularly after the records of the 2005
lawsuit filed against him by live-in lover
and Playboy Cyber Girl Coco
Johnsen. Her claim that Maher had promised to support her
was dismissed by the courts, but along the way revealed Maher to be
remorselessly self-absorbed and superficial. “I'm just into women
who are real, and they happen to be black,” Maher has said.
Otherwise put, not like any human beings he otherwise knows.
People who are truly
engaged with life, including the people encountered within it, tend to
grow with age. One sees those people become more kind, and to see that
become a key part of their strength. I can’t cite famous examples, but
we all have the aunts and uncles and grandparents that typify this mode.
They are the flip-side of the stinkers described above, who
become the Archie Bunker’s of our days. At the extreme end of that
resides those people who have the incomes and the platforms, which
always go together, to exploit their capacity for malevolent behavior.
In that vein, Bill Maher has become a thug.
People who don't like people seem an
unlikely source for solutions to the problems of people, not that this
is Maher's job. Still, neither is it the responsibility of anyone to
create new problems for people, which is the usual unfortunate
output of people who don't like people. Those folks don't want to help,
a philosophical position that fractures community purpose through
elimination of potential alternative solutions. Problems grow in that
environment, and in there may be no greater betrayal to humankind than
the decision to see yourself as other, not a part of the rest.
Thugs like Maher and his
mirror image Donald Trump get away with being what they are
because they make money for themselves and others through the fluke
exposures they offer. This is why you get this weird list of
sub-celebrities now showing up on Real Time with Bill Maher,
mixed with “serious” news journalists and opinion leaders. And this is
another of the reasons Maher has begun to vex.
Maher’s producers have never
differentiated between substantial and non-substantial guests, which
over time have blurred in distinction. The viewer is charged with making
the call, but broadcasting has this odd way of re-generating its own
signals and viewers have seemed to grow less nuanced with exposure to
the modern media age. And then there is Gestapo of it all, with
Maher bringing on guests from the right of the political spectrum so
that he can use the "F-word" against them, which is always his summation
judgment, i.e., you are fucking wrong! This is often unsupported
by any cogent argument or proof to the effect, but it is the red meat
Maher's audiences wait to howl for. One wonders if they aren’t checked
at the door for their political allegiances and their abilities to clap
on cue and then shut the fuck up!
Maher is big on rules. In fact, for
a brief, early moment his “New Rules”
segment was the best part of his show, though now it falls as
flat as the proverbial coal mine canary. The writers of the segment
surrendered several seasons back with an apparent inability to maintain
the premise with funny material, so they gave up trying even as Maher
continues to do the routine. The “new rules” are often not rules at all,
but rather just lead-in to a Bill Maher bullylogue, which is the
minute or two at the end of his show where this protected wimp of a man
snarks into the camera a bunch of indefensible and un-rebutted crap
about whatever he wants to get off his chest this week – and to say
where he’ll be performing the next couple weeks.
That the celebrity world is full of
marginal types, recently including Martin
Beshear of MSNBC and Tina Brown
of magazine publishing fame, who will drop in to promote their brands is
probably to be expected. One wishes they would leave with a stain that
would tell the world that they are media whores, for why else would they
go on Maher’s badly listing vessel.
One senses that when this fish boat
finally sinks, there won’t be anyone present who cares about saving Bill
Maher, unless some scurvy rat survives and connives to turn the saucy
old comedian into a fresh meal. Save that, Maher guy is bound to grow
even more gamey, and even less pleasant to watch on HBO. 021112
What Keeps NBC's Chuck Todd Up at
Night?
IS STEPHEN COLBERT DAMAGING OUR
POLITICAL SYSTEM?
Satirists need to be held accountable
when their political agenda seeps into the real
Media Wasteland
Study Correlates Media to Doltishness
The
media studiers at Farleigh
Dickenson were back at it recently, updating
their annual media report that measures the paucity of
correct information Americans have on domestic and
international news and political issues, and identifying the
sources of our lack of knowledge...at least sort of.
Survey
readers from the left of the political spectrum have loved
the Farleigh Dickenson research for the light it shines on
FOX News, whose viewers
always rank the lowest among study participants. They are
able to answer roughly 1 in 4 questions correctly, which to
media critics puts FOX in a bad light, but viewers of
MSNBC - the Left's analog
to what FOX News is to the political Right - are not
appreciably better informed. In fact, Americans generally
perform abysmally on these surveys, with the brightest bulbs
in the TV room - National Public
Radio (NPR) devotees - able to answer domestic
and international questions correctly less than half
of the time.
The study
itself seems questionable in its content and approach, but
accepting the results at face value one wonders if the more
valuable information doesn't relate to the limitations of
broadcast journalism in general, and of a system that leaves
citizens precious little time to absorb information any
other way.
The
switchover from being a people who read - the
standard up until about 1980, after which the behaviors of
news consumers rapidly began to change - to being a people
who watch and listen has been enormous in its
impacts. It has given rise to an age of information
chunking, elevating a strategy for managing the
limitations of electronic journalism to a lifestyle,
in which we pick and choose what we want or have time to
take in. This has been further promoted by the explosion of
cable channels, which provide a cornucopia of alternatives
for viewers to choose from, and in recent years the
explosion of Internet-based media, such as YouTube, have
added to the range of alternatives. The vast majority of all
of these offerings are entertainment rather than information
oriented. This would include most of the offerings specified
in the Farleigh Dickenson study, for in that media list in
those graphics shown above only the Sunday morning political
talk shows (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, etc.)
and the NPR News Hour with Jim Lehrer could be
considered primarily informational in nature. Everything
else on that list is opinion and entertainment, and that too
casts this study in an odd light.
Media
observers today like to point out that young people get most
of their information on political and international news
issues from John Stewart, Steven Colbert, and the late night
comedians. While that may be true, it would be incorrect to
assume that means that they are well informed through
these exposures. It may be where they get their information,
but it isn't sufficient to score better than a low "F" on
these civics and issues tests.
This change
in the way we get the information that is crucial to the
responsible operation of a democracy has been driven by
technological developments, which have in part been spurred
by environmental pressures. We decided sometime back to
become a paperless society, because cutting down forests to
produce disposable paper products has all kinds of
downsides. We are nowhere near to achieving that goal in the
big problem places, like offices, but the newspaper industry
has been devastated.
It hasn't
just been concern for the trees and the environment, but
also a long, downward arc in the overall economics of the
nation, which has dried up ad revenues and made it
impossible for big daily print operations to survive,
particularly when sharing ad revenues with the broadcast
media.
All of those
pressures have given us a news gathering formula that works
something like:
INTERESTS - TIME = CHOICE
What we are
finding to be interesting and how we are using our time
seems currently to be adding up to choices not particularly
conducive to the effective maintenance of a democratic
society. - RAR
(052412)
RATING THE NEWS READERS
The RCJ takes a critical look at the panorama
of news readers and reporters, rating them with regard to the weight their
opinion and reporting carries with decision makers, how bright they appear to
be, and how informed. The last two categories take into account the reporters'
personal appeal - we do tend to place greater stock in the information we gain
from people we admire - and the extent to which their personal biases seem to be
reflected in their interpretation of the news. See the legend below for
information on the ratings icons. (Compiled September 11, 2011)
Did Ron Paul
Suggest that the Uninsured Should Die?
ELECTION
2012: For the second time in the past week there was
an audience response at a Republican debate that raised the
hackles of progressives everywhere. Even Ronald Reagan's
daughter Patti Davis was on MSNBC talking about "it", and
stating "I don't like those people" referring to "it's"
adherents.
"It" is a perceived spirit of
viciousness on the political right, which was emphasized in the
MSNBC-sponsored debate earlier in the week when the audience
applauded Texas Gov. Rick Perry's record of executions in his
state under his leadership. Rather like the preceding Texas
Governor, former President George W. Bush, Perry doesn't pardon
anybody regardless of any lingering questions about their actual
guilt. Two hundred and thirty people have been put to death
under Perry's 10-year watch, the most under any Governor. He is
unconcerned about his record to the point of being boastful,
which is what the debate audience responded to.
The leftie press has jumped all over
this perception of blood lust, and last night's Tea
Party-sponsored debate, hosted by CNN, provided another gauge of
audience reaction when a question came up about how those who
decline to pay for health coverage should be treated should they
find themselves in sudden need of emergency care.
The Huffington Post headline read
"Let Him Die: Tea Party Audience Cheers".
It was Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) who
fielded the question, and as you can see from the video above
that Huffington Post headline was a little misleading. But judge
for yourself.
As a pretty far to the left
"progressive", I find the right-wing hatred apparent in some
audience members to be a little sick making, but equally
disturbing is the wedge the "liberal press" is trying to make of
this aberrant political behavior. Some have likened the spirit
of meanness to that of the Roman gladiatorial games, where
Christian-gnawing lions were similarly appreciated.
But did Ron Paul, who says a lot of
crazy stuff, say "Let him die" as the headline would seem to
imply? That was a line fed to him by debate host Wolf Blitzer,
who failed to get Paul to take the bait. The über-serious Paul
suggested that there might be other ways to handle such a
situation other than adding to the burden of government.
This example points out how
difficult it is to operate a fair and just democracy when voter
involvement is so closely tied to the manipulations of the
media.
Dylan Ratigan is the "Rick
Santelli of the progressive-analyticals"
Glory
unto Dylan Ratigan, the
defector-reporter from CNBC's Fast Money and Closing Bell
who now hosts "The Dylan Ratigan Show"
on MSNBC. No matter how awful the cover design of his first
book, Greedy Bastards!", he is providing a smart person's
depiction (in graphics) of the mechanisms that have
characterized U.S. capitalism over the past 40 years, and
what it has finally produced: massive public debt, a
disintegrating middle class, and an imbalance in wealth
distribution far beyond that of the Roman Empire at its
peak.
The former global managing
editor for corporate finance at Bloomberg News, credited
with developing and launching more than half-a-dozen
broadcast and new media properties, has even come up with a
solution for planning our way out of our economic despair:
"Hot Spotting".
Ratigan's Website
reports that he is "mad as hell. Infuriated by government
corruption and corporate communism, incensed by banksters
shaking down taxpayers, and despairing of an ailing health
care system, an age-old dependency on foreign oil, and a
failing educational system, Ratigan sees an America that has
allowed itself to be swindled and robbed."
Ratigan's broadcast history
has been fueled by angry rants, most notably this final
broadcast from the floor of the NYSE upon leaving CNBC in
2009, in which he reported precisely what the world would
soon know: "his guests, essentially 'perpetrated securities
fraud' and an 'insurance fraud scam against AIG — and, by
extension, the government and taxpayers funding that
insurance company's 'bailout'".
(Wikipedia)
Ratigan is the "Rick Santelli
of the progressive-analyticals", voicing for the voice-less
middle class what the Tea Party inspiring Santelli did for
the greed-and-acquisition set.
Dylan Ratigan may be mounting
a run for office, for he seems to be a guy on a crusade,
taking his finance industry educated views to the public the
way his MSNBC cohort Ed Schultz
("The Ed Show") speaks for blue collar workers.
Between the two, Ratigan
seems the odd personality to foist himself so dramatically
into the what's-wrong-with-America fray. He is cheeky while
having one of the more unsettled television personas to be
found anywhere; like watching Albert Brooks' sweat-flop
scene from Broadcast News played out over months
until finally an evolution occurs in the character. Dylan
has been touring the west coast of late, doing shows from
Silicon Valley and Treasure Island in San Francisco, and
displaying a notable and new je ne sais quoi.