Divinest Sense

Having just joined the iPod world with my new video-capable toy, I decided (all on my own initative!) to check out this “podcasting” (and the nascent “vodcasting”) to see what all the hype was about.

Well, there’s a whole lot of crap out there, just like everywhere else, but there are some really fun ones. I enjoy the music enthusiasts who drag old stuff out of the vault, dorktones being my current favorite. Then there are all the tech tidbits, funny stuff, treatises on the digital divide, news about outer space, documentary footage of life in Tuscany… lots of fun and educational things to waste time on the subway with.

Today I read this article in Wired online about how there are no women in podcasting. Although the piece starts off by citing an incident of sexist rudeness at a podcasting event, the tone subtly changes to shift the blame onto the women. Women just aren’t doing anything interesting. The only successful female-authored podcast is one about yuppie childrearing. Women aren’t interested in technology, and have to be dragged into it by their husbands. Women just aren’t making themselves heard.

Bullshit. This is no different from my visit to the National Museum of Women in the Arts here in DC, which features lots of interesting artwork from women whose husbands were famous artists. Don’t tell me that women just weren’t interested in making art. And of course there is the recurring lament of “where are all the women bloggers?” The female podcasters can’t be found because nobody in the boys club is looking for them. Nobody told them there was a convention. Journalists only give press time to the “most popular” podcasters, according to…. the male network of podcasters. Yawn. Same ol’ same ol’.

Wired Magazine kind of pisses me off anyway. It’s written in the same sort of pandering illiterate boy-speak that one finds in Maxim or Stuff and the graphics look like a flyer for an extreeeeeme whatever-boarding contest. A while back there was an issue devoted to the theme of “remix culture”, which could have been interesting, except that it was full of short pointless articles about tired and shallow mashups of various tropes. One article was about messing with famous logos for ironic fun - it featured a t-shirt with the Sex Pistols logo, except it had been changed to “Pistol Sex” and had a gagged and blindfolded woman and a bunch of guns floating around it. There was no caption explaining that one. It’s the kind of thing that could be provocative if painted in large scale and hung on a gallery wall with other logos made violent. But in the context of the article, it was clearly meant to be wearable and funny. Har har har! Pistol sex! I get it!

I’m watching the Sunday talk shows yesterday and Stephanopoulos is interviewing Queen Rania of Jordan about the bombing suspect that they had just captured. George asks:

“whoa, a WOMAN was going to blow herself up - is that some crazy shit or what?”

Rania: Yes, these are very bad people.

George: Yeah, but, a WOMAN?

Rania: uhhhh, I don’t follow…

George: If you had had a chance to sit down with this crazy lady for a heart-to-heart chat before the bombing took place, what would you have said to her to try to talk her out of it?

Rania: Oh, I dunno, George, I guess I would have popped “how Stella Got her Groove Back” into the VCR, got out the kleenexes and chocolates, and just, you know, talked to her, uterus to uterus, about what it means to be a slave to your own hysterics. And then we would have done each other’s nails, and then had “shopping therapy” to cure our silly anger problems. Are you effin’ kidding me? I would have buried that murdering lunatic so deep inside our darkest prison that she would have thought she’d mistakenly climbed up her own asshole. What the fuck do I look like?

OK, I may be paraphrasing a little bit, and she didn’t actually dress him down as she should have - but wouldn’t it have been great if she had? She’s a freaking ruler, not Oprah. *sigh* I’m a little down in the dumps, time for some shopping therapy!

Not to be, like, insulting to my readers and their associates, but why is everyone so naive and dimwitted? Here’s an article by the Truthout folks about a wild and crazy claim that the U.S. created the monster that is al-Zarqawi by inflating his mythos and using him to make up a nonexistent connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. This in turn, claims the crazy report, gave al-Zarqawi unprecented perceived power and influence. Combine this with the Jesus-ordained flattening and gassing of Iraq’s cities by our noble land, which for some reason created a motive for Iraqis to fight back. Now they knew who to call.

Um, DUHHHH, of COURSE we made this happen. Doesn’t anyone pay attention anymore? I thought this was the thing that we all knew to be true, but were just being polite and not mentioning it. I remember groaning when I read in the Post a year or more ago that al-Zarqawi was named (in a lovely red-carpet awards show, I’m sure) official leader of a new group called “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”. I turned to the person on the metro next to me and said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks that they spin this to sound like the group existed this whole time and we just now successfully uncovered it. Mission Accomplished!” She replied, “don’t talk to me, crazy stranger on the metro.” But I was right. And I’m still right.

When you start to give them the benefit of the doubt, you may think you’re being civil, but you’re just being retarded. Same goes for all the people who said, “aw, Roberts seems like a nice guy, he won’t be an extremist.” *Thwap thwap thwap* - don’t be an idiot!

I don’t care to be diplomatic about this stuff anymore. And neither should you. When you see stupidity, amnesia, and outright lying coming from our mass media and our president’s administration, say to as many people as will listen, “gosh, isn’t that completely UNTRUE? I seem to recall them saying exactly the OPPOSITE last week! Jeepers!” If you make sure to floss every day, wear clean clothes, and smile, they probably won’t pull out the pepper spray. It’s worth a try.

Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus wrote this article in today’s Post, making a bold attempt (for this paper) to cut through the latest chorus of bleating by the right-wing noise machine. There are a lot of obvious gaps in the administration’s current assertions that they had the same pre-Iraq intelligence that Congress did, and that an independent commission found that the intelligence was not purposely faked by intelligence agencies. What the commission did not cover, of course, was what the administration chose to do with the intelligence they received–intelligence that was far more in-depth than what was provided to Congress. Will the mainstream media keep up this suprisingly saucy behavior, or will they bend over once again?

Note to Congress: Read more than just the executive summary next time.
Note to CIA et al.: Write a better executive summary next time. Thank you.