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December 20, 2005

12.20.05 | The War on the War on Christmas; Problems With Biodiesel; Torture Music
December 20, 2005 Edition

"The Best of the Rest of the Web"

THiS WEEK: Why we must all be vigilant in pursuit of the War on Christmas; one argument in favor of not moving back to New Orleans; the big problem with biodiesel; deploying US popular culture in the torture of detainees; why little girls and boys love crushing Barbie's head; historic changes afoot in Bolivia's presidential election; some thoughts on utopia; coverage of the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Hong Kong; Katherine Albrecht suggests that we might become more concerned with how corporations are tracking our every move; creative artists really are having more sex than you; Sandip Roy gives the NSA a helping hand by volunteering (and translating) his last international phone call—to his mother; school may be detrimental to your intellectual health; and various other cartoons, videos, and delightful surprises in this slightly-delayed double batch of Media Picks.

This Week's Picks:

  1. VIDEO | The War on the War on Christmas
    A hilarious debate on the "war on Christmas" between AirAmerica's Sam Seder and Bob Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute.

    Sam Seder and Bob Knight | CNN / Thinkprogress.org
    http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/12/merry-seder-christmas


  2. Goodbye, New Orleans
    As we reach the 90-day mark since Katrina hit, it's time we ended our national state of denial. We should call it quits in New Orleans not because the city can't be made relatively safe from hurricanes. It can be. And not because to do so is more trouble than it's worth. It's not. As someone who dearly loves New Orleans and has experienced many of her charms, it pains me immeasurably to call for this retreat. This is not a rhetorical stunt or a shock argument meant to invite compromise talks. I mean what I say: Shut the city down and board it up before thousands more lives are lost.

    Mike Tidwell | Orion
    http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sidebars/front/index_front.html


  3. Worse Than Fossil Fuel
    In promoting biodiesel—as the European Union, the British and US governments and thousands of environmental campaigners do—you might imagine that you are creating a market for old chip fat, or rapeseed oil, or oil from algae grown in desert ponds. In reality you are creating a market for the most destructive crop on earth.

    George Monbiot | Z Net
    http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=57&ItemID=9285


  4. CARTOON | The True Meaning...

    Shannon Wheeler | Too Much Coffee Man
    http://www.tmcm.com/comics/tmcm051205.gif


  5. Disco Inferno
    Whatever the playlist—usually heavy metal or hip hop but sometimes, bizarrely, Barney the Dinosaur's "I Love You" or selections from Sesame Street—"torture music" is pumped at detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo with such brutality to unravel them without laying so much as a feather on their bodies. The mind is another story, and blasting loud music at captives has become part of what has now entered our lexicon as "torture lite." Torture lite is a calculated combination of psychological and physical means of coercion that stop short of causing death and pose little risk that telltale physical marks will be left behind, but that nonetheless can cause extreme psychological trauma. It's designed to deprive the victim of sleep and to cause massive sensory overstimulation, and it has been shown in different situations to be psychologically unbearable. Clearly, torture music is an assault on human rights. But more broadly, what does it mean when music gets enrolled in schools of torture and culture is sent jackbooted into war?

    Moustafa Bayoumi | The Nation
    http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/bayoumi


  6. Sugar and Spice, and Torturing Barbie
    Researchers from the Universtity of Bath made an interesting discovery through their study of childrens' reactions to branded toys: The mutilation of Barbie dolls at the hands of kids interviewed was reported, "quite gleefully," across age and gender lines. According to one researcher, "Whilst, for an adult, the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child's point of view, they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling."

    Jill Lawless | The Globe and Mail
    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051219.wbarbie1219/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/


  7. All-American Christmas
    It's that time of year again. A time for family and friends to gather. A sacred time. A time to look back and reflect on what really matters most. And, honestly, what matters more than Tomdispatch's third annual holiday list of the season's best gifts?

    Nick "Tongue Firmly in Cheek" Turse | TomDispatch
    http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=42769


  8. Evo Morales After the Election
    Bolivia is the country in South America with the highest number of people—around 65%—who define themselves as Indians. But it has never had an indigenous president. By any standard, Evo Morales' victory, if confirmed officially, would be historic.

    James Painter | BBC
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4542938.stm


  9. REVIEW | Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope
    The equation of utopia with death has become conventional wisdom across the political board. In Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, Russell Jacoby takes on philosophical questions about the nature of utopia and of the human imagination, and attempts to rescue utopian thought from its murderous reputation as well as from the more mundane charge that it is puritanical and repressive in its penchant for planning out the future to the last detail.

    Ellen Willis | Dissent
    http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/fa05/willis.htm


  10. On Tap at the WTO: Private Water
    The focus of the Hong Kong round for rich western nations is to squeeze every drop of money they can by privatizing public services. When it comes to water systems, that can be deadly.

    Joshua Holland | AlterNet
    http://www.alternet.org/story/29639/

    For more information on local and international mobilizations against the WTO meeting in Hong Kong, check out this audio coverage from Pacifica Radio and Free Speech Radio News (hosted by Against the Grain): http://www.againstthegrain.org/audio12.14.05.mp3


  11. Blood Feast: Celebrating Executions in America
    A society that is willing to intentionally kill one of its own people, is a society that is willing to accept barbarism as it guiding principle. There's no middle ground on capital punishment. When one offers their moral support to the practice, they are participating directly in the ritual murder of another human being.

    Mike Whitney | CounterPunch
    http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney12032005.html


  12. VIDEO | True Lies
    This piece, originally inspired by the book of the same name, features Taalam Acey's ever potent prose deftly matched by the animation of Haik Hoisington and scored to the music of The Soulsavers.

    Taalam Acey | Guerrilla News Network
    http://www.guerrillanews.com/videos/52/True_Lies


  13. INTERVIEW | Total Surveillance
    Katherine Albrecht, author of Spychips, is not happy that grocers surreptitiously plant radio tags on customers while cameras watch facial reactions to product displays. "Regardless of whether your beliefs are progressive or conservative, socially or politically, everybody's got a reason to not want somebody spying on them," she says. "Whether you're afraid that Big Brother is going to take the form of an evil corporation or Big Brother is going to take the form of an evil government or take whatever form, everybody's got a reason to be concerned."

    Michael Beckel | Mother Jones
    http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2005/12/albrecht.html


  14. Road to Riches ... or Ruin?
    Army recuitment may be down, but economic hardship keeps the troops of Halliburton at high levels.

    Andrew Stezler | In These Times
    http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2416/


  15. The Big Bang Theory of Art
    "Sex and art are the same thing," declared Pablo Picasso; this was one of the greatest chat-up lines ever, from a master of the art. Finally, a scientific survey has proven what everyone has long suspected (which is what scientific surveys ought to do): creative artists, it appears, really do have more exotic love lives than the rest of the population.

    Ben Macintyre | Times Online
    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1068-1900223,00.html


  16. Everything the NSA Needs to Know About My Indian Mother (But Was Afraid to Ask)
    News that President Bush signed an order allowing the National Security Agency to spy on international phone calls and e-mails makes one Indian immigrant think of his weekly, gossipy phone calls home—and the intensifying gaze of the state upon immigrant America.

    Sandip Roy | Pacific News Service
    http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=55aa51778b5d75701b6f319e90a7e1c0


  17. Unschooling
    "After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches," writes John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, "I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves."

    Jeremiah Vandermeer | The Tyee
    http://www.thetyee.ca/Views/2005/12/16/Unschooling


  18. FICTION | La Conchita
    I don't know if the average person really has much of an idea of what a mud slide involves. I certainly didn't—not before I started driving for a living, anyway. You'd see footage on the six-o'clock news, telephone poles down, trees knocked askew, a car or two flattened, and a garage staved in, but it didn't seem like much. It wasn't hot lava, wasn't an earthquake or one of the firestorms that burned through this subdivision or that, incinerating a couple hundred homes every fall. Maybe it was the fault of the term itself—mud slide. It sounded innocuous, almost cozy, as if it might be one of the new attractions at Magic Mountain, or vaguely sexy, like the women's mud-wrestling that was all the rage when I was in high school and too young to get in the door. But a mud slide, as I now know, is nothing short of an avalanche, where instead of snow you've got four hundred thousand tons of liquefied dirt bristling with rocks and tree trunks coming at you with the force of a tsunami. And it moves fast, faster than you would think.

    T. Coraghessan Boyle | The New Yorker
    http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/content/?051212fi_fiction


- Media Picks Contributing Editors: Adam Barker, Justin Park
- Media Picks compiled and edited by Erin Wiegand and Brian Awehali


Posted by erin at December 20, 2005 01:47 PM

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