March 29, 2007
Modernity = Boobs
this is from a WSJ editorial today, "Playboy in Indonesia" (link)
"In reality, the problem is not Playboy's predilection for the scantily clad, but Islamists' tendency to fly into a rage over a flash of thigh or a bare midriff. (There's no nudity in the Indonesian edition.) American popular culture ought to be celebrated rather than derided. In its crass commercialism and blithe disregard for Islamist sensibilities lie the greatest hopes of bringing Muslim societies to terms with modernity."
and this is from a Reuters piece announcing Hooter's Holy Land plans (link)
"I strongly believe that the Hooters concept is something that Israelis are looking for," Ofer Ahiraz, who bought the Hooters franchise for Israel, told Reuters Monday. "Hooters can suit the Israeli entertainment culture."
Posted by bw at 12:36 PM
March 20, 2007
4 Years Ago
(link)
Posted by bw at 09:28 AM
March 09, 2007
Slobo Still Undead
Vampire hunters in Serbia confess to driving a stake through Slobo's heart. Family to sue. Wow.
Posted by bw at 12:22 PM
March 06, 2007
New TOE series - WORK!
This week TOE kicks off an all new series, our old friend Peter Choyce even makes an appearance. WORK part 1. Listen
Posted by bw at 10:00 PM
February 26, 2007
Making Sense of Iran
I have been awaiting with dread the latest installment in Seymour Hersh's play by play of America's Imperial adventures and sure enough in this week's New Yorker he lays it out in plain talk:
"One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran."
One of my smarter friends explained the above to me over a year ago and I assure you every single report I have read or heard since distorts or ignores this truth. And since Bush has pretty much made it clear that he is holding Iran responsible for the violence in Iraq, it means that as soon as something big happens to our boys - bombs are gonna start falling over Tehran.
Of course it's not that simple, there is the small matter of covert funding for Sunni terrorist groups, and then there is the embarrassing fact that the main thrust of the Shiite militias has been to protect its people from the attacks of the very terrorists we are now funding. Most distressing though is the undeniable reality that the Sunni insurgency has won! By killing as many American and Iraqis as it could - it succeeded in redirecting American resolve and policy. Or perhaps - this has been the plan all along.
Posted by bw at 08:19 PM
February 16, 2007
Torture, ticking time bombs, and the American way
I finally broke down and watched Michael Winterbottom's The Road To Guantanamo the other night. As cynical as I am, I still find it astonishing that this place remains open and that there are those who still justify its existence - in fact this past month a justice department official, Charles Stimson, went as far to suggest that the law firms representing the detainees should be branded terrorist as well. That same week, I was given a copy of Fernando Botero's new book depicting Abu Ghraib Abuse. I got to thinking about how one artistically responds to Guantanamo. This is how I came to put together this list of youtube videos that I posted on the WFMU blog last week (link). I realize now that you can't just throw up a list of videos and expect anyone to watch them - the context is very important. Personally, I like to make the connections myself.
When you read the article on 'Counterinsurgency warfare as military malpractice' by Edward N. Luttwak in the current Harper's and the article on 24 and torture by Jane Mayer in the current New Yorker back to back - you can't help but ask yourself if 24 is a strategic response of some crazy secret Government agency to equip American citizens with the ability to sanction and accept torture? The key is this ticking time bomb argument (link). Even though Edward Luttwak makes it clear that all a terrorist has to do is last a few more hours and his 'ticking time bomb' will go off, but the even better argument is that there still has never been a case of a ticking time bomb! But since this idea works so well on 24, obviously the American people are ok with it - well, thats the way some people see it.
Lastly, I updated the archives and uploaded all the old Theory of Everything shows, including a few old 'your radio nightlights' (this is what the radio show was called back in the day) - and I thought I would share "holy war" with you this week as it most clearly spells out where we are going with this whole torture thing. Enjoy.
Posted by bw at 02:49 PM
February 15, 2007
And we're back!
It all started with this bottle of conditioner I purchased at a convenience store in London. A week later the strange writing on the bottle attracted the attention of an airport security guard in Chicago .. well, the next thing I know I am in the desert wearing an orange jumpsuit! 8 weeks of waterboarding and women's underwear! Unfortunately, I was unable to answer their question: "tell us where Osama Bin Laden is"
Actually, the conditions of my release stipulate that I only refer to my internment as "Imaginary" But yes, TOE is back. Over the next few days we will be firing up the website. New radio and video programs will then follow.
ps. Thanks to everyone who wrote me kind words during my absence. And just so you know, I wasn't totally screwing off - here is a link to the weekly posts I do for the WFMU blog.
Posted by bw at 07:10 PM
November 22, 2006
Where is my TOE?
Dear listener, please don't be angry. There is no slacking going on here at TOE central, quite the contrary. Last month I was in China, and now I am heading out to London, then Arizona, and then Chicago. Of course this travel should find its way onto this website - and it will - lots of radio for the upcoming work series - and check out some of the recent flickr additions as well, though I am almost embarrassed of them - especially when you compare my photos to some of the great ones my flickr friends upload (check out Daniel's stream) But stay turned, or at least don't turn the xml feed off! more to come,
Posted by bw at 12:01 PM
November 06, 2006
Fall conspiracies - le finale
Here is the last installment of a running story about the truth behind 9-11 and who is really running our country. It absolutely terrifies me how much of this program (that Chris B and I put together in 2003) contains stuff people ACTUALLY believe now. Really, conspiracy theory has become the news. (link)
(Listen) ps - next week we begin our new Theory of Everything series on Work, stay turned.
Posted by bw at 09:10 AM
October 26, 2006
Fall Conspiracies part deux
Posted by bw at 12:18 AM
October 19, 2006
Fall Conspiracies
As your host heads out to China and Hong Kong in pursuit of TOE's next series of programs, we are going to play a bit of catch up and run a three part series of pieces from a program I did with TOE's Washington DC correspondent Chris B. called 'decline and fall.' A man walks into a bar and says "wanna know what was in the classified part of the 9-11 report" Its a wild ride- he was there before all the 9-11 conspiracy jokers got on board - Listen to part one.
Posted by bw at 12:52 PM
October 18, 2006
Comedy does it better every time
Over the past few years yours truly has been ceding radio show time to 'other work' in the interest of the costs of living. This morning I woke up determined to make some changes - I lay in bed while a demolition team outside my window tore something big up. I tried to articulate why I need to focus more on making things up and the imagination.. and then I gave up and got out of bed, made some coffee and turned on the computer - and lo and behold - on the front page of the Guardian today - Armando Iannucci finishes my thoughts for me! (read)
It's what I suspect most of us who work in the creative arts occasionally feel: that what we're doing is interesting, it's fun, it's probably the only thing we can imagine ourselves doing. But is it a proper job? Is there a point to what anyone in the arts is doing? It's only recently that I've come to find out that it does - that spending one's life just imagining things, making things up, performs a crucial role today. It matters because it's an act of imagination, and imagination is one of the things that defines us as human beings rather than monkeys. It's an act of imagination that is just as valid, just as crucial, I think, as any serious competitor, like a drama or the novel. But I think we sometimes see comedy as an inferior art form.
Posted by bw at 10:17 AM
October 11, 2006
TOE 33 - Darth Vader
This is another expanded piece from one of the TOE radio shows - but I thought I should put it up in all its glory. This was made almost 5 years ago by myself with Sean Cole - its a story about a Darth Vader Impersonator - we call it the Impersovador. Listen
Here is a link to the original Transom post - I love that people didn't like the guy in the story - heh
Posted by bw at 09:26 AM
September 29, 2006
The bugs, the bugs
This week we are running an expanded version of a story from TOE's radio days - Landlord Mitch and the Cockroaches. Its pretty much bugs, bugs, bugs all the time here at TOE now. Check out this post on the WFMU blog to learn about your host's trials and tribulations - and give a LISTEN to the show.
Posted by bw at 12:00 PM
Things that didn't go into AIS
I have gotten a few emails wondering why I didn't use my AIS series to do a more thorough examination of our current political situation, with cameras going up on more and more street corners and bedrooms - well, my answer to that is too super depressing!
Serious, the stories surrounding the warrant-less wiretaps are just too bad. For example - a few weeks ago New York Magazine ran a cover story by Joe Hagen on Bill Keller and the current state of the Nytimes - I was blown away by the revelations about reporter Joe Risen and his NSA story and the reasons, or lack of, the paper gives for holding the story for 14 months - here are a few excerpts:
In the fall of 2004, Risen had brought a massive scoop to his editors: Beginning in the days after September 11, he discovered, the Bush administration had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on foreign calls into the United States without court-approved warrants.
When the Times first approached the White House with the story that fall, Taubman took the lead editorial role, beginning a series of meetings with Bush officials. General Hayden, the NSA director, took him on a personal tour of the agency’s headquarters and tried to impress upon him the importance of its secret programs. Taubman also met personally with then–national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, a close friend of his for more than twenty years. Six months before the 2004 election, Taubman had thrown a lavish dinner party for Rice at his house in Washington.
Asked recently if there was a defining piece of evidence that affected his decision to hold the story then, Keller said no, then took a deep breath and added, “The argument they made was that, even though it may seem obvious to us that they’re going to try to eavesdrop on terrorists’ phone calls, the behavior of terrorists suggested that it wasn’t obvious to them. Therefore, publishing the story would change their behavior.”
The holding of the NSA story enraged both Risen and Lichtblau, who primarily blamed Taubman. Risen would not comment for this story, but colleagues say he told them that Taubman lacked the “balls” to publish his scoop. Both Risen and Lichtblau—as well as many other reporters in the Washington bureau—suspected Taubman’s deference to Hayden and Rice had influenced his decision and thus Keller’s.
For Risen, holding the NSA spying story was the final insult. After the 2004 election, communications between him and Keller’s two key advisers—Abramson and Taubman—effectively disintegrated. “There was no working relationship between Risen and Jill, or Risen and Phil,” says a Times person who knows Risen well. “They didn’t engage him.”
The story, of course, didn’t go away. The Times could have published it right after the election. Keller offers a curious explanation for why that didn’t happen, suggesting that the “normal process was much delayed because the lead reporter on the story went on a book leave,” as if he had disappeared off the face of the earth. According to several sources, Risen was convinced that the paper would never publish the story, and he had already signed a lucrative deal with the Free Press for a book that was originally to be about George Tenet and the CIA. According to one Times person, Risen said he’d quit if the paper didn’t allow him the leave of absence, and off he went to write his book.
In the summer of 2005, two months after Risen returned from book leave, Taubman learned from a friend of Risen’s that he planned on including a chapter in his book about the NSA eavesdropping program. Both Abramson and Taubman confronted Risen, separately, and asked him point-blank whether he was using the material for his book. People briefed on those meetings say he was “evasive” and “squirrelly.”
Privately, the editors believed that Risen, who wasn’t able to get Tenet to cooperate because he had his own book deal, was desperate to salvage his book and had used the NSA material to pad it out. Taubman was livid, telling Risen that it was against Times policy to use material obtained on the newspaper’s dime for his book without notifying the paper.
In September, shortly after his conversation with Taubman, Risen delivered the manuscript to the Free Press, including a chapter called “The Program,” detailing the government’s secret eavesdropping program and drawn from the original draft of the story Risen had filed to the Times the year before. The Free Press believed it now owned the material (and, in a comic twist, offered the Times first-serial rights).
As the book’s publication loomed in the near distance (the Free Press was cagey about when exactly it would come out), Risen went back to work on the story for the Times. He was now caught between two obligations, but the Times was in an even tougher spot: If Keller again folded under the weight of White House arguments and held the story, the Times would be humiliated by Risen’s book. In a long e-mail about the origins of the spying story, Keller was adamant that the book had not been the “deciding factor” in publishing. The “conventional wisdom” that Risen’s book forced the paper to publish the story, he writes, “is bullshit.”
But he also admits, “I have tried to be careful never to say the Risen book was irrelevant. I’ve said it was a factor in reopening the discussion.” (In fact, Keller has never said that publicly before.)
Colleagues describe Risen and Lichtblau as vehement that the story okayed in 2005 was not fundamentally different from the one that had been rejected in 2004.
Now, the thing that kills me is that the Times actually has the balls to claim that publishing this story (in 2005) proves that it has balls to take on the administration! There is no hope for us...
Posted by bw at 11:37 AM
September 21, 2006
AIS: The Observer Effect (The Final Chapter)
This week our Adventures in Surveillance series comes to a close, with more of a wimper than a bang. Thanks this week to Chris B, Wikipedia, Ajda, and Meredith and of course Werner Heisenberg.
Posted by bw at 02:08 AM
September 11, 2006
TOE - sex and the internets
With the promised ultimate finale for our Adventures in Surveillance series already a week late - it has been decided that I should just post something from the archives so as to keep the angry hoards at bay. So, in that spirit I give you another expanded piece from the hard drive. A cautionary tale about STDs and the Interents. This piece was constructed in the offices of the Public Radio Exchange over a year ago with the talented Nick van der Kolk and Adrianne Mathiowetz who now have their own alt.npr podcast.
give a listen
Posted by bw at 06:26 PM
September 01, 2006
PENULTIMATE AIS: A midget Walks Into A Bar...
A Chinese midget walks into a bar and climbs up on the stool next to TOE's DC coorespondant Chris B jumpstarting our penultimate instalment of Adventures in Surveillance. If you have been listening since the beginning you will recall 'Operation Chastity Belt' from the last time we checked in with Chris - if you need a memory jog listen again. This week we peel back another layer of the mystery only to discover a world domination plot and Reality TV. LISTEN
Posted by bw at 11:56 AM
August 24, 2006
On the internets
TOE contributor and friend Tim Kreider had a great op-ed in yesterday's New York Times on the subject of Pluto READ
and your host is mighty proud of a post he did for the WFMU blog READ
Megadeath says F**k the United Nations READ
Posted by bw at 12:43 PM
August 23, 2006
Bush's summer reading list
The presidential 2006 summer reading list was released this week and much is being made of the fact that Bush is curling up on the beach with Camus' The Stranger - like this nice piece in the current New Yorker. Book TV provides a graphic, which suggests that the man has way too much time on his hands - maybe he needs a blog.
Posted by bw at 12:11 PM
