The Decline of Western Civilizaton

When I first heard of the ESPN special telecast, "The Decision," where LeBron was basically going to get a pr nozzle and make it into the Guinness Book of World Records by administering a mass enema to America, my first thought was, "bad move." My second; "What a fucknut." Oh, and I thought LeBron was lookin' bad too. (cue: rimshot)

Honestly, I can see how tiring it must be for Others to be subjected to the endless and constant stream of bullshit uncle scam spews. Whether spinning about wars in west Asia to just stupid talk about "recovery" I gotta hand it to unc scam; he's a marathoner in it for the long haul. To crowbar in another sports analogy, he's like the Bronx Bull, Lamotta; he can absorb any amount of punishment, but he won't go down.

But something did bring Jake down, and we all know it was the enemy within. (cue: intro, Beethoven's Fifth)

Now, the problems of the dispossessed in America are, in general, not on a scale to match the hell kids in Palestine or Congo or any other region that's been left out of the great "scale up on capitalism or die" race for a two-car garage and a lawn. But it is weird for those of us here in the belly of the beast who know better, sitting on the sidelines and watching this parade. Nero's fiddling has now been displaced by sheer mass, a population marching in lock-step toward the cliff, so engorged on delusion that the biggest threat to us is our own, steady as the sun rising diet of mis-direction. It is weird to watch; and exhausting.

So, here's the hilarious Matt Taibbi doing his thing, this time not about those other douchebags, Goldman Sachs or JPMC, but ESPN and LeBron. "King" James, indeed; King of douchery.

The Five Funniest Things About the "LeBron James: Global Superdouche" Broadcast
by Matt Taibbi
7/11/10
Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/179533/83512

"The Decision" was simultaneously the most painful and most hilarious television show I've seen in a long time. Its entertainment value rested almost entirely in its scope — the same way a person goes to the Niagara Falls or to the Grand Canyon for that take-your-breath-away moment when the heretofore unimaginable vastness of the vista is first perceived, I watched "The Decision" in breathless awe of the sheer scale of the narcissism involved.
By any measure it was a landmark moment in the history of human self-involvement, eclipsing previous peaks in the narcissism Himalayas (Nero's impromptu fiddle concert as Rome burned, the career of the prophet Mohammed, Kim Jong Il publishing "The Popularity of Kim Jong Il") mainly because it was a collective effort. You can understand the citizens of Tsaritsyn cheering the decision to rename their city; if they didn't like "Stalingrad," they were getting lined up and shot.
But what was our excuse? The weird thing about this LeBron story is that seven or eight years ago, he seemed like a nice kid. All he did was step into a media machinery designed to create, reward, nurture, and worship self-obsessed assholes. He was raw clay when he went in, and now he's everything we ever wanted him to be — a lost, attention-craving narcissistic monster who simultaneously despises and needs the slithering insect-mortals who by the millions are bent over licking his toes (represented in The Decision by the ball-less, drooling sycophant Jim Gray).
I'm sure there's a larger point to make in all of this about how the insane pathology behind the LeBron spectacle (read: a co-dependent need to worship insatiable media-attention hogs gone far off the rails of self-awareness) is what ultimately is going to destroy this country and leave us governed for all time by dingbat megalomaniacs like Sarah Palin. But for now I think it's important to just enjoy "The Decision" on a pure humor value basis, since we're unlikely to see anything that funny for a good long while. To me, the Top Five moments:
1. So here's LeBron James, sitting in a gymnasium full of children from the Boys and Girls Club, the charity that was to receive the proceeds from the event. Let's note the first thing: LeBron had a full hour to say anything he wanted, and might perhaps have used that time to talk about the Boys and Girls club, which was conceived for the express purpose of helping kids who don't have enough parental guidance — kids like LeBron, for instance (whose biological father was an ex-con who was never there). LeBron instead chooses to have a show entirely about himself filled with navel-gazing commentators raving over his highlights, followed by Gray and his idiotic questions about whether or not LeBron bites his nails. Then, when Gray finally gets to a question about whether it might be hard to share the spotlight with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, LeBron answers, "It's not about sharing. You know, it's about everybody having they own spotlight." That's his message to the Boys and Girls of America: It's not about sharing! I exploded in laughter when he said this. Even funnier, nobody commented on it. I mean, what's the problem? The kids got the proceeds, didn't they?
2. The day after the show, I woke up and checked the Internet to see if "It's about everybody having they own spotlight" had already made Bartlett's quotations or something — it seemed primed to be turned into a famous line that encapsulates the mood of a country for a whole decade, sort of like "Tune in, turn on, drop out" or "Greed is good." But when I Googled it, I found less than a full page of hits. Why? Because ESPN not only spent the whole evening shamelessly deep-throating LeBron, they fixed his grammar post-factum. In the official transcript, LeBron sounds not like stammering, uneducated buffoon he sounded like on live TV, but just like any other ordinary, more or less literate mass-media dickhead. Some of his malaprop gems will survive ("I want to win into the future"), but otherwise... apparently, fame is now its own spell-checker. Obviously this isn't all LeBron's fault — the guy didn't go to college, after all, and he's not being paid to be a public speaker — but this is part of the story, the fact that sports stars don't need to go to school really at all anymore and can get to the pros by going to sham high schools that exist solely to crank out basketball players. But even that part of the story gets whitewashed.
3. Gray isn't visible during most of the interview — thank God — but about five minutes into their talk LeBron glances down slightly, and suddenly I was conscious of feeling Gray's off-camera eyes locked on LeBron's crotch during LeBron's answers. I burst out laughing. Overall, the whole scene was an uncanny replay of the Hot Tub Time Machine sequence in which the balding white Rob Corddry is forced to suck off black comedian Craig Robinson after losing a football bet. This has to have been the absolute low point in the whole history of the "interview," right? Charlie Gibson's 2008 Bush interview is a candidate, I guess, but this has to be the worst ever — especially when you throw in the fact that Gray was a) paid by LeBron to do the interview, and b) chosen because he has a "special sales relationship" with one of the sponsors, the University of Phoenix.
4. When Gray asks LeBron, "Was it always your plan to play with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh?" watch as he hedges for a second in between the words "Well," and "I mean," before answering, "Well, I mean, I'm looking forward to it. To say it was always in my plans, I can't say it was always in my plans because I never thought it was possible." In that one little hedging moment he starts, ever so slightly, to smile. And everybody knew what that smile meant: it meant, "What the fuck do you think? Of course, we've been planning this for years." So he smiles, giving the deal away completely, then instantly switches gears and just turbo-lies right into the camera. I thought: this is just like politics! A terrible, totally unskilled liar, telling a completely transparent lie, who then improbably gets let off the hook by the sycophantic moron interviewing him. What is it about this story we love so much?
5. The camerawork was spectacular. The slow zoom-in leading to the EXTREME LeBRON CLOSE-UP during the key question — You've had everybody else biting their nails. So I guess it's time for them to stop chewing. The answer to the question everybody wants to know: LeBron, what's your decision? — if you'd asked a great comic film director to spoof reality-show direction, that's what it would look like. But here's the question: was this a spoof of reality-show TV, was it reality-show TV, or was this a society that can no longer tell the difference? Several times during the ESPN broadcast I got the sense that the network itself had lost track of where "reality" was. Were we really supposed to believe that this thing wasn't decided ages ago, that Wade was seriously considering going to Chicago at one point, that the Knicks were ever in it, that LeBron was trying to convince Bosh to come to Cleveland? Of course not, it was all bullshit, designed to snare viewers, the grownups among us all know that. But the ESPN anchors looked like they were hanging desperately on every tweet, almost like they really believed this stuff. Poor Stuart Scott, he's been podded completely, if you chopped that dude's head off, nothing but little plastic balls containing digitized "Boo-yah" chips would fall out of his skull. It's the prototype for all future news coverage — one or two dominant news networks pushing sensational fairy-tale versions of reality in a race for ad revenue, competing with a few scattered hacks on the Internet covering the much less important parallel "real story," i.e. the truth. In order for the networks to push their version most effectively, they have to genuinely believe that what they're spinning is real. Which is why you see them starting to mistake fake drama for real drama from time to time — they're beginning to drown in their own bullshit.
Watch and see if that doesn't become the template for presidential campaign coverage in 2012. See if those reality-show zoom-ins don't start to creep into interviews with candidates. This is the beginning of our big Lost in Space journey together, where news and reality-show programming fuse completely and we all end up complete morons, voting strippers and X-games athletes into the White House. I'm psyched. Are you?

Pants on Fire

In the continuing disaster that is the mainstream media's EM08 reporting, no less than NPR's venerated "Marketplace" just fired off an interview with this jerkoff, Leonard Zumpano, who's an academic (U. of Alabama). This is yet another faction, the academics, who with rare exception - like William Black - add their pile of crap to the lawyers's pile, the accountants' pile, uncle scam's pile....

Chumpano today gave his cheerleading effort toward residential real estate. Don't take my word for it, give it a bit and go to their site, listen yourself to today's program:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/episodes/show_rundown.php?show_id=14

[NOTE: As of 10/12/15 this segment has been archived here]

As I've said and let me be clear - now is NOT a good time to buy property. And people and businesses like Chumpano are setting up another battalion of fish who listen to drivel like this and put their futures at stake buying right now.

This should be a crime.

 Transcript follows below.

[NOTE: Edited 10/12/15

Coldwell extends homebuying tax credit

 Monday, April 26, 2010 - 19:01

• Transcript

TEXT OF INTERVIEW

Tess Vigeland: The government's $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit expires on Friday. If you haven't entered into a contract to buy a house by then -- you're not getting anything back from Uncle Sam. But you very well may get something back from one of the nation's biggest real-estate companies.

Coldwell Banker says it will make the credit an option for sellers participating in its "Buyer Bonus Sales Event." Homebuyers would have until July 31st to take advantage of the offer. For some insight we turn to Leonard Zumpano. He teaches finance at the University of Alabama. Good to have you with us.

Leonard Zumpano: My pleasure.

Vigeland: You know, before we get to what Coldwell Banker is doing, let's take a bit of a broader picture of the housing market. Did the homebuyer tax credit actually make people buy homes?

ZUMPANO: It has. The National Association of Realtors does an annual home buying and selling survey, and their numbers indicate that the tax credit was responsible for approximately 800,000 home sales. To put this in perspective, it includes the original $7,500 refundable tax credit, the $8,000 first-time homebuyer credit, and the extended credit that allows for credit for existing home sales.

Vigeland: Well, 800,000 people sounds like a lot.

ZUMPANO: It is a lot in absolute numbers. But during that same time period, there were five million homes sold. That's about 16 percent, which is not insignificant. Of all the reasons for purchasing a home, the tax credit was singled out by 16 percent of those homebuyers.

Vigeland: 800,000 people saying that the credit factored in, you know, the fact that it is now ending would presumably prompt a little bit of panic on the part of the realtors then.

ZUMPANO: One would expect that the availability of the credit and having a limited life expectancy ending at the end of the month put people that might have been sitting on the fence over the fence. So I think there will probably be a decline in future home sales in the next couple of months, assuming nothing else changes, like employment and mortgage rates. I think part of the most recent push from homebuyers who were watching interest rates beginning to rise.

Vigeland: Well, certainly for Coldwell Banker this is quite the unique marketing technique. Hey, you know, if Uncle Sam isn't going to help you out, we will.

ZUMPANO: Yeah, that's exactly right. But how profound is that going to be and what kind of incentive does it create? It's difficult to forecast because it may in fact cause other real-estate companies to do basically the same thing.

Vigeland: Right, that just means we're back in 2004-2005, right?

ZUMPANO: Right, exactly. There is evidence that the market is beginning to firm up. The most recent numbers I've seen for part of 2009 show that those states that suffer the worst in 2007, like California, are coming back. Buyers are being induced back into the market, and that's happening also in cities like Miami, which had a glut of condominiums just two years ago. With employment beginning to stabilize, the prospects for a housing market recovery are there. You're not going to see the kind of appreciation we saw between 2000-2005, but I don't ever want to see that again because that was simply unsustainable and everybody knew it.

Vigeland: Leonard Zumpano is a professor of finance with an emphasis on real estate at the University of Alabama. Thanks so much for chatting with us today.

ZUMPANO: My pleasure.

 

Featured in: Marketplace for Monday, April 26, 2010

Hanky the Terrorist, Uncle Scam and Mega Media

A week or two ago I was watching Charlie Rose and he had that basset hound Henry Kissinger on, and the inevitable "Iraq question(s)" come up. The parallels; escalation, insurgency, civil war...

But it's absolutely amazing how Charlie can be so off point and more, a softballer. I mean, he's the ONLY talk show that will guest Chomsky, which just goes to show how deep the "Jewish mafia" runs in mega-corp controlled mass-media. Btw, for anyone who doubts the Janus faced history of Jews in Hollywood, just read Gabler's, "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood." Jesus Christ (how's that for irony?), I thought my peeps were fucked up in terms of self-image. It cracks me up - wryly, of course - how, whenever I speak on a panel or at a seminar, inevitably I meet up with wide-eyed film students, hoping against hope that theirs is the lucky lotto number....

Shudder.

These poor kids - they spend tens of thousands of dollars on a film school "education" but can't tell you who this is...


let alone this dude


and god send money should they know who THIS is...


...cause I'll need a Costco sized bundle of tp to wipe my ass from the shock shit.

So. Charlie "sometimes on point" Rose has Henry, "I systematically TERRORIZED millions of mud people got a Nobel Prize out of it and some fat ass speaking engagements," Kissinger on. Asking the Iraq questions. The parallels.

THE PARALLELS???

I got your parallels, hanky, ya punk ass beeeatch, hiding behind your rat-bastard nixonian presidential seal while pushing buttons that terrorize; how about some donkey balls parallel to your chin muthaphuka??? How about THIS for a parallel, that you ILLEGALLY and sytematically TERRORIZED millions of Asians via the TET fucking offensive, you putrid piece of regurgitated bukake?

"The terrorists," "the war on terror" ... Parallel this: We're the laughing stock of the world because of this embarrassment of an administration.

Just as with the nixon administration.

I think this is the great trick of uncle scam; the games he sets up are basically elementary - taking a page from Goebbels and another from Bernays while being later deconstructed by Herman & Chomsky:

1. Control messaging via mass-media. Check.

2. Make sure the freeways that govern access to political power are constantly jammed with over 30,000 lobbyists, each wtih a man purse of laundered money. Check.

3. #2 also serves another purpose; it effectivly cuts off the .000001% of the riff-raff mud peeps that have a smidgen of power.

3. Have an endless supply of diversions - concocted or not - that mis-direct the laity and can be amply farmed out to #1. Check.

4. Liberal (in the conservative sense of that word) mentioning of buzz words/phrases; "freedom," "democracy," "America loves freedom," "war on terror," etc., while making Hegel twist in his grave by antithetically citing "the enemy," and that, "they're jealous of our freedom."

5. Lather, rinse... you now the drill.

It goes without saying so I"ll say it; sell-outs like this reprobate


not to in any way be corn-fused with THIS dude


are a necessary part of uncle scam's equation as well.

It's one of the most energy-sapping things to watch, the way these devils run their games.

I'ts also hard to critique when most of us are so self-involved with our own personal crap, because while the game is basically fundamental, it's macro. And we're not trained to think macro, much less long-term, much much less, critically, much much much less analogically.

For ONCE I'd like to see our mainstream journalists grow some nuts - JUST ONCE, so that I can have a smile fest for a minute just watching human puss sacks like Kissinger squirm in his grease. This is why Howard Stern, despite ... well, you know, he's Howard, it's why things like sending Stuttering John out to completgely deflate pompous celebs were fucking brilliant. Sasha Baron Cohen ain't got nothin' on Stern.

For someone like me, born in Hollywood (Kaiser, right on Sunsent), mass media's in my DNA. Just not in the, "I'll-degrade-myself-to-sub-species-level-AND-eat-mega-corp-conglomo-mierda-to-even
have-what-I-think-is-a-shot-at-working-FOR-FREE-on-your-plantation," sense.

Hanky, do humanity a favor; shove a burnt weenie sandwich up yer butt so that weasels rip your flesh to get at it.

Allusions and wordplay in this post: At least two. I think. (I'm particularly proud of the last one...)

A "New" Spin on Mass Media Conglomeration

check this out. newspapers are now jumping onto the citizen journalist bandwagon.

whoopee friggin' DOO.

newspapers are no different from any of the other mass media merchants in that they don't get it or they can't execute efficiently.

they don't get it - meaning, isn't the fact that this story is only appearing NOW, in 2006, proof enough??? mass media news simply can't seem to pry open their minds and look around at the paradigm shift occuring at this very moment in the music industry. they can't think, let alone see, analogically, therefore they can't draw lessons from it.

they can't execute efficiently - mass media, by definition, must carpet bomb on a large scale in order to cut operating expenses. (thus, the stereotypical centralized news source - a national desk - that farms out to its local channels.) this is one of the dynamics i talk about to indie filmmakers, that because big studios are over-concerned with mass market capture, the only approach that makes sense for indies is to target a niche market that's being ignored or under-served by the studios.

that last principle applies to any industry dominated by mega corporations.

anyway, this latest attempt to co-opt grassroots appeal is anything but new; after all, how long has "america's funniest home videos" been around???

-jp


Gannett To Change Its Papers' Approach

By Frank Ahrens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 7, 2006; D01

Gannett Co., the nation's largest newspaper chain, is radically changing the way its papers gather and present news by incorporating elements of reader-created "citizen journalism," mining online community discussions for stories and creating Internet databases of calendar listings and other non-news utilities.

The McLean company has 90 newspapers, including USA Today, the nation's largest. Like all major newspaper firms, Gannett has watched circulation and advertising revenue slide over the past decade, as readers turn to television and the Internet for news and information.

Gannett is attempting to grab some of the Internet mojo of blogs, community e-mail groups and other ground-up news sources to bring back readers and fundamentally change the idea of what newspapers have been for more than a century. The attempt to involve readers in news-gathering is part of a larger plan that also calls for Gannett to merge its newspaper and online operations into single units to speed delivery of news and improve its offerings to advertisers.

At Gannett's Des Moines Register, for example, editor Carolyn Washburn has moved desks to re-organize her newsroom. She created a Data Desk to build reader-searchable databases on topics from restaurant listings to a recent mumps outbreak. Though USA Today will not undergo a similar overhaul, it has merged its newspaper and online staffs.

Gannett's ideas are shared by a growing number of people in the industry who believe that news organizations have driven away readers by becoming too imperial, too distant and not fast enough to respond to reader needs and desires.

While other newspapers, including The Washington Post, have aggressively expanded their online presence or merged it with their print newsrooms, Gannett's move is the industry's first wide-scale overhaul, in name and purpose.

"It's pretty big," said Michael Maness, Gannett's vice president of strategic planning. "It's a fairly fundamental restructuring of how we go about news and information on a daily basis."

The most intriguing aspect of Gannett's plan is the inclusion of non-journalists in the process, drawing on specific expertise that many journalists do not have. In a test at Gannett's newspaper in Fort Myers, Fla., the News-Press, from readers such as retired engineers, accountants and other experts was solicited to examine documents and determine why it cost so much to connect new homes to water and sewer lines. The newspaper compiled the data and wrote a number of reader-assisted articles. As a result, fees were cut and an official resigned. Maness called it a "pro-am," approach, referring to a golf tournament in which professionals play alongside amateurs.

"I am very impressed with the Fort Myers" experiment, said Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor. "If that becomes the direction at a lot of Gannett papers, we could learn a lot from that."

Elements of Gannett's plan are seen elsewhere.

Rosen recently founded the Web site NewAssignment.net, which bills itself as "an experiment in open-source reporting" and is being partly funded by the Reuters news agency. Another Web site, NowPublic.com, claims of 31,000 citizen reporters in 130 countries who post news, photos and video to the site. NowPublic reporters were active in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

Gannett has been testing its new system at a few of its newspapers since July. Now, all of the company's newspapers are being urged to make the transition quickly.

Changes began with newsroom labels. Newsrooms divide coverage by traditional topics, such as national, foreign, local, features and sports.

Gannett's plan renames the newsroom an "Information Center" and divides it into seven areas: public service, digital, data, community conversation, local, custom content and multimedia. In a memo to employees Thursday, Gannett Chairman Craig Dubow said the company's news will be "platform agnostic," meaning it will be delivered however the reader desires -- on paper, on the Web, on a mobile device and so on.

Faced with declining average daily circulation since 1987, newspapers have been struggling to reinvent themselves and stay relevant. Before the Internet, many newspapers tried to look brighter and less staid, following the lead of USA Today, as a flurry of redesigns swept the industry. More newspapers began using color photographs, colored boxes and other design devices, and articles became shorter. Circulation did not improve. Now, newspapers look to the Internet.

Gannett's stock peaked in spring 2004 at more than $90 a share, but steadily declined to $52 a share during the summer. The stock has been rising since, closing yesterday at $58.77 a share, up 75 cents.

Bad Dude: Stuart Hall

One of the few people that left a lasting impression on me during my mis-education was Brotha Stuart Hall. His, "The Determinations of News Photographs," should be required reading for those who want to go beyond the catch-all, "It's the media...."

...the media ignores the real issues with which black people must contend. This is because the media, on the whole, naturally gravitate to the liberal middle-ground: they find conflict and oppression - the real conditions of black existence - difficult and awkward. They tend to redefine all problems as failures in communication.

Stuart Hall's achievement lies in the rational intensity he brought to the 1970's race-media debate. His politically potent arguments are just as central to our contemporary media concerns - from press freedom and the role of class, power, and institutional racism to the most intricate questions of minority images and employment in the press and journalism schools to mass communications studies and media ethics. Today, with mounting criticism of negative black images and under-representation in the media, Hall's brilliant analysis helps us to understand why colour-coded newsrooms and views of modern society must be changed.

There's plenty of him on the web, so Google him. If you're interested in mass- media communications, hegemony, race... you are in for a treat.