joe posts

Poor Steven Page. He’s looking at five years in a US prison. We’ll see if Canadian Celebrity Status carries any weight in NY. The National Post had the most tasteful headline:

‘Yeah, it’s cocaine,’ Page told police

Innocent until proven guilty, I say. And if guilty… well, it’s just a bit of cocaine. Is it worse than drinking ten Red Bull and a bottle of Jägermeister? From what I’ve seen at the hotel/nightclub where I work, no. Cokeheads don’t vomit on the bar while ordering another shot. They just rent rooms, paint various surfaces with their drug residue, and do anything but sleep.

At least he looked good in his mugshot.

I’ve been watching M*A*S*H DVDs – seasons 3 and 11. Basically.. I’ve been watching them for like a week straight, pausing only to watch Futurama’s new movie and, you know, work on a bunch of exciting copyediting assignments. But I am re-obsessed with the show. It’s playing right now in a little VLC window so I can blog about it at the same time. My neighbors are probably getting tired of hearing Suicide is Painless over and over again. Let me explain.

Unlike a lot of fans, I prefer the later episodes – I found the pre-Alda-takeover episodes to be just a little bit on the corny side. But the DVDs.. ahh.. the DVDs.. have blissfully given us the option of turning off the laugh track.

(Laugh track.. one word, or two? Blech. I’m all dictionaried out for today. Should there be a comma between word and or? Hmmm.. sigh.. turn off the brain.. it’s a blog..)

Anyhoo.

I didn’t realize how much the laugh track (or laughtrack) wrecked the show until I did a few simple comparisons – watching a scene that made me laugh without the laugh track, and then going back and switching the audio channel to hear how unfunny the fake-sounding giggles made the scene. It just never made sense to me. I could never help but wonder why an audience would follow a bunch of soldiers around and laugh at them? It was just bizarre – disrespectful to the troops, even. Heh.

The raging torrent of anger I felt at the newtork’s incompetence, which, from what I understand, forced this insane gigglefest onto the series in an attempt to make it ‘less dark,’ had clearly overshadowed my ability to appreciate the hilarity of the first few seasons. They’re pretty great. I think it’s just the awful way the laugh track was synced – the giggles tend to creep in just before a witty line, or simply filled in any and all silences during the “funny parts.”

As it turns out, the show can be as funny as any of our fancy modern-day non-laughtracked sitcoms. It’s not corny at all, really. If I can figure out how to post a video comparison, I might do that. After consulting a lawyer. Hah. Or not – It’s becoming sort of a game to guess the amount of copyrighted footage you can post online without getting noticed by The Man. Divide the profit margin of Fox studios by the age of the series (in hours), multiply by the Neilson ratings for the episode in question, factor in the DVD sales and subtract all that from the number of lawyers Fox has on retainer, multiply the answer by 100…. I’m guessing… 9.7 seconds? We’ll see.

So there you have it – Joe recommends you immediately run out and purchase the M*A*S*H DVDs. Or download them, if you’re a dirty filthy pirate who wants to hurt big corporations. And everybody knows, pirates are totally uncool.

“To me it looks like they’ve invented a perfect propaganda machine, one that chews up bodies and churns out justifications for everything the Bush administration desires.” – Me

When I wrote that blog back in February, it was because the little information that I could find about prisoner interrogation in “The War Against Terror” reminded me of the techniques used by repressive regimes like the Soviet Union during the cold war to elicit false confessions from anti-Soviet or anti-communist captives. It just seemed like the purpose of “enhanced interrogation” or torture wasn’t to get information, good or bad. Some seem to think the problem with torture is simply that it doesn’t elicit the truth. But it’s not necessarily a problem if the false confession matches the story the interrogator expects to hear, because that makes for some convenient propaganda. “See? He confessed. He can now be convicted. The war on terror works.” Still, I never really expected that there would be hard evidence of a program to elicit false confessions on purpose.

This morning I hit the good old StumbleUpon button and the first ’stumble’ was a telegraph.co.uk article, entitled “Guantanamo Bay interrogations based on faulty Chinese communist methods.” That’s a misleading title. The methods weren’t necessarily faulty, they were just completely evil, but useful for breaking down a human being. Here’s a short excerpt:

American military trainers gave a class to camp interrogators in 2002 on how to use “sleep deprivation”, “exposure” and other “torture” methods to reduce captives to “animals” and obtain information.

But it has emerged that the techniques presented in the class were copied word-for-word from a 1957 US Air Force study which focused on Chinese techniques – that did not work.

The study by sociologist Alfred Biderman, Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War, commented on methods that led to false confessions and “brainwashing”. – Telegraph

The Telegraph is a pretty right-wing newspaper, so it’s not like this is some wild fringe conspiracy theory. Even the centre-right U.S. Democratic Party has clued in and mentioned this scary tidbit of info. Senator Levin was quoted in the article as saying, “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

No? I think that perhaps they DO need it. How else can a state justify the curbing of civil liberties, the expansion of military powers, the insidious government propaganda, endless war, the suspension of habeas corpus… etc?

People have to be scared into allowing the authorities to play us like suckers.

One way to do that, apparently, is to take a tip from the Commies and torture some brown folks until they say what the U.S. government wants to hear. I’m a little freaked out by this kind of democracy.

This is why I don’t have much faith in Barack Obama, or really any of the nominees or candidates. Can anyone resist this kind of power? You know, the unlimited kind? Already Obama’s going with the Republicans on telecom immunity (see Glenn Greenwald’s excellent reporting), which legitimizes government spying on law-abiding citizens. He has vague plans to end the Iraq war, which isn’t a good sign. Obama calls himself a “uniter” which I naively used to think meant he’d unite the fractured Democratic Party. But now I think it just means he’ll play ball with whatever lunatic fascist sits across from him. What will he do with a bunch of damaged prisoners who’ve been brainwashed into confessing acts of terrorism? Repair and release them? Or make use of them?

Of course I say that, but if I lived there, I’d vote for him. Forget all that stuff, actually.

Americans, (please) Vote Obama..

heheh.. Barack Obama: Better than Dementia.