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Fox News polls its audience on how President Barack Obama performed during his first year in the White House. More than 473,000 had voted when I did this screen capture :

I saw it on Fox News. It must be true.

This result will unlikely be reflected in how Fox News covers the second year of Obama’s presidency.

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From the New Yorker,13 stories by JD Salinger :

“A Perfect Day for Bannanafish” (January 31, 1948)

“Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” (March 20, 1948)

“Just Before the War with the Eskimos” (June 5, 1948)

“The Laughing Man” (March 19, 1949)

“For Esmé—With Love and Squalor” (April 8, 1950)

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” (July 14, 1951)

“Teddy” (January 31, 1953)

“Franny” (January 29, 1955)

“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (November 19, 1955)

“Zooey” (May 4, 1957)

“Seymour: An Introduction” (June 6, 1959)

“Hapworth 16, 1924” (June 19, 1965)
There’s also a great piece in the New Yorker archive on the rebounding influence of JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, from 2001.

Holden Caulfield At Fifty

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By Darryl Mason

Bin Laden, or whoever is making those tapes, reinvents himself as anti-capitalist, anti-global warming warrior. Or as it will probably be soon known : Greenhadism.

The War On Terror is dying in a flurry of exposed forgeries and outright frauds. There has to be something next, or governments might stop spending so much money on defence and security.

It’s hard not to read a transcript of the latest Bin Laden blatherings and not wonder, seriously, if someone’s pulling our chains :

“This is a message to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions – whether intentionally or unintentionally – and about the action we must take.

“Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury – the phenomenon is an actual fact.”

“All the industrial states (are to blame for global warming), yet the majority of those states have signed the Kyoto Protocol and agreed to curb the emission of harmful gases.”

“George Bush junior, preceded by [the US] congress, dismissed the agreement to placate giant corporations. And they are themselves standing behind speculation, monopoly and soaring living costs.

“They are also behind ‘globalisation and its tragic implications’. And whenever the perpetrators are found guilty, the heads of state rush to rescue them using public money.”

Greenhadism. It’s Bin Laden’s Big New Thing.

More On All This At The Orstrahyun.

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No wonder they hate President Obama so much. He’s got a very, very big mouth :

“The Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has looked into 96 major defense projects from the last year, and found cost overruns that totaled $296 billion….indefensible, no-bid contracts that cost taxpayers billions and make contractors rich; special interests and their exotic projects that are years behind schedule and billions over budget; entrenched lobbyists pushing weapons that even our military says it doesn’t want and doesn’t need — the impulse in Washington to win political points back home by building things that we don’t need at costs we can’t afford. This waste would be unacceptable at any time, but at a time when we’re fighting two wars and facing a serious deficit, it’s inexcusable. It’s unconscionable. It’s an affront to the American people and to our troops, and it has to stop.

“…no longer will we be spending nearly $2 billion to buy more F-22 fighter jets that the Pentagon says they don’t need. This bill also terminates troubled and massively over budget programs such as the Future Combat Systems, the Airborne Lasers, the Combat Search and Rescue helicopter, and a new presidential helicopter that costs nearly as much as Air Force One. I won’t be flying on that.”

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11,000 Haitians are being paid 60 cents an hour by the UN to clear away the rubble of their capital city, and begin rebuilding. The UN plan to employ 90,000 more :

This devastated capital showed increasing signs of stirring back to life on Wednesday as Haitians restarted factory assembly lines, visited their barbers, sought replacement cellphones and even picked up their dry cleaning.Nothing could be called business as usual. When the big Brasserie Nationale d’Haïti beverage manufacturing plant kicked back into action, it did not start with one of its best-known products, Prestige, the national beer that is a point of pride here. It began with the essential: bottled water.

The Full Story Is Here

The Haiti earthquake death toll is now beyond 150,000.

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The Google News links to the original Jerusalem Post story are dead….

…..but it’s still cached here for now.

So why has the Jerusalem Post attempted to disappear this story?

The Holocaust only gets media coverage because of affluent Jews’ financial backing, military might and lobbying fronts, presenting a skewed version of events to the world, a high-ranking Polish bishop told a Catholic news portal on Monday.

Tadeusz Pieronek, a Polish bishop and professor and a friend of the last pope, John Paul II, claimed that “the Holocaust as such is a Jewish invention” promoted in the press by Jews to gain support for Israel.

Pieronek told the Web site Pontifex.roma that while the Holocaust was not exclusively Jewish, Jews had monopolized it in lieu of encouraging “serious historical debate, free from prejudice and victimization.”

Pieronek alleged that Jews today use the Holocaust as “a weapon of propaganda, used to obtain benefits which are often unjustified,” citing as an example the unconditional support for Israel by the US.

“This promotes a certain arrogance that I find unbearable,” he said, explaining that Israel was using its position of power and exploiting historical tragedies to treat the Palestinians “like animals.”

The bishop said that American support for the Jews had not always been so readily given. “What did the Jewish-American and allied forces do in [World War II] to avoid these tragedies? Little or nothing,” he said.

“The Holocaust as such is a Jewish invention … a day of remembrance must also be set for the many victims of Communism, persecuted Catholics and Christians and so on.”

“The anti-Semitic history of Poland is an invention. A joke … offensive to our people.”

Although most of the victims of the Holocaust were indeed Jews, many Poles, Italians and Catholics also died at the Nazi concentration camps, he said.

It doesn’t sound like there will be an apology, or a statement from the Pope this time.

There seems to be an increasing number of Catholic bishops saying such things about the exploitation of the WW2 Holocaust. Presumably it is in part to correct the historical record, but probably more so to fire back at campaigning against the sainting of the so-called ‘Nazi Pope.’

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Paul Joseph Watson :

Global warming is heading to the same dustbin of history as Y2K, SARS and swine flu – another manufactured scare peddled primarily to make vast profits for corrupt elitists at the expense of the general public. The entire fraud is collapsing under the weight of its own lies as new revelations of IPCC deception and bias emerge on an almost daily basis thanks to the sterling work of climate skeptics who have had their convictions vindicated.

If history does actually record that Global Warming Was A Fraud, it was the bloggers who busted it wide open, with most of the mainstream media slow indeed to chase down the story for themselves, or to even outwardly express suspicion at the expanse of enviro-apocalypse scenarios laid out by both deeply concerned scientists and outright scammers. In the end, it became almost impossible to tell the two apart.

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Barack Obama’s face moments before he went to take the oath of office.

This is a detail from a larger image, which reveals Obama is actually looking at himself, in a mirror.

As I’ve said here before, regardless of the intent, the official White House photography of the Obama administration has been excellent, sometimes intimate. occasionally surreal and often surprisingly revealing.

Here are a bunch of detail grabs from larger official White House photos :

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An incredibly indepth (“why did your mother and father commit suicide?”) and long interview with screenwriter Lem Dobbs (Dark City, The Limey) :

If only the Jews still controlled Hollywood. In the late 60s/early 70s you could get a movie made starring Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, James Caan, Elliott Gould, George Segal, George Burns, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Walter Matthau, Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, Richard Dreyfuss, Dustin Hoffman, Mel Brooks, Barbara Hershey, Henry Winkler, Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Michael Douglas, Robby Benson, Alan Arkin, Dyan Cannon, Barry Newman, Jerry Lewis, Peter Falk, Harvey Keitel, Laurence Harvey, Charles Grodin, Gene Wilder, Elaine May, Jill Clayburgh, Ali MacGraw, Joan Collins, Anthony Newley, Goldie Hawn, Marty Feldman — and Topol.

Today? Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Sasha Baron Cohen, Shia LaBeouf, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Jennifer Connelly, Sean Penn — and at least three of them are the progeny of older Hollywood. Notice the slight drop-off in quantity and quality? Screenwriters and directors and composers and studio executives — same story.

On a one-week visit to New York in the early 70s when my father had an exhibition there, I went to see The Exorcist (Friedkin), Serpico (Lumet), Papillon (Schaffner), with Dustin Hoffman, Mean Streets, with Harvey Keitel, The Getaway, a Foster-Brower production, Westworld, with Brynner and Benjamin, and Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

Wanna see what’s playing in New York this week?

Here’s what’s playing in New York this week : Avatar, Up In The Air, The Lovely Bones, Sherlock Holmes and….errr….The Tooth Fairy.

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You can watch a movie shot by chimpanzees here, (don’t worry, they’re not making porn. Yet) and it’s not bad, though the plot seems a bit disjointed (2 out of 5 stars).

But in the ‘relevant stories’ sidebar from the BBC archive at this link, there is a jarring list of headlines from recent years about our hairier relatives, and just how intelligent we’re learning they actually are.

Remember, one day they will learn to learn to communicate over the internet, and then they will hit the archives, so we should be careful what we say about them.

If you’ve ever been interrogated by a bunch of angry, righteously spiteful apes, you already know how unpleasant it can be.

Go Chimps!

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An impressive series of ads promoting Russia Today, banned in American airports, but turning heads in the UK :

More Of The Ads Can Be Seen Here

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The above photo, by Olivier Laban Mattei, is from ‘Haiti : Six Days Later’ at The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture.

Do you really think it would be any different in your city if 200,000 people died an earthquake? They’d be digging mass graves in New York’s Central Park and Sydney’s Botanical Gardens if those cities suffered a similar fate as Port-Au-Prince.

But would American newspapers show graphic photos of the dead, if they were in the majority dead Americans?

A New York Times photo editor insists that they would, and did during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath :

….the contention that such pictures would not appear in the paper if the victims were somewhere in the United States. If such pictures existed, she said, she would run them. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, The Times did publish a front-page picture of a body floating near a bridge where a woman was feeding her dog. But despite Katrina’s toll, there were relatively few such images in the paper. Irby said that authorities in the United States are generally quick to cordon off disaster scenes.

This stunning image from the 2004 tsunami is also cited as an example that Haiti is not the first time the New York Times has run graphic photos of natural disaster dead on its front page :

And yet, they are so reluctant to run images of the human carnage left behind in America’s wars.

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Demi Moore, the same photo shoot, before and after the digital retouching :

I don’t get it. She clearly is far more beautiful in the ‘before’ shot. Who are the advertisers trying to appeal to with such a plastic-face makeover? Robots?

More Here

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Four Lions Director Chris Morris On 9/11

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Philip K Dick :

“Perhaps we have not truly had a legal government since that day in Dallas, and those dreadful forces of murder and tyranny took over, cloaked in gray fog, to rule over us in the form of secret police, a true police state but masked by the outer garments of legality.”

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January 19 : Tony Blair To Testify At Iraq War Inquiry Over Pre-War Lies

January 22 : Britain Raises Terror Alert Level, Attack “Highly Likely”

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Robots drink vodka?

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Library Porn :

If those two pics got you warmed up, there’s Plenty More Here

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We’ll like robots even more when they empathise with us :

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A detail from Mathew McDermott’s extraordinary photograph of a child set free from the rubble of the Haitian earthquake, having survived eight days with no food or water :

The Full Photo Is Here

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