It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

From Alice Cooper?

Alice Cooper 

“If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal."

Thanks to Steven Taylor for the tip.

Janitor mistakes art for garbage and tosses it out. Thanks to Oxblog for noticing.

Show your disapproval by dancing at them!

Those of you who often read this blog will recall that, in my last post, I hatched a plan to (very mildly) disrupt the Republican Convention here in New York next week.

Along with fifty or sixty others, I'm going to dance at them. Dividing ourselves into several platoons of guerrilla dancers disguised as ordinary pedestrians, we are going to roam the sidewalks in Republican rich zones, periodically erupting into wild and inexplicable explosions of dancing. We will sustain these for a few minutes before melting back into the crowd and heading off to strike someplace else. I believe this will throw them off their game just slightly, since most of them don't or won't dance and are unsettled by those who do.

Brilliant!

Well, there's always this option, as long as you have no conscience, taste, or sense (thanks, I guess, to Jane Galt for the link).

here. Scroll to the bottom for previous sections.

First it was Reuters. Now, Lewis Lapham of Harpers has seemingly acquired the ability to travel into the future to report for the rest of us time-bound folks. Here's what he wrote about the not-yet-held Republican National Convention (thanks to Hit and Run for discovering this).

Referring to "the platform on which [George W. Bush] was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants," Lapham writes:

The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?

When do the rest of us get time machines?

Matanoiac has all the information you need (but you need to move quickly).

Well, I can't say I didn't predict it. Even before I had heard of the judging error that quite clearly cost one of the Korean athletes the gold medal in the men's gymnastics all-around, I wondered whether many in Korea would cry foul. And cry foul they did (with good reason). Here's an example of the latest way in which the issue is being understood and portrayed in Korea:

"What's the big deal?" 

"I don't understand. It is only one gold medal; why raise such a big fuss?" asks the ugly foreigner (note the ever so accurate depiction of Paul Hamm in the background).

But of course this isn't just about one gold medal because the foreigner also notes that Korea is long used to having things stolen from it: Koguryo, P'arhae, Tokdo etc. I suppose one could quibble with equating an award in a sporting competition with vast swathes of disputed territory but in at least some South Korean minds, it is all of a piece: Koreans as long-suffering victims at the hands of stronger powers. The extent and influence of this type of thinking probably should not be underestimated.

UPDATE: It isn't just some Koreans who think the games were rigged in America's favor.

Russia's Svetlana Khorkina, who was second to American Carly Patterson in the women's all-round gymnastics competition, has accused the judges of robbing her of the gold medal and said "everything was decided in advance."

"I'm just furious," Khorkina, who had been favorite for the coveted title, was quoted as saying in the daily Izvestia. "I knew well in advance, even before I stepped on the stage for my first event, that I was going to lose.

"Everything was decided in advance. I had no illusions about this when the judges gave me 9.462 for the vault after conferring with one another at length.

"I practically did everything right, still they just set me up and fleeced me," she said in the interview published on Saturday.

Asked why she felt she was marked down by the judges, Khorkina said: "You better ask them. I think it's because I'm from Russia, not from America!"

Do the denizens of Seoul want to be in this company?