Ok, here it is, the view from my computer/blogging desk:

 

And yes, that's the tree that had 6,000 bees in it a few days ago.

Who knew Paul Krugman was such a good film critic?

Moore's Public Service. Despite its flaws, "Fahrenheit 9/11" tells essential truths about leaders that should have been told by the media. By By PAUL KRUGMAN.

Krugman concludes: "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a tendentious, flawed movie, but it tells essential truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price.

Whoo! I'm slipping. Slavoj Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle has been published and I haven't bought it yet. (I've been waiting for it for a while.)

From the book description:

In order to render the strange logic of dreams, Freud quoted the old joke about the borrowed kettle: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you, (2) I returned it to you unbroken, (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms exactly what it endeavors to deny—that I returned a broken kettle to you ...

That same inconsistency, Zizek argues, characterized the justification of the attack on Iraq, whereby a link between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda was transformed into the threat posed by the regime to the region, which was then further transformed into the threat posed to everyone (but the US and Britain especially) by weapons of mass destruction. When no significant weapons were found, we were treated to the same bizarre logic: OK, the two labs we found don't really prove anything, but even if there are no WMD in Iraq, there are other good reasons to topple a tyrant like Saddam...

Well put:

The Bush administration's conduct in office, however, demonstrates the extent to which the reconstruction really has taken place. Since the Bushies don't care about good policy, we haven't gotten any good policy, but since they do care about politics, we've gotten a lot of policy.

Right, a lot of policy...

As many people have observed, the Bush administration turned into a legislative juggernaut, despite all expectations for a president who was not elected and who had no mandate. And this wasn't just before 9/11, either.

Political skills? I don't think that really explains it. They just took full advantage in the public's belief that "all politicians lie."  If  that's the case, they reason, why not just make up enormous lies?

As any marketing researcher will tell you, though, the public doesn't know itself. The public comes to believe the huge lies even though they think that they don't believe in and don't trust politicians.

This is the essence of non-critical "cynical" reception presented in Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason. Everyone thinks that they're cynical, immune to media manipulation, because they "don't believe the hype." (They still think that out there, somewhere, other people approach the media "naively," but they don't.)

Modern advertising and politics in fact depend on these attitudes. People whose mantra is "all politicians lie," who think this belief immunizes them from political manipulation, are in very easy to manipulate politically. The polls show this over and over.

Of course, after watching Once More, with Feeling, and getting blown away, I had to listen to the French language track for the episode. It was a burring demon of its own. "All these melodies go on too long...."