Parrot Cage

Asshole It Is: Ellison Withdraws His Donation

To follow up our previous post about Larry Ellison, he has now officially withdrawn his proposed $115 million donation to Harvard, thus resolving our query.  He's not a flake, he's an asshole.

Ellison's people are trying to say that his donation was withdrawn due to the ouster of Harvard President Lawrence Summers.  If you think this is even a remotely plausible explanation, the implications suggest that Larry Ellison is an even bigger prick than anyone could have conceived.  Ellison is suggesting that he was more enamored of the Harvard President than he was devoted to the study of world health--or worse, Ellison is more interested in tweaking the Harvard faculty (who won't shed any tears over Summers' departure) than in finding solutions to the world's health crises.  How seriously should any thinking person take this?  About as seriously as anyone should take non-thinking people.

No, we're still of the opinion that Ellison simply doesn't have the money to pony up--certainly not in combination with his other obligations (see below).  Besides, his proposal already earned him much praise and adulation as a philanthropist; why bother writing a check when you can simply make proposals?

Not coincidentally, yesterday he settled his insider-trading lawsuit by agreeing to donate $100 million to his own Ellison Medical Foundation.  Get this, his punishment for betraying stock holders is to donate money to his own self-promoting foundation, where he can also reap the rewards of heavenly tax deductions--which inevitably means that we taxpayers subsidize his lawsuit as well as his self-promotion.  We suspect that Ellison wasn't expecting anyone to accept his "donating to my own foundation is punishment enough" crap and was stringing Harvard along as a contingency plan.  Never forget, it's a rich man's country.

Not to totally piss on the super rich, we congratulate Warren Buffett in his decision to use his money for good while he's alive rather than pass it on to his progeny who will inevitably use their riches to fight off estate taxes.  Naturally, Buffet's choice of charity makes him a target for the ultra-nuttiest white-ringers.

The Threat of the Homegrown Jihadi Heart

The Justice Department has scored some serious jail time in their War on Terror at home.  Mind you, almost everyone serving time under terrorism-related charges since 9-11 has copped to plea bargains, thus sparing the Justice Department the effort of actually having to prove their cases.

In Lodi, where the Justice Department won their case against a young Muslim immigrant, they based their prosecution on his "Jihadi heart" rather than any real evidence against him.  And even in that case, a juror came forward and said that she was intimidated into voting for conviction by jurors who wanted to hang the accused even before the trial had commenced, and engaged in other misconduct.

And lest we forget the biggest feather in Bush's domestic terrorism-prevention cap, the 18 Middle Eastern men who were convicted for, in some ways, trying to purchase licenses to transport hazardous materials.  Even the prosecutors in those cases no longer pretend that it had anything to do with preventing terrorism.  The men, most of whom are on probation now, were mostly refugees of the first Gulf War and thought of America as their sanctuary.

So it should come as no surprise that the Justice Department has arrested seven members of a "terrorist cell" in Miami for allegedly plotting to blow up the Sears Tower.  Actually, the non-surprise lies in the apparent lack of anything much incriminating about the seven individuals other than the testimony of an informant in regard to their "Jihadi hearts".

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has admitted that the suspects lacked any weapons, explosives, knowledge of their supposed target, or even a basic strategy.  Justice Department officials have even balked at confirming whether or not their informant wore a wire, or if they are simply making arrests based on the informant's word.  In case anyone has forgotten, the Bush people have an abysmal history with their sourcing.

Of course, the Justice Department should be doing all it can to prevent terrorist attacks.  We just wish they were smarter, and more interested in preventing terrorism than making headlines to boost their dismal poll numbers.

Limp Republicans

Everyone's favorite drug-addled Republican Rush Limbaugh was briefly held at the Palm Beach Airport to verify that the prescription drugs he was traveling with were in fact his.  One of those drugs was Viagra.

Of course, this presents the opportunity to pose some meaningful questions about the plague of sexual inadequacy amongst male Republicans:

• Do the policies of war-making, imperialist ambition, class dominance, pornographic materialism, and religious chauvinism naturally interfere with healthy sexuality? 
• Or rather, does sexual dysfunction cause one to pursue the obliteration of humanity?
  

Other questions regarding the personal life of the ever-pious Limbaugh should also be explored.  The man is unmarried.  After three wives left him--and the last one held out just long enough to score some serious alimony for her efforts--Limbaugh is, once again, an unmarried man.  Do chaste men need Viagra?  Limbaugh has been dating CNN news reader Daryn Kagan for a couple of years.  Surely Rush practices the abstinence outside of marriage which he and his ilk demand for the rest of the population. 

When Limbaugh was held up at the airport he was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic.  Since they broke up in February, we suspect that Daryn Kagan was not the beneficiary of Limbaugh's Viagra consumption; however, as the Dominican Republic is one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere there are more than a few women willing to fulfill the amorous desires of rich Americans.  Yes, prostitution is prevalent and very very cheap in the Dominican Republic.  Anyone else notice that the Dominican Republic happens to be the closest port of major prostitution to Rush's home in Palm Beach Florida, and the epicenter of sex tourism in the Western Hemisphere?  Sounds like a Republican dream vacation to us--so long as the Viagra is well stocked.

Coulter the Deadhead

Does Ann Coulter's love for the Grateful Dead betray her as a mercenary con?  Well, if you haven't figured out that she's a walking Springer show, and a very rich one at that, then you might be disturbed by this interview in which she speaks lovingly about Deadhead culture.  And we're supposed to believe that Ms. She-wolf of the SS never toked up?  Naw, it's all about the music, ain't it?

Larry Ellison: Eccentric Flake or Rich Asshole?

After committing $115 million to Harvard, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn't appear to be following through.  Like Jonah Goldberg on prom night, Harvard is anxiously sitting by the phone, crying a permanent stain all over a ruffled baby-blue rayon tux.

Ellison's proposed donation for the Ellison Institute for World Health should have kicked in about 10 months ago.  In the competitive nature of rich techies, Bill Gates has set a high bar in his charitable contributions.

And Larry's a competitive guy, no doubt about it.  The Oracle CEO has already won a fleeting victory in the race of high-tech billionaires to build the most ostentatious yacht.  At $200 million, Ellison's yacht may not cure cancer, but it pisses off Paul Allen and is one sweet ride.

In the middle of that tech stock meltdown in 2000 Ellison briefly surpassed Bill Gates in net worth and became the world's richest man.  And like Gates, Ellison didn't acquire that wealth without taking more than a few short cuts and a generous dose of ruthlessness.  Beyond his hostile nature, Ellison's actual executive skills have been questioned by many.

As an Ayn Rand devotee, he is prone to justifying his lack of philanthropic activity as a moral statement:

... it is not very popular to think that commerce is more important than politics, but it is. It is not very popular to think that Ford Motor Company did more to help humanity than the Ford Foundation ever did, but it did.

A few years back, when Time Magazine devoted an issue to celebrating the philanthropy of the super rich, they didn't miss an opportunity to idolize even those billionaires who hadn't actually bothered to philanthropize.  Larry Ellison's little blurb, in a parade of do-gooders who actually bother to write checks and set up foundations, was this Orwellian title: He Gives Best by Investing.  Ellison repeated his little Ford Foundation v. Ford Motor Company chestnut to earn a hallowed seat amongst the charitable elite by simply equating business with benevolence.  Indeed, that title, and that entire issue, told you all you ever needed to know about Time Magazine's class interests.

Much like his buddy Steve Jobs (the enlightened megalomaniac), Ellison's social leanings are not especially conservative:

I am a Democrat.... There are no Republicans in California; they're just middle-of-the-road Democrats.

He was even rumored to play a role in fund raising for Bill Clinton's Presidential Library--though one can be assured that whatever Ellison's own contribution, it must surely be linked to the Clinton Justice Department's dogged pursuit of Oracle's arch-enemy Microsoft.

Again, seeing how Larry has never been especially charitable, why did he propose the donation in the first place?  The Financial Times hints at his real motives:

...after exchanging draft contracts, drafting a press release and saying the money would arrive in days, Mr Ellison's advisers last autumn began linking payment to final settlement of an insider trading suit brought by Oracle shareholders, which was to include a substantial donation to charity.

So it looks like Ellison may have simply set up his "donation" to negotiate his way out of a lawsuit.  And for a multi-billionaire looking for tax deductible write-offs, it's a hell of a double-play.  This kind of thinking reminds us of what separates the Prime Movers (in Randspeak) from the rabble.

Harvard's problem could now be that, given the way Ellison spends, he may not actually have the money to give Harvard.  But that's always been the Ellison/Oracle way, big on promise slow on delivery: like the first release of highly problematic Oracle software, which was designed to lock in customers rather than serve them.  Salesmanship over quality product every time.

There is an unusual amount of focus in the philanthropy of tech gurus towards "health" issues.  Now, health issues should be a predominant focus of anyone focused on the betterment of mankind.  However, to let our reasonable and cynical instincts run wild for a moment, as Silicon Valley legend and founder of both SGI and Netscape Jim Clark realized a few years back, the "health" industry is potentially the biggest financial jackpot of all.  Health care is the one industry that every human on the planet is likely to engage many times in their lives, and at no small expense.  Let's see, that's about 7 billion people multiplied by the costs of health care in a lifetime... well, that's about just enough money to satisfy a tech billionaire.

Also, health issues are a sneaky way of foisting intellectual property enforcement on underdeveloped countries with little need for copyright protection but an enormous need of medicine.  Every sizable donation of medical supplies and technology by a major industrialized country is explicitly tied to protecting pharmaceutical copyrights.  Until a country has developed an infrastructure to protect copyrights they are not a desirable market for the software and high tech industry.  Therefore, devotion to "health" issues could be less about sick people than it is about opening tech markets.

Of course, the religion of capitalism will tell us therein lies the beauty of capitalism: underdeveloped countries will ultimately benefit from the cynical motives of capitalists.  So, why then do we call it "philanthropy"?  And better still, why must their capital investment in the form of non-profit institutions be reimbursed by the rest of us in the form of tax deductions?  That's right, because it's not really capitalism after all.

Larry Ellison seems to exist to make Bill Gates look appealing.  Hey, it's working.

That Trembling British Mouth

If you thought Christopher Hitchens' musings on American foreign policy were creepy, try stomaching his ode to blowjobs.  Hitchens reveals his primary fondness for America, which may explain everything:

...when any sweet American girl smiled at me, I was at once bewitched and slain by the warm, moist cave of her mouth, lined with faultless white teeth and immaculate pink gums and organized around a tenderly coiled yet innocent tongue.

Much like his vision of Iraq, ew!  What's the use of stereotyping Brits as sexually repressed when they can't seem to hold it in?

The Obligatory Coulter Response

Yeah, we're a little late to the party on this one, but in the latest Ann Coulter promotional whirlwind we noticed that nobody seems to understand what she's really telling us.

Coulter's latest book attacks the 9-11 widows whose tireless efforts produced the 9-11 Commission.  Then, in her publicity tour she further elaborated her disdain for the widows on the Today Show.  And on and on, from one talk show to the next.

Those programming directors of newsish networks see Ann Coulter as a godsend: Oh, isn't she outrageous!  The programming day practically writes itself in the wake of a Coulter rampage.

So what is Ann Coulter really telling us?  That she hates 9-11 widows?  Big deal.  Her persona hates everyone, that's the character she plays.

No, Ann is telling us that, as a pundit, the greatest threat to her profession is credibility.  And for once, she's actually right.

In addition to 9-11 widows, there's a whole bevy of threats to Coulter's profession:

...there's Cindy Sheehan. There's Joe Wilson. Can't respond, can't point out that his wife works at the CIA. There's Max Cleland, there's Murtha. I mean it goes back to Caroline McCarthy, the congressman from Long Island whose husband was shot on the Long Island railroad. It's always -- and Christopher Reeve, arguing for stem-cell -- embryonic stem-cell research -- not adult stem-cell research.

She bemoans the fact that it is difficult to win an argument against someone who actually has a stake in that issue.  In fact, her profession is jeopardized by the very stark contrast between someone with actual experience and a personal investment on very serious issues to someone with no experience or expertise in anything.  Ann is not just mindlessly barking insults, she's desperately defending her entire class. 

Coulter, like most pundits, has no serious professional experience in anything other than as a member of the commentarian elite.  And even in that profession she's been fired multiple times for not living up to even the minimum standards of opinion peddling.  We remember when lazy talk shows would introduce her as a "Constitutional Scholar."  Apparently that was based on her membership in the white-ringer legal organization The Federalist Society.  The strange and dishonest methodology of research for her books suggest that she couldn't possibly be a scholar of anything.

Coulter is, as Andrew Sullivan calls her, "a drag queen impersonating a fascist."  But underneath all that overworked venom is a serious thought: credibility challenges the non-credible.  Should the public ever choose to become informed, the pundit class and parrotocracy could crumble into nothingness.

The question arises, is Ann Coulter more dangerous on TV or working the streets?  She already gets paid to fuck people in the ass, perhaps it's time she fucked over some willing recipients.  Looks like we have a cash-paying john anxiously lubing up over at Time.  May his rectum squeal like the sound of truth dying.
 

Inconvenient Truths and Convenient Lies: The Moral Flaws of Mr. Science Easterbrook

We just got back from seeing Al Gore's new film An Inconvenient Truth.  Yes, we loved it.  And yes, Gore is more appealing as a leader when he doesn't have a gaggle of flacks telling him what to say and do--and when he doesn't have to suffer the indignities of a bored press corps who felt free to malign him because he didn't pamper them on the campaign bus.  Gore's message about Global Warming is urgent and necessary; fortunately, his message is also fact-filled and easy to comprehend.

We had been anxiously anticipating this film for a while, but when we read Gregg Easterbrook's strange review of the film in Slate last week, we couldn't wait to respond.  Of course, the review sounded craptastic when we first read it, but after seeing the film it makes even less sense.  That is, until we did a little research on just who the fuck Gregg Easterbrook is, and more importantly, who he isn't.

The title of his article is Ask Mr. Science, The Moral Flaws of An Inconvenient Truth.  We read the Mr. Science part as a snide reference to Al Gore's professorial tone in his presentation.  We certainly wouldn't confuse Gregg Easterbrook for a scientist.  Funny, because Easterbrook seems to confuse himself for a scientist.  In fact, Easterbrook has landed himself a cushy gig at the Brookings Institute as an "expert" on Global Warming and Environmental Issues.  All this without an advanced degree in anything beyond journalism--you know, the art of writing much while saying little.  But then again, they also list him as an "expert" at professional sports, without ever having been an athlete, or a coach, or much more than a fan with a journalism degree.  Don't get us started about his "expertise" in Christianity... (more on that later).  He seems to fit the very definition of a modern pundit: that knowing little about anything makes you a highly paid expert in everything.

Easterbrook has been an editor of The New Republic, which isn't quite as shitty as it was under Andrew Sullivan (they should really start using that phrase in their marketing to boost circulation).  Although Easterbrook tells others, and possibly himself, that he's a liberal, he seems to be of the cross-dressing mercenary variety that land top jobs at The New Republic on the sheer moral courage of their confusion.  And about that confusion....

We are relieved that, as the resident non-scientific expert on Global Warming at the Brookings Institute, Easterbrook has, after much resistance, come to the realization that Global Warming is real.  For years Easterbrook has made a comfortable living arguing against the existence of Global Warming from his vast experience as a non-scientific expert on matters of science.   At least when he was arguing in favor of Creationism it was ostensibly as an expert in Christianity rather than as a non-scientist science expert.*  Easterbrook's status as an anti-environmental shill--also known as an "ecorealist"--culminated in his book A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism.  Apparently, the trick to earning money as an ecorealist is to play the environmentalist who attacks environmentalists for being, well, environmentalists.  His book was so fraught with error that it required at least two serious scientific rebuttals from the Environmental Defense Fund.

We think this passage sums up the Easterbrook science party perfectly: (from Media Matters)

(A) review of Moment of Earth in the August 1995 issue of Natural History, Pennsylvania State University professor Jack C. Schultz wrote that the book "contains some of the most egregious cases of misunderstood, misstated, misinterpreted, and plainly incorrect 'science' writing I've ever encountered."

In his review of Al Gore's presentation, Easterbrook pulls out all the stops to be Stosselian (a not very bright or very honest contrarian-for-pay).  Media Matters has probably the best critique of Easterbrook's Mr. Science hit piece.  But a couple of things really stood out to us. 

First, the issue which Easterbrook calls "a wacky side-trip into a conspiracy theory".  The film points out that Phillip Cooney, who was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, was appointed by Bush to be Chief of Staff for the Council on Environmental Quality.  In his role, Cooney altered material in a report on Global Warming which would have demanded action on behalf of a responsible government.  Cooney was a non-scientist (like Greggo) who clearly tried to hamstring any semblance of responsible environmental policy.  Once his actions were exposed, he resigned his post and took a job with Exxon the next day.  The only thing wacky about this story is anyone who doesn't find such action, or the placing of such individuals into positions of power, as anything short of a betrayal of the American people.  Easterbrook is right to find common cause with Cooney.  Perhaps some day he can directly partake of that sweet sweet oil money.

Secondly, Easterbrook's grasp of filmmaking is about as enlightening as his grasp of science:

When Gore isn't being applauded, Guggenheim (the director) presents him as alone and melancholy: walking alone, musing alone, standing alone in a darkened barn. The scenes are meant to convey our inability to imagine the burden the former vice president bears.

No, you fucking Philistine!  The context of Gore being applauded--which accounts for so much of the film that one could miss it in a blink--is within the course of his demonstration; there are no special cut-aways for effect.  There are multiple shots of Gore, which were clearly used as a bridge to stretch the film to a theatrical time length.  The solo shots of Gore tell us much about him: that he is technologically savvy, immersed in all the high-tech gadgetry he can get his hands on, and that he is contemplative--given our current President who doesn't seem to have a coherent thought in his head, the contrast is painful.  Only an ass would purse his lips and sarcastically bemoan: poor Al!   

Easterbrook's original claim to fame was in decrying the space shuttle program before it was launched.  When the Challenger exploded six years later, some thought Easterbrook prophetic.  He wasn't.  In fact, his powers of prophecy of late border on the hillarious.  Consider his contention in 2004 that George Bush would lead the charge in reversing Global Warming--which apparently was about the time that Easterbrook started to think that Global Warming might be a legitimate problem after all.

Less hilarious was Easterbrook's anti-Semitic rant in a condemnation of Quentin Tarrantino's Kill Bill (ever the film critic).  It was all in the calling of a good Christian who needed to know why the Jewishness of Michael Eisner dictated that he must bankroll violent unchristian films.  Consequently, the Disney company decided to fire Easterbrook from his gig writing Tuesday Morning Quarterback for ESPN.com, where his non-athletic football expertise was in much demand.  This extra time freed Easterbrook to ruminate on beliefnet (which is where you really want to quarantine your garden variety anti-Semites).  Check this mind-numbingly stupid gem in which Easterbrook suggests that the declining rates of teenage pregnancy throughout the nineties was the triumph of moral values peddled by fundamentalist Christians.  Never mind that those Christian abstinence programs have become breeding grounds for porn stars, Easterbrook was on the mend and after two years will resume his role writing about football from a non-scientific perspective.

Easterbrook isn't the worst that the parrotocracy has to offer.  He's just a gun for hire--who doesn't actually own a gun, but has read extensively about gunowners and can cross reference their testimonials....

*Our incessant reminder of Easterbrook's lack of scientific credentials rests almost solely in sympathy with our dear sister who toiled for many many years acquiring a doctorate in the very studies for which Easterbrook claims expertise.  The pay for serious scientific study of environmental matters is grossly overshadowed by the salaries and honoraria commanded by dilettantes who dance on a string.