Reagan Stamp

I was having a conversation with friends about last year's Ronald Reagan stamp. One friend was sent the stamp on a SASE and, despising Reagan, was horrified at having to use it, but not so horrified as to spend 39 cents on another stamp. After all, it's just a stamp.

Another friend said he liked the stamp. He also thought Reagan sucked, but liked the idea that a machine would be pounding into his face, smearing it with ink as the stamp as cancelled.

Another potential view, I remarked, although impolite, might be to recall that by federal law, no stamp or coin can bear the likeness of anyone still alive -- a law, by the way, which I think has been violated by the Ohio state quarter, since no one can honestly argue, I think, that the "astronaut" on the back is not simply John Glenn -- anyhow, one might recall that law and look upon the Reagan stamp and look at it as reassurance that "that f**ker's finally DEAD."

Photo Retouching 101

Well, I'm a little nonplussed by the way blogger lets you add photos. It took me a few tries to get the photo on the left to be on the left.

In any event, what you see us the before and after pictures from a photo retouching job I did. I wanted to post this because it's not something I do a lot of and I'm proud of this result. On the left is the original photo of a friend of mine. On the right, the adjusted product. The changes include changing the saturation and color balance to make the complexion a bit less ashen, thinning the face, moving the right jowl inward and eliminating the bulge a the neck, lowering the forehead, evening out the hairline, making the stubble less obvious and less grey, eliminating the veins on the forehead, darkening the eyebrows, and, of course, covering my tracks so the retouching job isn't totally obvious. I left plenty of clues for FBI laboratory staff if they ever wanted to test the authenticity of this photo, but with limited time for the project, I think I made it look pretty convincing to the naked eye.

So, beyond that bragging, I did have a retouching thread that I've been wanting to post for a while. Remember that Reuters photographer who retouched some of his photos of Israeli strikes in Iraq, Adnan Hajj? He basically added some dark smoke to a photo depicting an Israeli airstrike. He also did a crappy job. You can see that he basically copied a billow of smoke on photoshop and repasted it at intervals to add additional volume.

But of course the issue is not that he's an unskilled manipulator. Nor is it that there was any material misrepresentation involved. While supporters of the Israeli attacks screamed bloody murder and got Hajj suspended, let's be clear. The attack was real. It did make smoke. The photo was not fabricated out of whole cloth. Nor was the amount of smoke an important issue for which the photo provided evidence. Opponents of the attacks objected on the grounds that they killed, injured, or displaced a million people, mostly innocent people, violated international law, inflicted huge damage on the economy of Lebanon, and were counterproductive to their own stated goals. I don't recall a lot of people saying, Israel should stop its war because it makes too much smoke and that's really affecting air quality in the region.

No, the issue was, or supposedly would be, that any manipulation threatens the credibility of the publisher, so there is a need to be circumspect with respect to the integrity of photos regardless of whether they are used as evidence of a material point, or merely seek to entertain the eye and illustrate an event. But if that is true, what about all the other manipulation that takes place?

Take for example, the famous occasion of Time magazine darkening the mug shot of O.J. Simpson, making him look more African and at the same time, more sinsiter and obscure. This was done reportedly for asthetic reasons rather than editorial ones. The cover was conceived as an illustration rather than a photo attesting to reality, and it was assembled with a symbolic black-and-white theme. You can see that an iris effect was added to the background, the color
saturation was reduced, and even the color balance changed to be more reddish. The slate reading "BK4013970 061794 Los Angeles Police Jail Div" was also shrunk, and everything unrelated to the article is kept off the cover. So I get that the idea was conceived as being artistic rather than racist, but I think the manipulation was consequential and rightly criticized.

Other examples are, contempraneous to the Lebanon manipulation story, slimming down Katie Couric as she was slated to become CBS' new anchor, in CBS magazine, which was arguably an effort to sell the CBS Nightly News based on her looks. In this case, it's a matter of both false advertising, and debasing both the news and Couric by treating her as eye candy and the evening newscast as a form of entertainment whose essential quality is represented by the looks of its anchor.

More serious, though it involves a pretty standard photo trick requiring less sophisticated manipulation. This was the April 9, 2003 toppling of the statute of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Although the initially released photos appeared to show a substantial crowd of cheering Iraqis spontaneously pulling down the statue and celebrating, photos available at the time and later released showed that the crowd was insubstantial, concentrated entirely within the visual field of the cropped photo that appeared in countless papers.

Outside of that field, cropped off the bottom and sides of the picture, were two things:

1) the emptiness of a mostly deserted square, and

2) a U.S. military presence, which included the tank which actually pulled down the statue.

(Observers also noted that some of the members of the crowd were apparently plants, since the same individuals appeared in other crowd photos around the country and at least one was photographed as part of Ahmed Chalabi's entourage as they arrived in the country.)

Here the manipulation was not any sophisticated retouching, but merely cropping. Another common device is foreshortening. When a long lens is used, the viewer seems to be close to the action, because the image is large, but the sense of perspective is diminished, as when a scene is viewed from far away. The effect is that objects in the foreground and background appear to be separated by little distance along the axis of viewing, though they may in fact be a considerable distance apart.

Of course the point with Couric and OJ and Firdos Square is that, to my knowledge, none of these tricks prompted anyone to be suspended, or have their entire portfolio scanned for deceptions. A story on the Couric affair had a CBS exec laughing the whole thing off and treating it as trivial. It may be, simply given how common manipulation is in one form or another.

One could itemize other forms of manipulation, such as the mere decision to cover staged pseudo-events, which comprise perhaps a majority of all news, or helping to stage photos, or selecting subjects or angles or filters that make photographs dramatic and asthetic and thus fail to capure the boring reality that is their real subject.

Anyhow, the big deal over Hajj is overblown in relative terms, or perhaps all the other cases are simply underblown.

Potpourri, again

Once more I have a lot of ideas saved up. Here are some:

1. Blushing Bride. The local news had a story maybe 10 days ago, which again I'm in too much of a rush to link to, about a store that sold wedding dresses that suddenly shut its doors and declared bankrupcy. It featured, as might be expected, distraught brides to be, complaining about the awful situation they were in, because they trusted the company and then they suddenly closed, without notice.

I take the unpopular position that the news treated the bankrupt company unfairly. I don't hold them blameless, but from what little I know about business bankrupcy, the report failed to provide the context that would explain the company's actions. In doing this, it failed to point the way to possible solutions to keep this from happening in the future.

First of all, the company undoubtedly did not set out to go bankrupt. I haven't seen their business plan, but most companies want to make money, not lose it. As far as I know there have been no allegations of fraud, i.e. that the principals of the company overpaid themselves in order to rob the company as much as possible with bankrupcy on the horizon. It is pretty common for the owner of a small business to loan the business money to keep it afloat, hoping it will turn the corner and survive.

I don't know if the company's original plan was reasonable or whether it was reasonable for it to try to ride out the crisis as long as they did. It sounded like the company used a lot of shipping. When gas prices rise, shipping costs rise. That could help explain why things went awry. I do think it was piss poor to get into this situation. I think a company that undertakes an enterprise like this should make damn sure they're not undercapitalized, and there should be some insurance offered to customers to prevent the worst. But society has not set up a strict liability standard. The law and the culture encourage half-assed startups in the name of the market. So the entrepreneur cannot entirely be blamed.

The customers wish they had been informed in advance. My understanding is that there is no such thing. Once there is an announcement of an impending bankrupcy, any hopes of riding out the crisis pretty much go out the window. No one will put anything into the company anymore, because they're on notice they may not get it back. Fraudulent conveyance laws kick into place preventing the company from giving things out -- it's treated as creditor property even before the papers are filed. Basically, the company has no choice but to close its doors. Even to give out dresses kept on the premises would be considered stealing from the creditors.

I think it's shitty that the company did not leave their customers a longer note. It's not enough to say, sorry for the inconvenience, and let people presume the worst. They should have said, now that we're bankrupt, matters are mostly out of our control, but we will do our best working with the lawyers and creditors to get everyone their dresses if possible. That could have alleviated at least some of the stress.

Ultimately, everyone whose weddings were scheduled within two weeks of the bankrupcy were promised their dresses. As far as I know this promise was kept. It was reportedly kept for at lest the first bride with an upcoming wedding. I have no doubt this was the lawyers who worked this out, recognizing the potential for bad publicity against the creditors.

In sum, the company acted badly, but the news media's inept and misleading coverage made them the only culprit, and failed to explain how some of the complaints against them were really attributable to aspects of the law and culture that should have been questioned, but remained unquestioned after all the reporting was done, helping set this up to happen again.


2. McGruff. McGruff, the crime dog, is at it again, teaching the kiddies how to do crimes.

Cartoons are popular with three kinds of viewers: kiddies, the tragically ironic, and no-goods who bust into houses to rape, steal, and watch Tom and Jerry. Adults seeking serious information on how to prevent identity theft generally do not go to Blue’s Clues, Clifford the Big Red Dog or McGruff.

So here he is again on TV, showing us how you can take a picture of someone’s credit card discreetly with a cell phone, and use the numbers to make unauthorized purchases. Cool. Kids don’t have credit cards, though if the kid is over 12 he probably has his own cell number. So you know kids aren’t gonna run and tell their parents this new trick.

No-goods will be sitting in someone’s living room after a home invasion when McGruff comes on during Matlock, and reminds them how they can get a credit card out of the victim’s purse and order a pizza.

And of course, the tragically ironic just think it would be cool to commit a crime suggested to them by a misguided crime-prevention effort, so they order original artworks from the Banksy website and have them sent to the Whitney at Altria.


3. Yellow Ribbons. Yellow ribbons, it turns out, are a fascinating example of semantic drift. Part of the message of the ribbons has remained the same: I support you. But tracing their use backwards, it turns out that the rest of their meaning has reversed almost 180 degrees.

Today, the ribbons are an endemic outgrowth of the Iraq war, and they seem to signify something like, “I support you in your mission. You’re a hero.” Everyone is supposed to have one of the damn things. It’s considered patriotic to consider the mission heroic on the level of the individual soldier, even though most now see the war as a whole as stupid and counterproductive, if not simply wrong – one unnecessary atrocity spangled with smaller atrocities. It’s currently debated whether the ribbons also display support for the war.

I recall earlier uses of the ribbons. The previous Iraq war, or “Persian Gulf War,” then years before the current one, saw the ribbons. Their meaning was not support for the war so much, at least where I was. It was more, we love you and we want you back. Over the decade, the military aspect and even the location were unchanged, but there was a subtle change in tenor from expressing love and the pain of absence to support for the mission.

Ten years before that was the first use of the ribbons that I know of. We’re now back to the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979-80, the “crisis” that became “America Held Hostage” and later NBC’s Nightline. The ribbons were for the hostages. Between the Hostage Crisis and Iraq I, the notion of “we want you safely home” remained intact, but shifted from diplomatic hostages to military personnel engaging in a hot war.

The first use was in 1974, when Dawn, featuring Tony Orlando, performed “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree.” From some of the lyrics, you might think there was a hint of soldiers returning from the Vietnam war: it begins and ends with simply, “I'm comin' home…” Everyone knows the chorus:

Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak treeIt's been three long years. Do you still want me?If I don't see a ribbon round the old oak treeI'll stay on the bus, forget about us, put the blame on me.If I don't see a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree

But the context is clear that the singer is actually much more like the hostages in Iran than like our troops. He’s a prisoner. An inmate at one of America’s fine penal institutions:

I'm comin' home, I've done my time…
I'm really still in prison, and my love she holds the key
A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free

So, the yellow ribbon used to say: Yes, it looks like you done wrong and landed in jail. But you’ve done your time, you’ve reformed yourself. You’re willing to accept responsibility and “put the blame on me.” That gives me faith in you to forgive you and take you back.

Appropriate for Lynddie England, perhaps. Certainly not the meaning the ribbons have today.


4. Other. Here is just a reminder to me of things I want to write for this space:

a) The Activism Amendment, b) Venezuela or Guatemala for the Security Council? c) Democrats criticize Chavez, d) Dogcross, e) Westphalia, f) The purported rights of nations to persist, g) 911 and immigarants, h) guns in schools and nukes for nations, i) Sex talk, j) God Talk, k) Cry Wolf, l) Eden.

Republican Scandals

Well, it's been a month and I have a pile of items that I had planned to post that are all backed up in the pipeline. I'm going to continue that bout of laziness by being a lazy linker and not giving the hotlinks to a few references here, which is like filing a legal paper without the exhibits, but oh hell, maybe I'll find them later.

Crooks and liars has a video of some talking heads talking about the Foley scandal. It's a hoot because the Democrat guy spreads like a 1N debater, rattling off more than a dozen high-profile Republican scandals. I remember a great video they posted months ago with Howard Dean saying again and again how the Abramoff scandal had touched not one Democrat.

Counterpunch has an article with an analysis if why so many times Republicans get caught literally with pants down (With links to an about.com list of scandals that is redacted from Wikipedia).

My own thought is that this is at once a hard and an easy issue for the Democrats. It's hard because attention span is so short that any smart Republican can run out the clock listing Democratic scandals and make it look like a bipartisan failing. (Note however that the Crooks and Liars video shows that Republicans often aren't smart.) On the other hand, there must be some way to make the point that Republicans dominate in the area of scandal, because they do.

Beyond the lists you could make from this administration, one could compare the relatively clean Clinton, Carter, and Johnson white houses with the corrupt administrations of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes. (Ford was apparently not so bad.) For Johnson you had, what, a petty scandal regarding a Supreme Court appointee? Compare to Nixon: president resigned and pardoned, top advisors sent to jail. Ford restored and Carter restored some of the reputation the government had lost. Then recall when Time magazine presented its "Wall of Shame" showing a hundred-odd Reagan officials who'd been indicted or left under a cloud. Bush I had his own set of pardons of a half dozen of his top people right before leaving office. Clinton, in spite of being impeached and ultimately surrendering his law license for a misleadingly captious denial about sex with Monica Lewinsky, had a relatively clean house. Now Bush II and you have numerous investigations reaching into the White House, with various spy scandals, Plamegate, Abramoff, etc...

You read about the slimy environment in which young Republicans are trained to fight dirty, and I've seen these shenanigans in student politics. Anything goes, because the issues are always black and white to the authoritarian personality. John Dean has recently discovered this and written a book about it. It's no accident that the new breed of Republicans includes a disproportionate share of grifters, liars, and pedophiles.

Foleygate has been amusing and disturbing in part because of the lack of unified Republican spin. Of course, many want to shoot the messenger. Wonkette caught Fox News letting the Republicans off the hook by labeling Foley a Democrat. The FRC Christians have blamed the scandal on the Republican's coddling of gays. Drudge blames the kid victims for going along. Boehner blames Hastert. Foley blames alcohol. Hannity invented the fact that the twentysomething Lewinsky was actually still a tender child while servicing the Presidential staff, a comparison that O'Reilly had said only an extremist lunatic would make (but in Hannity's defense, you would only be a lunatic to compare the real facts of the cases, and as a Fox News pseudojournalust, he was dealing in made-up facts). How many different stories and scapegoats are we up to? Oh yeah, Stephen Colbert blames himself. Thanks for owning up.

Locally, we have a governor's race that is all about scandals. The Democratic governor, running for reelection, received a lot of campaign money from people who benefited from his policies, making him exactly like 100% of other politicians. He has not been the target of any investigation and exactly one person in state government, a minor functionary, has left under a cloud. This is the substance of all the negative Republican adds. Plus, they've added a new charge -- he tried to rig the election.

Now, I'm no great fan of this guy but I defend people who are attacked with stupid arguments. How did he attempt to rig the election? His lawyer lobbied the elections board to make a ruling favorable to him concerning his opponent's illegal activities. Scandalous -- a lawyer presenting an argument to a legal body. The Journal-Sentinel, only mass daily paper of the state's largest city, ran this "scandal" on page 1; it reported later on page 6B that the lawyer for the Republicans did the same thing, apparently not a scandal. The elections board voted along party lines, but a judge affirmed its ruling.

The substance of that ruling, as I understand, was that the Republican candidate, who is currently in Congress, transferred his entire Congressional campaign warchest into his budget for election to the statehouse. A bit over 1/3 of that money was raised from national donors who had never complied with the restrictions for giving to a state campaign. Its transfer violated federal law. The television station owned by the Journal's parent company covered the story last night in a condescendingly simple manner, apparently because it presumes its viewers are idiots who would not otherwise understand. They treated the whole warchest as suspect, and said that a Democratic congressman had done something similar in the last election -- but no word on whether his actions were significantly different in legal terms. It's like saying that a cop is partisan because he pulls over the Republican for driving drunk, but not the Democrat, even though the Democrat is also driving (and not mentioning that maybe he's sober). I believe about 10% of what this station airs as news.