Month: January 2013

“I’ve tried to be very respectful about Larry [King]; he’s a legend, and I feel very proud to have followed him. But I think he just slightly needs to button it, because he’s talking nonsense. The reason we’re different is, I’m a journalist and he’s not. Larry isn’t a journalist, never has been,” – Piers Morgan.

He addresses the Leveson Inquiry’s belief that he was at best indifferent to criminal phone-hacking while running the Daily Mirror, and his own role in publishing fake photos and being fired for it, in a separate piece here. Believe it or not, he denies everything. The Leveson Inquiry’s conclusion about Morgan’s denials in the Guardian last November is worth a read. Money quote:

Lord Justice Leveson has described former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan’s assertion that he had no knowledge of alleged phone hacking as “utterly unpersuasive”, and said the practice may well have occurred at the title in the late 1990s.

Morgan was asked during his evidence to the Leveson inquiry about an interview he gave Press Gazette in 2007 when he said that phone hacking was an “investigative practice that everyone knows was going on at almost every paper in Fleet Street for years”.

In his testimony, Morgan … downplayed the comment as “passing on rumours that I’d heard” and said that there was no phone hacking at the Daily Mirror under his editorship from 1995 to 2004.

“Overall, Mr Morgan’s attempt to push back from his own bullish statement to the Press Gazette was utterly unpersuasive,” said Leveson in his report on the culture, practices and ethics of the press, published on Thursday. “This was not, in any sense at all, a convincing answer.”

Leveson was also critical of Morgan’s attitude to phone hacking.

“This evidence does not establish that Mr Morgan authorised the hacking of voicemails or that journalists employed by TMG [Trinity Mirror Group] were indulging in this practice,” said Leveson. “What it does, however, clearly prove is that he was aware that it was taking place in the press as a whole and that he was sufficiently unembarrassed by what was criminal behaviour that he was prepared to joke about it.”

But Larry King is not a journalist.

Just when you thought the far right couldn’t get any more repellent …

A reader parses Jessica Chastain’s Daily Show comments on Zero Dark Thirty:

I actually know something about this topic both from years of covering the movie industry and from having done science and technical research for a studio movie that involved global terrorism and classified technology. I think you’re confusing two different ways the government cooperates with Hollywood.

In the Daily Show interview, Chastain says Bigelow and Boal decided “not to work in cooperation with the government.” She misspoke; she should have said that they decided not to work hand in hand with the Defense Department, which has a very active program of cooperation with Hollywood. Jerry Bruckheimer has used it many times. So did Michael Bay on Transformers. She is correct that under this program the DoD will provide helicopters and other authentic military hardware and locations. (I don’t know what financial arrangements they make with the production to cover costs.) However, they want to see the script first and will only provide that access to approved scripts.

Chastain implies they decided not to even try going that route. That was probably a wise decision. They probably wouldn’t have received that approval, and why fight that fight anyway? The lack of DoD cooperation probably cost them next to nothing. There are relatively few military locations or pieces of military gear in the movie. The big exception is the stealth helicopters used in the raid, and I think it’s safe to assume there was no way they were going to get access to them anyway, so those would have been created by the production one way or another.

That is not the same as Bigelow and Boal working closely with sources within the defense and intelligence community to research and write the script. I spoke to official DoD and CIA sources in doing my own research for that terrorism project. That was not contingent upon any script approval – and couldn’t have been, since the script wasn’t written yet. Good movie researchers, like good journalists, don’t rely entirely on those official sources, and after The Hurt Locker we can be sure Bigelow and Boal have a ton of contacts within the military and veterans who could help them contact sources such as current and former SEALs.

So I believe Chastain when she says the Zero Dark Thirty people didn’t work with the government go get military hardware and access, but that’s a separate issue from their having relied on government sources in writing the script.

The GOP keeps tripping over itself:

Reporters quickly noted that a session for lawmakers called “Discussion on Successful Communication with Minorities and Women” will actually take place in the “Burwell Plantation” room at the resort where the retreat is being held. It turns out, according to NBC News, the room “is named after the Burwell Family, a wealthy family that owned many slaves in 18th century Southern Virginia.”

A reader tries to wrap his head around this story:

Why is it that there is so little speculation that Manti Te’o may be in the closet? This seems like the perfect cover-up story. Te’o is Mormon, so obviously being gay is against his religion. Notre Dame is defending his story of being a victim of a hoax, but is it a surprise that the Catholic institution would want to keep his sexuality under cover?

It’s the perfect cover story (if it wasn’t completely fake). I mean … if the woman he loves died tragically, he has a long-term excuse for not being involved with any other women for years. It seems to me that many people close to him are complicit in advancing the story, to the point that it seemed much of his family had met “her” and were in communication with “her”. The Deadspin story links all of the various Twitter accounts, photos of “Lennay”, and much of the basis of the whole story to Te’o, his family, and friends or other acquaintances. He claimed to have met her (after a game at Stanford, visited her in Hawaii), but now says it was purely an online relationship? It all makes very little sense as described in most news stories I’ve read or watched so far.

To me, the only explanation for this seems to be that he is in the closet, and his friends and family went a bit overboard in perpetuating a cover-up story. Why is there no speculation about this possibility in the many news stories airing on every news and sports channel?

Another:

If it were true, the poor kid may be forced out of the closet. But he will also likely be drafted highly, and he could open the floodgates to all the major American male sports finally starting to accept openly gay players.

Update from another speculative reader:

I’ve been obsessed with the Manti Te’o story since it broke on Deadspin in a way that news stories don’t usually grab me. It’s a combination of being drawn to stories in which the truth turns out to be far more complicated than a simplistic story, a delight when hoaxes are unmasked, and a strong dislike of the human interest stories that seem to make up so much of popular sports coverage. So I’ve been reading everything I can about this story, and I have my own theory:

I don’t think Manti Te’o is gay. I think he greatly embellished his telling of his supposed relationship, but I think it’s completely consistent for a devout Mormon to be completely earnest, amazingly naive, and generally out of touch with the way in which normal relationships, gay or straight, usually proceed. But the general story of him being deceived, I think, is true.

If Te’o’a account is true, there is a hoaxer who was spending an enormous amount of time online and on the phone with him. Both the Deadspin article, and further reporting from TMZ.com make it clear that Ronaiah Tuiasosopo was involved in the hoax and probably the instigator. On a Utah sports talk radio show, Te’o’s uncle claimed that Ronaiah was trying to get close to Te’o in order to make money, using a fake leukemia foundation as cover.

Tuiasosopo comes from a big football family, and although he played high school football, his career never went beyond that. At present, he is a self-described actor, singer, dancer, and musician. He auditioned for The Voice, also telling a sob story involving a car accident.

I think Rohaiah Tuiasosopo is gay, and was living out his fantasy of a romantic relationship with a star football player through the online persona of Lennay Kekua. Te’o wasn’t the first football player that the Lennay Kekua persona interacted with. And other than a potential moneymaking scheme – and the elaborate detail of the hoax seems awfully inefficient if money was the only incentive -this is the only reason I can think of why a hoaxer would invest as much time as was reportedly spent courting Te’o.

Simon Hattenstone applauds the career of gold medalist Nicole Cooke, who retired from cycling this week at the age of 29:

[Cooke] has always said it as she has seen it, and never more so than in her retirement speech, in which she pulled what was left of the rug out from under her beloved sport. Slowly and methodically, she exposed every aspect of corruption in professional cycling, from doping to gross gender inequality. It took 20 minutes to deliver, and was greeted by journalists with stunned silence, then sustained applause. …

On her first Tour de France, she shared a house with other cyclists. When she opened the fridge she discovered it was full of medicines, which she promptly chucked out. Were the other women annoyed with her? She laughs, and says no they just pretended to be appalled and said they knew nothing about them. “A couple of weeks later, my team stopped paying the wages for me and my team mate, who had also said no. We were the only two riders who didn’t get our wages for the rest of the year.”

Her thoughts on Lance Armstrong:

He’s a criminal. He has stolen people’s livelihoods. There must be thousands of clean athletes scrabbling around on the bottom end of the employment structure because that’s all that’s possible, and he’s taken away their career… Of course, Lance Armstrong should go to jail. At the moment his punishment is not in line with the crimes he has committed. For the sport to genuinely clean itself up, the punishment has to be severe so not one would even think of doping.

Jane Martinson argues that Cooke deserves another medal “for turning the spotlight on the injustice and inequality” in cycling:

Like nearly all women’s sports in the UK, cycling suffers from a chicken-and-egg situation: a relative lack of prestige results in a lack of media coverage, sponsorship or support. The Commission on the Future of Women’s sport revealed that 0.5% of sponsorship in this country went to elite women’s sports in an 18-month period of 2010-11 compared with 61% for men.

But what Cooke has done is provide inside knowledge of how these overall figures hide deeper injustices in the way women are treated. Among the shocking things she discusses is that the sport’s governing body, the UCI Road Commission, has stated that a minimum wage is required for all male professionals, but not women. How on earth are they allowed to get away with such blatant discrimination?

By the way, a reader “boiled down the Armstrong interview” so you don’t have to watch it:

I did wrong.

But it was quite awhile ago.

And it’s not as much wrong as people think.

And I stopped on this particular date:  please note date in connection with the statute of limitations for perjury since even though I can afford to pay buckets of money as a consequence of civil suits, I’m far too pretty to go to prison.

And anyway, I wasn’t in charge.

And I have no excuse.  Except that I kinda do.  Did you know I had cancer and have only one ball?

And I’m truly, truly sorry.

Anyway, can’t we all just move on now?  Glad I got this off my chest.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity, Oprah.

Balko spells out how and why our justice system gives prosecutors so much power. He argues that we are increasingly “a nation ruled not by laws, but by politics”:

We need to move away from the idea that every act we find immoral, repugnant, or unsavory needs to be criminalized. Every new criminal law gives prosecutors more power. Once we have so many laws that it’s likely we’re all breaking at least one of them, the prosecutor’s job is no longer about enforcing the laws, but about choosing which laws to enforce. It’s then a short slide to the next step: Choosing what people need to be made into criminals, then simply picking the laws necessary to make that happen.

A reader writes:

As far as I can tell, there’s no evidence for the story that the piggy bank is named after a kind of clay called “pygg.” I’ve checked various dictionaries (including asking Merriam-Webster’s etymology editor) and looked into the origin of the “pygg” story, and as far as I can tell, the whole “pygg” thing is folklore (although extremely widely believed). Here’s a detailed writeup of my research so far.

Another writes:

I researched this subject recently for a post on my History Blog, and Megan Cohen’s summary of the origins of the piggy bank leaves out a key piece of the story. In so doing she inaccurately implies that the concept of a pig-shaped container for household moneys was a coincidence of English nomenclature that traveled across the world to 15th century Indonesia.

The “natural evolution of the English language” that transformed the pygg jar to the piggy bank was the Great Vowel Shift.

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, English long vowels gradually began to be formed higher in the mouth, changing the sound markedly. (This website has a nifty Java applet that allows you to hear the shift.) In 1400, “pygg” would have sounded like “pug.” It wasn’t until the Great Vowel Shift did its magic that it changed to “pig” and thus became a homonym of the animal. By 1700, then, even though pygg clay was no longer in widespread use, the term “pygg” had stuck and since it now sounded like “pig,” it gave craftsmen the undeniably adorable idea of turning out coin banks shaped like the animal.

The piggy banks produced in the Majapahit Empire of Java obviously had nothing to do with the Great Vowel Shift of the English language. Majapahit piggy banks began to be made in the 14th century, when pygg jars in England were still pronounced “pug jars” and were just generic cheap vessels for home use with zero connection to the porcine world. Under the Majapahit Empire, increasingly widespread wealth and a massive importation of bronze coins from China led to a new money economy in which even the common people had cash on hand. Cash necessitates a place to put it, which gave rise to artisans creating closed terracotta containers with slots into which coins could be dropped. The celeng, a wild boar native to Java, was the favored shape because their endless appetites, rotund bellies and love of mud made them a symbol of good luck and prosperity connected to the spirits of the earth. How apposite to shape clay into a creature which wallows in mud and then to fill its well-fed round tummy with literal prosperity.

The concept of a pig-shaped home savings bank didn’t “[go] global early,” as Cohen put it. The Javanese got the idea from their own cultural imagery, and then centuries later the English got the idea from a fluke of their language. Even more centuries later, the Ashmolean bought the cutest Majapahit piggy bank ever.

Seen above.