Charlie Rose

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“The Distribution May Be A Problem”

February 3, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

That handsome and agreeable robot Charlie Rose recently interviewed Warren Buffet and Bill Gates at Columbia University, and the billionaires made a point that is true in the long run, which is that technology replacing human toil and increasing productivity makes us richer. 

That’s correct, at least in the aggregate, though the distribution is tricky.

In the short- and medium-term, that can make for a bumpy ride, especially since the pace of the transitions are much faster now than in the time of steam-powered looms, a situation that’s only likely to accelerate as time passes. Smart policy is needed to fill the breach to help those left behind as Buffet and Gates state, but that’s not looking good presently, especially in America, with President Crazypants running the show.

The comments on automation:

Warren Buffett:

If we were here in 1800 and conducting this, somebody would point out that eventually tractors would come along and better fertilizer and that 80 percent of the people are now employed on the farm and in couple hundred years it is going to be 2 or 3 percent, and what are we going to do with all these people? Well, the answer is we release them. Keynes wrote something about in something called Essays in Persuasion, which he wrote in 1930 about what a more prosperous society would become like, and he actually postulated that in 100 years and we’re now 87 years along, there would be four to eight times as much output per capita—remarkable—but he didn’t quite get at how it would get distributed. But the idea of more output per capita—which is what the progress is made on productivity—that that should be harmful to society is crazy. Now the distribution may be a problem, but if one person could push a button and turn out everything we turn out now, is that good for the world or bad for the world? You’d have to figure out how to distribute it, but you’d free up all kinds of possibilities for everything else. Everything should be devoted initially to getting greater productivity, but people who fall through the wayside through no fault of their own, as the goose lays more golden eggs, should still get a chance to participate in that prosperity, and that’s where government comes in.

Charlie Rose (to Gates):

Do you have anything to add to that?

Bill Gates:

A problem of excess is a different problem than a problem of shortage. If all the tractor and computers stopped working, then we would have problems of shortage there, and we just wouldn’t have enough people to make the output. A problem of excess really forces us took at individuals effected and take those individual resources and make sure they’re directed to them in terms of reeducation and income policies. And the smaller class size in helping handicapped kids reaching out to the elderly…the demand for labor is not at zero. If you ever get to that point, sure, you can shorten the work week, you’ll be just fine with that. This idea of taking an individual during a generation who is effected by that, I think there’s a lot to be learned about that, a lot of thinking we have to do, but the macro picture that it enables is an opportunity.•

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“Not Bad For A Robot”

October 11, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Charlie Rose, a handsome and agreeable robot built in a laboratory mostly from bourbon and cufflinks, interviewed a fellow robot for 60 Minutes. How lifelike they both seemed!

“Sophia” is the brainchild of roboticist David Hanson, who aims to blur the lines between carbon and silicon, believing the disappearance of distinction will make machines more acceptable to people. I’m not convinced such seamlessness is healthy for a society, but that’s essentially what’s happening right now with voice and sensors and the gathering elements of the Internet of Things. The humanoid component, however, is overstated for the foreseeable future, even if it’s perfectly visual and dramatic for a TV segment.

From Brit McCandless:

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Sophia tells 60 Minutes correspondent Charlie Rose. They’re mid-interview, and Rose reacts with surprise.

“Waiting for me?” he asks.

“Not really,” she responds. “But it makes a good pickup line.”

Sophia managed to get a laugh out of Charlie Rose. Not bad for a robot.

Rose interviewed the human-like machine for this week’s two-part 60 Minutes piece on artificial intelligence, or A.I. In their exchange, excerpted in the clip above, Rose seems to approach the conversation with the same seriousness and curiosity he would bring to any interview.

“You put your head where you want to test the possibility,” Rose tells 60 Minutes Overtime. “You’re not simply saying, ‘Why am I going through this exercise of talking to a machine?’ You’re saying, ‘I want to talk to this machine as if it was a human to see how it comprehends.’”

Sophia’s creator, David Hanson, believes that if A.I. technology looks and sounds human, people will be more willing to engage with it in meaningful ways.•

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“We Need Revolutionary Change, Not Incremental Change”

December 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Big-picture thinkers are important, and I’m pleased Larry Page is among them, believing from the start that Google was about AI rather than search, establishing a latter-day Bell Labs with GoogleX. But I’m happy everyone isn’t like him. The micro also matters, suffering and inequity need addressing on a granular level until the future “arrives.” Both are vital. An excerpt from Page’s TED interview from last week, which was conducted by avuncular android Charlie Rose.

Charlie Rose:

Tell me about your philosophy. You don’t just want a small arena of progress.

Larry Page:

Many of the things we just talked about use the economic concept of additionality: You’re doing something that wouldn’t happen unless you were actually doing it. The more you do things like that, the bigger impact you have. That’s about doing things that people might not think are possible. The more I think about technology, the more I realize I don’t know.

Charlie Rose:

Lots of people think about the future — but then we never see implementation.

Larry Page:

Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.

Charlie Rose:

You are one of those people who believe that corporations are agents of change, if they’re run well.

Larry Page:

I’m really dismayed. Most people think corporations are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And that’s somewhat correct, if companies are doing the same incremental things they did 20 years ago. But that’s not really what we need. Especially in tech, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.

Charlie Rose:

You once said you might consider giving your money to Elon Musk because you had confidence he will change the future.

Larry Page:

He wants to go to Mars. That’s a worthy goal. We have a lot of employees at Google who’ve become pretty wealthy. You’re working because you want to change the world and make it better; if the company you work for is worthy of your time, why not your money as well? We just don’t think about that. I’d like for us to help out more than we are.

Charlie Rose:

What state of mind, quality of mind, has served you best? Rupert Murdoch and many others have said ‘curiosity,’ Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have said ‘focus.’ What has enabled you to think about the future and change the present?

Larry Page:

Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future. I try to focus on that: What is the future really going to be? And how do we create it? And how do we power our organization to really focus on that and really drive it at a high rate? When I was working on Android, I felt guilty. It wasn’t what we were working on, it was a start-up, and I felt guilty. That was stupid! It was the future.”•

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“Page Suggested Sharing Information With The ‘Right’ Companies”

March 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I admire Google for its Bell Labs-sized ambitions, but Larry Page telling us to trust his company with our private information is only slightly less ludicrous than Mark Zuckerberg lecturing the President about the NSA. It’s just a ruse to try to convince the more gullible among us that Silicon Valley isn’t Big Brother-ish. That’s a lie, of course. The government and Google and Facebook and, to a good extent, the rest of us, are all working in the same direction: to gather as much data we can to survive in the Information Age. Page and Zuckerberg want what’s inside your head; they even want to implant information there. I don’t doubt that Page has plenty of noble intentions, but a publicly traded behemoth’s largesse only goes so far. The beast must be fed.

From a WSJ report of a conversation between Page and Charlie Rose, a handsome robot who once had an epiphany on a tennis court:

“In what has become a Silicon Valley ritual, Page criticized electronic surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies, based on leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

‘We need to know the parameters of what the government is doing and why,’ Page said. ‘The government has done itself a disservice. I’m sad that Google is in the position of protecting you from what the government is doing.’

When it comes to individuals trying to shield themselves from private companies, however, Page said people shouldn’t be ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water.’

Page suggested sharing information with the ‘right’ companies is important for technology to advance, and that Google is among those companies. ‘We spend a lot of time thinking about these issues,’ he said. ‘The main thing we need to do is provide (users) choice” and show them what data will be used.'”

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“Murray Acts As A Kind Of Father Figure To The Saturday Night Live Alumni”

February 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Bill Murray’s interview with Charlie Rose a couple days ago was a nice complement to his recent Ask Me Anything. I thought the most interesting part was when he explained to the host how he caught “Oscar fever” at the time of Lost in Translation. Murray, of all people, being disappointed in not winning an Oscar was a disappointment in itself, so it’s great he has more perspective now.

The opening of “The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray,” a 1988 New York Times Magazine article by Timothy White, which misunderstood the comic’s cerebral nature for a Zen-like one, and opens with the first-ever reunion of SNL alumni:

“AS HOLLYWOOD parties go, the one in full swing this past spring in a handsome, Georgian Revival home off Sunset Boulevard was an anomaly.

No agents circulated, no studio executives haunted the hallways. The food was lasagna and fried chicken; the beverages, Mexican beer and bottled seltzer – with the seltzer proving the more popular. Instead of dizzying references to ‘gross points,’ ‘back-end deals,’ scripts ‘in turnaround’ and multimillion-dollar movie deals, the talk concerned the fortunes of Chicago sports teams and New York rock bands, and the only ‘creative products’ under scrutiny were baby pictures.

If any aspect of ‘the industry’ was being bantered about, it was the return to the employment ranks of the party’s co-host, Bill Murray, who had, earlier that day, finished filming for Scrooged – an outlandish adaptation of the Dickens Christmas classic that will be released on Wednesday. Coincidentally, three other film comedies featuring other former Saturday Night Live regulars were then nearing completion: Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy; Caddyshack II, starring Chevy Chase, and My Stepmother Is an Alien, starring Dan Aykroyd. To celebrate this serendipitous event, Murray and Peter Aykroyd, an actor-composer who is Dan’s younger brother, had decided on this first-time-ever gathering of Saturday Night Live alumni.

A picture of genial abandon in rumpled khakis, football jersey and sneakers, Murray was urging Dan Aykroyd, Laraine Newman and Chevy Chase to drop their ‘reserves of cool’ on the dance floor and ‘get down!’ Murray’s warmth is disarming. Chase, for instance, once considered Murray a rival, and the feeling was mutual. Murray was hired at Saturday Night Live in January 1977, just five weeks after Chase left for a movie career. The pressure Murray felt in trying to supplant his predecessor flared into backstage fisticuffs when Chase returned as a guest host for the third season of Saturday Night Live. Now, the two are thoroughly at ease with each other. Even Eddie Murphy, a Saturday Night Live latecomer whose box-office magnetism eclipses that of most of his associates, is meek in Murray’s presence.

Bill Murray is considered by his colleagues to be a man who has made peace with any private demons he might have had, someone who has brought his personal life and his career into enviable concord. Slightly disheveled and projecting what Richard Donner, the director of Scrooged, calls ‘a woolly Zen wisdom,’ Murray acts as a kind of father figure to the Saturday Night Live alumni.”

 

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“There’s No Reason They Can’t Be Used As Delivery Vehicles”

December 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Reports about two new uses for the domestic drone, hunting feral pigs and delivering Amazon goods, from, respectively, the Economist and 60 Minutes. 

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“WILD pigs are rooting around in a field in the dark. Partly hidden by tall grass, their tails wag happily as they snuffle around for roots and insects. A shot rings out and the biggest pig is down. The rest scatter quickly; yet a shooter picks them off one by one with uncanny accuracy.

Pigs are clever and hard to hunt; it can take a day to stalk one. But they are no match for an aerial drone such as the ‘dehogaflier’ operated by Louisiana Hog Control, a pest-extermination firm. It is a remote-controlled aircraft with a thermal-imaging camera and a laser pointer. It easily spots the pigs’ warm bodies from 400 feet and points them out to a hunter on the ground wearing night-vision goggles, who then shoots them.”

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“Leave It To Charlie Rose To Begin His Black Eye Story With ‘I Had Been To The Museum That Morning…'”

April 2, 2013 in Excerpts | Permalink

Charlie Rose, a handsome and agreeable robot who was constructed in a laboratory almost entirely from bourbon and cufflinks, just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Good morning, Charlie Rose. I have read that when you were a child you worked in your father’s country store. What were the dreams you had growing up? Have you fulfilled them? Where did your sophistication come from?

Charlie Rose:

I was born in 1942 in a small town: Henderson, North Carolina. About 15,000 people. My father fought in World War II and my mother and I lived with my grandparents; when my father came back, my responsibility was to get up every morning and open the store. The interesting thing about my dreams was that there was a train that ran from Boston to Miami that came close to our house. And I would look at that train — it was always going north — and think, wouldn’t I love to be on that? I didn’t know journalists and I didn’t know actors and I didn’t know architects and I didn’t know scientists. I knew lawyers and doctors and businesspeople. But my whole drive was to experience, to live, to access as much as I could. To have my driving passion be curiosity. All of the passions that have served me, made me. Curiosity, drive, the pursuit of experience. Whenever I look back, I know I learned more from when I said “yes” than when I said “no.”

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Question:

Who’s been your favorite guest over the years?

Charlie Rose:

It’s hard to say. I think mainly of fields. Among politicians, certainly Bill Clinton because he’s engaged by a whole range of subject matter. When I think about athletes, probably my favorite guest of all time among baseball players was Ted Williams. Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me. When I think about science, certainly Eric Kandel because of the Brain Series we did. Actors: Clooney, because of friendship, but British actors are interesting because of simply the diversity of what they bring to the table from Shakespeare to comedy to James Bond. The person I’ve always wanted to interview but never met was Richard Burton. I also like a lot of directors; the one I’ve never interviewed is Spielberg, but I like Sam Mendes. As a general rule, I like artists and writers — people who are creative. Increasingly, I find scientists interesting because of their work.

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Question:

Sorry if this is a sore subject Mr. Rose, but what’s up with the black eye you had last year? When I was watching I saw it but had no idea what happened.

Charlie Rose:

I had been to the museum that morning. It was a Saturday morning. I had taken with me my new MacBook Air. As I was coming back, at the intersection of 59th Street and 5th Avenue, I tripped on a curb and put my hand out to save the computer, but in the process got a black eye. Rather than making up a much more interesting story, that’s the story. Apple I think offered to make a commercial but I didn’t take them up on that.

Question:

Leave it to Charlie Rose to begin his black eye story with “I had been to the museum that morning…”

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Question:

If you would not have gone into journalism and television, what career would you have chosen? What fields intrigue you enough to perhaps considered?

Charlie Rose:

I would’ve been intrigued by being a film director. I would’ve been intrigued by politics. I thought about architecture. I would not have been working for something big, I would’ve been trying to create something. You can do that in a large institution but it’s just not what’s natural for me. I’d like to big something big but I don’t want to start in something big.•

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Max Headroom + David Letterman + Charlie Rose

January 1, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Max Headroom was a computer-generated talking head who existed only on television, and I suspect the same is true of Charlie Rose. From 1986:

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“For Three Decades, He Has Been Called A Terrorist And A Tyrant”

October 26, 2011 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the wake of 9/11, the recently departed Libyan despot tried to recast himself as anti-terrorist during a 60 Minutes interview with PBS strongman Charlie Rose.

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“All Life, At Its Core, Is A Process Of Digital-Information Transfer”

October 23, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Even though the word “meme” seems to have been invented during the Internet Age, Richard Dawkins actually coined the term–a truncated version of the ancient Greek word “mimeme,” which means “something repeated”–back in 1976. An excerpt from a 1995 Wired article by Michael Schrage about Dawkins:

“But even without futuristic morphing, Dawkins’s head holds more provocative ideas than most. Two decades ago, Dawkins presented a radical evolutionary perspective in a small book called The Selfish Gene, a disturbingly persuasive essay arguing that living things are little more than corporal vessels impelled to heed the primal dictates of selfish genes hellbent on their own replication and propagation. Much as the English philosopher and novelist Samuel Butler observed a century ago that a chicken is just a way an egg makes another egg, Dawkins proposed that we are nothing but expressions of our selfish genes in the process of making more selfish genes. Taking that idea even further, Dawkins proposed that genes themselves are expressions of particularly elegant code manipulating the world around it to its own reproductive end. He extended these notions into culture and described ideas as competing, self-replicating entities he called memes. Dawkins’s most recent book, River Out of Eden, extends his life’s work into a unified evolutionary theory arguing that all life, at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer.”

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Dawkins in 2000 with semi-convincing male impersonator Rosie Charles:

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“Gorbachev’s Closest Aides In The Communist Party, The Military And The KGB Arrested Him And Made Clear An Implicit Threat Of Murder”

June 24, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From David Remnick’s excellent 1991 Washington Post coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev’s ignominious ouster from the Kremlin, which occurred after he dismantled the Cold War Soviet machinery, leaving the former superpower less a danger to the rest of the world but seemingly no less a danger to itself:

“Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, whose battle to reform socialism has ended with the collapse of Leninist ideology and the Soviet Union, left the Kremlin tonight an exhausted and bitter man.

In his final days, Gorbachev told aides that he felt ‘balanced’ and ‘at peace’ with his choices, his place in history. But as he sat in the eerie quiet of his office last weekend receiving visitors and watching news reports on television, he learned that the presidents of the former Soviet republics, who had met to form the new Commonwealth of Independent States, had discussed not only an end to the Soviet Union but, with unconcealed relish, the details of his pension. Down the hall, members of President Boris Yeltsin’s Russian government were already taking measurements and inventory for their imminent move into the Kremlin.

‘For me, they have poisoned the air,’ Gorbachev confided to one reporter. ‘They have humiliated me.’

Gorbachev has tried hard to conceal his emotions, to cover them over with pride and the language of political euphemism. Yet his sense of rejection and betrayal from all sides seems no less profound for him than it was for Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was ousted in 1964, or for Winston Churchill when he was summarily voted out of 10 Downing St. after leading Britain to victory in World War II. Four months ago, Gorbachev’s closest aides in the Communist Party, the military and the KGB arrested him and made clear an implicit threat of murder. Once back in Moscow, Yeltsin and other republics’ leaders leached him of all authority, making him look hollow and weak.”

••••••••••

In 1996, Gorbachev is interviewed by noted male impersonator, Rosie Charles:

If you’d like, they can stuff the crust with cheese, comrade:

Another David Remnick post:

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“Students Fight To Get Into His Classroom, And Assorted Crazies Send Tirades Addressed To Mr. Illustrious Historical Professor Jay Gould, University Of Harvard”

June 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

No too many paleontologists make the pages of People magazine, but the late Stephen Jay Gould was a serious academic who crossed over into the mainstream. The Queens-born Harvard professor was a lightning rod for others who disagreed with his theories, but Gould was someone who continually questioned himself, often revising beliefs from early essays in subsequent ones. An excerpt from Michelle Green’s 1986 People profile:

“It is an inviting, vaguely antic enclave that suggests a 19th-century natural history museum turned into a bookish boys’ club. Faded lettering on the drab green walls announces ‘Synopsis of the Animal Kingdom’ and ‘Sponges and Protozoa,’ and in the room’s cluttered depths are a wealth of musty treasures: tall glass cases filled with drawers of trilobites, a towering painting of a tyrannosaurus, hundreds of leather-bound volumes and boxes of snail shells. A worn rattan chair has been pulled up to a worktable that holds fossils, microscopes and a supply of Pepperidge Farm cookies.

Stephen Jay Gould—evolutionary biologist, prolific writer and die-hard Yankees fan—has worked in this office at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology for 17 years, and many of his books have been spawned here: Ever Since Darwin, The Panda’s Thumb, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes and now The Flamingo’s Smile (Norton, $17.95). When he arrived with his freshly minted Ph.D. from Columbia, the rumpled, kinetic Gould was an exceptionally promising paleontologist; in the years since, he has become a popular symbol of erudition and scholarship. At 44, he recently completed the final year of a MacArthur Foundation grant that has paid him $38,400 a year since 1981. He was the recipient of an American Book Award in 1981, a National Magazine Award in 1980 and once made the cover of Newsweek. He has done battle with creationists, testified before congressional committees concerning nuclear winter and lectured in South Africa on the history of racism. Students fight to get into his classroom, and assorted crazies send tirades addressed to Mr. Illustrious Historical Professor Jay Gould, University of Harvard.

On this stone-gray afternoon, the illustrious historical professor is finding all the attention a bit of a problem. His secretary is putting through calls approximately every two minutes, and Gould—an ebullient man with a near-perpetual smile—is simultaneously trying to discuss his life’s work and fend off a flood of petitioners. On his desk is the latest batch of correspondence, including a letter from a man who suggests a connection between AIDS and aspirin, and a plea from the husband of a woman who is addicted to Gould’s columns in Discover:: Will the author please send birthday greetings to the following address? This nets the correspondent a hastily scrawled turndown: ‘I am not public property, but a man!'”

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“[I Have] Watched A Woman In Silver Lamé Projectile-Vomit Inside A Glass Elevator”

June 10, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The perfect opening of “Shipping Out,” David Foster Wallace’s 2004 Harper’s reportage about the enforced happiness of the luxury-cruise industry, which was subsequently retitled, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”:

“I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as ‘Mon’ in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dancing the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.

I have seen a lot of really big white ships. I have seen schools of little fish with fins that glow. I have seen and smelled all 145 cats inside the Ernest Hemingway residence in Key west, Florida. I now know the difference between straight bingo and Prize-O. I have seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator. I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the two-four beat of the same disco music I hated pointing to the ceiling to in 1977.

I have learned that there are actually intensities of blue beyond very bright blue. I have eaten more and classier food than I’ve ever eaten, and done this during a week when I’ve also learned the difference between ‘rolling’ in heavy seas and ‘pitching’ in heavy seas. I have heard a professional cruise-ship comedian tell folks, without irony, ‘But seriously.’ I have seen fuchsia pantsuits and pink sport coats and maroon-and-purple warm-ups and white loafers worn without socks. I have seen professional blackjack dealers so lovely they make you want to clutch your chest. I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship’s Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the trapshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is.”

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In 1986, Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Mark Leyner discuss literature in the Information Age with that handsome, world-weary robot Charlie Rose:

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“He’s Stupid. He’s Clinically Stupid.”

May 19, 2011 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

Oriana Fallaci was one of the people who overreacted after the tragedy of 9/11, seeming to believe that the West was at war with Islam rather than terrorism. But she was pretty spot-on in her assessment of Muammar el-Qaddafi when coversing with that shock jock Charlie Rose in 2003.


More Oriana Fallaci posts:

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“A Snarling Schnauzer Came Out, Leaped Into The Air, And Clamped Onto Parker’s Leg”

March 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"He saw that his pants were torn and blood was running down his leg."

An excerpt from “The Million-Dollar Nose,” William Langewiesche’s 2000 Atlantic article about the sometimes-perilous life of oenophile Robert Parker, who holds great sway among the grape-squashing set:

“Parker was in his hotel room in Bordeaux one night, working on the day’s notes, when he got a phone call from Jacques Hébrard, the family manager of a famous chateau called Cheval Blanc,whose recent vintage Parker had described as a disappointment. Because Hébrard was very angry, Parker agreed to visit the chateau the following night, after his regular schedule of work, in order to retaste the wine. At the agreed-upon time he knocked on the chateau door. When it opened, a snarling schnauzer came out, leaped into the air, and clamped onto Parker’s leg. Hébrard stood in the doorway, staring into Parker’s face and making no attempt to intervene. After several attempts Parker managed to shake off the dog, which went tumbling into the night. Parker followed Hébrard into an office, where he saw that his pants were torn and blood was running down his leg. He asked Hébrard for a bandage. Hébrard came across the room and glanced disdainfully at the wound. Without saying a word, he went to the far side of a desk, pulled out a copy of The Wine Advocate, and slammed it down hard. He said, ‘This is what you wrote about my wine!’

In his simplified French, Parker said, ‘That’s why I’m here. To retaste it. Because you think I’m wrong.’

‘Well, I’m not going to let you retaste it.’

Parker got as belligerent as he gets. He said, ‘Look. I came here at the end of the day. You said I could taste your wine. I’ve been bitten by your dog. If I was wrong about this wine, I will be the first to say so.'”

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Parker queried in 2003 by Charlie Rose, who seems fairly fermented himself.

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Thomas Friedman And The Art Of Sucking

March 10, 2010 in Misc., Politics | Permalink

Either I start getting more oral sex or they'll be more wars. (Photo by Charles Haynes.)

There are those moments when you hear a talking head on TV say something so stupendously wrong-minded that it’s stunning. Since most of cable news is aimed at attention-grabbing shock, it’s not easy to stand out as colossal bonehead, but it happens occasionally.

I thought of one such occasion today when I read Thomas Friedman’s op-ed piece in the New York Times. He uses the column to try to convince readers that he was in favor of the Iraq War because he hoped it would bring about democracy in that nation, one that would be supported and sustained by Iraqis themselves.

But Friedman had a very different rationale in 2003 for his loud urging of an American invasion. That was when the columnist and best-selling author guested on the Charlie Rose Show to explain why the U.S. needed to go to war. The comments still stand out to me for their irrationality, immaturity and immorality. Every time Friedman tries to revise his reasons for being an Iraq War cheerleader, these statements should be brought up. An excerpt:

“We needed to go over there, basically take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?’ You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.

We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.”

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