SANTORUM, IMPRESSARIO OF BATSHIT

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

New blog can be found at http://redroom.com/member/ivan-g-goldman/blog/santorum-impressario-of-batshit

The Ring is Counted Out: Boxing’s duplicity devours an honest magazine

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

My story about the alien spore of Golden Boy Promotions eating the brain of Ring magazine, a triumph of capitalism over sport, is now online & fully accessible to all at the Columbia Journalism Review site. Here are the first few paragraphs, followed by a link to the entire article.

Let’s get two things straight. One, last September I was fired from The Ring, the venerable boxing magazine, along with editor in chief Nigel Collins and most of the editorial staff. Two, I had it coming.

So I’m not as bitter about my dismissal as you might expect, even though no one from the company told me I’d been canned or even informed me that my next column and a scheduled feature were no longer welcome. As a non-employed contractor in our brave new world of semi-employed twenty-first century servitude, I had to perceive I was fired. We all know how these arrangements work. Non-employees float in an opaque legal gelatin that can wash out from under us at any time. But remember, I had it coming.

Who killed Davey Moore …
“Not me,” says the boxing writer …
No, you can’t blame me at all.
—from “Who Killed Davey Moore?” by Bob Dylan

The brain damage detected in so many ex-fighters makes the sport basically indefensible. I didn’t wait until I was fired to say that. My Ring column pointed out for years that basic safety rules were routinely ignored without consequence to presiding officials. I issued anti-awards, called Magoos, to dangerous twits like Arthur Mercante Jr., the New York referee who stood in the ring and watched George Khalid Jones methodically beat twenty-six-year-old Beethavean Scottland to death in 2001. Mercante and others like him earned Magoos over and over. Nothing changed. Most fans get angry when a corner or a referee stops a fight. They want to see losers punched unconscious. If a guy’s eyeball is hanging from a string, heck, it’s still attached, isn’t it?

http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_ring_is_counted_out.php

NEW BLOG ENTRY

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

Thanks all for checking out my blog. I've pretty much moved operations to http://www.redroom.com/author/ivan-g-goldman

You go there, look to your left and scroll down. You'll be able to click on my latest blog. I now use RedRoom for new blog entries because it actually drives traffic (I hate net jargon) to my site. Although blogspot is fine, I'm pretty much on my own here.

IRAQ BOOBY PRIZE, BUFFETT, FAST FOOD JOBS [LATEST BLOGS ON REDROOM]

http://redroom.com/member/ivan-g-goldman

REDIRECTING

For technical reasons I won't get into I'm blogging these days from RedRoom.com. Check it out at http://www.redroom.com/author/ivan-g-goldman

Thanks.

AFGHANISTAN SPEECH USES DEBATE TRICK

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

One thing we didn’t hear in the president’s Afghanistan speech is the fact that when he took office there were 32,000 U.S. troops there. He’d already more than doubled their number before the surge. His speech was a masterful costume designed to cover up his nakedness.

We “will bring home a total of 33,000 troops by next summer, fully recovering the surge I announced at West Point,” he said. Exactly. But not recovering the approximately 35,000 troops he added in his first escalation. The speech was a deft bait and switch, using the old debating trick of debating a fact that’s beside the point. In the photo above, notice the middle finger of the soldier in the foreground. An eloquent response to U.S. strategy as it translates on the ground. He was photographed in Iraq, but the sentiment encompasses Afghanistan too, the other morass of choice.

A more germane point than the one Obama tried to make is that he escalated the war in Afghanistan before the "surge" and will sustain that escalation. And the real point is that the war is pointless. The speech had nothing to do with formulating any kind of rational policy because there isn't any. The 65,000 troops that will be stuck in the graveyard of empires at the end of his term (after that the number becomes really murky) will be ordered to tell Afghans over and over that we won’t quit, we won’t let them down. But of course we will pretty much quit eventually, we will let them down, just as they’ve let us down. They failed to welcome our occupation. Imagine that.

We’ll let them down mostly by not quite leaving. Not exactly. The oligarchs who run our war policy from stations inside and outside the government are against leaving any of our war theaters. We’re still in Japan, Korea, Germany, etc., etc. And we’re building permanent bases in Iraq and Afghanistan as we speak. We will leave these places only when we get a president who has the courage to lead us out, because it takes far more courage to take out the trash than it does to let it sit there for the next president.

So our soldiers and Marines patrolling these villages, under orders to lie and say we’re really committed to Afghanistan's welfare, will know that what they're saying makes no sense at all and isn't true. Bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The 9/11 attacks were launched mostly from cells in Germany, not Afghanistan. We have a broken infrastructure and Americans lack jobs and die for lack of medical care. We have no good reason to try to remake Afghanistan into Nebraska. The villagers know this too. They know they're being lied to. We know it, and the president knows it.

So it was a clever speech, but cowardly and ultimately untrue.

PICTURE TELLS US ITS THOUSAND WORDS ON OUR AFGHANISTAN POLICY (MEMORIAL DAY ENTRY)

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

The policy of never-ending war and occupation waged in the name of the American people is not without consequences.