Angel Hair Pasta And When Writing Sings

Have you ever made your favorite and famous pasta sauce, only to realize that there was no spaghetti in the pantry? Did you ever have to break open that months-old box of angel hair pasta- and then realize that your favorite and famous pasta sauce was even better with the more delicate angel hair pasta?

La Vida Vica is one of the best written blogs we have ever run across (we’ve said that before) and that truth hasn’t changed. In fact, La Vida Vica is better than ever.

The author’s writing isn’t riveting- it is enveloping, like the melody that you close your eyes to and allow to wash over you.

I have decided that capitalism is the way to alleviate the lack of tenderness in my life. I’m going to buy tenderness. I know that love is not supposed to be for sale. But no one ever said anything about tenderness being off the market.

I would like this wonderful guy that I know to sell me a couple of hours of tenderness. My plan is this. I’ll rent a movie, preferably a comedy. And we’ll flop down on the sofa and watch it together. Curled up like spoons. He doesn’t have to love me. Or say anything mushy. Just watch the movie. And laugh. I want to feel him laugh. I want to feel his body shake against mine.

Nothing funny. No liquor. No professions of romance. Just two hours of snuggly comfort on a couch. Horizontal human contact - without nudity, repercussions, embarrassment, expectations or weight. Just tenderness.

Try this prologue to what is a very funny post:

I took an older friend to a McDonald’s one evening as we were headed home from the movies. We just wanted a quick sit-down over something warm and Mickey D’s was right on the way. Maybe a nice cup of tea and a rectangular apple pie cushion. So far, so good.

We walk into the glossy typical local McDonald’s. Nothing unfamiliar here, I thought. The bland utilitarian faux-homey decor is obviously mandated by the home office. I know that McDonald’s shift styles across the nation and around the world, but who are they kidding? One whiff of the fast food aroma inside and you know exactly where you stand. We drift up to the registers…

Moving right along…

I know women talk too much about men. I know one fantastic gal who has too many men to talk about! The lucky little coot. She is delightful - and unusually enough - men have actually figured this out. But my man drought continues. Fear not. I am not about to rant with regard to my general undesirability.

The other day, I was telling her about a lovely lunch that I had with the most wonderful guy. We were supposed to eat with his girlfriend, who was a no-call-no-show. He wanted to know if I was still interested. Yesforcryingoutloud. Because I am not dead, I thought. Any woman with the ability to chew solid food would be interested in a whole lot more than lunch with you…

My oversubscribed gal pal asked what Mr. Lunch was like. When tempted to gush, I try to restrict myself to my three favorite adjectives. I had been pondering these in the shower that very morning…

My friendly neighborhood femme fatale is currently seeing three men. (No, no. She is not a ‘ho. She actually dates the old-fashioned way. Dinner. Dancing. Movies.) Count ‘em, three guys. Just so she can experience sweet, honest and funny. Yet I have found all of these sought after traits in one great masculine value package. His Girlfriend doesn’t realize how lucky she is. I would be happy to tell her. Perhaps a PowerPoint presentation detailing how Mr. Lunch differs from the male herd in so many positive ways? Maybe an intervention by single women who wish they weren’t? Or a short documentary film wherein other gals talk about all of the lunkheaded gits they have dated? That’s it! Fostering the appreciation of sweet, honest and funny - all while earning an Oscar nomination. Roll ‘em.

There are many more examples of great writing, great story telling and great insights (we especially liked Unwilling To Clean, I Redecorate).

La Vida Vica isn’t a great blog because the author is a great writer. La Vida Vica is a great blog because the author doesn’t keep her writing detached from her life, as many authors do. When that happens, the writing becomes a separate and distinct creation, no longer a part of the same organism. The melody might be pretty, but it is also artificial and formulaic.

The author of La Vida Vica writes of her life, as it is. It is a melody you won’t soon forget.

*UPDATED* Media Lies, UN Lies, And A Presidential Library

What are the implications 0f media deceit? A lot more than the endorsement of tired and failed political agendas and ideologies.In fact, media deceit has lead to an environment where the deaths and killings of innocents, so that some agendas are presented in a more favorable light than others.

It was the media that ignored the genocide that resulted in the death of over a million Africans in Rwanda, even as the UN military commander pleaded with UN higher ups for orders to defend the helpless victims that never came.

The deliberate lack of press coverage could not hide other truths. While Rwanda is correctly portrayed as yet another failure of the UN, they weren’t alone in their culpability. Even as the UN maintained it’s customary inertia , the American administration under Bill Clinton was asked to help. They refused. After the humiliating defeat in Somalia, Washington was delighted to wash it’s hands of Africa and Africans.

A month after the documented mass murders, David Rawson, Mr Clinton’s US ambassador to Rwanda, stated that the killings were a ‘disaster’ and then categorized the orchestrated genocide as ‘tribal killings’ and no more. This kind of cavalier attitude was reinforced by the state department. One US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State was told by her higher ups that “…these people do this from time to time.” [emp-SC&A]

To be sure, none of these truths will be displayed at the presidential library of the nation’s ‘first black president,’ Bill Clinton.

The Canadian general in charge of the UN forces, Romeo Dallaire, minces no words. Despite deliberate lack of press coverage (by the same people covering the war in Iraq today- SC&A), he clearly says that

They knew how many people were dying…the world is racist, Africans don’t count; Yugoslavians do. More people were killed injured, internally displaced and refugeed in 100 days in Rwanda than in the whole eight to nine years of the Yugoslavia campaign…

The failure of the media to report on the events in Rwanda has had a lasting impact to this very day. Dallaire went on to ask

Why didn’t the world react to the scenes where women were held as human shields so nobody could shoot back while the militia shot into the crowd?

Sound familiar? The Palestinians learned that would not be held accountable by the media. As long as they present themselves as ‘non white,’ there would be no standards of civilized behavior expected of them.

Why is that very same media not demanding that heaven and earth be moved to end the slaughter in Darfur? The NYT was more animated in it’s demand that Augusta change it’s rules and admit women as members.

Dallaire went on to ask why the world and media were silent when

…boys were drugged up and turned into child soldiers, slaughtering families?..Where girls and women were systematically raped before they were killed? Babies ripped out of their stomachs…Why didn’t the world come?

The world didn’t come because the media didn’t believe that what was happening in Rwanda was important enough. The media chose to cover the President’s sexual antics because in the end, they could make it appear as if the Mr Clinton were a victim. The media did not want to report on a president of the United States that watched and did nothing as over a million Africans were butchered. The media did not want to report on a President of the United States as morally bankrupt as they were.

The old saying that a leopard cannot change it’s spots is proving to be true.

Reuters published a story released by the United Nations News Agency (IRIN), which states definitively that

Israel began building an eight-metre high, 703km-long concrete barrier through the West Bank in the occupied Palestinian territories in 2002.

Israel says the wall is a security measure to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist attacks by Palestinian militants. When the barrier is completed, about 10 per cent of the West Bank will be inside Israel.

With that deceit, the legacy of the UN and the media is once more being cemented.

It is a fact that less than 3% of Israels’ security barrier is concrete. 97% is a chain link fence.

It is also a fact that the route of the security fence has less to do with politics and land than it does with security. Palestinian farmers will continue to have access to their lands. See this for Q’s and A’s regarding the security fence. This information is readily available and known to the media- information they deliberately choose to ignore, instead repeating the deceit and distortion they have come to represent because of an agenda that coincides with their own.

That the UN is a source of deceit is no surprise. In a organization where the majority of member states are led by dysfunctional and tyrannical states, it was inevitable that toxicity from those states and their ideologies would poison a world body originally conceived to liberate and free mankind. Like tyrannies everywhere, the UN attempts to control information and the release of information. As in all dysfunctional regimes, control of media outlets is a necessary componant in maintaining the status quo and in perpetuating an agenda.

In publishing the IRIN fantasy as ‘news,’ Reuters highlights the difference between themselves and Nazi era media outlets. Those German media outlets were forced to report the lies and deceit and of the Third Reich.

Reuters and most of the mainstream media are perfectly happy to report the ‘party line’ and agenda as real news, willingly and without coercion. They cannot be expected to be taken seriously.

Do you really believe you are getting the news out of Iraq?

For an even more explicit look at the MSM’s failings and agenda of deliberate deceit, see Dr Sanity’s Undoing. It’s an eye opener as to just how blatant media manipulation can be as they participate in an particular agenda. Even more importantly, her post highlights the utter disregard the media has for the truth and consumers of news, who expect fair, if not always unbiased news.

As long as media remain unaccountable, expect more of the same.

*UPDATED*

Larwynn brought Getting The News From The Enemy, Update, by Ace (Be sure to read his original post) to our attention. He notes how sources no longer need be credible to be considered acceptable by the media. He describes how MSNBC (among others) and

The MSM has been using bogus officials to supply chaos to their stories and based on those same stories has decided Iraq is now a official civil war.

Make sense?

There is a pattern, of course. The Anchoress has some terrific links, that serve to highlight the deliberate way in which the media distance themselves from reality- and the truth.

In an earlier piece (with more great links), The Anchoress links to an important Patterico post (the same one referred to by Ace).

It is a powerful piece that will make you very angry. The fakery is breathtaking. And sadly, Patterico’s example is not the only one…read on…

Finally, the ever concise and clear Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom adds a few thoughts of his own. In Willful Suspension Of Disbelief, he notes

For those who continue to suggest that the mainstream press has a negligible impact on elections, consider that the majority of Americans who bothered to pay any attention whatsoever to this story will be left with an account of horrific sectarian violence against women and children—and the belief that sectarian strife in Iraq is not only inexorable and savage, but pandemic…

Whether this narrative is the product of willful distortion or merely the laziness that comes with being fed stories that match your preconceptions is almost beside the point when it comes to effect—though the former is clearly more despicable, and, should it prove to be the case, has the practical effect of undermining a representative democracy that can only work properly if citizens are being given accurate accountings of events by those purporting to do so…

Of course, this kind of “journalism” has its parallels aimed at understanding our own benighted western savages—from Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas? to the huge overseas headline after the Bush reelection that posed the question (paraphrased from memory), ”how could 58 million people be so stupid?” So is it really any surprise that sanctimonious liberal progressives would find the Other that they champion in theory so perfectly distasteful in fact?—at least, before the savages have been assimilated and incorporated into the landscape of the soft-socialist’s utopian plantation like so many little brown lawn jockeys…?

Not much to argue with, is there?

Again, the question must be asked: Do you really believe that the MSM coverage of the war in Iraq and events in the middle east are accurate?