With its flourishing art scene and influx of foreigners, Austria has experienced some strains.In 2000 the ultra-right wing xenophobic Freedom Party won a role in a coalition government with the conservative People's Party. In Vienna, a liberal enclave, 300,000 marchers protested. Artists called for boycotts.

Mr. Hentschlager, the artist, notes a benefit in the upheaval. After years of a left-wing government, the Freedom Party's success "split the country in half and forced people to leave their comfortable space and make statements about their beliefs," he says.

Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in Annandale-on- Hudson, N.Y., and an expert on Viennese music, sees a galvanizing effect in the shakeup.

"Without energetic politics, dissent, and internal criticism, art-making is difficult," he says. "Democracy has come alive in Austria. The reaction has been an explosion of writing, filmmaking, and composing, which is a very creative moment. Artists have something to say."

Politics is art's friend, as long as they don't get into bed together. Even that can work sometimes (e.g. Neil Young's "Ohio" and El Lissitzky's political posters), but it puts an expiration date on the piece. If didacticism is where you're headed, just go straight into politics.

Telephone and emailed death threats began deluging the home of the humanitarian worker's parents, Doreen and Stuart Shapiro, in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. Some callers promised that they would suffer a "fiery death."

Posters went up in the Brooklyn neighborhood urging passersby to call a phone number that carried a recorded message describing Adam Shapiro as a traitor and comparing him to John Walker Lindh, the young American man who was captured during the US massacre of Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan and now faces trial on charges of conspiracy and aiding terrorism. The recording also provided an address, which it gave as the home of the Shapiro family.

Right-wing Zionist factions from the Jewish Defense League to Betar denounced Shapiro in demonstrations, while a web site of one of the groups gave out personal information about family members, urging action against them.

The intensity of the calls for violence compelled Shapiro's parents, both New York City public school teachers, to flee the city, while his brother, Noah, a Manhattan attorney, is under constant police guard. [link via U]

First and foremost, you cannot trust any foreigners apart from the Americans. Take Communism away from the Russians and the Eastern Bloc countries and you're left with a bunch of gangsters and freeloaders. The Chinese think they're superior and the Middle East is full of people who dress oddly and don't go to church.

Only the Americans have moral right. This is because they speak English, are devout Christians and are very, very big. Anything they chose to do on the global stage is not only defensible, but desirable. Look at their actions in Vietnam and Nicaragua. If America demands that Saddam Hussein should go, Iraq and the rest of the world should respect that. If everyone took heed of this there would be no more wars.

Facing a deeply skeptical audience, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administrator Asa Hutchinson defended America's "war on drugs" Wednesday, saying prosecution and interdiction efforts had contributed to significant declines in drug use.

After Hutchinson's remarks at a Rice University drug conference, a succession of experts from health institutions, activist groups and even the criminal justice system disputed virtually everything he said. [U]

The Venezuelan President, anxious to restore a veneer of stability, has played down suggestions that Washington was involved. Asked if the US might have been involved in the coup, he said: "The root is here."

But his officials are investigating reports that a US-registered private plane was ready to fly him into exile from La Orchila, a Caribbean island retreat for the presidency, where Mr Chavez was being held. .

But the affair has made the US look stupid. Washington, even as it trumpets support for democracy and human rights, stands accused of conniving at the overthrow of a democratically elected leader in its own hemispheric backyard.

Doubly embarrassing, the US was almost alone in not denouncing the coup. Several other governments, led by Mexico, condemned it and refused to recognise an interim government installed by the military.

The fear now is that other restless generals in Central and South America may interpret the Bush administration's response to the Venezuelan crisis as a tacit green light for other coups to get rid of troublesome civilian leaders.
[link]

Narco News, for our part, has reported about Venezuela and offered media criticism of the professional simulators for the past two years. On September 18, 2000, we published "NY Times CIA Apologist Rohter Invades Venezuela Territory."

On February 1, 2001, we praised Chávez's unprecedented decision to place a civilian statesman at the helm of the nation's armed forces, after it was discovered that certain corrupt military leaders - from the same faction that deposed the elected president at gunpoint last week - were conspiring with Colombia's vicious AUC terrorist organization to form paramilitary death squads in Venezuela. We warned, more than a year ago, that the Bush administration in cahoots with rogue military officials and Colombian paramilitary groups had launched a plan "to destabilize the Chávez government from within."

Seven weeks ago, we went way out on a limb (and received no small amount of hate mail, as a result, from members of the spoiled brat elite classes of Venezuela) for a February 20, 2002 analysis we published by Narco News correspondent Kim Alphandary. It was titled: "Venezuela Faces U.S. Coup Plot: Washington Seeks End to World's Truest Democracy." [link via Grabbe]

It seemed a fait accompli, but it is at this moment that Chavez' policies began paying dividends. First, his supporters in the slums of Caracas and elsewhere were told of a different version of events, and, with a literacy rate that has tripled in the last 6 years, they could read that story. Within two days, a march on the presidential palace was organized, and as also on the coup-supporting television stations. A civilian Metropolitan Police drove away the private security forces that the media companies had hired - El Universal admitted as much on the night of the 13th. The improved phone and communications infrastructure enabled word to spread throughout the country, and several military commanders refused to recognize the junta, saying that it violated the constitution.

The junta's plans began unraveling further when the Interior Minister - who they accused of being the man who gave the orders to shoot - escaped a lynch mob that they had organized. The National Assembly reconvened in the liberated presidential palace, swore in Chavez' vice-president as an interim president "until the president is returned", and sent the National Guard to detain Cremona and other junta members. [this link and the last via Bush Watch]

Mr. Bush doesn't seem to realize that nuances are what his own administration is belatedly trying to master -- and must -- if Colin Powell is going to hasten a cease-fire in the Middle East. Mr. Bush doesn't seem to know that since the routing of the Taliban his moral clarity has atrophied into simplistic, often hypocritical sloganeering. He has let his infatuation with his own rectitude metastasize into hubris.

The result -- the catastrophe of the administration's handling of the Middle East -- is clear: 15 months of procrastination and conflict avoidance followed by a baffling barrage of mixed messages that have made Mr. Bush's use of the phrase "without delay" the most elastically parsed presidential words since his predecessor's definition of sex. It takes some kind of perverse genius to simultaneously earn the defiance of the Israelis, the Palestinians and our Arab "allies" alike and turn the United States into an impotent bystander.

The ensuing mess should be a wake-up call for Mr. Bush to examine his own failings and those of his administration rather than try (as he did a week ago) to shift the blame to Bill Clinton's failed Camp David summit talks (and then backpedal after being called on it). While the conventional wisdom has always had it that this president can be bailed out of foreign-policy jams by his seasoned brain trust, the competing axes of power in the left (State) and right (Defense) halves of that surrogate brain have instead sent him bouncing between conflicting policies like a yo-yo, sometimes within the same day.

At stake -- how TV is delivered and paid for, and the possible end of TV as the medium and cultural unifier we're used to.

In a nutshell: DVRs can automatically record every episode of favorite programs with a single command regardless of when those shows are broadcast. They let users pause, instantly replay or "slo-mo" live television while the rest of the program is being recorded. They can also create theme channels of, say, actors or directors--a Halle Berry or Billy Wilder channel--or cooking shows or sports events or whatever else strikes a viewer's fancy.

There's another critical benefit to consumers, if not to advertisers: depending on which DVR you have, you can either zip through commercials using three different speeds or jump over them with a 30-second skip button.

[...]

The ReplayTV 4000 is nothing less than a shot across the bow of the major media conglomerates, which fear the devices will trigger the collapse of mass media as we know it. Programming will be Napsterized by ReplayTV 4000 users, they charge, allowing large numbers of people to share ad-stripped television shows illegally.

[...]

"[SonicBlue's] unlawful scheme attacks the fundamental economic underpinnings of free television ... and hence the means by which the [studio's] copyrighted works are paid for," reads one studio complaint. "Advertisers will not pay to have their ad[s] placed within television programming delivered to viewers when [they] will be invisible to viewers. ... By undermining the engine by which content is produced, this unlawful feature will inevitably dry up the source and diminish the quality of the programming that most Americans have come to expect and demand."

In the contemporary United States it is almost always the people at the bottom of the virtue/value scale -- the adult poor, the non-white, the unmarried, the non-heterosexual, and the nonreproductive -- who are said to be creating the crisis that is mobilizing the mainstream public sphere to fight the good fight on behalf of normal national culture, while those in power are left relatively immune. -- Lauren Berlant