update: Jonathan Schell says that we’re screwed:

We are left in a situation that layers paradox upon paradox. A disastrous possible policy - military attack on Iran - has been headed off by a misguided, misinterpreted intelligence report …. But, report or no report, the danger that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons is real, and may even have increased. What’s missing is a policy to address it

The Brits are furious:

British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.

The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.

The IAEA and the French are withering in their analysis:

An unnamed senior official described by The New York Times as close to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN organization often derided as a soft on Iran by the Bush administration, scorned the U.S. agencies’ estimate as mushy.

“To be frank,” the official said, “we are more skeptical. We don’t buy the American analysis 100 percent. We are not that generous with Iran.”

In France, where the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, acting in coordination with Washington, has made vast efforts to enact separate European Union sanctions going beyond those of the UN Security Council, the report was characterized by an expert on nuclear proliferation as occasionally brushing close to the “hallucinatory.”

The expert, who requested not to be identified more specifically, said it was politically striking that the estimate began its “key judgments” section with its assertion that the Iranians halted work on weapons. This was described as notable since the report also acknowledged that “intelligence gaps” led two agencies, the National Intelligence Council and the Department of Energy, to question whether this conclusion had sufficient quality of information and corroboration.

Referring to the wide range of Iran’s possible weaponization activities (development of explosives and work on design, for example), those two agencies were only “moderately certain” that the entire Iranian weapons project came to a halt, the expert noted.

Whatever the fallout, though, it’s done now and can’t be undone—anotherb stellar performance from the Bush administration.

It’s hard not to sympathize with the stance of the president of the Hollywood writers’ union (West):

During an interview in his office here, Verrone described the looming negotiations with employers as a confrontation much grander than a simple fight over pay formulas. This battle would be about respect.

Writers, he said, were looking to restore a sense of leverage and status that had been lost as ever-larger corporations took control of the entertainment business. He described Hollywood as teetering on the brink of a dark age, as far as creative types were concerned.

“I think if they could do this business without us, they would, and so making our task as mechanical and simple and low-paying and unartistic as possible,” Verrone said. [e.a.]

Verrone is probably right—the studios would love to go about their business without having to accommodate “creative types.” But his timing is awful—all of the entertainment businesses are in total turmoil, their future profits unpredictable as technology changes the viewing habits of what was once a reliable audience.

And while Verrone hangs tough and demands jurisdiction for his union over new areas, the TV studios themselves are changing the face of the business:

One possibility is that networks will use the walkout as an opportunity to end their costly practice of presenting new programs to prospective advertisers in an elaborate spring road show known as the upfronts.

Instead, they might opt for simple visits to the main advertising agencies.

Networks could also use the strike to end a television development cycle that has them all chasing the same stars at the same time for fall programs that make their debuts en masse. Instead, they might develop new offerings throughout the year.

When the writers’ strike ends, they may have earned a modicum of “respect” (maybe),  but they will surely find a different entertainment landscape, and even more insecurity waiting for them.

There’s no end to what can be cooked up in the name of “reality TV,” the Times reported yesterday, and today’s Times reports the dismal results from the box office:

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 9 — Hollywood is counting on the impending arrival of a naughty chipmunk, a treasure hunter and Will Smith to reverse a lingering box office malaise that deepened over the weekend with disappointing sales for “The Golden Compass.”

The movie business is running into the 2007 home stretch with a serious limp. Measured in dollars, ticket sales for the crucial holiday season, which began Nov. 2, are down 6 percent through Sunday compared with last year, according to the box-office tracking company Media by Numbers. Attendance, meanwhile, is off by more than 10 percent.

Meanwhile, there’s entertainment a-plenty all over America for the former audience to indulge in.  Glenn Reynolds quotes an email he received about the surprising success (3 million copies sold so far) of the video game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Reynolds’s email correspondent writes [e.a.]:

At this rate it’ll be the successful game companies, that gives the pubic [sic] what they want, who’ll buy out the studios for their IP and name. Hollywood appears to have missed the impact of the technological shift as badly as MSM has. The public is getting the entertainment they crave, just not in the form that the old gatekeepers dispense.

Yep.

But I wouldn’t write off Hollywood. That would be a really stupid and big mistake.