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BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis
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August 31, 2003
As if Baghdad did not have enough troubles
: Now it has to contend with Lycraed bikers. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Salam Pax, bound
: Tom Coates got hold of an advance copy of Salam Pax' book, set to be released in the U.S. in October, says Amazon (but on Sept. 5 in Britain, says Amazon there).
Coates says that in present tense, he found Salam's weblog "essentially unreadable," but he decrees that in hindsight, it is "an abiding - albeit small - artefact of life on the ground during the second war in Iraq."
He also says -- and I agree with this -- that because Salam was a witness from there, not here, he helped us listen to new perspectives. The same can be said of Iranian weblogs, I'd say.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: I wonder whether Salam's 15 minutes are long since over. I wonder whether his book will sell now, so many months after the war. The reason I wonder is that the buzz about him has subsided greatly recently, partly because he has had less to say online, partly because he is no longer the only witness there. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
May caption contests abound
: Bush drops his dog. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Winning the peace
: Gene at Harry's place (darn, that's confusing) points us to John McCain's Washington Post op-ed today criticizing our postwar progress in Iraq: A recent visit to Iraq convinced me of several things. We were right to go to war to liberate Iraq. The Iraqi people welcome their liberation from tyranny. A free Iraq could transform the Middle East. And failure to make the necessary political and financial commitment to build the new Iraq could endanger American leadership in the world, empower our enemies and condemn Iraqis to renewed tyranny.
If we are to avoid a debate over who "lost" Iraq, we must act urgently to transform our military success into political victory....
We do not have time to spare. If we do not meaningfully improve services and security in Iraq over the next few months, it may be too late. We will risk an irreversible loss of Iraqi confidence and reinforce the efforts of extremists who seek our defeat and threaten Iraq's democratic future....
Iraq must be important to us because it is so important to our enemies. That's why they are opposing us so fiercely, and why we must win. He is all the more correct, of course, after the terrorist bombings in Iraq, which I'll bet come from al-Queda et al. As Tom Friedman said today: o one can say with any certainty who was behind the bombings at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the Shiite holy place in Najaf, but here is what you can say about them: They are incredibly sick and incredibly smart.
With one bomb at the U.N. office, they sent a warning to every country that is considering joining the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq: Even the U.N. is not safe here, so your troops surely won't be. They also stoked some vicious finger-pointing within the Western alliance. And with the bomb Friday in Najaf, they may have threatened the most pleasant surprise about post-Saddam Hussein Iraq: the absence of bloodletting between the three main ethnic groups — Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. After the Najaf bombing, Shiites started blaming Sunnis, and Shiites started blaming each other. Gene also says that pro-war bloggers have been notably silent on the problems in postwar Iraq. He's right. We have to show support not only for the war but also for investing the resources necessary to build the peace.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Whodathunkit?
: Perry de Havilland escapes to Bratislava and reports: I had always thought that Amsterdam and Zagreb were locked in mortal combat to see which had the most beautiful women per square kilometer but now I realize that those two august cities were just battling it out for second place. I do not think I have ever seen as many extraordinarily attractive young ladies in my life. Bratislava is, to use the technical term, seething with babes. : A further report here. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The soundtrack of our lives
: Adam Curry is pushing for an audio RSS.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 30, 2003
The memorial
: The NY Times has a substantial -- but ultimately unsatisfying -- package on the 9.11 memorial in Sunday's Arts & Leisure section.
In the lead essay, Michael Kimmelman contemplates -- without finding conclusion -- the use of names in memorials. The competition guidelines for the memorial at ground zero require that the design "recognize each individual who was a victim" on Sept. 11, 2001, and on Feb. 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked. It's a safe bet that many of the 5,200 submissions interpret that as some kind of list of names. By aesthetic and social consensus, names are today a kind of reflexive memorial impulse, lists of names having come almost automatically to connote "memorial," just as minimalism has come to be the presumptive sculptural style for memorial design, the monumental blank slate onto which the names can be inscribed. I can't say anything about my own proposed memorial, for we're forbidden by the rules of the anonymous competition from revealing our plans to the media, but I did address the issue of names because it's clear to me that the names are not enough. Just listing the names marks only the deaths of victims, not their lives. The memorial must to do more. I have my humble suggestion. There are other, better solutions, I am sure. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: More in the package:
: Herbert Muschamp writes a story that is at first antiseptic, then twee, then borderline offensive as he describes the current design in distant, aesthetic terms and then criticizes a pamphlet calling for a Museum of Freedom at the site: Throughout the ground zero design process, many New Yorkers have felt "powerful and powerless at the same time." They have spoken, but with little conviction that they are being heard. Should I have a turn at such a mouthpiece, this is what I would say:
Not everyone saw the twin towers as symbols of freedom. For some, they represented the Kafkaesque mental enslavement of government bureaucracy and dull office routine. For others, they stood for Rockefeller power: for oil, that is to say, and the bizarre things we do to satisfy our need for it.
NOT everyone thinks that the United States is ideally poised at this moment to point fingers at "places that lack basic human freedoms." ...
Ideally, I would like to voice such opinions without being branded a traitor, a pro-terrorist, or a person opposed to freedom. That all-caps "NOT" is a typographical accident online -- that's where a drop cap appears in print -- but it is like a political Freudian slip, revealing Muschamp's real point and the point I found offensive.
: A story on the " culture derby" erupting downtown.
: James Sanders says New York has an aversion to memorials and he explains why.
: A story on those who would rebuild the Twin Towers.
: A profile of David Childs, who's designing the Freedom Tower.
: And a story that reports little but speculates much on the process of selecting the memorial. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: It's an impressive, ambitious lot of stories. But ultimately, it's soulless, bloodless, like a parody of Arts & Leisure stories where art imitates art and never life.
The package treats New York as an unfinished sculpture in a dehumidified, silent, white museum, not a place where people live, a place that now must remember both its horror and its heroes. That's what this memorial is about, not aesthetics or politics or culture or architecture. It is about life and death.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: After reading the Times, go read Michele and see how a person with a beating heart is affected by the place, without a memorial.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
It's not a campaign, it's a spa
: Arianna Huffington presents her handy seven rules of campaigning:
- Absolutely no alcohol. Not even a sip of wine from somebody else's glass.
- No carbs. Although I must admit I broke down on the airplane and had a bag of pretzels. But it was a really tiny bag.
- Absolutely no high heels.
- Drink lots and lots and lots of water. And when you think you've drunk enough, drink another bottle
4a. Make sure you have a well-trained advance person who always knows where the closest bathroom is.
- Keep plenty of blotting tissue handy for dealing with shiny patches in-between interviews. Especially if, like me, you have Greek olive oily skin - it's great for wrinkles, but bad for TV.
- An ample supply of café lattes.
- And, most importantly, it helps to no end to have a set of ideas you passionately believe in - and that you don't mind saying again and again and again and again and again and again..
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Sexist twaddle
: As a man, I'm offended by this bigoted foolishness from a New School twit writing for Pacific News Service: President Bush may not face much opposition in Congress to his plan for perpetual preemptive war, but he better watch out for the women.
Angry over the swagger of violence coming out of the White House, disgusted by the bring-them-on itch for a fight as the solution to political problems, women around the globe are organizing in new ways.
These gender activists are on the Internet, in the streets, packed into rooms forming more groups and pushing resolutions through the United Nations. What's most offensive is that they lump together bin Laden and Bush and act as if the problem is testosterone, not terrorism. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Kelly's case for war
: The Guardian finds a piece written by Dr. Kelly supporting regime change and war: A remarkable article by Dr David Kelly, published for the first time today, reveals the government scientist's true views ahead of the war on Iraq and his expert assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
In a development which could have a major influence on the Hutton inquiry, Kelly said that, although the threat was 'modest', he believed military action was the only way to 'conclusively disarm' the country.
He also argued that there was evidence Saddam still had chemical and biological weapons and regime change, the policy of the United States, was the only way to stop the Iraqi dictator....
Kelly's article reveals a hawkish stance on Iraq which will come as some comfort to Number 10. 'Iraq has spent the past 30 years building up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction [WMD],' he wrote. 'Although the current threat presented by Iraq militarily is modest, both in terms of conventional and unconventional weapons, it has never given up its intent to develop and stockpile such weapons for both military and terrorist use.'
Kelly argues that any co-operation with UN weapons inspectors was superficial and that rockets specifically for chemical and biological use had been found.
Take that, Blair bashers. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Dr. Kelly's own conclusion: Perhaps the real threat from Iraq today comes from covert use of such weapons against troops or by terrorists against civilian targets worldwide. The link with al-Qaeda is disputed, but is, in any case, not the principal terrorist link of concern. Iraq has long trained and supported terrorist activities and is quite capable of initiating such activity using its security services.
The long-term threat, however, remains Iraq's development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction - something that only regime change will avert. : It's time to give the Guardian credit: They have covered the Hutton inquiry well and fairly even as it tightens the noose around Andrew Gilligan and the BBC.
Meanwhile, do you think Gilligan has started looking for a new job? torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The Party's party
: The Daily Kos takes a page from Howard Dean's playbook and says Meetups have worked so well for him that plain ol' Democrats should meetup, too: The progressive grassroots can start wielding the influence it deserves on the Democratic Party by self-organizing as well. And I'm not just talking about the DNC, but also state and local parties.
We can do a lot of good by banding together and working to help elect Democrats at all levels of government. MeetUp can provide the vehicle for that self-organizing -- especially in places were the local Democratic Parties are moribund, ineffective, or non-existant. I'm thinking of setting up a meeting for real liberals (read with a German accent, as in real politik) but I'm afraid only Roger L. Simon and Michael J. Totten would show up. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
RSS and sliced bread
: Lots of people are jumping on the mail-is-dead-long-live-RSS bandwagon. See Chris Pirillo and Steve Outing. In theory, I agree: RSS is a good delivery mechanism for newsletters (but clearly not personal email) because there can be no spam; you get only the feeds you ask for.
But, as I've said before, there's a problem: RSS readers are not ready for prime time. They're getting better. After Newzcrawler ate all my feed info and hard work, I started using Bloglines, web-based reader, and, by Outing's recommendation, Feed Demon, a downloaded client and they're both good. (Yeah, I know, you Macites have great readers but you are, sadly, a minority smaller than one-legged, left-handed, stuttering, albino Navajos.)
Here's the problem: The audience using RSS readers is tiny. That isn't going to stop me from publishing lots of RSS in my business -- headlines and, yes, newsletters. It's a good thing and a coming trend.
But the truth remains: If you're an email newsletter publisher and you have to convince your customers to have to download and set up a new program, you're sunk.
The only way RSS is going to work for business is if it is integrated into Internet Explorer.
So, at last, here's my point for all the RSS evangelists out there: You should be making a pilgrimage to Redmond to sell Microsoft on the need to integrate RSS into IE (as well as Outlook). Pirillo, Winer, et al: Hop that next jet west. And there are lots of RSS-informed Microsoft bloggers; enlist them in the cause; get them to start selling RSS inside the fortress.
That is the one sure thing that will make RSS take off. Without that, sad but true, RSS will remain just a neat geek thing. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: A commenter reminds me of a point I forgot to make: Of course, the Mozilla folks and other open-sourcers should be integrating RSS into their work to put additional pressure on Redmond. But, of course, IE is the homerun for it is the ubiquitous client.
Oh, and putting pressure on AOL would be good, too. AOL is providing RSS feeds of its new blogs (pat them on the back) but not providing its huge audience with a way to utilize them (hello, left hand, I'd like you to meet the right hand). torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 29, 2003
'I'm here to move love to the top of your to-do list'
: It's a mistake to judge a series by its preseason promos but if we were to do that, Alicia Silverstone's Miss Match would be sure be be a bomb, based on lines like that. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Send the man some Prozac spam
: Matt Welch points to evidence that Bill O'Reilly is starting to crack under the strain.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: More evidence here. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
A simple request
: A simple request to the wonderful group blogs I read (you know who you are, Corante and Hit & Run and Command Post and Harry): Put the name of the post's author at the top of the post so I can hear the right voice as I start to read. Also, put your authors' names in the RSS feed. Thank you. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The bloggers on the bus
: Dave Winer tells candidates how to blog and echoes my call to let bloggers on the campaign bus.
Bloggers should also be credentialed to cover the conventions (see wi-fi and conventions, below). I plan to do just that myself. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Told ya
: I told you it would happen: Somebody would dig up fresh dirt on Arnold's past lifestyle -- and it wouldn't make a difference in the campaign, freeing up future politicians to become human again and not priests supposed saints.
LA Observed has the backstory on the digging up of Arnold's Oui interview by Mickey Kaus and its subsequent publication at The Smoking Gun. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The left shall rise again
: John Podhoretz in the NY Post does the left the favor of listening to them, recognizing their growing movement, and advising them how to succeed: THE rise of an ardent, passionate, angry and engaged left is the most important political story of 2003.
The hottest book of the new publishing season is Al Franken's "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)." Joe Conason of the New York Observer has a fast-selling tome called "Big Lies." At the end of September comes "The Lies of George Bush" by David Corn of the Nation magazine, which will likely hit the bestseller list as well.
The triumphant success of Howard Dean's once-quixotic presidential campaign in marshaling genuine grass-roots support and money over the Internet demonstrates that there is a large and hungry audience in the land for a leftist political-cultural message. Yow. It sounds as if he's ready to convert. Not. He still sees the devil in the left: The Dean campaign is a more mainstream outgrowth of the popular demonstrations against the Iraq war organized last winter by the Stalinist anti-Semites of International ANSWER. Yow, again. But then he hits his stride making two important points about the political reaction to FoxNews and about the left's agenda. First, Fox: Part of what fuels this alliance is a feeling of powerlessness — of not being heard, of not being paid attention to. Note the rise of what I like to call "Foxanoia," the lunatic theory popular these days in leftist circles that the Fox News Channel has become the dominant voice in all of America and is controlling every piece of information that gets out to the American people. I'll second that motion and amend it: The anti-Fox craze also reveals (pardon my standard screed here) an essential snobbiness to the left these days. The left used to be the people's cause, the Democratic party the people's party. But with the age of disapproving, PC snips, the left became a culture of snobs. Labor ties aside, they look down upon the mall masses. And that's why they don't understand the popularity of Fox and its balls-out opinions. That's why theirs has become a smaller movement.
Podhoretz is right, though, to sense a spark of growth in energy if not numbers in the left thanks to George Bush: These folks believe a grotesque, nearly cosmic unfairness is going on — a wrong that must be righted. Everything — everything — has gone wrong since 2001. "The Bush administration has done virtually nothing good for the country," says Michael Tomasky, who as editor-elect of the American Prospect magazine will be making the more cerebral versions of the arguments offered in Franken's unabashed screed.
That is a powerful glue, the perfect opinion for the rise of a mass movement.
The problem for the Foxanoia axis is this: What, aside from hating Bush and the Fox News Channel, do they believe in? Right again, I'm sorry to say. The left has become the negative side. That used to be the right's job: to resist change, to complain. (Now don't give me hell in my comments and email, you conservative gabsters out there. I know I'm oversimplifying. Let me make my point. And note that I'm agreeing with a conservative columnist here, ferchrissake. Step away from that keyboard!). Now the left is complaining about everything that's wrong and about its enemies, Fox and Bush. That won't get them very far, in elections or in governance.
So Podhoretz suggests that they need to come up with a more positive agenda and he's right; it's the best advice the left can get from a sworn enemy. Yes, the left is rising. But for the left to truly challenge the right for dominance of the intellectual debate, its leaders and thinkers will need to be able to offer a picture of a better, safe and wealthier United States. Listen to the guy. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: More on the left and its causes: Matthew Yglesias says reforming Alabama's taxes is a more important issue than stopping the crackpot "judge" from etching granite. Gene at Harry's blog agrees and points to David Bromwich's piece that says: "It is sometimes said that the left won the culture war of the late 1960s and the right won the political war."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Ted Barlow asks a good question in the comments: Left-wingers criticize Fox for being biased, unfair and deceptive. At the same time, right wingers have been criticizing the New York Times and the BBC for being biased, unfair and deceptive.
We could talk forever about the validity of these sets of claims, but they're beside the point. Jeff, you say that the left-wing anti-FOX craze reveals an essential snobbery. Hmm. What does the right-wing anti-NY Times and anti-BBC craze reveal? Yes, I think that the right's paranoia about the NY Times is quite revealing -- of its paranoia, mainly.
But I'll counter that that's besides the point here. The point is not who's biased and who's not or who's right and who's not but instead what the left is missing in not having its own FoxNews, its own balls-out opinions, its own sense of populism.
Politics is marketing and the right and FoxNews know that better than the left. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Too many last words
: Yesterday, I heard a shrink on TV say that people would react differently to the release of the Port Authority 9/11 transcripts that filled the papers today: Some people need to know more; some would stay away. I wasn't sure which I would be.
Well, I read them all. It was painful, again, bringing memories back to the surface, reopening wounds. But I read them.
There are tragic mistakes: telling people to stay put. Who could have known?
There are stories of heroism, pieced together now. Jim Dwyer in the Times tells how two PA employees saved at least 50 people trapped on the 88th and 89th floors of the north tower. I look at the picture of one of them, Frank De Martini, with his beautiful children and I start counting the broken hearts again.
There are stories of helplessness; all the papers quote the assistant manager of Windows on the World dutifully calling, asking when help will arrive, telling the police that air is running out fast, even asking permission to break a window.
There are stories of wisdom, such as PATH dispatchers getting all their passengers and employees safely out of harm's way. I was one of them.
Yes, I had to read it all. I'm not sure why. I think it is a matter of keeping witness, of making sure we remember the horror and the heroism of the day.
As the second anniversary fast approaches, I had feared that we were trying to forget too quickly; TV is paying scant attention to the day and that is wrong, for we must remember.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: See the stories and transcripts here. Star-Ledger: 1, 2, 3. New York Times: 1, 2. Newsday: 1, 2, 3.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: The Port Authority, which was sued to release the transcripts, said: Because of the sheer volume of these materials, it is impossible to summarize their details. In general, they show people performing their duties very heroically and very professionally on a day of unimaginable horror.
Representatives of media organizations have assured us that they are interested in this material solely to evaluate emergency response on September 11, and to recount heroism. We take them at their word, and fully expect them to refrain from publishing gruesome, gratuitous or personal details that do nothing to further this discussion. We also hope and expect that the media will show appropriate respect for the families of the heroes of September 11, particularly as the second anniversary of that painful day approaches. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Our man in Kabul
: Ben Hammersley goes shopping: One store we visited tried to sell me a bullwhip. Ah, cool, I thought. Indiana Jones. No, says the shopkeeper, from the Taliban time. For women, he says, and looks away. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 28, 2003
Wi-Fi and the political conventions
: Will the Democratic and Republican conventions be wi-fi'ed?
They should be.
The press should demand it: instant communication.
The delegates should demand it: instant politicking.
We should demand it: Instant blogging, a new perspective on what has become a dull, predictable, stage-managed, unimportant event.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Update: In the comments comes this fascinating insight into technology and TV news from someone at ABC News: Greetings:torrent Magic Swap 3.6
I read your post about Wi-Fi at the political conventions with great interest. I am a project manager for the operations division of ABC News and we are actively working with both parties to encourage them to make Wi-Fi available not only at the conventions but also during the primaries.
We are planning to use Wi-Fi for our own production oriented activites including email and, to a lesser degree, for sending video files to our news room. ABC News has trained a number of its correspondents to shoot video in the field and transmit it using a laptop and DV camera. : When I complained about having problems with my high-speed access at Doubletree (did I remember to tell you: Doubletree sucks?), a quick-thinking of marketing at Wayport popped right in to offer his help.
Let's see who's quickest on this: Who will volunteer to wi-fi the conventions and primaries for media, participants -- and bloggers, getting great publicity and goodwill in the process: Wayport, T-Mobile, Boingo.... torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Geek love
: Cory Bergman finds a frightening bit of sociology in his TiVo newsletter: Talk about a geek loser. A Brooklyn man says he used TiVo's digital photo feature to propose to his girlfriend. Ted Linhart streamed a picture of himself holding a sign that read "Will You Marry Me?" to his living room DVR so that his gal Rachel would see the on-screen proposal as she walked through the door. Unbelievably, she said yes. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
 Belch: I was dying to go to In 'n' Out Burger... until I saw this. Layne, Welch, what do you have to say to this?
 torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Voices of September 11th
: Michele was aghast that media plan to pay little attention to the second anniversary of September 11, so she started Voices, a project to gather memories and reflections on the day.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Come on down!
: FoxNews has been playing and replaying a clip of Sean Hannity's show in which he quizzes Arnold Schwarzenegger on issues, one after another.
If the California campaign is a game show, this is the lightning round. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
A better man than I, Gunga Din
: John McCarthy, the British journalist who was held hostage by Islamic Jihad for more than five years, is returning to Beirut and also going to Iraq and Iran to do a TV documentary. I'd bring along some Marines, a few Mossad veterans, and P Diddy's posse, if I were him. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Howard Dean has nothing on me
: My embryonic experiment in hyperlocal blogging has attracted the attention of a local politician running for county office. The guy's a Democrat in the land of suburban Republicans. I've told him he should blog. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Our guys in Afghanistan
: Ben Hammersley finds another Afghanistan blogger, an aid worker: We just had one of our expats resign today after only two weeks.
She's never travelled outside of Europe before and I think Kandahar is freaking her out. I guess it's not for everybody this bouncing around war zones swatting flies and trying to come to terms with 45 C daily temperatures. Sometimes I wake up feeling like Martin Sheen in the opening ten minutes of Apocalypse Now and go to bed feeling like Brando in the last ten minutes. Mr. Kurtz could live here in splendid madness as easily as Vietnam or the Congo. Armed thugs ripping around the IDP camp last night set the tone for the whole bloody day. One shitty thing after another. : And Ben files another report from a Kabul Internet cafe (I think we're leaving the stone age): Yesterday I moved from my hotel into the spare room of the house of the correspondent here for Radio France. Sebastian is trying to start a little side business by renting out rooms, drivers and LandCruiser he is about to buy, to visiting journos and documentary crews. His driver, Babrack, although probably not spelt that way, is an ex-Mujahadeen who credits Stallone’s performance in Rambo 3 for teaching him the correct technique for firing a rocket launcher and looking good at the same time. : Update: Thanks to a commenter, I now see that the Afghanistan blog appears to have been taken down. I smell a bureaucrat. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 27, 2003
The private Private Lynch
: Private Lynch has an honorable discharge, so she's now free to tell/sell her story. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
We've only just begun...
: I got to see Ev Williams today, for the first time in way too long. (See his moblog photo here. Scroll up and you'll see an odd picture of a mean injury on Ev's photogenic face. Judging by the way I look in my picture, as if I'm about to lunge across the table at him in some heated moment of RSS argument, it may appear as if this is an action sequence. But he arrived with the scar. I didn't do it. Sporting injury, just for the record.)
We had fun (or at least I did) talking about so much that is left to be done with weblogs, tons of new functionality, lots of important uses, many new dimensions of data.
So add this thought to my post below in which I tweak my friend Jimmy Gutterman for tweaking bloggers: We are still at the dawn of this weblog thing. There is much more to be done before weblogging in its many forms -- community, content, advertising, organizing -- can begin to reach its potential.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Out
: I know that the Barney's Warehouse Sale has been out (as opposed to in) for years now. But I still go. That's where I get my suits (protective coloration at Conde Nast, as a colleague says). I'll confess that but for the grace of a half-hour, I would have been stuck there when the lights went out a week ago (boy, would that have been embarrassing).
Anyway, as the sale sputters to its close this weekend, I must sadly report that it ain't what it used to be.
They closed off whole hunks of the floor at the 17th Street warehouse; they are simply selling less.
The suits included hardly any designer labels; it's just Barney's private-label stuff (which is nice, but it's no Boss and certainly no Aramani).
The crowd was clearly thin; today they shut down the downstairs checkouts.
What am I going to do? Pay retail?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Cold crime
: Who'd have thought that there was crime in Antarctica?
A boat was nabbed for poaching endangered Chilean Seabass -- which is the ingredient for Nobu's signature dish.
What will New Yorkers do? torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Poor us
: Joi Ito says it appears that America's infrastructure is falling apart. Can we argue?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Hyperlocal
: My experiment with hyperlocal blogging continues, in fits and starts. I attended -- no, covered -- my town meeting last night. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Remake
: Howard Dean is trying to deftly remold his war posture and it's getting noticed. Glenn Reynolds quotes Dean: "We have no choice. It's a matter of national security. If we leave and we don't get a democracy in Iraq, the result is very significant danger to the United States. . . . bringing democracy to Iraq is not a two-year proposition." And then he says: Howard Dean is right. And he's the leading Democratic candidate at the moment. And that's bad news for the terrorists, whose only hope is that we'll fool ourselves into thinking otherwise, and give up before the job is done. And Michael J Totten points to this Washington Post story on the topic. The challenge for Dean now is to transition from champion of the antiwar, anti-Bush left to electable Democrat without losing his steam and solid liberal base, according to Democratic strategists. That will be a challenge, since he's already alienated me and a whole lot of other Democrats. And making the right noises isn't enough. He needs to be genuine. I'll see right through him if he is not.This transition is no easy task for the most outspoken critic of the Iraqi war... No kidding.
I think what you're seeing, from Totten at least, is simply the disaffection that comes from looking at the present Democratic field. Realistic Democrats, like us, are starting to ask ourselves whether we could go for Dean... and there's no good answer, yet. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Dander up
: Jimmy Gutterman is trying to steal a trick from Andrew Orlowski -- that is, baiting bloggers as a pathetic ploy for attention -- with a piece at Business 2.0 that poo-poos blogs. Several years into the phenomenon, even with solid tools like Blogger available, the blogging community is still, for the most part, self-absorbed and elitist. There's only minimal evidence that anyone is using the blog format as a business tool. Come on, Jimmy. It's just a publishing tool. It's just content. And, yes, I can name others making money -- and other big companies using weblogs (start here). Maybe you're just reading the wrong weblogs; you're concentrating in your piece just on the founding bloggers when the field has exploded in every direction. Or you can't get the hang of writing one. But you sound just like an old radio guy who thought this television thang would never pay off. [via I Want Media] torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Jimmy says weblogs have been around for six years, and so he judges their popularity on that time scale. Well, Filo T. Pharnsworth came up with TV a long time before it became popular. I'm not ready to start the clock on weblogs yet. September 11 brought on more writers. The war brought on more readers. AOL et al will bring in the masses. It's still just the beginning.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Just what we've been waiting for
: Glenn Reynolds, law professor, on the 10 Commandments. As George Washington noted, "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."
I'm willing to ignore, as de minimis, things like "In God We Trust." But there's nothing de minimis about what Roy Moore was attempting. He wanted to make a statement, to the effect that George Washington was wrong, and that the United States is a Christian nation. He wanted, in other words, to establish Christianity as the officially sanctioned religion. And that's not, er, kosher. It's quite obvious that Moore has more in mind than merely making a cultural/historical statement about the role of the Judeo-Christian tradition in law. And to suggest otherwise is either to be completely clueless or to, er, bear false witness. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 26, 2003
Get me to the minibar!
: Oh, I would not do well at Burning Man, not well at all. These descriptions make me want to call in the deprogrammers: Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind. And: Burning Man is an annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance. And radical self-absorption. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Jim Treacher points us to the comments on Boing etc., where the audience is giving Burning Person Xeni heck. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Is half a BBC better than none?
: David Brake cautions that we all may have gotten a bit too excited about the BBC's announcement that it would put its programming on the Internet: In fact, while BBC News' summary suggests Dyke said the Creative Archive would contain "all the corporation's programme archives", the speech actually promised to allow "parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download" (emphasis mine). Nothing there about all of the BBC's archives. And the example he uses - kids downloading, "real moving pictures which would turn their project into an exciting multi-media presentation" make it sound like a collection of digital clip-art. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Sight
: Ain't science grand?
Here's a man who received a stem-cell implant into his eyes and for the first time since he was 3, he can see: I found it very distracting to look at people's faces when I was having a conversation. I can see their lips moving, eyelashes flickering, head nodding and hands gesturing. At first, I tried looking down, but if it was a woman in a low-cut top that would be even more distracting. It was easier to close my eyes or tune out the visual input. This was often necessary in order to concentrate on what they were saying. I am sure there will come a time when all this visual communication will mean more to me, but for now it is just distracting....
The kids played soccer and asked me to play with them. I am more tentative with sight than I was without. My perception of space is still confusing enough and I don't want to run over one of these little guys. Still, I can see the ball flying through the air, which gives me a thrill. And bloggers' favorite Halley has a cataract operation and reports the results: I open my new improved eye.
Okay, I am freaking out. The bird is so resplendent in color and gold leaf. The colors are so vibrant. The edges are so clear and ... I hardly know the word ... try CRUNCHY ... that I can barely believe it. The delicate detail of the bamboo leaves on the painting are exquisite. I am gasping.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Project Trainwreck
: The numbers are in: The Battle of Shaker Heights, the product of this season's Project Greenlight on HBO, brought in $47,693 in five theaters last weekend. So that's less than $10,000 per screen. Miramax execs had said on the Greenlight season finale that if they were going to consider wide distribution of the film, they'd want to see $20,000 per screen (to which one scarred exec replied: the only way this is going to make $20k is if everybody seeing the movie leaves a $100 bill on the seat when they leave). So by that measure, it's a bomb.
But that doesn't matter. It's better, in fact.
This is what reality TV is all about: humiliation. And who better to humiliate than Hollywood executives? It's such great entertainment.
I can't wait for next season.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
No-speed chase
: I'm watching a no-speed chase in L.A. on FoxNews right now: The perp isn't moving and when she is, she merely creeps or goes around in crazy circles.
Could this be the result of skyrocketing gas prices: Cops and robbers can't afford bad fuel economy?
Turns out, the lady just got out of a mental institution (a bit too soon, I'd say).
As I'm watching, a few colleagues come into the office to catch the, uh, action with me.
One turns to the other and says: "David, here in New York, those people aren't in cars. They're in subways."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Now she's proving to be a Pied Piper; there's a parade of pedestrians (yes, they exist there) following her. I half expect to seem them waving to the choppers above. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Two years
: Anniversary stories are among the least informative nonstories media cover; they're dutiful and predictable and so I'm no big fan of them.
But I do think that September 11th is different. Network news will be all but ignoring the date -- here's the Post's roundup -- and that will probably indicate how other media will handle the date. Perhaps they're reflecting a national mood to get past, to get over, to get on with life. But I wonder. There are plenty of good stories two years on: How safe are we? How are the families coping? How much have our lives changed? What has been the cost of terrorism to business and government? What has the health impact been on New Yorkers (I'll tell you mine)? What has the psychological impact been on our children? What about the explosion of this new medium, weblogs, after 9/11? How about following the memorial jury for a day to see how the outpouring of tribute is affecting them? There are a million stories...torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: For what it matters, I will again take the day away from work to spend at the World Trade Center and I will blog about it.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Attention must be paid
: Inspired by David Weinberger's blogging from the Dean bus, I suggested yesterday that a wise campaign would invite some bloggers to get press credentials and get on the buss to cover the election. Why not invite Ken Layne, Matt Welch, Michael J Totten, Roger L Simon, Matthew Yglesias, make your own list. You'd get a fresh perspective of real people, real voters; it would shake up the status quo, and it'd be easy to get lots of digital link. Just look at how impressed Dave Winer was to get a press advisory from Dean: I got a press advisory this morning, via email, from the Dean campaign. That's very cool. Someone decided that even though I write for a weblog, I count as a press person. That's what it's all about: Letting people know that they count. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 25, 2003
Share and share alike
: I haven't done a video weblog (aka vlog) in too long because (a) I'm lazy and (b) I'm cheap -- that is, I don't want to find myself with a big bandwidth bill.
The solution to that problem is bubbling up: weblog P2P. It was a topic raised at the Boston weblog conference and now John Robb is raising it again, starting to define how it would work.
Unlike nefarious Napster, weblog P2P would work, Robb says, only via links, not hard-drive searches. Thus the files would be legit. And they'd be served from many webloggers all sharing the bandwidth bill. Content communism. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Not funny
: Maher tries to find humor in a dead child. He fails. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Flashmopes
: Says Jenny the Librarian: You know flash mobs are "over" when they land on "Jim Mullen's Hot Sheet" in Entertainment Weekly (August 22/29, 2003, p. 12)""Flash mob: hundreds of people are alerted by text messaging to show up at a certain time, and they do! The only hard part is getting Mom to drive you there." torrent Magic Swap 3.6
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Subscribe to The Week
: There's a good cause behind these ads for The Week: If you subscribe, you prove that blogs can be good for business. So subscribe already. (More on this here)
: Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the plug.
: Bloggers: If you'd like to sell The Week as well, leave your name in the comments. If this test is successful, I'll pass on your name...torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The PC editor
: Watch the Orlando Sentinal's "public editor," Manning Pynn, twist his knickers in knots trying to justify not calling Hamas a "terrorist" organization. In April, the committee adopted this standard: "Use caution when using these terms [militants, terrorists], which can show bias toward one side in a conflict. Generally, 'bombers,"attackers' or 'suicide bombers' are preferred terms."
The term "terrorist" certainly expresses judgment: It imputes to the person or organization being described the motive of trying to instill fear. "Militant" seems to me much more neutral. And that may be why the Sentinel, despite its style committee's decision, continues to use that term to describe Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Most of the news organizations I surveyed do the same.
I'm afraid that the horse is out of the barn on the labeling of al-Qaeda. Although journalists strive to avoid expressing bias in reporting the news, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, so shocked Americans -- including the news media -- that they almost universally applied the term "terrorism" to what had happened. I don't think the Sentinel will retreat from that.
Does that mean, though, that we should extend that judgment to all attacks on civilians? ... Oh, man, if you can't tell a terrorist until he bombs your town, then you have a problem with language and logic. You're "afraid" that horse is out of the barn? Oh, that horse got blasted out of the barn long since.
See the post below on how PCthink is making a lie of news and art. This guy proves the point. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Damn, scrap that convention junket
: Says Reuters: Iraq has postponed to next April a trade fair aimed at attracting foreign companies to help rebuild the country, a senior official said on Monday, but he blamed a shortage of hotel rooms rather than security concerns. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Our man in Kabul
: Ben Hammersley files his first report from Kabul. Damn, I love having a blogger as witness; the viewpoint is fresher, more immediate, less sculpted, more human. The contrast here between the destruction and the rebirth could not be more marked. The buildings are covered in bullet scars, the horizon is punctuated with bombed out neighbourhoods, and the runway at the airport is lined - and truly lined, like some twisted can-can troupe - with destroyed aircraft. But despite all that, every other shop in this neighbourhood is selling some form of technology. There’s a Dell dealership, with hand painted signs and no electricity; there are shops selling the latest Nokias and extolling the benefits of MMS; I passed a market stall selling pirated versions of Windows XP and the entire Adobe range, and that was next to an entire store of pirate DVDs. Kabul’s ancient position as the trading hub of Central Asia continues: these are the same discs I’ve seen for sale in both Iran and Bangkok for a couple of dollars each. No mac software, dammit. :-) Go read the rest and getaloada the 9/11 commemmorative Afghan rug he bought. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 24, 2003
PC TV
: A great speech at the Edinburgh TV Festival attacks the creeping PCization of TV, popular culture, and the news -- the oversensitivity to sensitivities that ends up adding up to a big lie:
The television industry is so in thrall to political correctness that soap and drama writers now routinely consult pressure groups for advice on what they consider offensive, the Edinburgh Television Festival heard yesterday.
In the annual Alternative MacTaggart Lecture, Rod Liddle, the former editor of Radio 4's Today programme, called on producers to ignore attempts by organisations such as the Commission for Racial Equality, the mental health charity Mind and the anti-smoking group Ash to dictate what is broadcast.
"They hector and harry you into portraying society as they would like it to be, rather than as what it is," Mr Liddle told an audience of broadcasters.
In many cases, the interference was done "with the connivance" of the Government and statutory bodies such as the Independent Television Commission and the BBC's Editorial Policy Unit. The aim was to "bully programme makers into changing the nature of their news programmes, dramas and light entertainment in order to accord with the various agendas pursued by each group"....
He recounted how, before the Iraq war, BBC journalists were summoned to a meeting to discuss how they could cover the conflict without offending Muslims.
Later, he heard a BBC report about a British suicide bomber in Israel. The report concluded - "apropos of nothing at all" - that the vast majority of British Muslims were "utterly opposed" to suicide attacks against Israel.
"When we are forced into making these blithe and comfortable platitudinous asides we do everybody a disservice," he said. In a desire to avoid inflaming religious antagonism, "we massage the truth in order to kid ourselves, and the audience, that that's really the case".
He gave warning that such "small incremental changes" to dramas or news may be well-intentioned, but "before you know it, we're living in a sort of ghastly Sesame Street", bearing no relation to reality.
Of course, this happens here, too: Special-interest pressure groups try to get art created by quota and agenda: don't show smoking; have more of this kind of person or that; don't say that even if people do say it. What it really means is: Be dishonest.
Somebody, please put up the entire text of the speech. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Flashmopes
: The world is getting fed up with self-indulgent flash mobs. Says the Scotsman: Now, the backlash has begun in earnest.
E-mail lists like "antimob" and "slashmob" provide a forum for those who are not totally convinced that flash mobs are an important artistic phenomenon.
Sites like Flashmugging mock the "young, naive, wealthy, bored, fashionistas" who take part in mobs. This spoof site warns that flash muggers stalk these events, quoting one such villain: "It’s simple, just turn up at the arranged meeting point, and hand out a load of fake instructions [proceed to the dark street behind the glue factory, then at exactly 14:45 take out your wallet], these suckers are so hyped-up on their own coolness, that they’d believe anything."
This idea of hijacking mobs is the inspiration for flashhack.blogspot.com, which tells it's readers: "The act isn't altruistic or artistic, the participants are self-absorbed, onlookers are irritated, media suck it in ... Hack the flash. Don't be sheep. Don't follow orders … Mobs are highly suggestible. Given direction, sheep will follow. In fact, the success of the Flash Mob wholly depends on the participants mindlessly following orders … Hand out your own instructions." ...
1. At precisely 14:46, go home.
2. Get a life already. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Bustamante and the N word
: Pacific News Service says Bustamante makes California blacks "nervous." The moment California Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante said he was tossing his hat in as a replacement candidate in the recall race, the buzz among blacks was that he was the guy who used the "N" word....
In a February 2001 speech to a group of black trade unionists, Bustamante purportedly slipped and uttered the dreaded "N" word. When a handful of blacks in the audience stormed out in protest, Bustamante backpedaled fast and swore it was a slip of the tongue. He did profuse mea culpas and furiously waved his credentials as a staunch defender of immigrant rights, affirmative action and multiculturalism....
But the anxiety among blacks about Bustamante is less about his careless slip than about the resurfacing of political tensions between many blacks and Latinos....
If Davis continues his downward plunge in the polls, Bustamante's stock will rise even higher among Democrats. That would include black Democrats too, if only it weren't for that "N" word. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Gawlee, Guber, it's that Gawker girl
: AL.com (one of my day-job services) has a story about our own Elizabeth Spiers, known here as the editor of Gawker, known there as "that Wetumpka girl." Some of her Gawker dialogue might be considered a little risque for a Wetumpka girl, but fortunately for Spiers, her parents don't spend much time surfing the Internet.
"They kind of vaguely know that I have a media job," she says. "But they don't really have any concept of what Gawker is or what its audience is or really even who 90 percent of the people we talk about are.
"It's really not racy for here, but I think it's very racy for there." : Where the hell is Wetumpka? Well, halfway between Riddle and Brassel Bottom, and a mere spit away from Eclectic and just down the road from Liberty, Friendship, Seman, and Kid. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Bye-bye Bush?
: Says a new Newsweek poll: The survey released Saturday showed that 49 percent of registered voters would not back the president for a second term if the vote were held now. Forty-four percent would support Mr. Bush's re-election.
The poll marked the first time in a Newsweek survey that supporters of Mr. Bush were out-numbered by those who would not like to see him back remain in office....
The Newsweek report attributed the decline in the president's popularity to public disenchantment over the Iraq war. The poll found 69 percent of respondents said they were concerned that the United States will be bogged down for many years in Iraq without achieving its goals there. ...
However, 61 percent still believe the United States was right to take military action against Iraq in March. The war was a success. But the peace is hell. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
BBC archives online
: The BBC announced that it will put its whole program archive online for free. [via Dave Winer]
I wonder whether this is a desperate effort to curry favor and increase value as a means of holding onto the license fee. [via Glenn Reynolds]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Don't let the border bump you on the ass on the way out
: The Observer's U.S. correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, leaves the U.S. and it appears it's not a minute too soon. He pens a bitter, mean, angry, anti-American (and badly written) farewell piece that is filled with nothing but negativity: terrorist bombs, lynchings, poverty; he sees our world through dung-colored glasses: America was always a dichotomous, Janus nation - born of a revolution by democratic visionaries such as Tom Paine but built on genocide and enslavement. Enriched by immigration but made greedy by power and wealth. It was always a question of which America was in the ascendancy at a given time. I think that during Clinton's presidency there were elements of that democratic America to the fore. Or at least there were by contrast to a country now redefining its role as an international citizen, a country where democratic rights, enshrined in the Constitution, are eroded largely by consent. Jeesh.
Good riddance. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Our boy on the bus
: David Weinberger is blogging from the Dean campaign bus. On the plane now. It's a chartered 737 sitting on a back leg of the airport. No metal detectors here, but they do a thorough job going through everyone's luggage. The press sits in the back of the plane, the staff in the front. Plastic clumps of grass are taped to the seats because this is a "grassroots" campaign, which is somewhere between charming and hokey.
The Governor enters the plane last of all. (Yes, they wand him before he enters ... you never know, given his stand on gun control, he could be packing heat :) David is an (unpaid) adviser to the Dean campaign.
Reading this, it would be very smart for a campaign to invite a few unaffiliated bloggers onto the campaign bus: The result would be more human, less jaded, more compelling coverage of a campaign from real people.
Call it grassroots coverage.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Our man in Kabul
: Ben Hammersley, blogging correspondent, has made it into Afghanistan. He ended up flying in, rather than trekking over the Khyber Pass: Two days in Dubai, then, instead of the Islamabad-Peshawar-Jalalabad-Kabul route of legend. In many ways I'm relieved. I've been to Peshawar before, two months before 9/11, and it was dodgy then. In a choice between dubious airline and a roadtrip where the Pakistani authorities insist that you take a gunman with you to the border, and I guess it's more calming to take the plane. Of course, the incessant worries about the wings dropping off and suchlike are still there - it's the *Afghan* national airline, after all... torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 23, 2003
Flashwastes
: Two choices:
(1) Declare flashmobs tired and retired. It was cute for a day. But they are pointless and irritating: just a bunch of rich and wired kids with nothing better to do showing off that they are rich and wired and can afford to waste their time.
(2) Organize a flashmob to actually do something useful: Hey, kids, let's all meet in Central Park at 7:08 and each of us pick up a piece of litter? Or why don't we all meet in downtown Manhattan and give the still-struggling merchants down there a little business? Or let's all show up on the FCC's doorstep and tell them that we want more wireless innovation now. (Special French edition: Let's all show up at an old folks' home, make sure they're not dying of the heat, and bring them a cold Evian.)torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Ayatollah Moore
: Hammihan, an Iranian blogger, gets what's wrong with "Judge" Bubba Moore's refusal to take his religious monument out of a government building. Amazing that the "judge" and his religious extremists don't: by disobeying the ruling of Alabama's supreme court, Mr. Moore has violated the principle which sets the US government apart from regime's like that which is oppressing the people of Iran. by stating that the word of HIS 'god' shall overrule the laws of the State of Alabama, he has declared that he wishes Alabama to become a theocracy, just like the one in Iran. he has declared himself the representative of 'god' on Earth (or in Alabama), and has allowed himself to destroy the civil institutions of that State based on his religious bigotry. Mr. Moore should move to Iran, and join the Ayatollahs in doing the 'work of god', ie, opressing people and destroying democracy Amen, brother. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Baghdad Bob, pitchman
: Andy the Hobo Traveler in Iraq finds a billboard selling olives and making fun of Baghdad Bob.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Raindrops on roses and Iranians on Americans
: The American woman married to an Iranian and living in Iran lists the things she likes about Iran, including this: I like being an American here. Everyone is so nice to me. Everyone seems to think that Americans are wonderful. One restaurant owner had to restrain himself from hugging me when he discovered that I was American. People shake my hand. They talk to me. Sometimes they tell me that they don’t like Bush, but they always tell me how much they like Americans. This is so refreshing after a couple of years of living in Europe where all I heard was how evil Americans were. Now ain't that a kick in the pants? People are nicer to Americans in Iran -- where, not long ago, mobs called for our demise -- than they are in our ol' pal Europe. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
If you can't stand the heat, get out of France
: Mark Steyn on the incredible scandal of 10,000 dead from heat in France: 'The US and British armies have entered the gates of hell," thundered George Galloway last month. "Soon it will be 100 degrees at midnight in Baghdad, but there will be no respite from the need for full body armour."
As usual, George was a little off. The gates of hell are on the périphérique and it's 100 degrees at midnight in the pissoir on the Metro. To date, two US soldiers are believed to have succumbed to the heat in Iraq, whereas over 10,000 people have succumbed to it in France....
Certainly, Iraq has its problems. Jacques Chirac, en vacances just up the road from me in North Hatley, Quebec, took time out of his three-week holiday to issue a statement on events in Baghdad, where 20 people died on Tuesday. But he didn't bother to interrupt his vacation to issue a statement on events in France, where so many people have died, the funeral homes are standing room only and they're having to store bodies in the freezers at the fruit and veg markets....
And where are the Red Cross and Oxfam and Human Rights Watch and all the other noisy humanitarians? If 10,000 Iraqis had died of dysentery on George W Bush's watch, you'd never hear the end of it....
France isn't on the edge, it's in the abyss. When I motored round Iraq a couple of months ago, the hospital wards were well below capacity. Yet in France the entire health system – or that percentage of it not spending August at the beach – is stretched beyond its limits (35 hours a week, 44 weeks a year). Why aren't Médecins Sans Frontières demanding to be allowed in to take over?
There's an old, cynical formula for the weight accorded different disasters on American TV news. It runs something like: one dead American = 10 dead Israelis = 100 dead Russians = 1,000 dead Bangladeshis. But 10,000 French can die, and even the French don't seem to care – or not too much, and not with any great urgency.... torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 22, 2003
Doubtful
: Many are pointing to this alleged space image of the U.S. during the blackout. I don't believe it. Most of New Jersey, for example, had power and thus light. The dark dozen was not so clean and clear. I smell Photoshop. Calling Dr. Snopes.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Fox loses
: Franken wins: "There are hard cases and there are easy cases. This is an easy case," said U.S. District Judge Denny Chin, who added that the motion for an injunction was "wholly without merit." torrent Magic Swap 3.6
In lieu of flowers... throw da bum out
: In her obit, a dead Wisconsin woman's heirs suggest donations to anti-Bush causes: "Memorials in her honor can be made to any organization working for the removal of President Bush." The obit.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
It's as if somebody changed my underwear and I didn't notice
: Google just changed my toolbar without asking me or letting me know. Not evil, perhaps, but freaky and frightening nonetheless.
: Note the comment: I'm not alone. All over the Internet now, people are "freaking out" at the change. I'll just bet some nervous Google user is right now worried that a worm did it.
Not smart, Google. I don't like somebody else driving my car when I'm in the driver's seat.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Back to business
: One irony of a Schwarzenegger victory would be that personal peccadilloes may matter less. Arnold has essentially acknowledged all his, shall we say, human weaknesses; he mentioned womanizing on Tonight. Roger Simon says Hollywood heavyweights will start coming out with an army of skeletons from Arnold's closet. Says Page Six: Cybill Shepherd is freaked out by the prospect of the Austrian-born action hero in the executive mansion.
"That would be the worst tragedy in the history of California," Shepherd hyperventilated to "Access Hollywood."
"I think that we are the laughing stock of the world, with Arnold Schwarzenegger running [for] governor," Shepherd said. "I think he's a real hypocrite. I think he has a past that is going to come out, and I'm not going to mention what it is, but it's not going to be pretty." I predict that things will come out -- and they will make not one bit of difference; the voters won't care and probably will expect such behavior from Arnold (and those throwing stones at him out of their own Bel Air glass houses). If the dirt flies and if Arnold wins, we'll then have a womanizing, steroid-slurping, inhaling governor and that will make it harder to act shocked and offended the next time a mere politician or president is caught doing something human. And I think that's a good thing, a damned good thing. We would get back to judging politicians on the basis of job performance, not morality (as if anyone ever thought politicians were moral anyway). torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Subscribe to The Week -- an ad
: Note that I'm shilling for The Week magazine with an ad on the right and a text ad every day.
I'm doing this for three reasons:
First, I like The Week. It's a weblog without the links. It's smart, informative, opinionated. I said that long before I met anyone from the magazine. (In fact, I blogged my tribute to the magazine back in June, 2002). But then I met the folks at the Week and I ended up liking them as much as I like their magazine.
Second, I've been suggesting to the people at The Week that they sell subscriptions on weblogs because it's their perfect audience and -- here's the point -- because webloggers can make money that way.
So this is a test: Can a weblog sell subscriptions to a magazine?
If it can, weblogs can sell other things.
And if it can do that, maybe a weblogger can actually make money.
It makes sense: This is a smart, engaged audience, highly targeted, a great environment for advertising.
So stack the deck. Fix the test. Buy a subscription.
It's risk-free: Try four issues free; if you don't like it, cancel. If you do, thank me.
[And, yes, I get a cut of the revenue. If this works, this offer will be open to other webloggers to also get their cut. So subscribe!] [/ad]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Oops. I apologize for sticking that obnoxious text ad inbetween every post. I intended to put the obnoxious text ad only inbetween every day. So I'm a bad page coder. Don't hold that against me. Don't let that stop you from subscribing to The Week. (Sorry. Couldn't help myself. I'm getting carried away with capitalism and the need to succeed.) If you subscribe, I promise I won't use popups.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Reparations and racism
: I've long dismissed the fringe calls for reparations payments for slavery for many reasons -- because the sins of the fathers are not the sins of the gerat-great-grandchildren, because many (perhaps most) Americans today are descended from people who came here after the Civil War (how do you determine who should pay and who should be paid?), and mostly because this feeling of entitlement via suit has to end somewhere: The logical and absurd extension of this, I've always said, is that the Jews should sue the Egyptians for reparations for slavery under Pharoah.
Well now, Via Memri, the service that translated Middle Eastern media, here is an absurd and sick twist on that: The Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram Al-Arabi interviewed Dr. Nabil Hilmi, dean of the faculty of law at the University of Al-Zaqaziq, who is working on a lawsuit on behalf of Egyptians in Switzerland against "all the Jews of the world" because, when they fled Egypt, they took with them gold and cooking utensils. The theft was not limited to gold alone. The thieves stole everything imaginable. They emptied the Egyptian homes of cooking utensils. One of the women approached Pharaoh, her eyes downcast, and said that her Jewish neighbor [don't you mean "slave?" -ed] who lived in the house on the right of her house had come to her and asked to borrow her gold items, claiming she had been invited to a wedding… The Jewish neighbor took [the items] and promised to return them the next day. A few minutes later, the neighbor to the left knocked on the door and asked to borrow the cooking utensils, because she was having guests for dinner. Using this same deceitful system, they took possession of all the cooking utensils...
Taking posession of the gold was understandable. This is clear theft of a host country's resources and treasure, something that fits the morals and character of the Jews...." Sick, offensive, stupid. Odd, it doesn't appear on Al Ahram's English-language site. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Gained in the translation
: NPR ran a correction this morning. Yesterday, they translated a crowd's chant in Israel as, "Arabs must die." Today, they say the correct translation was, "We want revenge." Yeah, close.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Don't encourage them!
: AOL Journals (aka blogs) are off to a good start but I smell trouble with this promo on the Journals home page: Make Spike a Star
You know your pooch is the best dog in America, heck on the planet! Don't keep those cute photos and funny antics to yourself. Create a Web page for your dog and show him off to the world. It only takes a few minutes and he'll love you for it. No, no, not more dog blogs! What's next? No, please, no: cat blogs... torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Freedom of religion
: The religious nuts who want God in government refuse to understand that the Constitution is their best protection.
They want prayer in school. They want the 10 Commandments in court.
They want to be ayatollahs. And fine for them as long as they are the ayatollahs; they'd have their way.
But what happens when I win the election? When I'm America's ayatollah, I will decree gay marriage a fine thing. I will make abortion legal. I will get rid of laws concerning sexual behavior of adults. I will free Howard Stern to say whatever the F he wants on the radio. I will decree nudity a matter of free speech, bringing breasts to billboards as my little celebration of God's creation and my effort to beautify America.
Yes, I'd make a fine ayatollah, if I do say so myself.
Don't you see, Bubbas? Once you open the door for one religion to be in government and schools and courts, you open the door for that religion to be a religion other than yours. And that closes the door on yours. Once you let one religion in, you kick other religions out. That is wh we let none in.
That is precisely the protection of Constitution affords all faiths.
Our founding fathers were damned smart.
And you, Bubbas, are frighteningly stupid.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: I'm getting hell for using the apparently unPC term "Bubba." Fine, I apologize to all the shit-kickers who kicked the shit out of me for that. But I'll still call "Judge" Moore Bubba because I do want to insult him and if Bubba is an insult then Bubba is what I will call him.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Also note the comments and the effort to say that a little God here or a few commandments there must be OK. Slippery slope, folks. Once you have someone saying what is and what isn't OK religion, then you're in trouble. Don't cross that line. To a Buddhist or a Hindu, the 10 Commandments aren't kosher; to an atheist, yes, God does not compute.
Separation of church and state is not anti-God or anti-church. The Constitution is strongly pro-God and pro-Church precisely because it protects your God and your Church (or whatever) from government interference. You'd think that anti-government religionists would be the first to get that, but they will be the last.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Update: The woman who brought the case against "Judge" Moore -- and the decidely unChristian behavior of alleged Christians against her. God bless her; she's the one defending both God and the Constitution.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Staff blogger
: David Weinberger is going to travel with his boy, Howard Dean, as official campaign blogger.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Hyperlocal radio
: Glenn Reynolds is celebrating that FCC honcho Michael Powell is talking about getting moving with low-power FM stations. There's one thing more that they could do: Open it up not only to noncommercial use (that's the law today) but also to small-scale, local commercial use. If you really want this thing to grow, then let the people who make the investment of money and time at least make their money back. That will energize what otherwise is bound to be a listless media fizzle.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: See also Virginia Postrel on hyperlocal radio here and here. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Us v. them
: Peoria Pundit Bill Dennis takes off on the is-it-blog-or-is-it-journalism discussion with a comparison of blogs and big-media "j-blogs:" Blogs: Blogs give the power of the press to those who don’t own a press.
J-blogs: Owned by those who already own the presses.... torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blogs: Bloggers often spend a great deal of time designing sites that fit their personality and tastes.
J-blogs: Look like every other page on the company Website. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blogs: Bloggers have a burning need to express their opinions and thoughts.
J-blogs: Most j-bloggers are already published every day in the regular newspaper.... torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blogs: Unedited nature of blogs is part of their charm.
J-blogs: Newspaper culture says “unedited” equals “anarchy.” torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 21, 2003
Put another shrimp on the cross
: Churchmen Down Under have created the Aussie Bible. Really, they have. A verse in the local vulgate: The angel said to her, 'G'day Mary. You are a pretty special sheila. God has his eye on you'. And: This made Herod as jumpy as a wallaby on hot rocks and stirred up the whole town. So Herod got some of his cronies together – smart blokes who had more degrees than a thermometer – and asked them where the Promised One was supposed to be born. I'm going to start working on the Jersey Bible: Yo, Mary, listen up. You're preggers, you hear? You gotta problem wid dat?" Or perhaps the Bama Bible:Bubba, y'all shalt be bull-headed and intolerant, y'hear? torrent Magic Swap 3.6
AOL blogs
: John Scalzi, who's blogging-by-example over at AOL, is now out of beta (and thus into gamma, I guess). torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Third world
: Can somebody explain how, in a civilized country, a mere heat wave can kill, by current estimates, 10,000 people? Good God. Some critics blamed families for abandoning elderly relatives alone at home while they took August vacations. Health workers blamed understaffing and underfunding at hospitals and retirement homes. Many accused the government of doing too little, too late.
In an apparent effort to calm the storm of criticism, Chirac said ''today, the time is for contemplation, solidarity and action.'' ...
Chirac was vacationing in Canada during the heat wave and did not speak about the crisis in public, although aides said he was following the situation. Still, his decision not to break off his vacation irked some of Chirac's opponents. That's our Jacques.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
In a jam
: Cuba tells the U.S. that it wasn't jamming satellite broadcasts to Iran -- Iranians in the Iranian embassy in Havana were doing it. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Condemned
: Iranian blogs are appalled at the bombings in Iraq and Israel. See Kaveh, who also shows us a picture of a mural in Tehran reading, "Israel must be destroyed." And see Sleepwalker, a new blog from Iran.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Kabulog
: Ben Hammersley is going to blog from Afghanistan.
I'd love to do the same from Iraq -- well, once the bombs stop.
: See also HoboTraveler, a weblogger now in Iraq. [via Kaveh]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Stern forced to cancel Schwarzenegger interview
: Thanks to the innane FCC equal-time rule -- and to his company's spineless lawyers and bosses -- Howard Stern was forced to cancel an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger this morning.
This was going to be Schwarzenegger's first major interview and it would have been informative. Stern is a great interviewer and he'd be asking the questions the voters would want asked. On the weekend gab shows, they tried to make fun of Schwarzenegger's media choice but George Stephanopoulos got it right: He said Stern's is the No. 1 show in California and Schwarzenegger is going where the voters are.
But the voters won't get to hear what Schwarzenegger has to say under questioning because of the equal time rule. Stern's dimwitted station manager and wimpy lawyers said that if he talked to Arnold, he'd have to talk to all 130 candidates. Stern begged them to fight and get an FCC exemption but they didn't.
This is wrong on so many levels. Stern's show is facing this fight because he's not considered news (hey, there's just as much fluff on three hours of the Today Show -- and Stern makes a helluva lot more news than any other show) and also because the FCC has a hard-on for him. The FCC -- the government -- should not be in a position to determine what is news and what isn't and what we can and cannot hear. As a result of this rule and its unfair enforcement, it's the electorate that suffers. Instead of assuring that we are better informed, we are less informed. That is the government infringing free speech and the free market of ideas. That is wrong. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Email the FCC to fight for Stern
: Here is where you can email FCC Chairman Michael Powell.
Tell him you want the FCC to give Howard Stern an exemption from the equal time rule so Stern can interview Scharwzenegger.
Tell him that the equal time rule is doing the opposite of what it should and that it should be revealed.
Tell that that the FCC should not be deciding what we hear -- we should. If he believes in a free market in media, then here is how he proves it!
Come on, all you libertarians on weblogs: Stand up for the rights of the people against government meddling. Email Powell. All you Republicans: Let your action here be heard: Email Powell. Democrats, don't let this happen to Al Franken when he runs for President: Email Powell. Come on, Larry Lessig, if you really believe in freeing media, fight for Stern. Come on, Prof. Balkin, if you believe in the First Amendment, fight for Stern.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: And if you want to email the Stern show, here's the address. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 20, 2003
Primer
: Tim Blair explains blogs.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Update: Blair blogs more quotes here. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Casual
: Couldn't Arnold at least wear a tie for his commercial?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
A world with editors?
: Tim Porter gazes at the editorial navel and asks: "Who edits the blog? If it's not edited, then is it journalism? And, if it is, then is it blogging?" He defines journalism as editing, as a process of selection, by editors.
I disagree.
Journalism is first and foremost reporting: getting the facts, getting them right. Editors can help, of course. But without reporters, editors are nothing.
Journalism is, second, comment, which includes questioning.
In weblogs, the audience acts as editor by selecting, commenting, questioning. It's still journalism.
So, yes, journalism can be journalism without editing.
Dave Winer insists a blog isn't a blog with editing.
I don't buy that, either, for I know the issues newspapers have to worry about: reputation and libel and such; they depend on editors, who may take away the immediacy of blogs but add comfort.
Is a blog without an editor journalism? Of course.
Is a blog with an editor journalism? Sure.
Nonissue.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The Memorial
: Via Greg Allen, here's Newsday's report on progress in selecting finalists for the design of the September 11th memorial: The board authorized $937,300 Thursday for as many as eight memorial finalists to develop models and three-dimensional computerized designs. Finalists will be chosen this fall from the 5,200 designs submitted to the agency....
The 13 members of the memorial jury, chosen by LMDC officials to select the winning memorial, have begun indicating their preferences, according to a source familiar with the process. Each jury member places a dot on the memorial design boards he or she likes, and the designs with no dots are excluded from further consideration, the source said.
The jury is expected to choose a winner sometime in October or November. I hope that they find a way to display not just eight but hundreds of the design proposals, in an exhibition, and in a book. The flood of love and care will be healing. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: As Greg also points out: "The competition's gag rule has thrown approximately 5,199 of 5,200 people into a weird, cagey limbo; we really want to talk about our entries, but don't want to get disqualified. Maybe we should form Entrants Anonymous."
Once I don't make the cut, I'll post my entry here.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Fair & balanced
: FoxNews calls Al Franken a satirist. But Bill O'Reilly says calling Franken a satirist is a "sick joke."
See, this is why I say there are no vast right- or left-wing conspiracies. People just don't talk to each other. They're too damned disorganized to coordinate let alone conspire.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 19, 2003
A good cause
: Movable Type and Typepad's Trotts are coming to New York and are looking for a sublet. Anil, Nick, and the New York blogging mafia have been working on them to move themselves and the blogging epicenter to New York. So, Mr. Trump, get them a pad. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Customer service
: A very, very clever VP marketing for Wayport read my Doubletree sucks post below and left a clever response.
This is smart marketing.
I'm curious how he found the post, since I mentioned Doubletree and not Wayport. Was it Technorati? Google?
In any case, it's the wise company that listens to customers where they now have a voice, online. Good for you, Wayport.
And even though it was Wayport that slowed down like molasses in Helsinki, it's the hotel I blame. The access worked for hours and then suddenly stopped. They should have cared; they should have taken care of it. But they only charged me. They didn't care enough to call their provider. Doubletree sucks.
This is a hotel that clearly doesn't give a damn. I had a psycho New York fit with the customer care line that didn't care, then with the desk clerk who didn't care, then with the manager who didn't do a damned thing, then with the poor grinning sucker who had the bad luck to bring me my bill -- including $10 for the frigging access that didn't work -- as I slammed doors to get the hell out of the place, pointing out to him, like the perfect New York asshole, as we're trapped on the elevator, that it was a disgraceful mess and it's obvious that no one on the staff takes the slightest pride in this dump aka Doubletree sucks.
Note that you don't find a Doubletree sucks VP on here leaving an apology. Wayport does. Wayport does not suck. But Doubletree sucks.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: See also the absolutely magnificent PowerPoint tribute to how Doubletree sucks, from the comments, here.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Thank goodness, I'm not trapped in the wrong body
: Whew.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Wired
: Doubletree sucks. I just stormed out of my hotel in Tampa because their $10/day Wayport Internet access went wonky and they told me it was my problem and I had to call the 800-minute number. I'm now in Starbucks on my second cup before the flight back home. Blogging this afternoon. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Everybody's doing it
: Even the Chicago Tribune has a blog.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The evening line
: I overheard someone last night talking about how she and her family bet on all the reality shows. And I'll bet there's more such action than we can imagine. And more cheating, too.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
TMI
: Please, let's hope that bloggers don't start using their blogs to show us all their yicky bits. Imagine what it will be like when we all turn 80: We'll be blogging our pains, pills, and diseases.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 18, 2003
No-no words
: Dong Resin writes a convincing nanoessay decrying the self-conscious, self-congratulatory use of the n-word -- and the precious habit of calling it the n-word. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Arnold can run backwards, too
: The only thing on Arnold's soon-to-be campaign web site is a statement repudiating his advisor Warren Buffett's criticism of Prop. 13, the Jarvis/Gann [no relation] initiative that limited California property taxes. Buffett is right: It was a mistake. It changed the state forever. It reduced the quality of education in California, which was once California's greatest asset. It turned California into a state ruled by the voting mob rather than by representative democracy. It led to today's recall anarchy.
But Arnold wants nothing to do with that. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 17, 2003
A world without editors: The sequel
: Last month, I had a snarkfit about the ham-handed "editing" I received at the hands of the butcher overseeing the exceedingly dull and ponderous Nieman Reports. (It continued here and here.) Rather than having my story about weblogs mangled and having my views changed to fit this alleged editor's own agenda, I killed the piece and published it here, for a larger audience, on the web.
Now a brief sequel:
Sheila Lennon, the Projo blogger, just submitted her piece and reports: I know the difference between a deadline and a drop-dead deadline (when the presses roll), and it's been a busy summer. I didn't get around to filing my story till Monday.
Like Jeff, I found that Melissa rewrote some of my sentences, making them inaccurate. It was shocking to see my straightforward prose badly misunderstood, my facts replaced by someone else's erroneous assumptions.
Which was, of course, her point: It's an aggressive magazine-editing style -- Samurai editor! Hai! -- that forces a yelp and a strong reaction: "It's not that, it's this!" Which was exactly what she was trying to get from me. By taking on the persona of a clueless reader who would interpret my words willy-nilly, she forced me to nail every concept so it could not be misunderstood. Sorry, Sheila, but like the mom of a mass murderer, you're just justifying the hack.
Good editing never but never entails changing facts and making them wrong and changing the writer's solicited opinions to make the writer disagree with herself just to provoke a reaction. That's treating bad editing as if it were performance art: Hey, man, if you hate it, at least it got you to react.
No, a good editor who doesn't understand something should ask a question. A good editor who doesn't like the way something is said should say so. A good editor who doesn't like a piece should kill it.
A bad editor mangles first and asks questions later.
Sheila is happy with her story as it turned out.
I'm happy, too. I'd rather be on the Web.
[By the way, Sheila's post came up with funky one-word-wide formatting on my screen, so I hope I managed to read it all.] torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Catfight!
: L.A. blonde vs. New York snarkqueen. I'm betting on the New Yorker.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Thanks be to Rudy
: John Podhoretz says that we can still thank Rudy Guliani for the fact that New York was calm and civilized and even good-hearted through the blackout. What's happening right now is a mere inconvenience compared to the world-changing horror of 9/11, but the wondrous spirit of New York that emerged from that catastrophe is still very much in evidence nearly two years later. Maybe that's because we've been through that hell and we really do know the difference.
And once again, the city should recognize and acknowledge its enormous debt to the one man who really made it possible for us to weather these storms: Rudy Giuliani. : The New York Times has a daintier -- more sociological, less political -- view of the same story. But the reasons are also writ small, in commonplaces of New York life that would have been unthinkable in 1977. For one thing, you can smell the roses, or at least the city parks' more varied assortment of flowers.
In innumerable locations they sprout unencumbered by the chicken wire that used to protect them from flower thieves, when they were grown at all. : Not everybody was civlized all the time, of course. Everything's relative. On the Real pay service, I saw a clip from CNN of a reporter using a payphone being harrassed by an angry mob wanting, understandably, to use the same phone. They hung it up on her.
It's still New York. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: By the way, Maureen Dowd has lost it. I know that's old news. But she wrote an OK column or two during 9.11 and the anthrax attacks. Those were the last she wrote. I thought she'd be able to tackle the blackout with at least a feature-writer's flair, but instead she recycles old news in the cause of her tortured, lame, crippled, gimpy gags: Steamed Iraqis offered us tips, including: Sleep on the roof and take showers. As in showdenfreude? torrent Magic Swap 3.6
It's the coverup that'll always get you -- even if you're Pope
: The Observer uncovers a Vatican order from Pope John XXIII ordering a coverup of sexual abuse cases: The Vatican instructed Catholic bishops around the world to cover up cases of sexual abuse or risk being thrown out of the Church....
The 69-page Latin document bearing the seal of Pope John XXIII was sent to every bishop in the world. The instructions outline a policy of 'strictest' secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatens those who speak out with excommunication.
They also call for the victim to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to Church officials. It states that the instructions are to 'be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published nor added to with any commentaries.' ...
Bishops are instructed to pursue these cases 'in the most secretive way... restrained by a perpetual silence... and everyone... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office... under the penalty of excommunication'.
Texan lawyer Daniel Shea uncovered the document as part of his work for victims of abuse from Catholic priests in the US. He has handed it over to US authorities, urging them to launch a federal investigation into the clergy's alleged cover-up of sexual abuse.
He said: 'These instructions went out to every bishop around the globe and would certainly have applied in Britain. It proves there was an international conspiracy by the Church to hush up sexual abuse issues. It is a devious attempt to conceal criminal conduct and is a blueprint for deception and concealment.' torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Oz meets The Restaurant by way of Goodfellas
: A once-top Irish chef, Conrad Gallagher, ends up in the Brooklyn House of Detention awaiting extradition to Ireland on a financial fracas and there, the Observer says, he befriends and cooks for Mafia inmates and that probably saves his life: After five days, he was assigned to another wing, 162, and felt an atmospheric change immediately. There were, basically, white faces, even though he knew they were all probably Mafia. That night, 74-year-old Frankie Pero asked to see him, having read in the New York Times of Conrad's history. They talked, and fantasised, about food. The mob boss suggested a 'nice veal cutlet with cep mushrooms and a little madeira jus'. The Dubliner countered with 'a nice veal piccatta with a side order of macaroni and a glass of chianti'. Pero roared with laughter, and the word went out that 'Irish' was to be kept safe, and for the next five weeks he was.
Instead of regulation meals, Jews and Muslims received 'common fare' - raw vegetables with a can of tomato juice and the use of a microwave. Gallagher and the Italians bartered with them for the vegetables, and he would spend hours making stews. 'I would take the blade from my razor and very carefully chop up pieces of broccoli, garlic, potato, cauliflower, carrots. Maybe I'd get an Oxo cube from somebody, or somebody would smuggle a spice from the kitchen. I'd spend as long as I could chopping vegetables as it would kill the time.'
He also gathered recipes from the Italians, and had each man sign his contribution; he's thinking of incorporating them into his next book. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 16, 2003
More blackout photos
: A blogger blogs the blackout from Bryant Park. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blackout blog
: For posterity, my company's blackout blog can be found here.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blogging this weekend
: I will be away from high-speed this weekend; blogging will be very light. I'm going to try enjoying being away from both electricity and connectivity. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Fair and Balanced
: I just noticed that Al Franken has, in essence, been blogging the Fair and Balanced dustup.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 15, 2003
Weblogs and big-time news
: Let the record show that weblogs were handy -- no, critical -- to our news operation in the aftermath of the Great Blackout.
Because the power surge fried a part that still has not arrived [Cisco sucks. Cisco sucks.] we could not update our sites.
So the editors of one of our services, NJ.com, created the Blackout Blog and we pointed all our home pages to that weblog to keep the audience updated.
Next, the editors of our regional web services put up their own local weblogs with news from the papers and the wires and we pointed to them. See AL.com's, OregonLive's, Masslive's, Nola.com's, Syracuse.com's, and MLive.com's.
Weblogging is, after all, just the product of the world's easiest, fastest, cheapest publishing tool connected to the history's best distribution network and it works even for the big boys.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Art imitates art
: Too funny: Rob Lowe will reportedly join Schwarzenegger's campaign as a top adviser. Arnold: Rob merely played a political adviser on TV. He read the lines. He didn't think them. You're trying to run a state, not cast a movie. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
AOL blogs
: John Scalzi, hired as the pioneer AOL blogger to set an example for the mobs to come, gives us a link to his beta blog. (Now what am I going to have to do to get on his blogroll? Haven't I written about AOL blogs enough? I guess I need to read "How to get linked.")torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blackout blog
: Advance Internet just put up the latest edition of the blackout blog.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Nya-nya
: A Bush/Cheney-2004 blog quotes a 2001 speech from Vice President Cheney that will be one of many told-ya-so's we'll be hearing: "One of the concerns, obviously, is the aging power grid and the growing problem that we have in getting electricity from the power plant to the light switch. It's clear that we must upgrade and expand the power grid. If we put more connections in place, we'll go a long way towards avoiding future blackouts. Another broad aim is to increase energy supplies from diverse sources; from oil and gas, renewables, coal, hydro and nuclear." [via Michele] torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Skylines
: Michael J Totten collected pictures of all the darkened skylines.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Circle of friends
: Blogs are a means to make and keep in touch with friends, so bloggers feel as if they're trapped in an elevator when their blogs are down. Bene Diction, a Canadian blogger, couldn't get online and thus had a friend post to the blog from elsewhere to let everybody know that Bene was fine. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Urban survivalists
: KMK, in my comments, tells a tale of urban survivalism: I'm an alarmist........and I've been the butt of many jokes since Christmas. I took hat boxes and spray painted them with glow in the dark paint. In them I put lanterns that run on batteries, huge flashlights, walkman radio's, old phones that require no power to work, heavy duty hospital supply face masks, MRE's from the army navy supply on Canal Street, juice boxes, and a large supply of replacement batteries. They all got a keyring laser light. I taped my phone number to the phones and laminated a card for everyone's wallet with my number on it. My friend in Soho, who is an artist, displays my box in an Andy Warhol kind of way with his art. I'd like to say I had the last laugh last night but I am just relieved. My friends and family, when they made it home, had light and a radio telling them it wasn't a terrorist attack. They were able to tell their neighbors what was going on. I spent the night as a check in point reuniting people with their significant others and parents with children. It didn't take more than $40 bucks per box and a little planning to be prepared. If you could have heard the frantic tone in my friends voice when at 11:30 he still had not heard from his girlfriend and the relief when I told him she had called and was planning to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to get home (she works midtown) and the fact that she had stopped off with a few friends to partake in the free beer pubs were offering, you'd make a box. The only one who talked to all the kids about a plan was me, the alarmist. I'm happy to know I have no MIA's, just a few people sleeping off the free beer, and a big Cheshire cat smile on my face. That is live in New York after 9/11. Fear comes in handy. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Why it takes so long
: Steven Den Beste -- for those of you who are new to blogging, he's a blogger renowned for his lengthy and complete posts and that's an understatement -- explains in a fascinating and not-too-long post why it takes so long to get the power back: If the power could go out in a wide area in 3 seconds, why will it take days to bring it all back up?
One reason is that they need to check everything to make sure it wasn't damaged when it went down. If a transmission line tripped its breakers because it was approaching overload, then the breakers are supposed to throw before anything is damaged – but you never know for sure, and it's better to check. (Expensive components are legendary for burning out first in order to protect fuses and breakers.)
Another reason is that this kind of failure takes place when the demand for power comes close to the supply. As you get close, the system becomes less robust, and a local surge in demand or an unexpected loss of generation capacity can set off what's known as a cascading failure where each time something overloads and shuts down it causes the next piece in turn to overload, sort of like a series of dominoes falling over.
Unfortunately, if the power's been off for a long time (fifteen minutes or more), then when the grid comes back on again it actually draws much more than normal for quite a while.
For the first few seconds there is a huge spike, caused by all the electric lights and everything with a motor turning on....
The other effect is caused by everything which has a thermostat....
If, once they've checked everything, they were to turn a huge area (e.g. Manhattan) back on all at once, they'd overload their generating capacity and the whole system would shut itself back down again in self-defense. What they have to do is to bring the grid back up gradually, a piece at a time. After each piece comes back on, they wait until the load drops back to something near normal before bring the next lot back online....
Update: Benjamin writes:
As someone that plans part of the transmission grid in three states (CO, KS, & MO), I felt it was needed to point out items about power generation that you have left out....
First off is that most base load power plants are steam (either nuclear, coal, or gas). Once these plants have been knocked out of service, the fuel for providing the steam is shut off. This cools the plant down.
Most large base load plants (steam), also do not have the ability to start on their own (aka black start capability). These plants rely on the grid to excite their generators to get them to start. Consequently when the grid goes down, they can not start....
And the plan is speculative, given that this kind of thing doesn't happen very often. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blackouts we have known
: Here's a great site with an archive of news from the other great blackouts, now dwarfed by this one. [via Josh Marshall]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blackout links
: Amy Langfield has lots of blackout links, including:
: Lots of good pictures at Gothamist.
: Don't expect a baby boom. Snopes punctures the popular myth that the big black out of '65 led to a pop in population.
: torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Iraq says: Nya-nya
: Iraqis know how to deal with blackouts, from the AP: Iraqis who have suffered for months with little electricity gloated Friday over a blackout in the northeastern United States and southern Canada and offered some tips to help Americans beat the heat.
From frequent showers to rooftop slumber parties, Iraqis have developed advanced techniques to adapt to life without electricity....
"Let them taste what we have tasted," said Ali Abdul Hussein, selling "Keep Cold" brand ice chests on a sidewalk. "Let them sit outside drinking tea and smoking cigarettes waiting for the power to come back, just like the Iraqis." ...
- SIT IN THE SHADE. Many Iraqis head outside when the power's off. "We sit in the shade," said George Ruweid, 27, playing cards with friends on the sidewalk. Of the U.S. blackout, he said: "I hope it lasts for 20 years. Let them feel our suffering." torrent Magic Swap 3.6
A day in the sun
: Gov. Pataki is saying on TV now that they've opened the beaches for free.
Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg said they closed the beaches because of raw sewage being spewed into the water.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Something we do better than Canadians
: Reuters says Toronto was leaderless in the crisis: As Canada's biggest city struggled back to life on Friday following a massive power outage that hit large areas of North America, Toronto residents were looking around for their civic leaders.
There was a noticeable lack of leadership to guide Toronto, the country's financial hub, as subways ground to a halt, the city was pitched into darkness and thousands were milling about downtown streets late into the night.
In contrast to New York City and Ottawa, where mayors quickly appeared at press conferences to calm residents and provided regular updates, Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman was noticeably absent. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Weblogs for news
: Well, live by the wire, die by the wire. The blackout fried part of our primary router and we're getting the new part and then will get up to the Internet. In the meantime, we are using dial-up to update our blackout page on our Advance Internet sites and after running around all morning dealing with that, I'm now online to link from here. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Instapundit notes that our blackout page is sending links to weblogs, including this one, to impart news while our wires are crossed. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blackout: The next morning
: A current wire story on the blackout here. A story about newspapers struggling to get out here.
Here's the GoogleNews page on the blackout.
The CNN wrapup.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: The update for readers of Advance Internet services: If power is restored to our location in Jersey City this morning, we will be able to start bringing back services after 7 a.m. Home pages will, at first, be outdated (that is, whatever was sitting there when the blackout hit) but editors will be updating them as quickly as possible. Newspaper feeds will be delayed but they, too, will go up as soon as possible. Thanks for your understanding.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: 7 a.m.: The latest for Advance Internet (since I see this morning that there's a link on our blackout page to this weblog): Power is being restored now to our HQ in Jersey City. When it is back up and the servers are brought back, within an hour, then we will point traffic back to the main pages for the services (which will be out of date for a short time) and editors will then be able to update their services and get feeds of newspaper content resent. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Here's an image of the U.S. power grid and its spider veins, via Instapundit.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Meanwhile, in Canada.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Today's story is the blame game. Bush, Pataki, Clinton, Chretien... they've all started apportioning blame and pointing fingers about this fragile system.
More on the U.S./Canadian cross-border finger-pointing here. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday afternoon that everything would be back to normal in New York City this morning. I said then that he'd regret those words.
He's now saying that everything will be normal in New York City tomorrow morning. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Blackouts through history. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: NJ outages: The Star-Ledger has a map this morning finally showing where power was lost in New Jersey. The heaviest outages were all clustered in Hudson, Union, and Essex counties. This morning, PSE&G had all but 15,000 customers back online by 7 a.m.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 14, 2003
More Fair and Balanced
: The text of the FoxNews complaint v. Al Franken. [via Balkin]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
More blackout
: Just watched some great video-of-the-people from inside a subway car on WNBC. You see the conductor explaining what's happening; you see the people sweltering; you see them escaping to the street. This is how news will be reported, before you know it: Witnesses to news, armed with the tools of newsmen.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Times Square is dark. It's a tourist attraction.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: TV reporter says to tourist: "You're from California, so you might be used to this sort of thing." Yup, California, the screwed-up state.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: What's amazing -- and frightening -- is that we still don't know the cause. Our frigging power went out across the Northeast and we don't have any idea how it happened? The Prime Minister of Canada says it's a fire in a ConEd plant in New York. New York denies that. The PM says it's lightning in Canada. The PM says it's another plant in Canada. Now I hear the PM saying it's a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
They have no frigging idea. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The blackout
: Mayor Mike Bloomberg said on the radio that the city had set up emergency shelters and they put the addresses on the city's web site.
MIKE, YOU BLOOMING IDIOT, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Jersey City was oddly quiet. Spooky quiet.
Right afterward, I saw a huge plume of smoke coming from the power plant just west of the office (we were told later that that's normal when they shut down). We went to the roof and saw black smoke coming from Manhattan and more coming from Bayonne.
Of course, I thought, "Not again." torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Well, this apparently isn't an act of terrorism. But it certainly demonstrated to bad guys how easy it would be to bring down the Northeast of America.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: It doesn't look like we learned a lot on September 11. The evacuation of New York is a frigging mess -- worse than it was then. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: I just got home, in western New Jersey, where we have power. Damn, I'm glad I didn't have to go into Manhattan today. I'm glad about that every day.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: The intrepid technical and editorial staff at Advance.net drove in a caravan down to our server facility to update our sites manually. NJ.com is back now. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Here's funny fallout of the power outage: TV news people without blow driers. Their hair looks as if they're the ones who stuck their fingers in the sockets and brought the grid down.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Xeni points us to a moblog on the blackout. This is how news will be reported before you know it. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Finally, a magazine for pencil-necked geeks like me
: There's a guy out there pitching a magazine for tall people.
Called Tall (of course), it's aimed at men over 6'2" and women over 5'8", reports Media Life.
Hmmm. I'm 6'4"+ so this magazine should be just the thing for me. But I can't see waiting, stooped, by the mailbox for the latest issue. Sounds more like a weblob (the latest on airline leg room!).torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Ya gotta love it. I now discover there is a Tall Club of New York. Prospective members must be measured in stocking feet before getting in. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The Japanese do eat disgusting things
: Such as the Southern French Ratatouille Hamburger Sandwich from McDonald's. [via the WSJ]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
 Jersey bloggers: Front and center!
: All New Jersey bloggers -- please leave your weblog address in the comments on this post. Or if you know a Jersey blogger, please turn him or her in below. I want to get a sense of how wide the blogging community is here and I'm working on some new ideas. (And, no, I'm not going to make you rich.)torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Bias
: The interview and the story turned out OK, but neither the interview nor the story started off right.
I got a call from a freelancer working on a story for the Online Journalism Review -- Sarah Lai Stirland -- about community and media sites.
She started off telling me that her editor's premise was that community was over, it was dying, it was yesterday.
I blew my top: Tell your editor he's full of crap, I said, making a less judicious choice of words. Proceeded to say just how full he is. At my company's sites, we get more than a third of our traffic from community; we get our most loyal audience from community; we get great content from community. Your editor doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, I screeched.
Now I've been a reporter long enough to realize that arguing with or yelling at reporters is not one's best PR tactic. As it turned out, I had a long conversation and a few long email exchanges with the reporter and they were fine.
Now comes the story. And it's fine -- except for the lede: Does the idea of fostering online communities at news Web sites still make sense? A decade after author Howard Rheingold popularized the notion in his influential national bestseller "The Virtual Community," news executives still support the idea, but they're struggling to make the concept work. Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the hand of an editor.
Nothing but nothing in the story that follows backs up that lede.
In the story, many of my colleagues in this business -- the New York Times' Martin Nissenholtz and the San Jose Mercury News' Dan Gillmor among them -- sing an aria of praises to the miracle of community. They all say it's incredibly popular and builds amazing loyalty. They all say it brings audience to their web sites and thus their advertising and thus their business. They all seem to know quite well how to "make the concept work."
I've been making the concept work for nine years now. I'd say we're past making the concept work. It works.
The truth is that the concept works so well that it is now expanding in new areas -- such as weblogs, the next generation of audience content (which the story just touches on).
So go ahead and read the story. But ignore the lede. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 13, 2003
The horror! The hype!
: Oh, my. Atlantic Books put up a site to hype Salam Pax' upcoming book and the prose is rhetorical shock and awe: Salam Pax is an internet sensation. His diary ('The Baghdad Blog') of the war in Iraq and its aftermath, has become a global media phenomenon. I guess they decided to leave off the bangers (!) for subtlety. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Chill
: Harry Hatchett says, rightly, that the government Hutton inquiry into the Gilligan/Kelly scandal in Britain will have a chilling effect on news sources. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: By the way, the noose is getting tighter and tighter around Andrew Gilligan's neck.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Julie/Julia
: The delightful Julie/Julia blog project gets some deserved attention from the NY Times. This the same day that Dowd reads blogs.
So who says blogs are obscure? Heck, even the NY Times reads them. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Inhuman
: Here's the concrete proof that the lefty left has lost any semblance of its heritage in humanism, that is in caring about people. Or to put it another way, here's the proof that the looney left has no heart.
On September 11, the civilized world will mark this terrible anniversary by mourning the loss of life, by remembering the innocents who perished there, by perhaps praying for them and their families.
But the Guerrilla News Network et al will use Sept. 11 as just an excuse to shriek their anti-government, anti-business agenda.
Heartless.
See Michele for more appropriate bile.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
G.
: Salam Pax says his friend G was beaten up by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. G works as a translator for the NY Times. Have I missed something? Has anyone seen the story there?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blast that worm
: Mike Wendland has the clearest instructions I've seen for protecting yourself against the dreaded worm.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
More F&B: News as advertising
: On the fair-and-balanced suit by FoxNews against Al Franken, Glenn Reynolds says: Of course, as several people have pointed out, this "dumb" suit has gotten both Fox and Franken a lot of free publicity. Well, that's the media biz, these days. Yup, it's how you use news to get publicity.
You can file suit and get a story.
Or you can run for office and get a story (see Terry Tate, state house linebacker).
What's next: petty crimes for the sake of publicity? torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Yale Law School's Jack Balkin also weighs in on FoxNews v. Franken. I think he's overintellectualizing what is at best a publicity stunt and at worst a Bill O'Reilly hissy fit: If Franken may not use the expression "fair and balanced" in a book to accuse Fox News of failing to be "fair and balanced," there is something seriously wrong with trademark law under our First Amendment. And if Fox can get an injunction preventing the sale of the book, we can be sure that the expansion of intellectual property rights has gone too far. So far, so good: If a court allows this to happen, then that would be a travesty. I doubt any sane court would enjoin Franken.
Balkin keeps a-chuggin' down this track: The most troubling aspect of the lawsuit politically is its attempt to harass a political opponent through the use of intellectual property laws. Fox News v. Franken is merely one episode in a much larger conflict between freedom of speech and intellectual property. Trademark, like copyright, has now become a general purpose device for private parties to use the state to suppress speech they do not like. And they can suppress the speech of others not merely to protect their legitimate economic interests but because of aesthetic and political disagreements as well. A bit stretched, a tad paranoid, eh? I don't see a trend here (yet). But I'm sure Larry Lessig will see boogeyman lurking nonetheless; it's another convenient opportunity to try to paint copyright as a bad thing. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: One other very odd piece of this: You'd think that Fox -- owner of Harper Collins -- would not want to set precedent in prior restraint of the distribution of books, both as a matter of free speech and as a matter of free trade. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Neal Pollack declares Friday, Aug. 15 Fair and Balanced day, urging all bloggers to use the words on their websites.
So we are all Al Franken. We are all curly-haired and paunchy. [via RFB]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Drudge says that, indeed, this is just a Bill O'Reilly hissyfit. [via Michele]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Who needs Bonnie Fuller?
: We have celebrity moblogging. [via Anil]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Fair and balanced justice
: A trademark attorney tells us the demerits of FoxNews' case against Al Franken's use of "fair and balanced" in the comments, below. A snippet: The mark "fair & balanced" is what trademark folk would call a laudatory mark, like "the best burger in town." Such marks are inherently weak and entitled to a limited scope of protection. Fox could articulate a plausible claim against CNN, perhaps, if it adopted the same mark to promote the same services.
Franken is not in Fox's business. More importantly, Franken is using the words "fair and balance" in their primary, non-trademark sense. To the extent that Franken may also be using the phrase to refer to Fox, such use is protected as "nominative" fair use. In addition to these obstacles to Fox's claim, Franken is engaged in political commentary. The first amendment gives him a broad zone of protection. Remember, free speech is a constitutional right. Trademark law is a mere creature of statute.
Based on what I know of the suit, Fox's trademark infringement claim is frivolous on its face. : See more F&B above. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 12, 2003
Homeland insecurity
: Well, at least they nabbed one: A British arms dealer was arrested today in Newark on charges that he tried to sell a Russian-made surface-to-air missile to an American undercover agent posing as an operative for Al Qaeda, law enforcement officials said.
A shoulder-fired SA-18 missile and launcher, which had been made inoperable as part of a sting operation, were seized today by American investigators, acting on extensive help from Russian and British authorities, officials said. The missile, when armed, is capable of bringing down a commercial airliner. In a case of life imitating HBO, the missile was smuggled into the port of Baltimore, the setting of the cop series The Wire. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
So who did the sexing?
: The noose is tightening around Gilligan's neck: BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan today faced fierce questioning from a Hutton inquiry lawyer about whether he "exaggerated and embellished" what David Kelly told him about last year's Iraq dossier. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Yea! I'm A!
: Robert Scoble gives us the latest A-list parody (and I'm proud to be parodied). My favorite part: Ben and Mena Trott: "We are cute. We are cute." [via Tech Guru by way of Tehran]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Dummkopf
: TV's on in the background. Just heard FoxNews' Adam Housley talking about all the languages to be used in the California ballots -- "but not in Austrian, the language of the country" Schwarzenegger came from.
Ja, und wir sprechen Amerikan.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Flashfog
: Flashmobs are essentially the useless amusements of the underemployed: We use our phones to mob the unsuspecting and untechnical just because we can and because somebody told us it was fun. This fad will die quickly. And here's the first sign: It is being taken over by IndyMedia and they are managing to make Flashmobs seem not only useless but excruciatingly dull: The concept of Flash Mobs can be seen in Science Fiction and the critical mass cycling phenomenon. Probably the most noteworthy of antecedents has been the Situationists as psychogeographers who encapsulated the idea of the flash mob as the dérive, who created 'situations' for cultural subversion. The Situationists, as avante garde artists and itellectuals, used revolutionary theory, and the work of The Futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists before them, to explore cultural subversion, and "put forward the slogans of unitary urbanism, experimental behavior, hyper-political propaganda, and the construction of ambiences" (Guy Debord 1957). Gawd, clean the fog out of my ears. I just can't bear that itellectual talk. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
A B.A. in B.S.
: A San Francisco school is now offering a degree in activism.
What a curriculum:
Today class, we will learn to hug a tree.
Tomorrow, be prepared to shout silly slogans until you're hoarse.
For phys ed, we'll learn how to sit.
Please make sure to stop by the campus store and buy your official backpacks, Birkinstocks, and ratty t-shirts.
A question from the back... Uh, no, they don't sell deodorant.
And where is all this happening? Do you really have to ask? [via Zogby]
Oh, the torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Putting words in mouths
: The BBC should be (but likely won't be) embarrassed about the latest reports from the inquiry into the Gilligan/Kelly affair.
The Guardian reports that the BBC now admits that its bosses were concerned about Gilligan's reports. Hmmm. Perhaps they should have admitted that before. They seem to be more concerned about circling their wagons (quaint colonial phrase) than about maintaining their credibility with the audience.
It also comes out that Gilligan did not have comprehensive notes of his meeting with Kelly and that his wording in the first reports was a bit stretched. The BBC show's editor complained about it: But several weeks later Marsh wrote to the BBC's head of radio news, Stephen Mitchell, describing the report as "a good piece of investigative journalism marred by poor reporting".
"Our biggest millstone is a loose use of language and lack of judgment in some of his phraseology," he added. Now get this, buried at the bottom of the Guardian story: Gilligan was asked again if the "sexed up" reference was first made by him or by Dr Kelly.
He replied: "I said 'To make it sexier?' and he said: 'Yes, to make it sexy'." Old trick, that: putting words in the other guy's mouth. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Sated
: Lost Remote's Cory Bergman says: Larry Pryor from USC's Annenberg School for Communication raises a good point after reading Jim Rutenberg's story in the NY Times on how news burnout may be to blame for sliding network news ratings. Writes Pryor in Poynter's Online News group: "He makes no effort to look at alternate explanations.... Instead of news burnout, it could well be online news satisfaction. Who needs the evening news?" torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Gogle Did you mean: Google?
: A Google trick:
I find that I now use Google as my spellchecker. If I'm doing anything outside of Word -- that is, if I'm posting here -- and I run across a word of unsure spelling (which happens more and more now, thanks to [1] reliance on the Word automatic spellchecker and [2] age), I just put it in the Google search bar and, sure enough, wise old Google asks: "Did you mean...?"torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: And in the comments come these two wonderful posts relating to our smart Google: I was just reading about Jerome (of Vulgate fame), who was a "scholar" as well as later a translator, and I thought how we've come almost full circle with Google. In his day (350 AD), there weren't books or even handly libraries, so if you wanted to "look something up" to verify accuracy, you hired a smart person. If you were rich enough, you hired one all to yourself. Then libraries made access to fact-checking more available to the common folk. Then every home (almost) had a dictionary and encyclopedia of their own -- an 'in-house' library for checking facts. Then, broad-band access to an electronic, distributed library. And, finally, a smart person all my own: Google. I go to it for the simplest question. We have a number of CD-based encyclopedias (and hard-copy Encyclopedia Brit, giving away my era), but I go to our scholar for questions ranging from spelling to, as it happened, Jerome: he lived in Bethlehem for at least 15 years. Google helped set that straight, just as Jerome would have two millenia ago.
What a country.
Posted by Lawrence Cardon at August 12, 2003 11:53 AM torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Google would have caught 'millenia,' too. If I'd asked -- that part of checking is still a problem.
Posted by Lawrence Cardon at August 12, 2003 11:59 AM What a wonderful medium. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The next Chinese revolution
: A weblog says the first blog book in Chinese is now available.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The anniversary
: The city just announced plans for the second anniversary of September 11.
: Children of the victims will read the names of the dead (God, I can't imagine how hard that would be). Children will also perform music.
: The families will descend the ramp and lay flowers on the lowest level.
: At night, the Towers of Light will come back for one night and the city plans to bring them back on every anniversary (I applaud this).torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Crain's New York (in a story behind its barbed wire) says that most businesses will operate as normal on the anniversary this year, including Broadway, which shut down last year.
The Wall Street Journal reports that there will be little commemorative news coverage and that advertisers will promote as usual. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Michele fears that we have forgotten too much only two years later.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: I doubt that we've found the proper level of commemoration: A shut-down is too much; normal is too little.
We need some unavoidable if brief tribute simply so we do not try to forget.
For example:
At the moment the first jet hit and at the moment the second tower fell, all broadcasters observe a moment of silence; all busiensses and schools observe a moment of silence; all churches ring their bells. Just so we remember.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: I will take off work on Sept. 11 and go to the World Trade Center, reporting on the day here as I did last year.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Lizzie update
: No great surprise: Lizzie Grubman won't be on Howard Stern this week. Lizzie had scheduled it herself for Wednesday but then Lizzie's people said, silly Lizzy, she forgot that she's in Miami on Wednesday. She'll reschedule. Uh-huh.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 11, 2003
Unfair and unbalanced (and unfunny)
: I've defended FoxNews with horrified journalist friends and I've rolled my eyes at the once-funny Al Franken but in this case, I have to side with Franken: Fox News Channel has sued liberal humorist Al Franken and the Penguin Group to stop them from using the phrase "fair and balanced" in the title of his upcoming book.
Filed Monday in Manhattan, the trademark infringement lawsuit seeks a court order forcing Penguin to rename the book, "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." It also asks for unspecified damages.
Fox News registered "Fair & Balanced" as a trademark in 1995, the suit says.
Franken's "intent is clear - to exploit Fox News' trademark, confuse the public as to the origins of the book and, accordingly, boost sales of the book," the suit said. Sounds like Bill O'Reilly having a hissy fit.
Fox should just have a sense of humor and let it go.
Hey, Fox attorneys, you might want to go after this on competitor CNN and this and this and this and this. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
POP!
: Chris Pirillo has a Tupperware store! Can Amway be far behind?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
A Oh, Well
: AOL Time Warner is thinking about dropping AOL from its name. The Wall Street Journal reports that the idea came from AOL itself so the online division gets its brand back. (Mewonders whether that may be a bit of overspun PR, but fine.)
I long ago suggested dropping the AOL and I'd go one step further and drop the Warner. That's one way to prove that the company is no longer trying to stitch and synergize, that it is coming together behind one strategic engine. And Time is such a, well, timeless name.
That's what I'd do if I ran AOL Time Warner. But thank goodness, I'm not.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
  Ah, the first red-bellied fad bird of summer
: I made my first Segway sighting in New York: At 41st and 6th, right by Bryant Park, here came a guy zooming put-putting gliding along the sidewalk. You have to love New York for its essential cool: Not one person, not one stopped, gasped, spoke, or even turned at the sight of the guy: We've seen it all before. It's a good thing the sidewalk was not crowded as he oozed along; it takes up as much space and time as a gawking Kansas tourist. New Yorkers will get hostile if these things start breeding. Or then again, it could be the thing to have for a week or two. If we stories about a flashmob on Segways, I'm moving to Kansas.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The fad divide
: While New Yorkers are riding Segways that cost $5,000, across the river in Jersey City, the hot fad in transportation at the moment is the motorized scotter, for under $300.
 torrent Magic Swap 3.6
PR's PR
: Howard Stern said this morning that Lizzie Grubman, people-mowing PR princess and ex-con, is going to be on the show this week. Howard said there was considerable debate about whether to have her, but, hey, she asked to come on and Howard is hardly holding back his disdain for her. He calls it: She is cocky enough to think she can handle Howard. She believes her own PR.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: UPDATE: See the post above. Lizzie backs out...torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 10, 2003
Foot fetish
: The Australian reports on sicko New Yorkers who cut off hunks of their toes to fit into their Manolo Blahniks.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 09, 2003
 G.I. George
: Not a joke: The George Bush action figure, in uniform, just as he appeared hopping out of the jet on that aircraft carrier: $39.99 at KB Toys:
Exacting in detail and fully equipped with authentic gear, this limited-edition action figure is a meticulous 1:6 scale recreation of the Commander-in-Chief's appearance during his historic Aircraft Carrier landing. ...
This fully poseable figure features a realistic head sculpt, fully detailed cloth flight suit, helmet with oxygen mask, survival vest, g-pants, parachute harness and much more.... Yes, a "realistic head," just like the President.
[via schizopersian]
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Party, Iranian style
: The American wife of an Iranian blogging from Tehran tells of attending a wedding party there: About 2 hours into the party, my friend heard shouts of “Scarves! Manteaus! The religious police are here!” The women ran for their manteaus. The band disappeared. The men went to the door to bribe the two religious police at the door. After about five minutes, they were successful and the two bearded guards of Islam left.
45 minutes later, however, the religious police were back. This time it was a different group with about 20 18-year old representatives of the religious police charging in with guns and rifles ready. These guys did not want to be bribed; they wanted to make arrests. The shouts were more panicked this time: “Run! Run!” The women crowded into a bathroom together. The men came in with their manteaus and scarves. “I saw the fear on their faces,” my friend said. “It was terrible. The worst thing was that I saw that people did not help each other. They only thought for themselves.” ...
Meanwhile the religious police were on their radios calling for buses to come and pick up all of the women and all of the men at the party. “We can’t get buses at this time of night,” the response came from their command center. Other police were inside the party smelling the glasses and checking for alcohol. “Thank god we didn’t have any,” my friend said.... torrent Magic Swap 3.6
TypePad reaction
: I held off reacting to TypePad because I was a beta tester and wore a gag of indeterminate duration.
Now that the product is released, I put some reaction -- concentrating on constructive complaints -- on my AOL test blog.
My TypePad test blog is here. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: UPDATE: Anil has left a lot of good answers to my quibbles in the comments. I forgot to mention the biggest advantage Movable Type and TypePad have over Blogger/Blogspot, AOL and others: responsiveness. Ben, Mena, and Anil listen to their customers. That's why it's worth throwing your two cents out here.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
All the Shah's men
: A couple of fascinating reviews of All the Shah's Men, the book by Stephen Kinzer. The Business Week review is a good summary of America's -- and, importantly, Britain's -- roles in the overthrow of Iranian PM Mohammed Mossadegh. The text lies behind the barbed wire but here's how it ends: "...certainly Kinzer's book should give pause to would-be regime-changes." Here's the NY Times review. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The grinning guerilla
: Here's how the smiling terrorist murder Amrozi will be put to death: UNDER Indonesian law, Bali bomber Amrozi will be given three days' notice of his execution by firing squad, which will occur at night in a secluded forest or on a beach.... If Amrozi's appeal against his death sentence is denied, he will be led to the place of execution wearing a white shirt with a red target marked over his heart. Iranian blog Astigma worries about turning suicide bombers into martyrs: He was giving thumbs up and laughing after the death penalty was given to him. I was happy for the innocent victims family, offended by his acts of joy in the courtroom, angry by the heroic method of his execution (firing squad) and sad for him himself, not because he is going to be killed, but because I think I could understand what is going through his mind. Poor guy has been brain washed that Americans and Jews should be killed and if in doing so, he gets killed, he will be a hero and will have an “exclusive” place in the heaven. He surly considers himself as a martyr. Logically thinking, he should be happy. He and his friends were involved in a suicide attack; and his friends are all dead. Why? Because all of them were trying to find a “shortcut” to heaven. I can remember lots of stories about Iranian soldiers being killed for nothing in the war because they have been promised to have great place in Paradise. In my opinion, this is exactly the case for all Islamic terrorists. They are all seeking heaven through civilian bodies. And what are we giving them? Exactly what they want: Death.... This will make a martyr and hero out of a fanatic and encourages others to follow their footsteps because either way they hit the target of going to heaven.... I am opposed to the death penalty, even for evil sewer slime such as this, simply because I do not want to sink to his level. And I do worry about his martyrdom; that will be an issue with the Gitmo prisoners as well.
I want this slime to suffer as long as possible. Death is the easy way out. Eternity in an Indonesian prison is just what he deserves. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Yes, and mimes are suspected terrorists -- arrest them all now, please!
: A couple of "performance artists" were arrested at the Capitol: Reena Patel, 22 and Ilelabayo David Olaniyi, 32 were arrested in Washington D.C. in March in front of the Capitol building on suspicion of being suicide bombers.
The affidavit from the Capitol police says Patel was "wearing a gray waist band which resembled an explosive device." It also says Olaniyi stood up "revealing what appeared to be gray harness strapped to his upper body." Performance artists are dorks.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Besotted wimps
: I'm amazed that the all-time hottest day in British history was 98.8 degrees F (and tomorrow may break the record). That's what they're complaining about? Wimps.
They just want an excuse to drink: And parched Britons are working up a big thirst, with breweries saying an extra three million pints will be consumed over the weekend. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Readin', writin' & what was that other thing?
: Greg Beato says I messed up the math on my analysis of Instapundit's unique audience. I'll lay the blame on the service that reported his uniques if indeed it did not follow what is now quite standard industry practice in reporting monthly uniques. If Greg's right and they're wrong, I'll fess up to the faulty ciphering. I'll also admit that even I was surprised at the relative size of audience. But my point remains quite the same: Put Instapundit against the list of newspapers and magazines -- and put all bloggers in aggregate against that list -- and you will find a (realistic but) significant audience and significant influence. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The believe-it-or-not blog
: Jayson Blair should start a blog.
No, that's not a punchline.
The guy had talent. Now he has infamy.
He was going to write that movie review for Esquire on "Shattered Glass," based on the book by fellow liar-journalist Stephen Glass.
I thought it was questionable taste and judgment to make the assignment in the first place. It was a sight gag at Blair's expense and he lacked enough pride to go along with it.
Now Esquire killed the assignment because word of it got out, ruining the gag.
Gothamist says says Esquire "shafted" Blair; that may be a bit strong; they probably shafted him by making the assignment.
The guy's not going to get assignments, not for a long time.
So Blair should start a weblog, where he can say what he wants, where you can read it or not and believe it or not.
This is, after all, a world without editors.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Update: Now they can use Treacher's review instead. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Burn, baby, burn
: The Norwegian "comedian" who burned an American flag now won't face prison after higher-ups intervened in the case and took it away from the prosecutor. By our way of looking at things, it would have been wrong to punish him for excercising free speech. Besides, he now serves as life sentence as a jerk.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Changing Europe:
: FAZ.net reports: "...last year, for the first time, Germany accepted more Jews as immigrants than did Israel."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Hammersley's law
: "Coders, writers and artists in their teens and twenties are now responsible not just for the creation and consumption of revolutionary media, but for the whole distribution chain."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blog 101
: In case a friend asks, "How do I do this klog thing I keep hearing about?"... Anders Jacobsen put up an admirably brief tutorial on how to blog. For more depth on how to blog with movable type, nothing beats the class at Tokyo Shoes.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
If you could see me now...
: hEiko hebig finds a frightening site: blog naked. [work safe, aesthetically dangerous]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 08, 2003
The health-care crisis
: Tom Daschle's road weblog keeps coming back to the health-care crisis, from the perspective of the real people he meets. A good thing.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Episcopalian
: First and foremost, let me pat the Episcopalians on the back (if such a touch would not be seen as sexually inappropriate by some looney parishioner). They elevated Bishop Robinson. They left it to locals to decide on holding gay committment ceremonies and thus blesses those that do occur. The Presbyterians should be half as Christian. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: James Lileks said one good thing about gay marriage in his Newhouse column: Does gay marriage threaten heterosexual marriage? Of course! Who knows how many women woke last week to find notes on the kitchen table: "Dearest Wife, now that homosexual sodomy is legal in Texas, I have to go try it. Took the cell phone. Farewell."
No, if heterosexual marriage is threatened by anything, it's by heterosexuals. Famous heterosexuals in particular. We see them grinning from the covers of gossip mags, celebrating wedding No. 9 or dissolving marriage No. 14, or just having a hot fling with whatever good-gened, white-toothed cretin is the flavor of the season....
Say what you will about gay marriage, it's nice to see someone taking the institution seriously. : But then, on his bleat, Lileks sings a slightly different tune regarding Bishop Robinson. He complains that Robinson should not have left his wife and children just so he could sleep on the other side of the fence -- a meme I've been seeing on weblogs and in my own comments, below.
Mike at Begging to Differ begs to differ, giving a heartfelt summary of Robinson's heartfelt struggle with his sexuality and family life and religion, a story well worth reading. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Yglesias' Law
: "The further to the right you are, the further left the media seems, and vice-versa."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
I am California's shrink
: And my diagnosis: California is a crisis queen.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
And in the center ring...
: In the space of six paragraphs, Michael Totten convinces himself to support Arnold: "So it turns out he's the type of guy who'll annoy Rush Limbaugh and the Europeans?..."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
 Instahit...
: Instapundit is two years old today.
Now I'll confess that when I started blogging a mere month and a half after Glenn Reynolds started, I resisted Instaworship. I wondered why there was all this blogfawning over him. I wondered who'd clicked and made him God.
Of course, I soon found out and joined the chorus. It's because he reliably delivers the quality links and information that we come to count on weblogs to give us. He's quick about it (reading weblogs has made me only more impatient with dragging-it-out, damnit-would-you-get-to-the-point newspaper leads and TV magazine stories). He's generous with his links and audience. And he's a damned nice guy.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Instaudience...
: But here's the point: In just two years, he has built a presence that is significant in the bigger media world.
Instapundit has more traffic every month than certain major magazines I could name whose online sites have (a) tons of content, (b) tons of promotion, and (c) big brands behind them.
His unique audience is significant. At its height, during the war, Instapundit had 1.6 million in its audience; that's the circulation of the magazine I created, Entertainment Weekly. It took EW 10 years to reach that level (and a $200 million investment!!). It took Glenn less two years and a a few grand. Of course, Instapundit is free and magazines cost money and so the comparison on the basis of popularity is unfair. But the comparison on the basis of influence is quite fair.
Or look at the numbers another way: That size of audience would make Instapundit the third biggest newspaper in America, beating out the NY Times. Again, the comparison is unfair (newspapers get that circulation every day; he gets it over a month). But still, the point is the same:
Instapundit is an influence. So are other weblogs. So are weblogs as a whole.
Just yesterday, I had a pleasant lunch with a magazine editor who could not be talked into doing a story on weblogs. A few newpaper-editor friends of mine make fun of me for blogging and poo-poo the phenom.
At your peril, folks, at your peril.
The truth is that weblogs are an influence to be reckoned with.
No, Instapundit and even weblogs as a whole do not reach a huge percentage of the population... yet. But the next time you hear someone say that answer with this: Weblogs do reach just as big an audience as most magazines and most newspapers.
And they reach a powerful audience; why else are presidential candidates rushing to blog themselves?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Instabiz...
: One more point: This week, I spoke with Matt Welch about a story he's writing and, as is my want, I made a point that had nothing to do with what he was asking and so I'll recycle it here:
There are three revolutions going on in media. The first is about opinion, the second about business, the third about audience.
FoxNews is revolutionizing TV news not just because it adds perspective and thus life to news -- and gets ratings do it -- but also because it is getting the news to us without expensive produced pieces and thus with more live excitement. TV news will never be the same -- that is, never as expensive -- again.
The Week magazine is set to revolutionize magazines not just because it, too, is opinionated but because it is produced with an incredibly small staff. (When I launched EW, I was proud to have built the smallest edit staff in Time Inc. -- a weekly with fewer employees than even the monthlies: 60. The Week has a total staff, edit and business, of 24.) I know the editorial head of one major magazine company (not mine) who slavers over The Week's masthead; he will try to replicate it.
Instapundit and weblogs are revolutionizing media not just because they are opinionated but because they are so incredibly cheap. No, weblogs will not replace reporters who have the means -- time, training, support, salaries -- to get the news. But weblogs will replace some media efforts (look at the value PaidContent and IWantMedia bring to their trade readers and Gawker and Gizmodo bring to their wider audiences). And webloggers will replace some editors for -- individually and in aggregate -- we do a good job of editing the world: We're fast; we're thorough; we're fun; we're everywhere.
Media is going to go through big changes because the audience is gaining control over their content; there is far more competition for our time; ad revenue to any single entity is decreasing across all media; costs must thus be reduced. Weblogs are part of that story. Instapundit is part of that story. And the audience is the star of that story for that's the real revolution here: The audience is creating content, too, and that affects the value of the content the big boys produce. The audience and its content have value, too. That is the real moral to this birthday story.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: And, by the way, this is also the first birthday of Blogcritics. And Kesher has an anny, too! And so does RSS! And Jupiter has aligned with Mars!torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Update: See also Lileks on blogs v. Limbaugh as media influencers. Ditto Doc.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Usage update: I always used to say "as is my wont" and then some copy editor in my deep past convinced me it was "want" and that's what I typed above. A diligent reader says it's "wont" and looking things up, I think he's quite right. So I stand corrected. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
New neighbors
: Joe Katzman sends us to a new Iranian group blog in English, Free Thoughts. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 07, 2003
Can Gary Coleman be far behind?
: Next up guest-blogging at Larry Lessig's site: Kucinich. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
But it fits
: Jim Treacher finds a cringeworthy headline on AOL: "Armless Child Embraces Life."
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blogging pays
: John Scalzi announces that he has been hired by AOL to blog via the new AOL Journals tool, providing an example to the millions of bloggers who will follow. Good idea. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Newspeak
: Ashcroft should be condemned just for using dorky names for laws. [via Glenn Reynolds]torrent Magic Swap 3.6
A constitutional
: I have one bit of advice for the governing council that will create a new constitution for Iraq: Do nothing that California does.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: As I repeat with obnoxious frequency, I'm a populist; I believe in the intelligence and essential good will and common sense of the people. But that must be tempered with time and the way to do that is through structure and process. If we all voted on everything, we'd have the anarchy of the moment. That is the genius of our system and our Constitution, of our representative democracy with its checks and balances. California essentially throws all that out to, instead, rule by whim, impulse, and insanity.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: See also a wonderful piece by William Niskanen of the Cato Instutite comparing the U.S. Constitution with the wordy and ill-conceived proposed EU constitution. The most important difference between the US Constitution and the proposed EU constitution, however, is the concept of rights.
The US Bill of Rights is a list of individual rights against the state. In contrast, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which constitutes Part II of the proposed EU constitution, includes a long list of rights to services provided by the state. Such rights, for example, include education, a free placement service, paid maternity leave, social security benefits and social services, housing assistance, preventive health care, services of general economic interest and high levels of environmental and consumer protection.
These claims on the state represent the most important potential tension in the Union. On the one hand, the proposed EU constitution states that the "Free movement of persons, goods, services and capital, and freedom of establishment shall be guaranteed within and by the Union ... [and] any discrimination on grounds of nationality shall be prohibited."
Fine. On the other hand, any citizen of the Union seems to have a claim on a wide range of social services wherever that person chooses to live. This will lead to either a massive movement of people to states with a higher level of social services or the harmonization of these services among the member states. Archive posts on the EU efforts here, here here, here. [via Anil] torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Who do they think they are, the Guardian?
: Tucked into a New York Times story from Baghdad about postwars rumors and urban legend -- rumors that soldiers' specs have X-ray vision -- comes this gratuitous swipe: Of course, Americans have been circulating their own kinds of legends, starting with the fantasies a few months ago that the occupying troops would be peacefully welcomed by a nation of grateful flower-waving citizens. Show me the official predictions of that and I'll show you the stories about Iraqis who were, in fact, relieved and welcoming. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Hawash hogwash
: So it turns out that terrorist nerd Maher Mofreid "Mike" Hawash now admits that he did give aid to the terrorists (see below).
The fact that he was incompetent at it -- that he couldn't even get himself into Pakistan to fight alongside his fellow terrorist slime -- is neither here nor there. It only shows that you shouldn't arm a geek.
The important truth is that after the Taliban and Al-Queda committed an atrocious attack on this country and its civilians, this scum now freely confesses that he went abroad with the intent to fight alongside them against us. Traitor. Terrorist. Sewer rat. Pick your moniker.
Now he'll pay in prison. Now he'll turn on his fellow travelers. Justice served.
Yet still, the guy remains the darling of paranoid fools who think that our government is somehow the enemy. They're still whining (in my comments below, for example) that Hawash was held as a material witness before he was charged. Give it up.
Yes, the guy was hauled off in shackles -- and good on the government for finding out about his crimes and locking him up before he could commit more. I'm grateful for that. Yes, they held him as a material witness; that is a tool in the government's arsenal and if you don't like it, get a new law passed or take it on in the courts (because in this country, you can) but note that this is what police and prosecutors do: They got the bad guy, they got the confession, they got the truth, and they got his cooperation to stop other criminals before they murder more of us. Thank goodness.
I'll defend civil rights as loudly as the next person. I'll fear and sneer at John Ashcroft as much as anybody. But I'll also defend the government as it does its first and most important job: Defending us.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: There is a new priority in this country: We must protect our citizens from terrorist attacks that we now know all to well are real. We forget that at the peril of our lives.
So am I OK with the government locking up "Mike"? Oh, you bet. Am I OK with the TSA and the airlines making sure that our planes are safe -- even to the point of failing to see the humor or irony in a "suspected terrorist" button or a note about a bomb? Absolutely.
I will say this again and keep saying it: I stood a few hundred yards below two jets as they vaporized at the World Trade Center, taking thousands of innocent lives with them. The threat is that real. I will not see that happen again because we want to be nice to "Mike" or because some jerk wants to make an obnoxious point. Tough. It's a new, hard reality we're living in. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Oregonian columnist David Reinhard didn't buy the Hawash hogwash and stood up bravely against the PC mob that supported him. Reinhard wrote last May: But after federal prosecutors charged Maher "Mike" Hawash with conspiring to wage war against the United States and aid al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan -- well, the "dark night of fascism" humbug looked a spot weak. And his column today says: Hawash seems to have owned up to his wrongdoing. I wonder if Hawash's friends and those who were so quick to excoriate the government in this case ever will.
Sticking by a friend -- even a guilty one -- through tough times is one thing. Hawash's friends don't need to apologize for this one bit. What was disturbing in this case, however, was their raw hostility to the government and anyone who questioned Hawash's innocence. Against all evidence to the contrary, Hawash's friends and some media commentators were so eager think the best of "Mike" that they were ever-ready to think the very worst of our law enforcement officials.
I wonder if folks who played the cheapest kind of identity politics in this case -- they're picking on Hawash because he's an Arab American in post-9/11 America -- will ask forgiveness. Will the chatterboxes who likened law enforcement officials to Nazis or Latin American juntas apologize for their disgraceful references? Will they even recognize the war on terror is not a game, played with overwrought metaphors and tired phrases? I wonder if we'll see "We're sorry. We were wrong" on the "Free Mike Hawash" Web site. Bam! torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Give these people credit: The Free Mike Hawash site did acknowledge their hero's copping to a plea of aiding and abetting terrorists. "Aug 6: Mike pled guilty today to one count of his three-count indictment. He admitted attempting to enter Afghanistan with members of the "Portland 6". We hope that justice has been served, and our focus now shifts to support for Mike's family in this difficult time."
Oh. Nevermind.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Note also that Hawash has agreed to travel to Guantanamo, presumably to testify against terrorist slime there. See his plea deal here.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 06, 2003
Aid and comfort to the enemy
: Former Intel engineer Maher "Mike" Hawash has pleaded guilty to aiding the Taliban and has agreed to rat on fellow terrorists; he'll serve a minimum of seven years.
Hmmmm. I seem to remember lots and lots of sites defending him and decrying our bully government for taking him away in handcuffs.
So now he admits he's guilty. Hawash pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban. Prosecutors agreed to drop charges of conspiring to levy war against the United States and conspiring to provide material support for terrorism.
"You and the others in the group were prepared to take up arms, and die as martyrs if necessary, to defend the Taliban. Is this true?" U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones asked Hawash during the hearing.
"Yes, your honor," Hawash replied. Anybody have a spare "suspected terrorist" button for Mike? torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Push, the monster that won't die
: Push, created by that Dr. Frankenstein of the bubble, Pointcast, will not die.
AOL bought the successor to Pointcast and with its new Communicator email/IM client, it adds a push screensaver, complete with annoying, moving graphics that'll give you a seizure.
I first saw Pointcast before it was released and I hated it immediately. First, it seemed ridiculous to me to deliver news and advertising via a screensaver, for your screensaver comes on when you're not using your computer; this was the delivery channel aimed at an audience down the hall in the bathroom. Second, the application was a hog of computer power and bandwidth; it brought down corporate networks the world around. Third, it was simply overdone with annoying graphics and other wasted bits; it was a program with a big ego.
I left the demo and decided that I could deliver the value of Pointcast with nothing more than a browser page that refreshed every minute with the latest news. Thus, with some help, Newsflash was born. It still lives. Pointcast turned down $500 million from Rupert Murdoch and eventually died.
And the saga continues: Gary Wolf, who just wrote a history of Wired magazine, declares on his book-blog [via Scott Rosenberg] that the single dumbest story ever in the magazine was its cover cooing over push. Push! (5.03) In March, 1997 Wired said goodbye to the Web browser. In an article so important it started on the cover, the Wired editors announced: “the Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance. In its place...” ...
Meanwhile, the Wired cover spawned Push media conferences, push media consultants, push media investment strategies, and uncountable push media nightmares. The nightmare continues. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Out
: Elizabeth Spiers declares that big media snarky jokes about bloggers are "out."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Georgie porgie
: George Clooney put up a shrine to Joe Biden on his own web site (amazing that he could fit in in, what with all the pictures of George there): Being one of the few men qualified to restore democracy to America following the demoralization of it's [sic] people, destruction of the environment, destabilization of the economy, and dishonor in the world community, it is certainly our hope that he will do so. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Guvunuh Ahnuld
: So he's running. This is going to be entertaining. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
To the great relief of trailer trash everywhere
: Jerry Springer just announced that because his show would get in the way of a candidacy, he won't be running for the Senate.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Pepe le PU
: Can you imagine what France smells like now?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Next: eBay, the movie
: Somebody's making a movie about a day in the lives of CraigsList.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Poliblogs
: Mark Glaser writes about the Dean blog today (quoting me, btw). And at WSJ, James Taranto writes about all the blogging pols. He argues that it won't work because blogs need to be snarky. No, blogging is just publishing and the better job these pols do at publishing, the better they will connect to voters. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
RSS and freedom
: Hoder, the pioneering Iranian blogger, has an interesting idea: using RSS with peer-to-peer distribution to get around government censorship. One of his comments points out that this is what Freenet is intended to do. The difference, I imagine, is that using RSS allows any weblog to be published or read as is, around censors.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Blue Bird
: Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting Blue Bird -- the Iranian/American teen who blogged so eloquently about her return to Tehran recently -- with her parents and her brother, a prominent online Iranian himself, on their vacation trip to New York. It was a delightful lunch with some very nice people. And I'm glad to see that Blue Bird got herself a digital camera (I merely recommended the best place to buy it).
I tell you all this because I marvel, once again, at the ability of this weblog and Internet thing of ours to bring people together.
By chance, I found Iranian weblogs and then found Blue Bird's. I wrote about them and linked to them. They linked to me. Conversation began (and a few arguments). Education ensued (and I learned a great deal). Connections were made (and friendships formed).
But these are connections that in no way could have been made otherwise.
In a sense, a meeting via weblog is as serendipitous as the seating on an airplane: You can find yourself sitting next to someone you would not otherwise have met and end up having a conversation and learning and connecting. But in that case, you don't get to peer into the thoughts and heart and soul of the person next to you before connecting -- as you can do through weblogs.
So then is a meeting via weblog more like writing to an author after you've read his or her book? No, because that's so one-sided and one-to-many.
No, this weblog and Internet thing of ours is new and special and powerful in ways we still don't fully understand. I just know that it's thanks to weblogs that I had a wonderful lunch with some new friends.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
King of all jerks
: Jerks never know when to shut up. That's what makes them jerks.
The king of all jerks, John Gilmore, the guy who wore the "suspected terrorist" button on a BA flight, keeps trumpeting his self-centered immaturity in the comments on Lessig's site and Floyd McWilliams sent me his latest dumb bomb: Rob said “We must take whatever measures are necessary to prevent another 9/11, because I don’t want it to be MY office building they run a plane into next." That’s exactly where we part company. The US has many millions of buildings. Three or four of them were knocked down in the 9/11 attacks. The chance of Rob’s building being “next” is less than one in a million. So, for Rob’s safety in a one-in-a-million chance, we must take “whatever measures are necessary”? Not if it undermines freedom of expression, association, and travel, I say.
The plane-into-building thing was brilliant political theatre, but did very little to physically hurt the US or its people. Out of 280 million people, about 280 million survived. If Rob really wants to increase his chance of survival, he’ll take whatever measures are necessary to stop heart disease — which kills more people in the US every week than 9/11 or the Afghan war or the Iraq war killed.
What demonstrates the brilliance of the political theatre is how many people will violently disagree with me, that we “must” stop terrorism, etc. Let me ask you then, when we will know that we have taken “whatever measures are necessary”? When will we know that no more measures are necesary? It’s almost two years since 9/11/01 and no planes have flown into buildings since; no harbors mined, no trains destroyed, no major attacks on US soil or US properties (except against US forces invading other countries).
When should the Bush Administration set the “alert level” to green and dismantle the whole “alert level” system? When should the FBI stop wiretapping the Internet without warrants and peeking into what library books people are reading? When will mere allegations stop being reason enough to imprison British citizens without trials? When will Americans be able to travel in their own country without government permission? How many years of total safety do you have to experience before you’ll be comfortable with a guy wearing a political button sitting next to you on an airplane? So Gilmore wants the world to be safe once more for him to be a jerk, that's what it gets down to. He doesn't want to be bothered with the fact of the real and constant threat against us because he wants to be a show-off jerk. He wants to put his own jerkfoolery above the safety and lives not only of his fellow passengers on a jet but also the lives of his fellow Americans. He shrugs off the deaths of 3,000 as insignificant against his rights to be a jerk. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: But here's something even more shocking. I note that Lessig filed the Gilmore posts under the category heroes.
Put the entire weblog in that context and smoke it.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 05, 2003
Bravo
: The Episcopalians redeem themselves and elect an openly gay bishop.
Let the bigots scream and leave; let them show themselves.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
How to fix AOL, part II
: AOL is releasing its Communicator email/IM client. I've been using the beta for a few months now and I have to say it's very good.
(I know this will look as if I'm suddenly shilling for AOL, having just written about their weblog/journal tool and now this -- and I do own too damned much of the stock -- but it's just a coincidence.)
Communicator acts like a real mail client -- like Outlook (though, unfortunately, tragically, it doesn't come with a calendar) or Eudora -- but adds important pluses: You can check any POP email (this is how I read my personal mail) and it does a good job of nabbing spam (getting about 85 percent, I'd say; you can have it hide the spam or just mark it and then you can delete it all with a click). It operates well. It acts like an Internet program, not like an AOL program. It tells you in email whether your IM buddies are online.
That's the good news.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: The bad news is that AOL is sticking with its old business model and is giving this only to full AOL subscribers.
I've said before -- and will say again now -- that AOL would be far better off unbundling many of its services and not trying to get everyone to gulp down the whole service:
: I'd pay a few bucks a month for the AOL mail service with Communicator and its spam program.
: If I were a new blogger, I'd pay a price competitive with TypePad's for AOL's new journal service (with unlimited bandwidth: a slam-dunk!).
: I'd pay AOL for downloaded music as readily as I'd pay Real or BuyMusic.com.
The reason I do pay for the AOL service is my job; I need to keep up on what they're doing. If not for that, imagine that I were no longer an AOL customer. Then wouldn't AOL be better off selling me a part of its service than the whole service? Wouldn't AOL be better off maintaining a billing relationship with me so it could sell me more things -- including content under a micropayment model (which, in turn, would drive content owners to work with them)? Wouldn't it cost AOL a helluva lot less to market a simple email service to me to get me in the door and then upsell me later?
Shouldn't AOL think of itself as the Amazon of content and services -- we will sell you anything with one click?
AOL is stuck with its old model -- one big size fits all -- and its numbers are declining as a result. Broadband growth is only adding to the pain.
If AOL made it a goal to sell all of us something and have a billing relationship with more and more people it would start to grow again. And Wall Street would be happy. And that would make me happy. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The land of no news
: It's amazing that right now, the top story on the Guardian, the Times of London, the Telegraph, and the Independent is No. 10 apologizing for calling timid suicidal science snitch David Kelly a "Walter Mitty" character, complete with sidebars answering the question, "Who is Walter Mitty?" and comment and transcripts aplenty.
Man, news days don't get slower than this.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: The Sun, on the other hand, reports on the fired-then-cleared TV hosts 3-in-a-bed kinky sex secrets while the Mirror reports on the secrets of Kylie's bottom. Secrets uncovered! Now that's news.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Who says bloggers have no class?
: Two long-former colleagues of mine, Terry Teachout and Greg Sandow, have blogs at ArtsJournal.com, Terry's about arts in New York, Greg's about classical music. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Iron Mike rusts
: The Smoking Gun has Iron Mike Tyson's bankruptcy filing, of course. Some fun reading:
: $308k for limousines
: $61lk for a Ferrari (what, you need both?)
: A financial consultant called Jimmy Henchmen from a company called SECRETS. Hmmmm.
: And here's the gem: $86k to two Arizona doctors who, upon Googling, turn out to be the creators of something called The Fourth Domain: This series of meditation exercises is based on the research of two leading mental health professionals who have merged the medical understanding of brain functioning during the altered states of meditation with ancient prayers of empowerment.
The first exercise is a dynamic meditation exercise, which enables you to make the spiritual space necessary to achieve Divine Awareness. On this journey, you will learn to relax the body and mind to prepare your receptivity for Divine Awareness. Drs. Barksdale and Gibson have discovered the unique spacing and timing of sounds to allow you to consistently maintain the convergence and balance of your physical, mental and spiritual domains. This balanced convergence is the 4th Domain. The ancient prayers of the Kabbalistic and Shinto Metaphysical Traditions are employed to further open you to Divine awareness. Hooboy. Yeah, money well spent.
And for only $250, you can get a " soul potential report" to find out where your soul is when you're sleeping. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
What big media?
: Robert J Samuelson says the big media boogieman is bull. The idea that “big media” has dangerously increased its control over our choices is absurd. Yet much of the public, including journalists and politicians, believe religiously in this myth. They confuse size with power. It’s true that some gigantic media companies are getting even bigger at the expense of other media companies. But it’s not true that their power is increasing at the public’s expense.
Popular hostility toward big media stems partly from the growing competition (a.k.a. more “choice”), which creates winners and losers—and losers complain. Liberals don’t like the conservative talk shows, but younger viewers do. A June poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that viewers from the ages of 18 to 29 approved of “hosts with strong opinions” by a 58 percent to 32 percent margin. Social conservatives despise what one recently called “the raw sewage, ultraviolence, graphic sex and raunchy language” of TV. But many viewers love it. Journalists detest the cost and profit pressures that result from stiff competition with other news and entertainment outlets.
It’s the tyranny of the market: a triumph of popular tastes. Big media companies try to anticipate, shape and profit from these tastes. But media diversity frustrates any one company from imposing its views and values on an unwilling audience. People just click to another channel or cancel their subscription. Pardon me while I commit the bloggers' most obnoxious sin but... I've been saying exactly this.
Samuelson also says that the supposed backlash over the FCC's deregulation of media is overblown.
And he warns that broadcast TV is in danger -- thanks to competition from cable and the Internet -- and if Congress prevents TV companies from owning more stations to stay profitable, then broadcast TV could whither. "If Congress prevents that, it may perversely hurt the very diversity and the people that it’s trying to protect." Amen. [via IWantMedia]
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Rescue Lileks
: James Lileks is still drifting on a raft without a server or a site.
Yo, James, I'm sure many of us would be privileged to act as your backup: Send your bleats to a few blogging friends and we'll post them. (And, no, this isn't a shameless bid for traffic. I simply feel like a Jewish mother whose son stopped calling. The silence. The silence.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Ah, irony
: Maciej Ceglowski points us with glee to "an essay about the importance of linking to others, where all the hyperlinks just point back to himself. You can't make this stuff up."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: I want to make clear up here on the front page, and not just in the comments, that I'm not bashing, criticizing, ridiculing, or otherwise piling on Dave Winer with this. I know I'm linking to a piler-on. But I wasn't piling. As I say in the comments: The irony is cheap, I grant, but I found it funny. It's a good-natured rib, nothing more.
And I'm saying this out here, to be clear, just because the butane has been turned up high lately and I understand Dave interpretting a rib as a jab. It's not.
Everybody clear on that? torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The worst job in journalism II
: Tim Porter goes to the fraternity of ombudsmen (a fun group) to get career advice for the soon-to-be-named New York Times ombudsman. I would suggest Tums and a good shrink.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 04, 2003
Style, defined
: Neon-blue fingernails.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Pray for them. They need it.
: Well, the Episcopalians certainly are mucking this up.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Airport insecurity
: In relation to the jerks, below, who thought they were being cute disrupting air travel security, note this warning from the TSA: Talk to your children before coming to the airport and let them know that it's against the law to make threats such as, "I have a bomb in my bag." Threats made jokingly (even by a child) can result in the entire family being delayed and could result in fines. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Hiring?
: A weblogger just out of NYU J-school wants a job.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Khomeini's grandson pushes for a revolution's revolution
: The grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an Iranian reformist, goes to Iraq and says some surprising things about the state of Iran, the Star-Ledger reports: grandson of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery cleric who launched an anti-American Islamic revolution in Iran that sparked 25 years of unrest in the Gulf region, yesterday condemned Iran's clerical regime and suggested United States military intervention in Iran as a possible path to liberation for his country.
"In Iran, the people really need freedom and freedom must come about. Freedom is more important than bread," said Hussein Khomeini.
The 45-year-old cleric said that "if there's no way for freedom in Iran other than American intervention, I think the people would accept that. I would accept it, too, because it's in accord with my faith."
The young Khomeini -- here ostensibly on a religious pilgrimage to Shi'a holy sites in Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad -- praised the U.S. takeover of Iraq.
"I see day-by-day that (Iraq) is on the path to improvement," he said. "I see that there's security, that the people are happy, that they've been released from suffering." ...
The young Khomeini argues for the separation of religion and state...
He condemned Saddam Hussein's regime and criticized those countries opposed to the war against Iraq's Ba'athist government as ignorant of the conditions under which Iraqis were suffering.
"The people here were subject to crimes unprecedented in world history," he said.
He said nationalism has no basis in religious doctrine, and freedom was more important than independence from foreign rule. "Freedom is a basic right. It supersedes all," he said. Iranian blogger Kaveh is amazed that some of this was even published in Iran. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Losing in the translation
: The BBC Style Guide -- linked by IWantMedia -- includes a few amusing moments of linguistic anti-Americanism: Broadcasting is all about the spoken word, and good spoken English is at the heart of what we do.There is a kind of journalese which [sic -- that should be "that" - ed] flies in the face of this simple truth. It has its origins in the press and in American radio, and some broadcasters think it adds impact to their output....
Very many people dislike what they see as the Americanisation of Britain, and they look to the BBC to defend ‘Britishness’ in its broadest sense. In particular, they demand standard English from us, and we should acknowledge their concerns. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The NY Times: 25 years out of date
: An absurdly out-of-date headline in today's NY Times: "Gossip Goes Glossy and Loses Its Stigma."
Jeesh. Where the hell have they been? I'd say People magazine did that more than 25 years ago. And Liz Smith. And Page Six. And celebrities on the cover of every imaginable magazine (even Architectural Digest). And gossip columns in newspapers. And gossip shows on TV.
The headline should have been: "Brigadoon Times Finally Wakes Up And Notices Major Social Phenomenon It Tried To Ignore For A Generation."torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Media blather
: Michael Wolff prints up some (very selective) quotes from last week's media & war confab. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The Gigli curse
: On the mesmerizing Project Greenlight -- the show that shows just how Hollywood is populated by pompous assholes -- Ben & Jen made a cameo appearance last night. The intent, clearly, was to promote Gigli, their just-opened Weapon of Mass Destruction. The impact will be the opposite: Cinematic cooties. The Gigli curse. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Dear Andrew Sullivan,
: Your church is causing you pain and conflict as you decide whether you can continue to belong to an institution that now calls you, God's child, evil for your love. Today, you wrote: ...this debate is not an abstract one for me or for many others. Our very integrity as human beings and equality as citizens is being weighed in the balance by others with enormous power over us.... It's hard to describe the agony gay Catholics are now in; and I'm facing a pretty major life-decision. In this, you need quiet to listen to God and pray sincerely for his help in the struggle to maintain a good conscience and lead a moral life. When the Pope declared homosexuality "evil," you wrote: Leaving the sacraments would be a huge blow to the soul; but the pope just called the love I have for my boyfriend "evil." That's a word he couldn't bring himself to use about Saddam Hussein. How can I recognize what I know to be true with what the Pope has just said? I cannot. It doesn't leave many options but departure. : I would leave. I left my church, the Presbyterian, over this same issue because I did not want to raise my children in an atmosphere of hate and bigotry against gays, an atmosphere in which mere men put themselves in a position of judgment over their fellow man and thus in a position over God. It was hard to do; my own sister is a Presbyterian pastor and she has fought this issue bravely, from the inside. So far, she and her allies have lost but they keep fighting.
I decided not to fight. I left. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Rossi just wrote about this on her web site. It's not an abstract issue for her, either.
She was inspired by the Hasidic Rebel, who wrote his creed on his weblog: :I believed that distinctions between good and evil and between right and wrong were within each human's conscience if they are truly sought out. And I believed that no ideology's truth can be so wholly absolute as to require its adherents to compel everyone else to join. Rossi has written about her own jarring path to and from and to Judaism and here she says that she has gained insight from friends who had left the Jehovah's Witnesses. One of them preaches to other Witnesses: he left a recent sermon for me to read
and the part that got me
was where he said any religion that
forces one to lose ones individuality
is wrong
we are all different from one another
different dreams
different wants
we can not be shoved into one mind : Today, the Episcopalians are voting on whether to allow a gay clergyman to become a bishop. If he is successful, many Anglicans from around the world have warned of a schism in the American church and a split from the worldwide church.
So we have gay Catholics deciding whether to leave the Catholic church over the condemnation of gays.
We have straight anti-gay Episcopalians deciding whether to leave the Episcopal church over the acceptance of a gay.
We have many other denominations locked in battle over the issue.
I fear we will look back in a generation and mark both splits in churches and the accelerated decline of church membership and belief to this time and this issue.
So be it. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Maybe this won't happen. Women in the clergy (a big issue for the Episcopalians that I covered as a reporter just a generation ago) did not break up churches or implode the faiths.
But this is different; this is deeper; nobody called women evil for being women. This is about the rightful claim to morality and humanity.
I know that I recently sermonized about the need for the major faiths that are frequently at war -- Jewish, Christian, Muslim -- to recognize their shared heritage from Abraham and God so that we become less alien, so we cannot continue to kill each other. I argue that we need to inch closer to each other. But I don't argue for one big faith. Rossi's and the Hasidic Rebel are right: We cannot all be shoved into one mind.
So here, I think that splitting off is, if not good, at least necessary. It is a matter of conscience. I could not continue to support the Presbyterian Church when it would refuse gays ordination. I wish the fight had not continued within. I wish we who fought this issue had left as a group. Instead, I had to leave alone.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: My only advice -- and I'll admit that it's advice from the reform tradition -- is that your relationship to your church can end but your relationship with your faith or with God need not.
I left the church in which I was raised and joined a small Congregational church where no one is making this an issue, where I am confident that no one would be allowed to make this an issue. My parents, I'm proud to say, did likewise.
Now, five years later, I can say that the anger fades. The disappointment fades. The faith need not.
So, Andrew, I would not pretend to tell you what to do and I would never proselytize you or anyone to another denomination. All I can say is what I did and what I would do: I would leave the church, but stay with God. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 03, 2003
They're blind with hairy palms, too
: Jerry Falwell's site is good for laughs. Today's chuckle: Tiffany and Kyle grew up in church. Their youth pastor warned against premarital sex, but they knew what was best for them; after all, their movies, television and music advocated it. So one night after youth group, they had sex for the first time. It was satisfying for neither; Tiffany felt horrible and Kyle was mad because she let it happen. In the years that followed, both turned away from Christ, Tiffany to drugs and prostitution, Kyle to atheism and promiscuity. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Meeting Meetup
: Meetup's Scott Heiferman was just on NPR. Missed it? Listen here.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
French pornography
: Merde in France reports that a Frenchman -- of course -- is turning the story of the World Trade Center into pornography and Michele speaks for the rest of us. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
G returns
: The other Baghdad blogger, G, returns after too long of an absence, and writes an atmospheric essay about the stuttering steps of rebuilding civilization in Iraq: Unlike what al-Jazeera says I think Iraqis gained something form the Americans.
We got some amebic concept, some call it freedom others call it chaos,
I call it a fuzzy dream of democracy. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Jerks don't know when to shut up... that's what makes them jerks
: John Gilmore -- the jerk who wore the "Suspected Terrorist" button on a BA flight, causing the crew to turn the jet around -- is still trying to dine out on his jerkiness (which he thinks is a brave political statement).
He writes to Larry Lessig defending himself and buried in there is this doozy of paranoid delusion: I had zero expectation that my refusal to doff a button would result in the captain returning the plane to the gate. But even if I did fly often, my response would be the same: to constantly push back against the rules that turn a free people into the slaves of a totalitarian regime. I push back using the rights granted me by the constitutional structure of the country, plus my own intelligence and resources. Way too many of you readers are like the Poles who, under orders from swaggering bullies, built the brick wall around their own ghetto, as shown in the award-winning movie “The Pianist”... "Slaves of a totalitarian regime." Jeesh.
Listen, I stood a few hundred yards below two jets as they slammed into the World Trade Center. The Nazis were the Islamofascists who took over those planes. We, as a civilization of laws and respect for the primary of human life, must do what we must do to protect ourselves from these murderers. You got a problem with that, jerk, then I repeat my advice: Walk. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Cory Doctorow is indignant at what happened to Gilmore (while I am indignant at Gilmore) and also at what happened to this jerk who made threats -- in hindsight, scarcastic threats -- about a bomb in his suitcase: A Paxton teenager was arraigned on a felony charge yesterday morning after he and his family were removed from a plane bound for Hawaii following the discovery of a profanity-filled note referencing a bomb in his luggage examined at Logan International Airport.
Appearing in court with his navy blue T-shirt pulled up over his face, 17-year-old David Socha pleaded not guilty to one count of making a bomb/hijacking threat in East Boston District Court, as his parents and younger sister looked on. I have a homework assignment for this jerk and Gilmore: Go get a tape of the jets smashing into the World Trade Center and tell me this is funny. Go get a tape of the 3,000 funerals that resulted and tell me this is a joke. Go to the World Trade Center and see what isn't there and tell me that your smart-assed political statements have one iota of validity and maturity.
I'm damned glad that the airlines and the TSA are taking threats seriously even if they are just from jerks.
Terrorists are jerks, too.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 02, 2003
Moblog meets culture
: The Scotsman is hosting a moblog and contest for the Edinburgh Festival.
: And more mobile smarts in Scotland: Police will now receive mobile phone text messages when they are needed to testify in trials, thus allowing them to stay on the street and beat longer. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
God and country
: Tony Blair is looking at involving religion in government: Blair is to allow Christian organisations and other 'faith groups' a central role in policy-making in a decisive break with British traditions that religion and government should not mix....
The Prime Minister, who this weekend becomes the longest continually serving Labour Prime Minister in history, has set up a ministerial working group in the Home Office charged with injecting religious ideas 'across Whitehall'....
The new high-powered ministerial grouping will have an input across government. Although based in the Home Office, it will advise the Departments for Education, Culture, Media and Sport and Trade and Industry....
Membership of the committee will also include representatives of the Jewish, Sikh, Muslim and Hindu faiths. So you could see this coming a mile away: Some No 10 officials are concerned that the Government will fall victim to unfavourable comparisons with the Republican administration in America, where President Bush makes no secret of his religious faith and right-wing religious organisations have a powerful input into policy-making, particularly on sensitive issues such as abortion. Opportunities for Bush/Blair snarks aside, I would be nervous, too. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Lucky Lindy
: Charles Lindbergh had a secret German family, reports The Sueddeutsche Zeitung (auf Englisch here). In an article yesterday, they told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that, on a visit to Germany in 1957, Lindbergh, then 55, fell in love with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a 31-year-old hat maker.
For the next 17 years, Hesshaimer was his intimate companion and gave birth to three children, who now range in age from 36 to 45. They only discovered their father's identity after his death in 1974 and it was not until their mother's death that the three felt able to tell the world. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Women and men
: At View from Iran, the American and female half of the Iranian/American couple who blog there, writes today about the role of women in Iran: I am beginning to feel that women themselves are responsible for much of the way that society in Iran works. I see this pattern time and time again: women, mothers, aunts, everyone, raise their daughters to deny their true self. From the time they are very young, the daughters are looking after other people. They are serving guests, serving their fathers, serving their brothers, serving their mothers. They are encouraged to be cute and do cute things. They are told not to complain or say that they are hungry or ask for anything. They are told to obey. Later, when they are adults, Iranians, both men and women, complain that Iranian women are manipulative. How could they be anything else but? Because they cannot honestly ask for things, they learn to manipulate situations to get what they need or want. ...
Just for a little comparison, I want to write about one of the last conversations I had with my great-Aunt Rose. She said that what amazed her most in her lifetime was how much men had changed (which means that women had changed at least as much). “When I was young, my husband did not do a thing in the house. He did not touch the babies or help with the children or cook or clean. Now I see my grandsons changing diapers and cooking dinner, and I know that the world is getting better.” torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Imagine what they'd do with Richard Simmons
: The mullahs even fear aerobic dancing: Khordadian, 46, became a symbol of cultural unrest when he returned to Iran last year for the first time since 1980 to visit his ailing father. In the nation where student aspirations for democratic reforms are clashing with the ideals of political hard-liners, he was arrested and convicted for "promoting moral corruption" by holding dance classes in the United States.
Instead of death, the judge eventually banned Khordadian from teaching dance for the rest of his life. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Afraid of the truth
: The mullahs of Iran have gone on a spree of arresting journalists. Says Reporters Without Borders: Amid continuing clamour about the death of photojournalist Zahra Kazemi while in custody at the start of July, Reporters Without Borders today voiced concern about the imprisonment of a total of 21 journalists in very harsh conditions in Iran, many of them in a wave of arrests in the past few weeks.
Secretary-general Robert Ménard said at least 14 journalists have been arrested in the space of a month, and in most cases the families have received no word about those detained. "Those lucky enough to have been freed have talked of very harsh conditions of detention, psychological pressure and mistreatment," Ménard said.
He stressed that the organisation is very worried about the fact that half of the detained journalists are being held by aides of Tehran state prosecutor Said Mortazavi and by revolutionary guards in the same centre where Kazemi, a photographer with Canadian and Iranian citizenship, received the blows to the head that caused her death. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Trouble
: Al Bawaba reports: The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah movement, announced Saturday it was ending its truce on anti-Israeli attacks after the arrest of 20 of its activists by Palestinian security forces.
"We have ordered the resumption everywhere of our attacks and in particular suicide operations," the group said in a statement.
torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The real reason for war
: To repeat: The real reason for war was never WMD but was the moral imperative to rid Iraq of a murderous tyrant and the mistake Bush and Blair made was playing to the U.N. and the left by pushing WMD when they should have pushed their moral hand and justified the war based on morality and humanism.
Tom Friedman tomorrow says the best speech made about the war was made to a hallway by Tony Blair, as recounted in Peter Stothard's book, "30 Days": `What amazes me,' [Mr. Blair says,] `is how many people are happy for Saddam to stay. They ask why we don't get rid of [the Zimbabwean leader Robert] Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, let's get rid of them all. I don't because I can't, but when you can you should.' "
Alas, Mr. Blair never really made this case to his public. Why not? Because the British public never would have gone to war for the good reasons alone. Why not? Because the British public had not gone through 9/11 and did not really feel threatened, because it demanded a U.N. legal cover for any war and because it didn't like or trust George Bush. Yes, it's amazing that we had to make Saddam a threat to us. How self-centered of us. How selfish of us. He was clearly a threat to his own people. But to Europe and the antiwar left, Saddam's people did not matter. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Numbers
: Douglas Rushkoff says the just-passed law trying to discourage (to say the least) Israel/Palestinian marriages is really a matter of numbers: The most ancient, but relevant fact in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the numbers game. Whoever is the most fruitful and multiplying, wins. Israel realizes that within a few years - 4 to 8 by most counts - the Israelis in Israel will be outnumbered by Palestinians and Arabs.
This is why Sharon and even the most radically conservative members of his government support the formation of a Palestinian state. It's also why their parliament passed today what can only be understood as a racist law under which Palestinians who marry Israelis will be denied citizenship (while others who marry Israelis will face no such restriction). ...
This is also an major reason why Palestinian militants seek to slow down the peace process. The longer it takes, the less it will matter whether Israel accepts a Palestinian state. It will simply become one.... torrent Magic Swap 3.6
The blogger candidate
: Phil Wolff urges Dave Winer to run for governor in California as the bloggers' candidate (and then he puts forth a platform of the, well, Bloggers Party). The idea is that people would then be motivated to ask, What the heck is a blogger? Not a bad idea. No offense to Dave, but if he runs would Howard Dean still be known as the grumpiest politician? Any other nominees?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Post-industrial
: hAiko hebig points us to some magnificent photos of the aftermath of industry. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
August 01, 2003
One more
: Add to my list of presidential-candidate weblogs, below, a weblog from one of the movements to draft Wesley Clark. And another for him. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: And, thanks to a commenter below, the Kucinich blog.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
: Yo, Bush, where's your blog?torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Murder on murder
: This scares Salam Pax, and for good reason: Two hours before the dawn call to prayer, in a village still shrouded in silence, Sabah Kerbul's executioners arrived. His father carried an AK-47 assault rifle, as did his brother. And with barely a word spoken, they led the man accused by the village of working as an informer for the Americans behind a house girded with fig trees, vineyards and orange groves.
His father raised his rifle and aimed it at his oldest son.
"Sabah didn't try to escape," said Abdullah Ali, a village resident. "He knew he was facing his fate." torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Rebuilding
: Greg Allen, who knows much more about this than I do, is quite happy with the selection of Santiago Calatrava as the architect who'll design the transit center at the World Trade Center. The NYTimes report also says there seems to be peace among architects and pols and that's good news, for the sooner they start building now, the better. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
I thee can't wed
: Howard Sherman defines the difference: Here's one important difference between liberals and conservatives. Liberals don't give a damn who you marry. Conservatives think it is a crime against humanity if your conception of marriage isn't exactly the same as theirs. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Brainy
: Steven Johnson is ready to start talking about his next book, about your brain. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
 The Gawker Girl
: So Gawker has added personals and this young woman is now pictured on the home page: Want a date with her? Want to go to the coolest Gawker hangout or perhaps the Conde cafeteria? Want to get matching trucker hats?
Why do I smell ringer? Surely, they hired an actress to portray the perfect Gawker Girl, no? Surely, they wrote her personal:
Favorite on-screen sex scene
The directors cut of 'Lilo & Stitch' or 'Anal encounters 2', it's always been a tough call.
Surely, she can get a date.
Ah, but then perhaps she snarks them away. Yes, that's why she's the Gawker Girl.
Note the other pictures on her personal: The guy with the arm around her unceremoniously amputated at the shoulder.
Date her if you dare. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Yes, something to learn from Europe
: Norway is gobsmacked at Bush's stance against gay marriage. From net-only newspaper Nettavisen: Norwegian politicians are shocked that President Bush is opposing homosexual marriages and think the President should look to Norway, where several prominent politicians are openly gay and experiences with homosexual marriages are positive.
Kristin Halvorsen, leader of the socialist left-wing party SV, is shocked that President Bush is opposing homosexual marriages, as the attitude towards homosexuality is completely different in Norway. Norway legalised homosexual marriages 13 years ago.
Even the Norwegian Conservative Party, who is strongly represented in government, has a number of prominent members who are openly homosexual, amongst them Minister of Finance, Per-Kristian Foss....
In Europe, 10 countries have legalised homosexual marriages. The ten countries are France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland, England, The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Croatia. In certain areas of Spain and Switzerland homosexual marriages are legalised, according to AFP. torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Buy these people some T-shirts
: Movable Type needs his own T-shirts, so Anil doesn't have to wear the competitor's.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
Why I want Arnold to run
: 1. It would be fun to watch.
2. I want Dick Riordan to concentrate instead on starting his newspaper and giving Layne and Welch real jobs.torrent Magic Swap 3.6
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