BuzzMachine
by Jeff Jarvis

November 30, 2003

Treo 600 geeking
: Dan Gillmor is planning to buy a Treo 600 and that's good news for the rest of us Treogeeks, for he will write about any shortcoming he finds as Palm, if its smart, will fix it. In that line, I lobbied him with all my wishes when he asked me about using the Treo as a modem for my laptop (alas, it won't work for Dan because he's on Mac). Dan suggested that I post my wishlist and so, for those who care, click on more...

Dan,
This works like a charm: It's called PDAnet. You install it on the Treo (make sure you get the
600 version) and the PC; connect via the Treo; the PC looks on it as a
modem that has dialed out. I love it.
I got the Sprint version of the Treo because it is supposed to be faster (the GSM
version is said to have longer battery life).
I love the Treo and agree with you that it comes closest -- so far -- to
the right combination.
A few points:
1. I am dying to buy music from any of the legal services and play it on
my Treo; I bought a 512meg SD card just for that. But here's the
problem: I cannot find a player for Palm that plays WMA files and all
the legal services use WMA instead of MP3. If you start lobbying....
2. I tried to use Audible on the 600 and I cannot get it to work and
could not get the slightest customer service out of Audible. They
advertise that it will work; it doesn't.
3. I have been able to blog using the browser. I did just find a limit:
The text window that opens will take only so many characters. I wonder
whether I can use another browser.
4. I just ordered the travel cable that allows you to sync and charge
via USB because using the modem thing with PDAnet does drain the battery
on the phone pretty quickly. You might want to consider this.
5. I also just bought the keyboard to play with it.
6. I have been using the RSS reader you blogged; it works pretty well.
7. I use SnapperMail and it works well with my POP accounts. (The only
problem is that it bypasses my spam protections. But that will come.)
8. The phone interface isn't the best but I'm not complaining.
9. I can't wait until Movable Type gets mail-to-blog working at last!
Then I can moblog.
I do love the thing. Changes life.
Sorry for blathering; ask a simple question and this is what you get.
Werbach is great at the 600 too.

The leftist who can't laugh
: The utter humorlessness of Noam Chomsky never ceases to amuse me.
The Observer interviews him on the release of his latest book (in which he says, 'No president in that time, judged on the principles of Nuremberg, would have escaped hanging' -- with, of course, a straight face) and it begins with this exchange:

I start tentatively enough with a question about a remark he made recently in the New York Times about the fact that he continued to live in America, because it was 'the greatest country in the world'. In what sense did he believe this?
He starts, too, as he means to go on. 'I have to first of all give a background,' he says, already a bit exasperated. 'That interview never took place. It is rather interesting, interviews like that never take place.'
The New York Times made it up?
'It was a senseless contraction of an hour-and-a-half telephone conversation in which I explained question by question why I am not going to answer this question or that question, because it is not a sensible question.' Right.
'And the published interview was contracted from the original questions and sentences extracted from my often lengthy explanations of why I was not going to answer. There is no country in the world where interviews like these would happen. Where these kind of trivial questions would be asked.'
What a blowhard.

Blog scandal!
: There's a scandal in the blogosphere but it's not about sex (we're all too damned geeky and dull for that); of course, it's about links and traffic. Clay Shirky reports on Truth Laid Bare's discovery that the Ecosystem is being manipulated with multiple Sitemeter counters.
Hey, I'd be happy if Technorati would once and for all and finally get me into the Top 100, where I belong!

You are a network
: The BBC just licensed some cool technology that will let correspondents broadcast live over the air from their laptop and any Internet connection. The company that created it calls this Laptop News Gathering.
The barrier to entry keeps falling and falling. Anybody can be a publisher. Anybody can be a network. [via Live Remote]

: Meanwhile, Stuart Hughes in Cambodia perfects the art of vlogging.

Google "news"
: Google "News" won't put up weblogs of good repute but it does list this as if it were a legit news. Huh?

: It gets worse. I just found this from antiwar.com. News?

If GoogleNews wanted to have a separate opinion scrape, that would be good and useful. But I'd recommend a hundred weblogs before I'd recommend the two sources linked above -- two sources that happen to exhibit the same slant. So is GoogleNews slanted?

Iraq: a liberal cause
: Tom Friedman, bless him, finally comes out today and says what I've been saying for a long time:
The ouster of the tyrant Saddam Hussein was a liberal and humanitarian cause.
And the rebuilding of Iraq is a liberal cause.
But liberals don't know it.

...this war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan. The primary focus of U.S. forces in Iraq today is erecting a decent, legitimate, tolerant, pluralistic representative government from the ground up. I don't know if we can pull this off. We got off to an unnecessarily bad start. But it is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot....
On Iraq, there has to be more to the left than anti-Bushism....
For my money, the right liberal approach to Iraq is to say: We can do it better. Which is why the sign I most hungered to see in London was, "Thanks, Mr. Bush. We'll take it from here."
Try telling that to the liberals running for president.

: UPDATE: Jack Balkin, good liberal, agrees with Friedman that we must fix up Iraq but then he cops out, saying that Bush will not listen. Jack, when did that ever stop anyone from putting pressure on? That's what we should be doing. Instead of continuing to carp, we should be demanding the best path to democracy in Iraq:
: Putting pressure on to have more troops, not fewer, to bring security to Iraq.
: Putting pressure on the U.N. to send more troops from more nations to show support for democracy in Iraq.
: Putting pressure on companies to be ready to invest in Iraq.
: Putting pressure on Arab nations to disavow the terrorism -- yes, terrorism -- that is targeting Iraqi civilians and not only military but also civilian workers from other countries.
Rather than just carping, liberals should be demanding that the president -- but first, their presidential candidates -- do more to grow democracy and civilization in Iraq and the Middle East.
There's plenty we can do, Jack, plenty.

The speed of blog
: Way back on Nov. 19, Hit & Run's weblog broke the silly master/slave meme (in which a doofus California bureaucrat who should be unemployed by now sends out a memo instructing people involved with computers not to call devices masters or slaves because it violates the supreme law of the age -- it's offensive).
The story finally got picked up by the AP -- and, in turn the Chicago Tribune -- today.
See, guys, if you'd been reading weblogs, you could have stolen that story far sooner.

November 29, 2003

Jarvisk
: I'm flattered to be plotted in the map of the Commonwealth of Blogosphere States.

A deft touch
: I never cease to be amused at the utter lack of humor, subtlety, and irony in Larry Lessig's "work." The mere title of his latest book says it all: "Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity." I'm working on my biography: "Lawrence Lessig: How a Professor Manages to Use a Sledgehammer To Keep Beating Home The Point That He Just Hates Media and Will Not Stop Until The Horse Is Dead, I Tell You, Dead, Really Dead."

Through dung-colored glasses
: It has come to this: Atrios quoting Juan Cole. I have made a sport of reading Cole. There is not other weblog or news source anywhere this side of Pyongyang that is more one-sided. Cole does nothing but nothing all day but find every negative thing he can find that happened in Iraq today. A soldier killed. A pothole opened. Whatever. He made his point months ago. But like the most boring soul on earth, like a man condemned to his own hell of tedium, he keeps on finding every possible negative link. You can guess his analysis of the Bush trip to Iraq:

Instead, the President had to sneak in and out of Iraq for a quick and dirty photo op, clearly in fear of his life if the news of his visit had leaked. He did not even get time to eat a meal with the troops. He was there for two hours. He did not dare meet with ordinary Iraqis, with the people he had conquered (liberated).
Damned astute, Prof. Cole.
I just can't tell you how happy I am that I don't live in Michigan and my tax dollars don't go to paying for your tenure, you laughable fraud.

Dating myself
: Kind of a sad night. Well, poignant. Yes, poignant, that's it. I turned on the local PBS station and there we had This Land Is Your Land: Trini Lopez with back-up singers who each weighed as much as any three backup singers in their heyday.
On the drive back from Hershey, I saw one guy with an anti-Bush bumpersticker and as I passed him (going slowly in his van), I saw he had a beard the size of a bush. Cliche, I said. Then I passed another car with another such bumpersticker. This guy had on a fisherman's cap. Gawd, don't they know they're breathing cliches, I thought. Were we all like that?
And then I turned on PBS again and here is the Grateful Dead from the closing of Winterland in 1978.
I was there.
Yes, my children, I was there.
I covered the event for my column in The Examiner. I pissed off Bill Graham when I asked readers for the memories of the place and I dared to include drug-induced vomiting.
I seem to remember cosmic brownies that night.
I do remember legend Herb Caen pulling out a silver cigarette case stuffed with joints.
Mellow. Damn, I miss mellow.

Pet peeve
: Hey, bloggers: PUT YOUR DAMNED NAME ON YOUR HOME PAGES! I want to mention you by name not by blog or address when I link to you but I also don't want to make a damned fool of myself and misspell your name. Too many of you forget to mention your names on your own pages. Silly, you. New readers come all the time. Have an ego. Be famous. Mention YOUR OWN DAMNED NAME! You know who you are. (But we don't.)

Vlogging
: The amazing and, unfortunately, one-legged correspondent Stuart Hughes creates a vlog from Cambodia.

Rust and dust
: On the way back to New Jersey, we passed through Bethlehem, Pa., to get some Christmas ornaments and lunch and, of course, we drove by the five-mile-long rotting hulk of American industrialization, the Bethelehem Steel plant. It's as sad as it is impressive (I am eager to see it become a National Museum of Industrial History). It is also the biggest, meanest economic reality check you'd ever want to find: Industrialization is over. Technology and information are our future if we're wise enough to invest in that. But then, we knew that. We are returning to an age of cottage industries, rather than factories. We can only hope that the cottages are here.
See Om Malik's piece on the cult of lone coders.

Broadband is a great enabler which has allowed many of the lone-coders to get into business for themselves. Thanks to a high speed connection and cheap hosting services, a programmer in Oregon can set-up shop without as much as idling the engine on his decade old Honda. Today, when outsourcing and off-shoring are threatening the American way of business, the lone coders are perfect example of how technology and broadband can counter those macro economic forces.
The Internet boom has proved to be a boon for programmers who refuse to climb the corporate ladder; or kowtow to the whims and fancies of venture capitalists. An increasing number of talented coders are setting up shop on their own, developing niche products for under served markets and making a decent living. Rick Ellis, a musician turned programmer. It is a counter-culture movement and has gaining strength especially with the scarcity of jobs. Mena and Ben Trott were dot.com road kill when they wrote blogging software, Moveable-Type just on a lark when unemployed.
See also Mike Wendland on Detroit churches installing cheap wireless broadband for poor neighborhoods.
The river ran through Bethlehem, bringing industry there.
Broadband can run wherever we want, bringing industry with it, too.

Chocolate, kid?

hershey.bmp: Having just returned from Hershey, I've been thinking of the power of that American brand. So far as I know, it doesn't carry with it any of the globaliztion-goblinization of Coke, McDonald's, American Express, or Disney. Hershey is still a smiling brand. Hershey is what American G.I.s gave out to grateful little German and French urchins after World War II. Hershey was and perhaps still is a symbol of American success, goodness, and generosity.

And so it occurs me to that what we need today in Iraq is more Hersheys. No, I don't mean that we should go into the streets handing out condescending candy and thinking that would solve a thing: "Hey, you foreign fanatic murderer, put away that explosive belt; have some chocolate and it'll make you feel all warm inside."

No, what I mean is that we need to reinvigorate that sense of American generosity.

I wasn't around when the Marshall plan was proposed but I'm sure there was plenty of carping at the time: "Why should we American taxpayers send anything to those murderous Krauts?" But that attitude neither prevailed nor remained. Instead, we look upon Marshall like a giant Hershey bar, a gift gladly given, and a wise investment.

Now unlike the Iraqis, the Germans as a people massed to kill our sons. They murdered six million Jews. They brought the world into a terrible war.

Yet we were more generous to the Germans than we are to the Iraqis.

Is it because they are more alien? Is an Iraqi victim any stranger to us than a European perpetrator?
Is it because we have changed? Have we lost that essential generosity?
Is it because even charity is seen as a sign of globalization and for reasons still quite unclear to me, globalization is presumed to be a sin?
Or is it because the anti-war crowd has managed to demonize anything having to do with Iraq? First, they condemn the humanitarian rescue of the Iraqi people from a despot. Next, they back away even from humanitarian aid and support for the people. They tell us just to leave.

No matter. The answer remains the same: We need to give away Hershey bars -- in the form of support, investment, education, exchange. To be able to do that, we first need to make the place secure (using an iron hand to accomplish that) so that it will be safe to give aid. And just as important, we must humanize the Iraqi people in the eyes of Americans.

Look at how Iraqis are portrayed now in our media: They are either "insurgents" and "guerillas" or they are grousers who allegedly complain that George Bush didn't come to fix their sewers while he was in town.

The Iraqis I know are nothing like that. The Iraqis I know today are intelligent, insightful, freedom-loving, reasonable, grateful to be rid of their opressor, and grateful for whatever will help them get their lives and their nation on the right track. The Iraqis I know are webloggers with names: Zeyad, Omar, Ays, Alaa, and Nabil.

We need to find ways to introduce these people to our neighbors. American media should be writing stories about what they are saying. We need to support them in small ways (there are many American bloggers trying to figure out how to help pay for their access). And we need to hope that more and more of them raise their voices and tell us what real Iraqis think and say. Hell, why shouldn't we have a tour of the Iraqi bloggers? Why shouldn't a few of them get scholarships to American journalism schools? (Apart from the fact that they'd have trouble getting visas.)

You see, that's what Hershey really symbolized. It wasn't a condescending hand-out. It was a gift joyfully given, a moment of friendship, a human connection. We need more of that between the Iraqi and the American people.

: UPDATE: When I wrote this, I was afraid that someone on the other side of the water would make fun of me for suggesting we should hand out chocolate; that's why I laced the post with references to not being condescending.
To my complete delight, the tough Harry Hachet posts from the other of the water that, yes, indeed, what we do need is more people-to-people solidarity.

I remember as a kid my Dad telling me about the parcels that used to arrive during the war from a family in the States who weren't related at all but were part of some kind of a pen-friend/solidarity initiative in the US. I don't know how widespread this sort of activity was but as a kid I was surprised at the idea that English families were once on the receiving end of charity like that.
Jeff's post prompted me to ask my Dad about those parcels and he remember the contents of the gifts: Libby's tinned fruit cocktail, tinned milk, Armour tinned corned beef hash, Royal powdered puddings, Chiclets chewing gum, Mary Baker cake mix. All treats in the days of rations and powdered eggs.
Around 1980 the man who sent those parcels turned up at our house in Lancashire. It was almost a comic scene - a bloke in a stetson wandering up the street of terrace houses in a milltown to meet the boy to whom had sent those parcels to forty years earlier.
I know charities are busy doing their best for people in Iraq and elsewhere but it is a shame that this kind of direct people-to-people solidarity seems to have disappeared....
Harry wonders whether such programs exist today. The only one I can point to is Chief Wiggles' toy drive -- a tremendous effort but still one man, not a nation.
Thanks, Harry.

: I'm sometimes surprised what resonates. AdRants also comments on chocolate.

I'm back
: And you didn't even know I was gone. I get a little paranoid telling the world we're away. And thanks to my handy, dandy Treo 600, I was able to use it as a modem (at 145 kps), avoiding the usurious hotel access fees.
We went to Hershey, which seemed like a good idea. It's a bit of a rip-off and they are surprisingly clueless about children, for a brand built on decaying children's teeth. The reputed children's menu at the we're-too-fancy-we-know-it's-not-New-York-but-we-can-act-like-it-restaurant had goat-cheese risotto. Show me one kid on earth who'll eat goat-cheese risotto (French excepted). The amusement park is empty but they still charge you $6 for parking.
We still prefer Skytop.
Well, actually, we just prefer being home.

: Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention how silly it was seeing little kids hug a walking York Peppermint Patty.
I was holding out to hug a Reese's Piece.

November 28, 2003

Let's play wack-a-meme
: Following Bush's trip to Iraq, Adam Nagourney in the NY Times quoted the Dean, Kerry, and Edwards camps using it as a limp launching pad for continued criticism of the Iraq war and then replayed this meme:

The trip came at a time of rising criticism of the president for not attending the funerals of the returning war dead. It also came in the same week that Mr. Bush met with families of 26 soldiers killed in Iraq, and thus appeared to be a concerted effort by the White House to deal with a political problem.
And so I was wondering how many other presidents attended funerals of soldiers killed in the line of duty.
Well, click and ye shall find: Donald Sensing links to John Cole, who links to this good homework from the History News Network:
Lyndon Baines Johnson: ...attended two funerals for soldiers who died during the Vietnam War. The first funeral was for Captain Albert Smith, son of White House correspondent Merriman Smith, which was held February 28, 1966. The second was for Major General Keith R. Ware, held September 17, 1968. LBJ had met Ware while visiting Vietnam.
Richard Nixon does not appear to have attended the funerals of any soldiers killed in Vietnam....
Jimmy Carter: According to the New York Times, Jimmy Carter attended a memorial service for the soldiers killed in the failed rescue of America hostages in Iran in 1980.
Ronald Reagan attended memorial services on several occasions for American soldiers. In 1983 he attended a service at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in connection with the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which cost the lives of 241 people. In 1987 he attended a service at Mayport Naval Station in Florida for the sailors killed on the USS Stark.
George H.W. Bush does not appear to have attended any funerals for American soldiers. (The NYT, citing Marlin Fitzwater as a source, indicated that the president did attend several such funerals. But no details were provided.)
Bill Clinton attended a service in October 2000 in memory of the 17 sailors killed in the attack on the USS Cole.
After the terrorist bombing the Murrah building in downtown Oklahoma City he publicly grieved with the families of the victims at an event that was regarded at the time as a turning point in his presidency.
So let's wack that gopher back into its hole.

Cause and defect
: A dose of CNN logic tonight: The anchor, Carol Lin, notes that after Bush left, someone was shot in Iraq and so she asks whether the visit was a provocation.
Right. If he hadn't gone there, nobody would have been shot. The war would have been over. The natives and the foreigners would have sat down over turkey and corn and built a great nation. Jeesh.

: It gets worse. Now that same anchor is talking to the bureau chief from Al-Jazeera and she's saying that because Bush didn't go out "on the streets" to greet Iraqis it's "being seen as downright rude."
And Jon Hendren of the LA Times says Iraqis "just don't understand" why Bush didn't come out on the street. Which is his way of saying Iraqis are stupid, I suppose.
Read a few Iraqi blogs and you'll find real Iraqis -- not composites in correspondents' imaginations -- say something quite different.

: Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Hillary Clinton, too, visited Iraq. But the Times manages to pooh-pooh both her visit and President's Bush's in one graph.

But while Dr. Khuzai found the visits useful, many Iraqis — though they gave Mr. Bush and Mrs. Clinton points for bravery — said their visits were irrelevant. The measure for them, unlike for the American soldiers who seemed buoyed by the visits, was whether life here would change as a result.
Come on, folks, Iraqis aren't that stupid -- and neither are we.

Burchill's parting shot
: Julie Burchill is leaving the Guardian for the Times -- but first, she had to take one shot at the Guardian and its causists. She takes on their anti-Israelism, aka anti-Semitism:

But if there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew, perceive to be a quite striking bias against the state of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the only country in that barren region that you or I, or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist, could bear to live under.
I find this hard to accept because, crucially, I don't swallow the modern liberal line that anti-Zionism is entirely different from anti-semitism; the first good, the other bad....
If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it's a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers....
She promises more next week. Can't wait.

Against terror
: The Telegraph covers the Bagdad demonstration against terror from London as does The Age from Australia. So does Iraqi blogger Omar from Baghdad; he marched. Even Iran Broadcasting does. Any American coverage? None that I can find yet. We'll see.

Wack that mole
: As I turned off my laptop last night to go to bed, I heard Howard Kurtz on CNN saying that it would have be seen whether the "deception was warranted" regarding the President's trip to Iraq -- bringing the predictions of the Ranting Profs in the post below to life.
Let's wack this mole -- let's maul this meme -- right now.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the White House keeping this trip secret for security reasons. There's especially nothing wrong because reporters went and told us all about it.
But Kurtz and company are trying to start up a collective kvetch that will only make journalists look bad to a public this is wiser.
Here he is in the Washington Post today:

Although the White House lied to much of the press to conceal President Bush's Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad, many journalists and analysts yesterday were willing to give the administration a pass.
Well, "lied" is a strong word. You can tell it grates Kurtz that he couldn't find every journalist agreeing with his proposition. But he found some:
But Philip Taubman, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, said that "in this day and age, there should have been a way to take more reporters. People are perfectly capable of maintaining a confidence for security reasons. It's a bad precedent." Once White House officials "decided to do a stealth trip, they bought into a whole series of things that are questionable."
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, criticized the White House correspondents who made the trip without spilling the secret. "That's just not kosher," he said. "Reporters are in the business of telling the truth. They can't decide it's okay to lie sometimes because it serves a larger truth or good cause."
What a naive crock.
Reporters are forever being told things that are off the record. They can't tell the full truth. They made a secret deal not to tell the full truth. They do it to get larger stories. That's 101.
And in a time of war, details of missions and whereabouts are routinely kept secret. Ask Geraldo Rivera. When he didn't follow that rule, he got booted from Iraq. That's the 102-level course in war reporting.
And that's pure common sense.
This is a nonstory, guys, and you should know that better than anyone. Mole, get the hell back in that hole.

: And on the political side, most of the Democratic candidates tried to snark about Iraq still. Only Clark's side had the sensible response:

Matt Bennett, the communications director for Gen. Wesley K. Clark, said: "We're not going to throw stones at the guy for trying to do a nice thing for the troops. When the president goes and spends time with the troops, that's a good thing."

November 27, 2003

Covering the Bush Thanksgiving mission
: The Independent put this headline on it: "The Turkey Has Landed."
: The Guardian seems to have ignored it on their home page.
: The BBC tried to find a dark lining to this silver cloud, below.
: The Ranting Profs say this regarding media coverage:

when the subject comes up (and it will) as to whether this was a PR stunt, consider that it was an awful lot of trouble to go to for a stunt that would be covered by the B, C, or D team on every network, when one cable network isn't even staffed, on what has to be the worst watched news night in American family life of the year with the exceptions of Christmas Eve, Christmas, and New Years Eve. And then look at the tears welling up in the man's eyes and tell me you think this was a cynical ploy, even if you think everything else he has done in Iraq has been a terrible mistake.
" The Profs also predict that some will try to stir up a stink about the White House telling the press a lie to make this event happen. Tough noogies, I say. Security was everything. The press was on the trip. Wack that gopher.
: And in the San Francisco Chronic, Mark Morford wrote this turkey before the President's trip:
Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya's massive crushing karmic burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning string of lies lies lies like a firehose of giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.
For it really is all too plain: G.W. Bush is one of the most reviled and openly disrespected major world leaders in modern history. America has never been so embarrassed and reluctant to send a president abroad. We cringe when the man takes the stage.
My, what bad timing you have, you twit.

Thankful
: George Bush's words thanking our troops in Iraq:

I bring a message on behalf of America: we thank you for your service, we're proud of you, and America stands solidly behind you. (Applause.) Together, you and I have taken an oath to defend our country. You're honoring that oath. The United States military is doing a fantastic job. (Applause.) You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq, so that we don't have to face them in our own country. You're defeating Saddam's henchmen, so that the people of Iraq can live in peace and freedom.
By helping the Iraqi people become free, you're helping change a troubled and violent part of the world. By helping to build a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East, you are defending the American people from danger and we are grateful. (Applause.)
You're engaged in a difficult mission. Those who attack our coalition forces and kill innocent Iraqis are testing our will. They hope we will run. We did not charge hundreds of miles into the heart of Iraq, pay a bitter cost in casualties, defeat a brutal dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins. (Applause.)
We will prevail. We will win because our cause is just. We will win because we will stay on the offensive. And we will win because you're part of the finest military ever assembled. (Applause.) And we will prevail because the Iraqis want their freedom. (Applause.) ...
(Applause)

: He's not the only person who's thankful today. On the occasion of the Muslim holiday Eid (aka Id), he also has words of thanks:

This is the first id after Saddam's gone. I’d like you my brothers of all religions and convictions to share my happiness with me....
decided to break the tradition of visiting the relatives and exchanging gifts with them, instead of that I went out to the streets to share the largest no. of Iraqi people the joy of the id.
As this time it's not official, but it's the people's id.
Yes I admit there was some sort of worry in the eyes of people that one can not miss, as the future is still vague for most of the Iraqis, but you also won't miss the optimism in the eyes of the young generations.
Mixed with that there was the grief and heartache for our brothers who we still miss.
Rise my brother from your mass graves for without you our happiness will never be perfect.
We won't forget you, for it was your struggle and your blood which was shed fighting the tyrant.
Without you the world would have never even heard of our misery and we would have never been free.
You ask me not to feel gratitude to those who set me free, ask for what is more realistic.
I say it with all my heart: may Allah bless America, UK, Italy, Spain, Australia, Poland and Ukraine.
For through the sacrifices of their sons and daughters on this land, smile has found it's way to our faces.
You have to be proud for what you have done.

: And Iraqi blogger Alaa also gives thanks:

I didn’t know about the Thanks Giving Holiday until I heard on my way back on the car radio the news of the President’s landing in Baghdad Airport. The news stirred very strong emotions in me....
Happy Thanks Giving to you all.
God Bless
P.S. I remember that the Thanks Giving occasion has a very moving origin of persecuted people thanking God for their delivery....
The visit of the President has produced quite an effect. I am personally very moved by it. Also I notice the effect on those around me.

The electric revolution
: Winds of Change says that tomrrow it will Hungarian Ambassador Andras Simonyi's speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland ("Rocking for the Free World: How Rock Music Helped to Bring Down the Iron Curtain") as a guest post.

Supporting free speech
: I've received separate notes from blog readers who are each trying to send cameras or other support to Iraqi bloggers. I like this: We with free speech and resources supporting those who are trying to create their own.
: See the post below and please continue to share suggestions on how to send material and support to Iraq.

British Bias Corporation
: The BBC gives an instant analysis of the Bush trip to Baghdad:

President Bush's visit to Iraq was a morale-booster for troops far from home on the most important family day of the year for Americans.
But the need for secrecy also emphasised the difficulties of the US-led occupation of Iraq.
It was notable, too, that Mr Bush chose the "war on terror" as a major theme of his visit, linking Iraq to that worldwide war.
He is already making it the highlight of his gathering campaign to win next November's presidential election.
Twaddle.
Of course, the trip was executed in secrecy. There are still dangerous people -- I'd call them terrorists -- there trying to shoot down cargo jets, and kill Iraqi children, and murder Red Cross workers, let alone Presidents. (Hey, read your own service and see that there are terrorists being arrested even in Britain today. Guess that indicates you're losing a war at home, eh?)
And, of course, the "war on terror" (why is that in quotes?) is a theme of what he said because (a) he has been saying that consistently and (b) it is a war on terror.

: Uh, Mr. Dyke, head of the BBC, is this what you were talking about when you said U.S. TV is not giving balanced coverage and you are? Your own "journalists" are making a liar of you. But then, you did a pretty good job of that yourself.

What should inspire
: The New York Times adds to the collective shrug that has met the World Trade Center memorial designs.

The eight memorial designs being considered for the World Trade Center site seem to have done almost everything they were supposed to do. Except resonate in the public imagination.
They may not have been greeted with the impassioned hostility from some quarters that first met Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. But neither have they been fervently embraced....
Yet the plans seem to have left people hungering for something else.
``There is a remarkable sameness to these designs,'' said the New York metropolitan chapter of the American Planning Association.
``None provide a well-designed urban public gathering space, none make use of the artifacts from the World Trade Center buildings and none convey the urban and international texture of the place that made it a target for attack... Most glaring, the designs as they stand do little to recall the actual horror of the destruction of the towers or the void left at ground zero.''
In general, said Michael Kuo of the Municipal Art Society, the public feels the designs ``did not communicate really what happened here, at this place'' and ``did not go beyond the victims to reflect the sense of community that held us together after our city and our lives were torn apart.''
The Times questions whether one memorial can do everything it should. It goes on to argue that the memorial is already being built:
...start thinking of the memorial collectively - the sphere, the pit, the chapel, the wall, the cross, each and every firehouse and all the other unplanned shrines where 9/11 has already been marked. Because in some respects, while the city has been planning a memorial, the memorial has already been built.
I don't agree that the memorial already exists. But I do fervently agree that the elements listed there in New York's ad hoc memorial are exactly what are missing from the proposals: Contributions from us.
I don't mean to keep coming back to my proposal, as if plugging it, but this is why I included a place where people could leave their memories and this is why I devised a video memorial that could be updated with new views and new perspectives over time, because we must help build this memorial.
We are all mourners. We are, together, the memory of that event.

: MommaBear also comes out against the proposals, saying that the World Trade Center site is a battleground and should have a battleground memorial.

: In some ways, it would have been better if the proposals had evoked the strong emotions of Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial.
Evoking a shrug is the last thing this memorial should do.

The war we must win
: Tom Friedman wrote an important column today that he should have saved for Sunday, not a holiday. Writing as if he were Saddam Hussein sending a note to George Bush, he says:

You see, Bush, this really is "The Mother of All Battles." You may not have meant to, but you have triggered a huge civilizational war — the war within Islam. Who wins in Iraq will have a big impact on this war — which is now spreading to Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
By now you've realized that I was prepared for this war. I got rid of all my W.M.D., hid explosives and set up an underground network to fight you once you were in country. But God bless the Turkish Parliament. By not allowing you to use Turkey to invade from the north, my boys in the Sunni Triangle were spared....
We have a business plan and we're executing it: We started by eliminating the U.N., the Red Cross and attacking oil pipelines. Then we moved against the countries that have sent troops or might — Italy, Jordan and Turkey. And now we're killing all Iraqis who collaborate with you — police, army, judges, technocrats. We know who everyone is and where they live. We're "a learning enemy." When you adapt to us, we re-adapt to you. Yes, we're secular Baathists, but we've made contact with Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria, and they drive our suicide vans. So many volunteers, so many good targets.
What we all believe is that if we can defeat you here, American cultural, political and economic influence in this part of the world will be finished for a long time....
Yes, Bush, you and Blair have kicked off something very big — a war of ideas with, and within, Islam. It's as big as the cold war. But to win, you have to mobilize your whole society, as you did in the cold war. You are talking about trying to change a whole civilization, whose backward, fanatical elements — when combined with modern technology — now threaten you.
Yet your Pentagon only talks about pulling troops out of Iraq, when you should be putting more in. What are you thinking? You should have brought every soldier you have in Europe and Japan right here....
Every Democratic candidate should read that column. Every nervous Republican should read that.
If we lose in Iraq, we lose World War III.

: Mark Steyn lists five more nations where we have to win the war.

bushiraq.bmpAmazing
: What a great move:

In a stunning mission conducted under enormous secrecy, President Bush flew into Baghdad today aboard Air Force One to have dinner with United States officials and a group of astonished American troops.
His trip -- the first ever to Iraq by an American president -- had been kept a matter of absolute secrecy by the White House, which had said that he would be spending the Thanksgiving weekend at his ranch outside Crawford, Tex....
The trip was an extraordinary gesture, with scant precedent, and was seen as an effort by Mr. Bush to show the importance he attaches to the embattled United States-led effort to pacify and democratize Iraq.
Bravo. [AP pool photo]

: Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton goes to Afghanistan.

: Ryan Pitts says he doesn't much care how much Bush's team calculated the political benefits of the trip.
Right. This is above politics. This is presidential. This shows the support for the troops that they need and deserve.

Cold
: A flight attendant who should have been on one of the death flights of September 11 -- but who took a vacation day -- has been unable to work since but she was just denied workers' comp. From the Star-Ledger:

This is the legacy of Sept. 11, 2001: Even the lucky ones suffer.
United Airlines flight attendant Kim Stroka had been scheduled to work Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, but took the day off to look after her daughter. She was on her way to pick up the girl from school when she learned the plane had been hijacked by terrorists and crashed in Shanksville, Pa., killing all aboard.
Distraught that a co-worker had died in her place, Stroka had difficulty eating and sleeping. She could not return to work. A psychologist treated her for post-traumatic stress disorder and a workers' compensation judge awarded her medical and disability payments.
Yesterday brought her more bad news. A state appeals court ruled Stroka, 43, of Howell is not entitled to collect workers' compensation because "her disability did not arise in the course of her employment."
They're afraid of setting a precedent. Jeesh. The judges and the airline should be ashamed.

Flim flam at 11
: Will Farrell is lampooning TV news in Anchorman, a movie coming out next summer. But you can see the trailer now. [via Lost Remote]

November 26, 2003

Memorial failure
: Greg Allen says now what I said the other day: None of the memorial proposals for the World Trade Center is sufficient. He calls for throwing them all out and starting again. And he sends us to Clay Risen's story in the Observer, which argues that the proposals are all too influenced by Vietnam Memorial designer Maya Lin and do not have an adequate sense of the place.

Nor is there any attempt to tie the site into its surroundings, either the rest of Ground Zero or lower Manhattan as a whole.... Then again, context wasn’t important with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; it’s in Washington, not Vietnam, and thus its surroundings have little relevance to its form....
But at Ground Zero, as in Oklahoma City, the task of placing a memorial on the site of a national tragedy requires a fundamental relationship between the site and the form. ...
It’s strange that little outcry has been made over the finalists’ decision not to incorporate pieces of the World Trade Center—after all, crews at Fresh Kills separated out tons of steel from the enormous piles of debris as candidates for use in a memorial.... so it’s a fair assumption that the finalists made a conscious decision not to include it. And how could they have? Within Ms. Lin’s minimalism, there’s no room for such literalism.
We are rushing into this decision. We will make a mistake, a mistake with which we and our children will have to live for centuries.

Nuff said
: Noam Chomsky gives a snoozy forum interview at WashingtonPost.com (decrying power wherever it exists!). Here's my favorite Q&A:

Washington, D.C.: Your writings and talks are generally very serious affairs. Do you have a humorous side? What sorts of things genuinely make you laugh?
Noam Chomsky: Playing with my grandchildren? Lots more. Frankly, I don't like to respond to personal questions. I'm a private person. I don't think it's anyone's business, apart from friends and family.
Yup, I think that answers it.

Who needs ombudsmen?
: David Weinberger fisks the Boston Globe on Dean today. Well, it's not a true, rage-filled, gotcha fisk. It's more a sigh-filled, disappointed dissection.

Vote for Hoder!
: Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian weblog pioneer, has decided to run for the Iranian parliament!

See also the post below on the at-home primary. I suspect that weblogs give a person a small scent of power and can change their lives.

Hoder: Put up a tip jar for your campaign. I suspect there are no campaign spending limits in Iran, are there?

Update: In the comments, Sassan worries that this will put Hossein in jeopardy. I fear his incredible activities online could do that as well.
But if he merely tries to run -- even if from afar, even if not allowed to, even if unable to campaign or win -- sends a most powerful message:
Here is a man who has created a new political power base online.
We've joked about a blogger running for office in the U.S. Hoder is doing it.
We've joked about starting a revolution online. Hoder has done it.
I pray that Hoder does nothing to put himself at risk. But I stand in awe of what he has accomplished.

You WILL join a community because I said so!
: Martyn Perks at Spiked [via Smart Mobs] tears into the BBC's community venture iCan in a rich and telling analysis.
iCan is supposed to let people start movements.
Perks complains that there are too many rules: "Surely iCan should be renamed iCan't. No wonder the current featured campaign is about banning chewing gum."
He also complains about the anonymity of it, which he says will actually lead to much flouting of those rules and nasty chatter rather than real and constructive movements.
He complains about people meeting online rather than in person. I disagree with that one. I'm now more likely to meet and join up with fellow citizens online than I am at some tedious town meeting or political event.
But here are his most interesting complaints. First:

Here the BBC is addressing its future role, taking its cue from a political elite that is unable to connect with an uninterested population. From voter apathy to the police struggling to prove their accountability, we must suffer more attempts to coerce us into playing ball.
Right. Communities can be coercive. Back in the early days of online, executives of this new medium fretted about how to get everyone involved and if everyone didn't start chatting with everyone else, they thought it all a failure. That's clearly wrong-headed. But it's a problem online and politicians and news people often share: They want to define what "involved" means. But they cannot and should not. We'll get involved when we bloody well want to. And don't insult us by assuming we're dolts if we don't do what you think we should do.
Perks' last complaint is his most intriguing:
Also, reducing the effort needed to start a campaign will greatly reduce its impact. As if there aren't enough charities and single-issue campaigns to deal with, iCan would continue to personalise and individualise our experience of the world.... Imagine it - a new campaign for every day of the year. In reality, iCan can't deliver what it promises. The faith some have in iCan avoids tackling real issues head-on and belittles us with a safe, comfortable idyll. By playing village politics we will lose sight of how to better society through considered debate and, when necessary, confrontation.
Well, it's not all about storming the barricades. Perks should not, in turn, belittle those who fight for an issue that matters to them in their town. But what interests me is the idea that you need some barrier, some speedbump to make a movement worthwhile and I think that's true: Even with every new tool of this networked world, if you don't convince people to join you and create a critical mass, you don't have a movement; you have only blather.

The cure to the TV news blues
: Here's the real cure to the TV news problem (see the post below): be your own producer. MSN has up a beta of its pick-your-own-news video service. It's pretty good. They offer 10 stories. I watched two. I'm happy. Iwatched their commercial. They're happy.
Think of this as a video blog.
Or think of it as the video GoogleNews.
It's TV news on my terms. I can skip that stupid busiest-travel-day-of-the-year story today. And I can skip those stupid busiest-shopping-days-of-the-year on Friday and the day after Christmas. I'll also skip most city-digs-out-after-blizzard stories, thank you. And I'll admit that I'm not getting much out of the conjoined-twins-separated-in-long-and-risky-operation stories, either.
Give it a try. [via Lost Remote]

: UPDATE: See also Terry Heaton's column that adds to this citizens' video.
I'm working on just that now.

The at-home primary
: Fred Wilson wasn't sure whether he supported Dean or Clark. So he invited Clark -- and 70 close friends -- over to his house. How does it feel to be Iowa, Fred?
Now Fred is backing Clark.
When Clark announced, I had hopes for him. But those hopes keep getting dashed.
I'm appalled by his promise to sign a Consitutional amendment banning flag burning. During Vietnam, authorities in New York started arresting people for displaying the peace-sign-American-flag button. My father -- a staunch Republican, a veteran, a proud patriot -- was so incensed at this violation of Constitutional rights of free speech that he asked me to give him one of my buttons and he wore it with defiance: Arrest me! I was so proud of him for that. I'm not proud of Clark's stand. It's Constitutionally naive and dangerous. It's pandering that will get him nowhere.
I'm quite unimpressed with his "plan" for Iraq: pull the hell out and hand it over to Iraq now, with minor help. That is downright irresponsible. We have a moral duty to help the Iraqi people build a strong democracy and economy. Pulling out, Vietnam-like, won't do that. This, too, is pandering.
And as a test of leadership ability, thinking on his feet, and just being smart, Clark failed bigtime with his waffling on whether he would or would not have signed the Iraq resolution.
Fred: Can you have a few other candidates over for coffee?

: Fred answers me and I answer him in his comments. I won't get into the specifics of our back-and-forth here; go give him the page views.
But I do want to repeat this:
Damn, this is fun. It's practically making politics engaging again.
Thanks to this crazy medium, I'm only a degree of separation away from a man who would be President.
When I covered the New Hampshire primary, lo, many years ago, I got close; I asked them questions and shook their hands and reported what they said. But I did not to get into a discussion of issues. Here, I'm playing issue tennis with the guy who is influential enough to have Wes over to his place. You can, too. Smaller circles. More substance. More influence. For more people.
There's something important going on in this campaign that we haven't been able to grok yet. We've all noted it: the Dean blog; the Dean comment community; the catch-up candidates' blogs; Meet-up; voters' blogs....
This, I believe, could be the rebirth of true bottom-up politics.
What the BBC is doing (see the iCan post above) and what news sites do when they create what they call "interactive" games that let you push buttons and act as if you're in power (see the post below) are still top-down: The powerful let you play as if power were a toy.
Real power is about being heard by power. Real power is about having real influence. And one way or another, a bit at a time, real people can gain real power here. I even think there's a business in this.
It's way, way too soon to know whether it's really working. But I smell the barely budding flower of change.

: Note, separately, that Andrew Sullivan supports Wesley Clark over George Bush on the matter of government and God.

If you already know it, is it news?
: If I ran a TV news operation (not likely), I'd come on the air on this day every year and say: "People, you know and I know that there's going to be a lot of traffic today, right? Busy roads, busy airport. Been there, done that story a million times. So I'm not going to insult your intelligence and do it again. I'm not going to waste my precious resources and do it again. I'm going to give you the news, instead."
You wonder why young people don't watch or read the news much? Could it be that they often turn on the TV and say, "I already knew that." What's the value in telling me what I already know? Is that news? Or is it just a waste of my time?

Blogging Times
: If I were NYTimes.com editor Len Apcar or president Martin Nisenholtz or NY Times Public Editor Dan Okrent, I'd feel like the only atheist in Alabama: bait for every evangelist in sight. We bloggers are going after them with religious fervor, trying to get the Times to blog, trying to convert them to the Church of Blog (what are we, Bloggists?).
I've personally gone after all three of them. That might seem odd; you'd think I'd want to keep this living-in-two-faiths, big-media/nanomedia schizo thing to myself and a small fraternity of fellow religionists. But no, like any evangelist, I subscribe to the view: the more the merrier. Once The Times blogs, we won't have to explain what blogging is anymore; we won't have to put up with conference-haunting journalists dismissing this phenom as a fad; we'll all get more readers and more to read. Once The Times blogs, everyone will. And no, that won't coopt the form; that will explode the form. That will be good for blogging. And what's good for blogging is good for the citizens.
(I'm just a Populist in the temple of the Bloggists, you see.)

: Now Jay Rosen goes after Okrent to start a blog as the perfect form for his ombudsmanian duties. Rosen's right: A weblog lets Okrent note and respond to (or not respond to) criticism and comment about the Times: "The weblog becomes the place where voices from the reading public, and voices from the editorial staff, are placed artfully into conversation by the presiding voice of the editor." I can see that the blog also presents a few issues for someone in that position, for every word will be dissected (a frightening prospect in a medium of such immediacy). Weblogs are a personal medium with a personal voice and that needs to be squared with speaking for an institution (and an industry). But I agree with Jay: Weblogs are a good way to meet the public editor's and The Times' goals. Weblogs are also the right voice for a public editor, as I advised here. And Okrent would be an awesome weblogger because he's damned smart, has a great voice, and lives in interesting Times.

: A prediction: I'll bet you'll be seeing weblogs from The Times sooner than you think....

November 25, 2003

MovieOn
: MoveOn made a movie. You can watch the trailer; looks like the Reefer Madness of WMDs.

Q & Arab
: Fayrouz, blogging Live from Dallas, sends us to the Detroit Free Press' quite handy 100 Qs and As about Arab-Americans.

Advice, please
: I got a digital camera for Zeyad. Any advice on how to -- reliably -- ship it to Iraq?
Zeyad thinks FedEx might do the trick (but I can't find any reference to them shipping there). Suggestions from those who know?

: More advice: I pushed Zeyad to get a PayPal tip jar to, at a minimum, pay for his expensive Internet access or, at a maximum, convince him that his future lies in reporting, not dentistry. The problem, you'll recall, was how to get the money to him.
Zeyad pulled a London cousin out of his hat and that seemed like the solution. But Cuz is not unwisely worried that Inland Revenue (read: IRS) authorities will wonder whether this money came from. Any help from British tax whizes about how to set up an account or transfer that won't cause headaches?

: It's all in a good cause. And if this works for Zeyad, I know of other bloggers who are ready to help other Iraqi bloggers.

: And, by the way, some nice blogger bought Zeyad his own domain. So you can now go to healingiraq.com.

I thought it was a joke
: NBC is thinking of starting a Law & Order channel.
And CBS is thinking of starting a Show We Had To Cancel Because Of Controversy Channel.

Food, glorious food
: Jackie, of au Currant fame, has started a food blog.
Do me a favor, folks: Leave me comments listing all the food blogs you know of.
I have my reasons.
Thanks....

Rush gives up drugs -- and logic
: Getaloada this fractured logic from Rush Limbaugh, when confronted on his show about his hypocrisy:

"It's not hypocritical because my behavior doesn't determine the value of right and wrong - nobody's does," Limbaugh told listeners....
"If I were to admit I'm a hypocrite, then I'm going to be disqualified from being able to say what I think is right and wrong.
"I'm not going to let anybody take that away from me," he said.
"Whatever I did I did, but it doesn't change what right and wrong are."
Limbaugh told his estimated 15 million listeners that "some people" may be trying to brand him a hypocrite for political reasons.
"The liberals do the same thing with defense," he said. "They try to say that people who didn't serve in the military can't talk about defense. People who wish to be exempt from any moral judgment [are] taking the occasion of my story to try to weaken the whole concept of right and wrong by taking shots at me," Limbaugh said.
That makes NO FRIGGING SENSE! It pains me too much to parse it.
So let's just get this straight, Rushy boy: You said that people engaging in the illegal traffic of drugs should go to jail no matter who they are, right?
And you apparently engaged in the illegal traffic of drugs (so your housekeeper says... and besides, why would you have to go to rehab if you didn't buy more drugs than you should have?).
And you're not in jail.
Seems you should have turned yourself in, no?
If you think drugs and wrong and you illegally trafficked in drugs then you are wrong, right?
Man, I have such a headache from all that advanced logic, I think I need a pain reliever.

: From the Letterman monologue: "Everyone is getting the cold or flu. Rush Limbaugh had his housekeeper go buy him some Nyquil."

Who puts words in George Bush's mouth?
: Now you can. [via IT&W]

Design
: Go to Big White Guy (in Hong Kong) and keep refreshing to see beautiful images rotating atop his blog. Cheap but wonderful way to get lots of page views.

Out of office:
: A sublime post from Heiko Hebig:

Out of Office AutoBlog
I am currently away. If urgent, read another blog.

Baghdad Broadcasting Company, a model for us all
: Greg Dyke, chief chutzpah officer of the BBC, lashes out at U.S. TV news war coverage as he accepts a dubious award in New York:

News organisations should be in the business of balancing their coverage, not banging the drum for one side or the other. This is something which seemed to get lost in American reporting of the war," said Mr Dyke.
He said only four out of 840 experts interviewed on US news outlets during the conflict opposed the war and the situation would not have been tolerated at the BBC.
"Telling people what they want to hear is not doing them any favours. It may not be comfortable to challenge governments or even popular opinion but it's what we are here to do," he said.
Yo, Doc, cure thyself!
What an incredibly blind/deaf/dumb comment to come from Baghdad Broadcasting, of all places.
Balance? The BBC exhibits as much balance as Christopher Reeve on a tightrope.
Telling people what they want to hear? That's exactly what the BBC did and quite cynically, I might add.
Experts? What experts? Name two. That is the kind of ridiculous faux stat I'd expect to hear from, oh, American talk radio, not the head of the vaunted BBC.
And Greg, I have two words to remind you of: Andrew Gilligan.
But what's even more pathetic is his lack of awareness about the business reality of TV news -- yes, business reality:
In a robust defence of public service broadcasting Mr Dyke said TV was not "just another commodity" like Starbucks or Coca-Cola and disagreed with those who said it should be left to the market.
"Television is only different from coffee or Coke if we recognise that fact. If we treat TV like these things, it will become like them. We end up with nothing more than a briefly enjoyable experience devoid of any lasting value," he said.
Face it, mate: News -- especially TV news -- is already a commodity. Cable -- and, in your case, satellite -- and the Internet already accomplished that.
The wave of the future is to admit your perspective -- and, lord knows you have one (in fact, denying that you do is the worst single blow to your credibility -- and to let the audience decide how to look at a story.
If you came out and said you were against the war because somebody had to be, somebody had to give that perspective -- well, I might disagree but I would respect the honesty of that and the vision. But no.
You're a dinosaur, Dyke. But worse than that, you're a dishonest one.

Brown-paper blog
: Halley Suitt is offering to sell blushing bloggers copies of Penthouse for a slight (100 percent) profit.
Oh, yes, she has a story in there and she's autographing it. I wonder whether this could be the last issue. That'd make it really valuable.
Otherwise, Halley should talk to Fleshbot about a new revenue stream.

EId
: As I drove into Jersey City this morning, I saw people converging on a large mosque in all varieties of formal and foreign dress. It's the start of Eid. And then I got to work and found email from Zeyad, who tells me:

By the way, today we are celebrating the first day of the Id holidays and the atmosphere in Baghdad is very different. People everywhere. I haven't seen such celebrations since before the war. It's all really fun. Anyway, I'm off to a party right now. so see you later.
Welcome relief.

They call it old Europe for a reason
: A remarkable projection in today's NY Times David Brooks column:

Working off U.N. and U.S. census data, Bill Frey, the indispensable University of Michigan demographer, projects that in the year 2050 the median age in the United States will be 35. The median age in Europe will be 52. The implications of that are enormous.
Europe, the land of yesterday. The continent of old farts. The next Beatles sure won't come from there. They will come from, oh, Iran.

Rush hour
: This morning, I came into the World Trade Center in rush hour, in a fairly crowded train. As soon as the train came into the site, the train went completely silent; most people looked outside; some just looked off. I wonder how long that will last. Maybe forever. Maybe it is our way of paying our respects.

November 24, 2003

Spin spam
: Tonight's presidential debate (I saw the last half) just proves Jay Rosen's points. The candidates don't answer a damned question; they stick tape carts in their mouths and hit "play." And afterward, on MSNBC, Chris Matthews goes on about who "won." What he should be doing is saying, "You guys didn't say jack! You wouldn't answer the questions. You didn't advance the debate. You didn't advance the conversation. You wasted our damned time." That's the unspun zone.

European anti-Semitism
: The Guardian asks the tough question: "The 'new' anti-semitism: is Europe in grip of worst bout of hatred since the Holocaust?"

"Anti-semitism has become politically correct in Europe," said Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and minister in Ariel Sharon's government....
But it is the "new" anti-semitism that most disturbs some Jewish leaders because they say it emanates from influential groups such as academics, politicians and the media and is dressed up as criticism of Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.
It is time to honestly face this spectre. This isn't Europe-bashing. It is a warning we must heed.... this time.

Pew
Uh-oh
: The Pew Internet & American Life center releases no end of great, if sometimes frightening, studies of the online us. Take a look at this chart from the latest, which looks at the technology and media consumption of relatively techy segments of the population. They asked which of these media it would be "hard to give up."
Note poor ol' print down at the bottom of the list. Most would sooner give up newspapers and magazines than PDAs.
With that in mind, read the post below this...

: UPDATE: Tom Mangan, in the comments, says this is apples/kumquat comparison. Fair enough. Also note that the PDA question was asked only of people who have PDAs; the people who don't have them would give them up easily. Still, I was depressed at the low number of people who would find it hard to give up their newspaper. That's the sad part.

Interact
: Andrew Nachison, director of The Media Center, scolds journalism "pros" for dismissing and dissing weblogs and interactivity. Go get 'em, Andrew:

I’m using the word blog over and over here because I know how much it irks some people, perhaps even more so than the word convergence....
To some, blogs represent a degradation, if not a downright blight, on real journalism. One author said in a post to the ONA discussion forum [which is closed to anyone but members - ed] today, “Anyone can 'publish' their stuff. Drivel is passed off as journalism. The ramblings of someone somewhere are passed off as news. The result is acres and acres of terrible reporting. Incoherent ramblings and notes-to-myself that are published in public space.”
It’s a sentiment I encounter often with newspaper editors and other “seasoned” journalists who have been there and done that and believe that journalism is best handled by trained professionals.
Here’s some agitation: the “blogs good-blogs bad” discussion vastly oversimplifies a profound social change now under way..... Emphasis is now on the word relationship – implying a two-way conversation. Our notions of control, who’s an expert and what it takes to establish credibility, have been challenged, and the information dialog of the future may not resemble what we have known from the past....
We’re in the midst of a communications Renaissance – an explosion of dialog unlike anything before in human history.
Sad that he has to scold his industry like that, but he does.
Just wait until the New York Times blogs (it's closer than you think) and you'll see these folks trip over themselves dying to jump on the bandwagon.

: At the same time, I just got a spanking from Jan Schaffer, executive director of the J-Lab, the Institute for [so-called] Interactive Journalism. At the Online News confab, I got fed up at her panel's definition of interactivity. It was all about making the audience push Flash buttons rather than truly interacting with people. They said interactivity was about getting involved in a story. See my snarky views here; see her scolding in the comments there:

Jeff -- I wish you would have asked a question at the ONA Interactivity panel and provoked some of the vaunted "conversation" with people that you pay such lip service to.
Well, Jan, I'd say the conversation is happening right here, on weblogs, not in a hotel conference room where a handful of people had to pay hundreds of dollars to get in. The conversation is here, where many people can have their say and respond to each other on the record. And it's here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. That is a conversation. That is interactivity.

Aren't we cute
: All Things Considered airs your basic condescending report on blogs and presidential candidates tonight. The only thing they quote from Dean's comments is somebody giving the candidate sartorial advice. They give blogs the back-handed compliment of being "cool" (how frigging '90s). They dismissively say that blogs don't have a big audience. They don't get it: This is not another computer game. It's the people -- the audience, the voters, the citizens -- talking. Wanna listen, NPR? Try reading some. [Here's the link to listen.]

: Ed Cone's growling about it, too.

: Update: Two commenters point out the tasty irony of NPR dismissing any medium for having a small audience.

Correction
: The Pentagon denies reports that the soldiers killed in Mosul did not have their throats slit and were not pummeled by a crowd. They were shot and killed and robbed. But now Atrios may not see a bad sign.

Payday
: Parade (full disclosure: it's part of my company) is working on its annual income surveya and went to John Scalzi to find out what bloggers make. Boy, is that a straight line.

An Iranain politician blogs
: Hossein Derkhshan reports the amazing news that an Iranian politican is now blogging:

Mohammad Ali Abtahi is the first Iranian politician who has a weblog (Unfortunately only in Persian). Surprisingly, he doesn't discuss much about politics in his weblog. But he takes secret photos from Eduard Shevardnadze, he tells the story of how he was among thousands of Iranians who welcomed Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner, in Tehran Airport, and he writes about personal and unreported conversations with prominent politicians such as Mehdi Karrubi, the parliament speaker....
And who says it's not a revolution?

pathwtc.jpg

Welcome back
: I kept telling myself, It's just a train ride.
The last time I rode these tracks, as many of you know, was on the last PATH train into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Today, I returned. And I didn't know how I'd react. I often feel as I live with a webcam pointed at my psyche, always watching, always recording the reaction to anything 9/11: today sunken, tomorrow angry, the next day tired, the next day numb, someday hopeful. So what will it be today?
Well, the first, best indication of my own reaction came when the train pulled into Jersey City and the conductor droned, "World Trade Center." And I smiled. Relief. Even a touch of victory.
The midmorning train wasn't crowded. One grizzly guy sat by the front window; a tourist/pilgrim with camera sat a few feet away. I kept my camera in my pocket; I dislike turning tragedy into tourism.
As we went under the river, a guy in a PATH reconstruction jacket came up to the front window to look. So did the rest of us. The tunnel -- where rowboats navigated after the attacks -- looked new and clean. And up ahead, we saw daylight. That, alone was shocking; this station always seemed as if it were a mile underground. Now, of course, there is nothing above.
The train halted just at the entrance, as if to let us get ready. The grizzly guy muttered, "Graveyard." The rest stared ahead. I felt a clutch coming but then stopped.
It's just a train ride.
There was no more enormity to it. I've felt the enormity again and again; have not stopped feeling it. We came out into the Trade Center site, with the floors chewed off by the devil himself, the scarred walls, the ramps, the yellow construction equipment. I've seen it from above. Now I see it from below. Same enormity.
pathview.jpg

The train takes a big loop around the site and then pulls into the station.
It's odd that the authorities try to subtly stop us from looking even as millions are drawn to the site just to look. The new bridge over West Street, which also opened today, is designed to block the view. The grate and green canvas surrounding the site all but block it. In the new PATH station, there are huge, transluscent fabric walls with quotes about New York that don't quite block the view but do block cameras. We can glance. We can't stare.
"Something's always happening here," said Myrna Loy. "If you're bored in New York, it's your own fault." It borders on bad taste to stare through that quote at the destruction and rebuilding. But, hey, this is New York; we love the edge.
So people stood and stared, of course. On the platform -- pure, clean concrete -- some stood. Up a level, more stared.
pathescalator.jpgAnd then came the escalators. Those were the most striking feature of the original station: So many stairs going so high, always moving, forever full. They symbolized New York business and ambition to me. And on That Morning, it was coming up those stairs and hearing silence -- a sound never heard in this place -- that made me realize something was wrong, very wrong.
Now there are fewer stairs. But they are back and they lead up to another level and then stairs take you up onto Church Street, right where the Borders Books used to be. When I was last here, I ran across that street as debris fell and a cop shouted for our lives, ordering us to run.
Now, I come up on the street and it's crowded. Some are still staring. Some are rushing; real jobs, real lives. Some take pictures in front of the World Trade Center PATH signs (suitable for framing?).
The mood there seems to match my own: relieved, glad, a little triumphant.
The bustle's back.

Harry's birthday
: I don't usually mark others' blog birthdays (I don't even mark my own). But when Harry says nice things about you, well, flattery will get you a link. I often agree with Harry; I often disagree; I always enjoy the conversation and it has been a nicer nabe since he moved in.

Georgia on his mind
: Pedram wonders whether the velvet revolution in Georgia provides an example for Iran. He fears religions would get in the way.

So an ayatollah, an imam, and a rabbi walk into a bar cafe...
: Here's a good story promoting the talents of Arab-American comics -- better yet, it comes from Steven I. Weiss in Jewsweek: "If you want to turn an average Arab-American into a comedian, give one a plane ticket and then wait to see what happens."

Michael Jackson blogs
: ... well, not quite. But like everyone else today, he comes to the web to tell his story.

For the dead
: Ays tells us that obituaries for those Saddam executed were prohibited. Now that he is gone, the dead get their day.

Feeling left behind?
: Rafat Ali is posting to PaidContent.org from a small town in India, where he gets broad Internet access thanks to his 3G phone (giving him faster access than I get off my Sprint Treo). If he were here, he'd be sniffing out the nearest Starbucks. Good for India. Bad for us.

Stop the presses: NY Times editor reads blogs
: NY Times Executive Editor Bill Keller tells Howard Kurtz that, yes, he reads weblogs:

One striking thing about Keller's style is that he doesn't dismiss criticism of the paper out of hand. "I look at the blogs. . . . Sometimes I read something on a blog that makes me feel we screwed up. A lot of times I read things that strike me as ill-tempered and ill-informed."
Perhaps the best example of Keller's open-mindedness toward outside critics is his choice for the Times's first public editor. He picked former Life managing editor Daniel Okrent, whom he had never met, rather than a Times veteran.
"Maybe we were a little too closed off to how the world sees us. . . . The more I interviewed people, the more I realized it would be more interesting to listen to someone who hadn't grown up in our culture," Keller says. Over time, he admits, "I may want to eat those words, or the staff may want to shove them down my throat."
We'll see that excerpt all over weblogs today. But there shouldn't be anything surprising about this. A good reporter or editor should want to know what's happening out there and should want to find new sources of information and read criticism.
The big news would be if he did not read blogs.
Now what would be more impressive is if you saw Keller et al leaving a comment or two on weblogs to enter into a dialogue. Because -- repeat after me -- news is a conversation.

Tough times
: Blogger Gary Farber is living Murphy's Law right now. Go here to give him a helping hand. [Note: The direct link is hosed so go to the top and scroll down.]

November 23, 2003

The new and true essence of media
: I ended my psychotic blatherings at the Online News confab with a kicker Hugh McLeod left in the comments here because he said something smarter and more forward-thinking than I could:

Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as "things", rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A Joi-Ito-like [Joi being a central weblogger] brain trust, held cohesive by good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won't (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.
I agree enthusiastically. When I read that quote, I changed "collective" to "community" -- felt better. But it was damned well said.
Hugh keeps refining his view and he just left this comment below:
Media is not "entertainment" or "information". Media is an interface. Interface implies action. I leave Buzzmachine more switched on than when I entered. So for me, there's an actual kinetic quality about visiting here. The same should be true (but mostly isn't) for ABC, CBS, The NYT, Nickelodeon, MTV etc etc. I want the benefit of interacting with any given media brand I use to be more flamingly obvious, less vague and elitist.
Well-said again. I'll blush at the too-kind reference to this humble site. And I'll change the word "interface" to "relationship" because it, too, feels better. But hear the theme:
This medium is about relationships and the audience wants (desperately) to relate to media (or at least news media) as more than just an audience. They want a conversation. They want influence. They want power. No, we want all those things.
That is the real guiding principle for the future of media: relationships.

Britain's (latest) press revolution
: With its hyperbolimeter turned up high, the Guardian says this is the most momentous time in British news since the Wapping revolution.

The ecology of British newspapers is changing before our eyes because of two unconnected events: the successful launch of the tabloid Independent and the financial crisis enveloping the owner of the Telegraph group, Lord (Conrad) Black.
Note first the paradoxes. The Independent is the newest of papers and the lowest-selling; the Telegraph is one of the oldest and the largest-selling. The former, a left-of-centre paper, has turned around its fortunes by daring to innovate; the latter, a conservative organ, has watched its audience die off and done too little to attract replacements. Both have fallen foul of the same enemy: Rupert Murdoch. Ever since the owner of the Times launched his price war in 1993 he has gradually squeezed the breath out of the two papers, denuding them of readers and threatening their ability to make profits.
Big paper/little paper. Profitable/troubled. Those aren't revolutions; they aren't even momentous; they're life. Momentous is what would happen if the BBC lost its licensing fee. Momentous is what's happening online. Momentous is a huge shift of audience from one medium to another.
Still, this is interesting stuff. Would a high-brow tabloid work in the U.S. (it would be a better user interface, eh?).

The (Mouth from the) South shall rise again
: Reese Schonfeld reports on Ted Turner's resurrection:

Monday over lunch I picked up an item from a former Time Warner exec. He asked me if I knew who was running CNN. I guessed Jim Walton. He said Ted Turner – Dick Parsons defers to Ted on anything to do with CNN according to this guy. So, to all of you who have been suggesting TW bring back Ted Turner; maybe you got your wish.
: Schonfeld also debunks the obituary-timed commentary that Lawrence Tisch ruined the "Tiffany Network," CBS. I agree and agreed when Tisch ran it. The network was in bad shape; the news guys were utterly blind to business realities (i.e., an audience that was deserting in droves); Tisch didn't do everything right but he did, at least, try to bring business to network news -- and that's not a sin, it's only sensible; it's only a matter of survival.

Bastards
: SkyNews says that two U.S. soldiers stopped in traffic were killed by having their throats slit. Another report says they were shot and then dragged from their vehicle and pummeled with concrete blocks.
This is not the time for restraint. Even the Iraqi bloggers say that. This is the time to end these murderous crimes.

: Atrios says all this is "not a good sign."
Not a good sign of what?
Of the morals of our opponents?
Of the depths to which our opponents will stoop?
Of the evil of the people who ruled Iraq, whom we ousted?
A sign of what, Atrios?