BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

June 06, 2004

Protest the evils of oil and polyester!

: The World Naked Bike Ride protests oil dependency. Who the hell knows what flesh has to do with fuel but, hey, anything for cheap peeps. [via Jimmiz]spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

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Unnews

: Ethan Zuckerman links to the U.N.'s list of most underreported stories and then lists five of his own. What are yours?spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

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Catching up in Iraq

: I'm catching up with my reading of Iraqi weblogs. Read this from Baghdadi, an Iraqi-American, on the new government, and tell me whether you saw any of this excitement in media coverage:

The beginning for the new Iraq has started and the people of Iraq finally got a government they should be proud of. I was so happy this morning watching the new Iraqi government and the names of those ministers and of course the new president. There was one moment during the whole ceremony that equated to the moment when they announced the capture of Saddam and that is when they announced the new president of Iraq, to me that was a dream comes true. I believe most of us young Iraqis when we hear the phrase president of Iraq, we think of Saddam and only Saddam. Well, history was made today Saddam and his clans have no chance of getting the power or any position in the new Iraq. Iraq is changing and I believe it is changing toward a free and democratic Iraq. I spoke with my family in Baghdad twice today and they are so excited about the new government, my brother was telling me that we all are praying for these guys and Inshallaha god will be with them. I think this is a new era for us and for the Middle East as a whole. Listening to all the names that were announced today, you can not, but think that this new government is the most educated individuals among all the governments in the Middle East. Most of them have a doctorate in their fields of expertise not to mention a lot of them have lived and gained there experience in the west. With the help of the US and the rest of the world, I believe these guys will definitely get Iraq out of this mess.

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A year in the life

: A picture a day for a year in one of my favorite cities, Berlin. [via Kunstspaziergänge]spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

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Good swarms

: Steven Johnson not only gives some link charity to Spirit of America, he also seems something bigger going on here -- good swarms:

But the site makes me wonder whether this isn't the beginning of a fascinating new chapter in the web's gift economy. Thanks to the passion of the bloggers themselves, and clustering technologies like Technorati and Blogdex, we've already mastered the art of locating and quickly swarming around the week's hot news item or thinkpiece. (You know the drill: Clay posts a provocative essay about power laws on Monday, and by Friday there are fifty in-depth responses, a dozen fact checks, ten suggestions for future research, and a handful of requests for the Lazy Web.) What Spirit Of America suggests is a version of that swarming directed towards Good Causes: someone halfway across the globe (or halfway across the country, or the county) puts out a call for help setting up a wi-fi network in an under-funded school, or repairing a sewage treatment facility, and within five days they're flooded with funds, spare parts, technical expertise, and good will. And when the network goes online, or the sewage starts getting processed again, we all get to see the results. (Maybe not so fun for sewage, but you get the idea.) And then we get to move on to the next cause.

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Say 'blog!'
: Scoble imagines the blogging camera:

Imagine a digital camera with Wifi built in, and with something like Radio UserLand built in. Now that'd be crazy, huh? Take a picture, have it automatically thrown up to a weblog whenever there's connectivity (which is quite often now -- even the San Francisco Giants' baseball stadium has WiFi).

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Ground Zero's future

: The NY Times celebrates disarray in cultural plans for the World Trade Center site and in a typically self-indulgent editorial act has its own critics blather on about what they'd do there (or, actually, blather on to try to show how cute they can be). spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

A.O. Scott, the movie critic, ends up absurdly but starts out ok:

We already have more than our share of monuments to polite culture — more than we can use, actually. Furthermore, the concentration of dance companies, museums, performance spaces and whatever else on newly developed acreage is a recipe for urban desolation. The last time such a thing was tried on a large scale, it produced the Lincoln Center complex, which has demanded respect for 40 years without inspiring much in the way of love. Why, on the site of our biggest civic catastrophe, would we want yet another middle-brow mausoleum?

Herbert Muschamp, as always, proves to be a self-centered blowhard

....I have recently become more sympathetic to the "cop-out" position, which would mean abandoning the flawed ground zero design process altogether in favor of reconstructing the twin towers more or less as they were. Certainly, I'm prepared to defend reconstruction as a cultural act. It would be an offering to Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, from whom all culture flows.spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
The reduction to essentials is a great New York tradition, evident in our engineering and in our art. It is the correct tradition to invoke here. And then, to insure its revival, I would propose a school, a center of unlearning as well as learning, a place for disembedding ourselves from the welter of fantasies that has enveloped the country in recent years.

This guy should spend his time writing in crayon in the ward. What an insufferable bunch of offensive jibberish. spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

: But Steve Cuozo in the NY Post remains the voice of sanity regarding the World Trade Center. On Thursday, I was down there shaking my head at a still-destroyed building bringing back such unpleasant memories on the north side of the site. On Friday, Cuozo wrote about it:

Nearly three years after 9/11, the blackened, 15-story, soot-caked ruin of Fiterman Hall continues to cast a pall on Downtown. The bleak relic not only darkens the north rim of Ground Zero, it threatens the economic viability of Larry Silverstein's new, $700 million 7 World Trade Center rising across the street from it. And everybody involved is passing the buck. spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
That the macabre eyesore remains in place is a civic disgrace. New Yorkers took deserved pride in the swift cleanup of Ground Zero. Yet this white-brick structure just north of there, on the block bounded by West Broadway, Barclay and Greenwich streets and Park Place, still looks much as it did on Sept. 12, 2001. spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
It's outrageous that such blight remains just weeks before the Freedom Tower — symbolic of Downtown's tremulous rebirth — breaks ground. And thanks to political gridlock, the eerie monstrosity may haunt the scene for a long time to come.

Exactly.
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Is a hero a hero only if you like the war?

: Cori Dauber reports this from Andy Rooney on Imus:

His complaint was with the practice of considering all the soldiers, airmen, Marines, sailors and Coastguardsmen serving in Iraq as heroes. Most soldiers in Iraq, he said, "they're not heroes, they're victims. They got trapped in the Army."spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
And what about the WW II analogy? There was "no question about the ethical, moral, righteousness of our war against the Nazis." Today's situation is "not at all the same." (Even if you don't think we should have gone to war in Iraq, I still don't understand how people can argue against the moral righteousness of the war as a humanitarian intervention. It's just beyond me.)spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
But Rooney continued: "They just don't have a righteous war to fight," and that's the only reason today's military forces aren't a Greatest Generation. "They don't have an occasion to rise to."spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
Fascism is fascism, and it is always a righteous cause to fight fascism with an appetite for global conquest.

I agre with Cori on all points and, as usual, disagree with Rooney. spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

These soldiers were not trapped in the Army; they volunteered. spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

Why is getting rid of murdering fascists in Germany different from getting rid of murdering fascists in Iraq? spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

And -- in the context this discussion comes from, it's Bush talking about the war on terrorism and not just the war in Iraq -- this generation most certainly does have the occasion to rise to: the defeat of terrorism and Islamic mass murderers. spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

: And by the way, how come when a man goes on a rampage destroying buildings throughout his own town and nearly killing his own neighbors, he's known as a "nut" while people who do that in Iraq are known as "insurgents?"spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

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Seven

: John Battelle reports that Andrew Anker -- ex-head of Wired Digital, ex-VC -- has joined SixApart, making of Movable Type, as exec vp of corporate development. spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack

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We are all journalists?

: Seth Godin says we are all journalists:

So, there's now almost 3,000,000 bloggers tracked by some of the online services. That's 1% or so of the active online population, and since it seems as though the number is doubling every month or so, it's starting to get significant.spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
Remember how you used to curse journalists? Curse them for being lazy, or hyperbolic? ...

Now, everyone with a blog is a journalist. When you run a post accusing a politician of having no personality, for example, you're indulging the public's desire to elect a dinner partner, not a president. When you chime in on the day's talking points, you're a tool, not a new voice.spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
So, we come to the moment of truth. Now that anyone who wants to be a journalist CAN be a journalist, are the ethics going to get better... or worse?spy hunter ver 1.1.30 crack
I'm an optimist most of the time, but on this issue, I'm afraid I'm a realist.

Or we reinvent journalism.
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