They say that history is written by the victors. But now, before the victors win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message that will not vanish. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: "I was here, and this is what happened to me"?
Related: "The Modelers' Hippocratic Oath": I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so....I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.
Charlie Lord's work, which exposed the horrors of Byberry State Hospital here in Philadelphia in the 1940s, was recently profiled by NPR:
At Byberry, Lord sneaked a small Agfa camera in his jacket pocket. It was the camera he'd borrowed to take on his honeymoon. But he'd dropped it in a lake and then felt he had to buy the damaged camera from his friend. Now he could use it to take pictures to show conditions in the A and B buildings.
When no one was watching, he'd quickly shoot a picture without even looking through the viewfinder. "I'd try to fill the frame," he says. "You know, not just have little people far away. I'd get up as close as I could. I was aware of composition. But the main thing was to show the truth."
Over a few months, Lord filled three rolls of film, with 36 exposures each. His pictures showed the truth, in black and white. In the past, reformers and journalists like Dorothea Dix and Nellie Bly sneaked into institutions and wrote exposes about the horrific conditions there.
But Lord was one of the first to ever expose institutions by using the power of photography. "I just thought this would show people what it was like. It's not, not somebody writing to describe something," he says. "They can use flowery words or you know, do whatever they want. But if the photograph is there, you can't deny it."
By Karl on February 20, 2010 10:51 AM
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Clay Shirky, in a recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo New York, challenged us to stop talking about information overload as an excuse, recognize it as a fact (one that's existed for a long time and will not diminish in the future), and to work on building better filters.
Titles like the Boing Boing one are kinda unfortunate because they frame Shirky's view to be one that would be in opposition to lets say, David Shenk's from his book "Data Smog".
As with any look forward, the book wildly missed the mark with some of its more grim predictions, but in many ways still has much to offer and think about.
In particular, towards the end of the book Shenk proposed a personal call to action for building better filters (learning to be our own for example) and to be better information producing citizens (being our own editors). Big foreshadowing of Shirky's talk there.
Most reviews of the book focussed on Shenk's definition of the problem and pooh-poohed his suggestions. So here we are, many years down the line, and most of the focus is *still* grousing about 'information overload'.
Clay Shirky's point is its high time to stop doing that and get busy building the tools, protocols, customs and businesses that will help us not only deal with it, but thrive from it.
By Karl on February 20, 2010 10:29 AM
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When you get older, these kinds of reflections start to seem all the more uncomfortable don't they? That makes them all the better to consider and think about.
Many of the chronically homeless have mental illnesses that, like many disabilities, require them to have special services available to be able to live their lives independently. Where someone with a wheelchair might require a special transportation to get about, a person facing these difficulties might require a technician to visit daily to insure they are taking their medication. Provided the right tools and structure, many do very well.
Kinney's article, and 'Mary''s story, raise hard questions for which there are no easy answers.
My Mom, our family, was thankful for the efforts of Carelink which provided similar services for her. Many deal with the effects of dementia in their loved ones as they age, and for her, the last few years of her life were probably her most lucid and clear with their help.
Wow does this headline sounds like so much self-help crap! But read the stories linked with an open mind. The research is thought provoking and inspiring.
Stanford Psychology professor and author of "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success", Carol Dweck has spent decades researching the question "What makes a really capable child give up in the face of failure, where other children may be motivated by the failure?".
Her research and a body inspired from it has implications for how we raise our children, how we manage employees, how we work to overcome difficulties, how we think of ourselves.
In April 2007 Stanford Magazine wrote up a profile of her titled, "The Effort Effect".
That Bronson's piece came out in 2007 and it influenced what I've come to believe about instilling a belief in Emma that she or me isn't 'smart' - but that it's smart to try and try again to figure something out, to learn something by practice and experimentation.
Dweck believes that we tend to have one of two mindsets when it comes to seeing achievement in others and ourselves: a 'fixed' mindset that tells us when we see someone's mastery over something it is from innate talent, or a 'growth' mindset that tells us that person must have worked hard to achieve it.
People who believe others are born with certain talents tend to do worst than those that believe we can grow and change.
In order to believe someone can grow and change, including ourselves, we need to believe that failures have lessons and that if we keep at something, we can improve.
Just keeping that as a core belief can make all the difference in our lives and in how we see others. It calls on us to give ourselves a chance, to give others a chance. To be empathetic, to empower. And to keep on keepin' on. This may sound a bit too 'new agey'. But its more a call to action. Because yes, the world isn't fair, but if we try and try again, we might raise our lives to a better place, and better yet, the lives of those around us.
Related:
Recently Po Bronson has co-authored with Ashley Merryman a new book I've been meaning to read that incorporates some of these lessons in parenting.
Finally, quote from Calvin Coolidge I've kept in my wallet for over 10 years:
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we've changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn't be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don't have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they'd like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don't think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don't want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?
Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don't have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That's the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn't dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?
King spoke of a debt before he spoke of the dream. This is important to remember because it shows his focus on economic conditions and problems in America. King was concerned not only with fighting segregation and discrimination, but also with fighting poverty. During his last year he was organizing a poor people's campaign to come to Washington, D.C.
The Analytics X Prize is "to use statistical techniques and any data sets you can find to predict where crime, specifically homicides, will occur in the city".
It used to be common place when a women was raped to blame her in America: to say that she wore the wrong clothes, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, or sent out the 'wrong signals'. Unfortunately, this attitude still exists in parts of the world.
It is still commonin America to take the default position that when a person loses their job, their house, their lively hoods, to put the blame on their shoulders. Even in the 'Great Recession' we are now in. They didn't work hard enough. They didn't move with the times fast enough. They were losers or uneducated due to their own laziness.
I have heard, horrifically, when people have lost children, or gotten cancer, or were dealing with mental illness, they simply didn't *pray* enough. That God must be teaching them a lesson.
I'm a free speech absolutist, so I'm not going to say these creatures don't have a right to speak.
But fuck them.
You have the power to walk away, turn the channel, delete that bookmark.
Events like the earthquake in Haiti do put things in perspective. In addition they help separate those that actually *care* for other human beings from those that think they are the center of the world or are the marketers of that.
It's a moment that those into cyberpunk have been looking for, for a long time - when a multinational corporation whose bread and butter is in cyberspace itself confronts a nation-state. When Google posted to their blog "A New Approach To China" it was historic for many reasons: it was an *Internet company* confronting a *country* over *hacking* (try and digest that for a moment), the first most of us heard about this was from Google's blog post, and it highlights issues of having to do with intellectual property, with free speech, and access to information.
Wow.
You can go on and on with questions, thoughts, concerns, and as usual there is a terrific Metafilter: Metafilte thread to check out.
I started to pull together some choice quotes from Bruce Sterling, answering questions about the "State of the World 2010" at the WELL, but realized I'd be quoting far too much. You are better off reading the whole thing yourself. Enjoy.
It's not that print's a medium, and the web's a medium, and you get to migrate between media. The Web is a metamedium that turns everything it grips into network-culture.
*So it's easy to see that mags are in for it. What's a little harder is looking at the hollow shell of your once-favorite antique shop and realizing that's all about eBay. "Gee, I'm on the web all the time now... time for a stroll, it's a sunny day... Gosh, my neighborhood's full of spooky holes." Gothic High-Tech.
We moved around Philadelphia a lot growing up but I ended up back in Frankford in my 20s which leads it to have a special place in my bones. Mike Newall, for the new online publication "Metropolis", has written a must read series on the challenges taking place there in "The Frankford Story".
Read the link - be inspired - then find a way to act. No matter how small. A tweet here, a blog post there, actually can push the ball forward. Making a donation to organizations like Project HOME or donating your time, even better.
Lately, my mind has been thinking about Camden Hopeworks. They are a nonprofit teaching program that provides youth with experience building websites and GIS/Mapping solutions for clients across the area. Check out the Hopeworks GIS Gallery.
In Philadelphia we are doing better at helping the homeless move into permanent housing, but there are signs the past 10 years have decreased opportunity for economic mobility.
Economic mobility, according to Wikipedia, is "the ability of an individual or family to improve their economic status." In short, the ease with which a person can climb from poverty to lower middle class. From lower middle class to middle class. From middle class to upper middle class. From upper middle class to wealthy.
A point I should have emphasized in my last post on homelessness is my journey to self-sufficiency took place in the 90s. We're a long way from then.
The 90s were an interesting time. Good music, movies, TV in the early 90s devolved towards its end. I think art and entertainment get better during hard times. The end of the 90s there was a sense in America that we were on the upswing. Hence the bad art. We started with Nirvana and ended up with Limp Bizkit - that says it all.
American confidence was reflected in ways beyond art. Consider how unconcerned we were with the Presidential election. Many didn't care about the election because the choice of Gore or Bush seemed too narrow. It seemed inconsequential who would be President. Generation-X lived up to our slacker stereotype in 2000. Things changed in 2004 and 2008. My generation woke up. But I'm talking about the 90s remember.
In many looks back the 90s gets defined by the dot-com bubble. The idea being that any growth during the 90s was due to and then eliminated in that bubble. I think you can make an argument that belief is incorrect. I believe the dot-com bubble was an artifact of the late 90s. Pushed on and encouraged by the irrational exuberance that had built up over that decade. Right along with bad music and unconcerned political participation. Fact of the matter was the 90s laid the technological foundation for what we have today at mass scale.
Income inequality continued to grow from the 80s to the 90s and at an accelerating rate. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele published a book sourced from their Philadelphia Inquirer series that argued that the American Dream was already stolen. But the 90s featured such job and personal income growth that many were too distracted to notice. In fact, according to FactCheck.org, the last eight years of Clinton's presidency stand as the longest economic boon in American history to that date.
It was in this generally optimistic environment that me and millions of others were part of a "dramatic decline" in the decrease of concentrated poverty. Some attribute this to record keeping, that Welfare rolls were trimmed due to President Clinton's mislabeled 'Welfare Reform' effort. But I believe that I am proof that the the decade's optimism was reflected in greater opportunities for me and others. People were more willing to take a chance.
The 'Aughts' eliminated many gains made during the 90s. According to the Washington Post the "Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy and workers". Add to this the fact that the safety net was shredded by efforts such as Welfare Reform and now you have a growing population of America living on nothing more than food stamps. Take a dip in a Metafilter thread discussion for more.
Those without jobs have very hard roads to walk. Those that do, well many are working 2 or 3 jobs just to make sure they don't fall.
Eventually it will lead to an environment where chances are less likely to be offered to potential risks like what I was in the 90s. Less opportunity. Less upward mobility.
Ironically, I hear from a surprising number that those not doing well are 'lazy'. That they don't have 'vision'. They aren't 'motivated'. That they need 'to hustle'. To 'get a job'. That we are on our own - freelancing agents and personal brands. Social contracts, like those that existed between employers and employees, between government and its citizens, between seller and buyer, aren't to be expected or trusted anyway - right? Aren't these some of the lessons of the 'Aughts'?
Well no. I heard these things in the 90s. And why couldn't counter lessons become conventional wisdom? That more empathy towards one another will help us get through challenging times?
That yes - the world isn't fair - but that we should work hard to be fair to one another other?
It does look more difficult to repeat my story now. It saddens and frightens me. A complete lack of progress since the 90s. You have a dysfunctional safety net simultaneous with less work opportunity.
We all want so many of the same things. Health. Friends. Understanding. Acceptance. Self-sufficiency. Dignity.
People will do amazing things when given the tools to succeed and given the opportunity to succeed (and fail a few times on the way). It is in such environments that you find real innovation. Real forward thinking. Because you are not simply fighting to survive.
A friend had recently asked me what it took for me to become self-sufficient and no longer be homeless.
Lets define the word 'homeless' first. There were times in my life, in the early 90s, when I found myself sleeping on the Frankford El, in a train station, on a bus, or in an illegal squat. I had a choice to go to a shelter. I did not. Mostly out of fear and ignorance. Today, I wouldn't hesitate. For me, the state of homelessness is defined by not having a reliable single place to hang your coat, to be with friends, family, to receive mail, and to sleep at night. If you are in this boat - you are homeless.
There were a few reasons for me ending up in this situation. Some of which are outlined in older posts on my blog, others I have not shared and am not comfortable sharing. Maybe someday I will write more. I find it difficult to talk about and do so in bursts.
Here is a quick outline of some steps took for me to earn self-sufficiency:
A friend: Someone who will be a good reference. You will need this to find a job. I was blessed with a few great ones. Teachers and counselors would vouch for me too. Being on the honor roll counted for something in high school.
A virtual-home: A place to sleep and shower, a place to register on work applications. I wasn't about to go to a shelter, or have a shelter listed as my residence. I slept on trains and in squats. I "showered" in fast food restaurant bathrooms or in showers without hot water (the absolute worst - I hate cold water). You will need someone to say you live at an address for work applications and to get phone messages. Again it was friends to the rescue. By lieing and saying I was living at their address, even though I wasn't, I appeared "normal" to employeers.
Skills: Almost anything helps. 7-11 in a bad neighborhood was my ticket. They required little in the way of skills, and were willing to train. That helped for my next job.
Something to eat: A job at 7-11 midnight shift. Guess where my primary source of food came from?
Saving for your place: A huge obstacle to overcome. At near minimum wage it can take months to save for an apartment. Again, for me, it was friends to the rescue. Someone vouched for me to a landlord, and I made a deal to spread out paying my security deposit amongst several rent payments.
Transportation: Without it you will never hold or find a job. One of my priorities each month was to buy a SEPTA transpass. This was very important. You needed transportation to look for a job and hold one. You needed transportation to maintain contact with your friends. Sometimes you needed a transpass just to find a place to sleep. This was a higher priority then food. You can always "find" food. You gotta *buy* transportation.
Clean Clothes: You may have few clothes - but keep them clean no matter what. Shoddy clothes make it harder for people to trust you as responsible.
Realizing the road is incremental: You need to take things one step at a time. If you can only get an apartment, and not afford utilities, that is better then not having an apartment. Having the apartment will help you find a job that will pay enough for utilities. This is really difficult. I know a lot of people who get overwhelmed by expecting their goal to be achieved in one step. My experience tells me that's a fairy tale. Things happen incrementally. Sometimes with the smallest of steps.
Use the Internet: While the Internet didn't help me end my homelessness, it did help me work my way to a middle class career and has been a tool in maintaining it. Friends I met online helped get my resume to where I needed it seen, and countless web site and forum helped me learn the basics of computer programming. These days it is your doorway to many resources, including connecting with others working through the same issues you are facing. This last matter is most important. Knowing you are not alone and connecting helps face the day to day. This is emphasized in my next point.
People matter: I don't think I would have had any progress without mentors, friends, and faith. When I speak of faith, I don't speak of faith in the stereotypical sense. When I say faith... I mean faith that things can get better and that I *do* have a role in my outcome. I have freewill. As it says in 'Seven Habits', between stimulus and response I have the freedom to choose. That counts for something. When I say friends and mentors - well I would not be here today if it wasn't for them. From Richelle, who has always believed in me, to my mothers at Sears (Mary, Joan, Paula), to various bosses along the way who became mentors and friends, Debbie, Sarah, Joe, Pat, Rajiv, to my brother Steve and my brother Dante, to Richelle's parents whom I eventually won over. To all those who took a chance on me I owe so much thanks.
Try and be a 'good person' - don't be an asshole: I do not believe that life is fair. Instant karma is bullshit. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people every day. So trying to 'be good' for some kind of reward is fruitless (at least in this world). What I *do* believe is that if you try to always do the right thing, if you work at being a good person everyday (you will fail sometimes, just *try* every day) - well you might find yourself with friends and family where you didn't think you had any. In "All I Really Need to Know I Learned In Kindergarten" it says "When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.". That says it all really.
There are times when I feel like I am about to lose it all and end up back where I started. Sometimes, I look at a bench and want to curl up into a ball and sleep. There are times when I look at those I associate with, work with, hang out with, and feel... alien. These feelings are irrational, and thank goodness I can recognize them as such. It's been over 15 years now - a half a life a way.
Most time I feel like the most blessed man on Earth, with a job and family that I need to pinch myself to believe I have. I am very, very blessed and thankful.
2009 is coming to a close. It's been a big decade. Lots of ups, lots of change, lots of terrible horror. My history informs me that there can be light in the darkness, and hope can triumph over over the cold. So contrary to what you may think, I would not trade my experience for anything. It gives me valuable perspective. When I let it - it fuels my optimism. But its hard for those with tragedies so great and for many ongoing. My thoughts are with those who are fighting on and for those unable to fight.
Awful Marketing: St. Louis Newspaper Has Web Commenter Fired: In this new information age, newspapers are having a hard time hanging on to their old business models, and are struggling to hold on to readership and monetize their on-line content. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has obviously not run into this issue, or they wouldn't be shooting themselves in the foot by getting people fired when they post to the paper's online comment boards.
Anil Dash: The Web in Danger: We cannot say we were not warned. We will not be able to say "nobody saw this coming".
Susan Ohanian: It's the Poverty, Stupid, Not Pre-K Skills: If our corporate-politicos would look at the November 2009 issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, they would see that half of American children receive food stamps, which means they live in food insecure homes, and studies show that Adults who grew up in poverty are more likely to have impaired physical and mental growth, lower academic achievement, and to remain impoverished.
Joe Bageant: Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers: At heart, it's a predatory society. So damned mean we no longer even notice its inherent cruelty. A strongman's democracy in which bodily appearance has become political, and the only allowable vice is self-righteousness.
Philly.com: USDA: Hunger rises in U.S.: Referring to the increasing numbers of children who suffered the most from hunger, Philadelphia hunger expert Mariana Chilton, a Drexel University public-health professor, said: "This is a catastrophe. This is not a blip. This recession will be in the bodies of our children."
An 11-member Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice has been created to identify "those who knew but failed to speak" and "those who saw but failed to act." The commission, which held hearings in Wilkes-Barre this week, faces a daunting task, because complicity in the scandal goes beyond even the lawyers, elected officials, school administrators, teachers, probation officers, and prosecutors charged with protecting the children who were victimized.
The parents of the victims are also to blame. They had a responsibility to ask why Ciavarella did not allow legal representation for their children. If they couldn't afford counsel, they should have demanded that the court appoint a public defender, which is a constitutional right. And they should have appealed when their children were incarcerated for what didn't even amount to a misdemeanor.
The reasons for their negligence are deeply rooted. They are products of a regional culture that emphasizes deference to public officials and retribution for those who challenge authority.
American RadioWorks: Emily Hanford: Early Lessons: "doing well in school, and in life, is about more than a test score.":
"Now you're getting into something really deep," says economist James Heckman. "How is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation?"
Heckman is a Nobel laureate who teaches at the University of Chicago. Preschool was not among his interests until he came across the Perry Study several years ago. What caught his attention is the apparent paradox at its core: The people who went to preschool were not "smarter" than their peers, but they did better.
The assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that measured intelligence is the key to everything. But with the Perry Preschool children, something else made the difference. It was not IQ. Heckman is now working with psychologists to try to understand how the preschool may have affected the development of what he calls "non-cognitive" skills, things like motivation, sociability and the ability to work with others.
These are critical skills that help people succeed at school, at work - and in life.
And as it turns out, the Perry preschool children did do better in life.
Homeless Resource Center: Fonfield-Ayinla, Gladys : My Experience Parenting While Homeless: It was never a goal of mine to be homeless, but it happened.
NYTimes: Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways : oreclosures, layoffs, rising food and fuel prices and inadequate supplies of low-cost housing have stretched families to the extreme, and those pressures have trickled down to teenagers and preteens.
NYTimes: For Runaways, Sex Buys Survival: Nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay, according to a variety of studies published in academic and public health journals.
Everyone said the real problem was that Philadelphia -- the nation's sixth largest city and fourth largest TV market, birthplace of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution -- was a victim of a strange condition: low civic self-esteem. And what brought that on? A lot of things, some of them self-inflicted like our "corrupt and content" political culture -- but there was also a severe case of sibling jealousy, the sibling being our colonial cousin of New York City.
Even at the start of the 19th Century, Philadelphia was still the center of the nation's culture and higher learning -- and then the Industrial Revolution hit. Philly plunged right in, manufacturing everything under the sun, from steam locomotives to Stetson hats. New York decided instead to manage -- and occasionally gamble -- the profits. You know how that worked out (when was the last time you wore a Stetson hat -- or were transported by a steam locomotive?) Just 100 miles to the northeast, New York became a black-hole-like force, sucking the energy from Philadelphia, stealing everything from our talented college grads to foreign tourists who never even saw the nation's founding city as they whizzed down the New Jersey Turnpike from the Statue of Liberty to the Washington Monument. New York got Broadway, the UN, the World's Fair...and baseball. The Yankees won more World Series' than any other team, while the Phillies lost more games than any other franchise in America -- in any sport. Even the Mets, who didn't exist until 1962, won a World Series before the Phillies finally did in 1980.
Bad behavior became the mask for a city's collective anxiety. It wasn't just the notorious 700 Level at the dank, concrete Veterans Stadium, where wearing an opponent's jersey meant maybe sparing your life...maybe. Here at the Philadelphia Daily News, back when the Eagles became title contenders (but nothing more, of course) in the 2000s, we had a regular feature that inside the newsroom was officially known as "hater's guides" to the cities that the Eagles were playing that week, even if the "city" was actually a Wisconsin Nice burg like Green Bay. You didn't need Sigmund Freud to diagnose the pathology of Philly's "haters guides."
Then there was a day when everything seemed to change.
I think you can trace this way back to 2004 and Howard Dean's run for the presidency. Their team chose Drupal as the framework to leverage for their web efforts and it paid off as part of what was the most Internet-savvy campaign by that time. Inspired by that campaign and their use of technology, I had relaunched Philly Future in fact.
Dries Buytaert says of the choice:
First of all, I think Drupal is a perfect match for President Barack Obama's push for an open and transparent government -- Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama's desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.
Consuming news media 24-7. Not just CNN, but news on every station I can tune into. All the while subscribing to over a hundred RSS feeds tracking stories from innumerable sources on subjects ranging from software engineering to politics, to the future of news journalism, to comic books. Facebook. Twitter. Blogging. Email. Cycle, rinse, repeat.
I feel constantly at odds with myself over the time I spend at home, at work, trying to sharpen the saw and keep myself open friends, family, new experiences. Be a good dad. A good husband. A good co-worker. A good brother, a good friend. Amidst this, trying to figure out how to make a positive change in the world some how, never feeling as though I've repaid my debts to those who took a chance on me.
I pretty much feel like I serve all my cares poorly, the guitar on the wall gathering dust.
In that original context I reviewed "The Freak Manifesto", and in that context I absorbed the headings and pull quotes and missed the greater context of the whole document, which is a bit of a rallying cry for people such as myself, and probably you too if you can relate (I'm sure you can).
Upon re-reading, I don't find myself agreeing with just 6 of the 44 pages - those that prescribe disconnecting from the control paradigm. It's not the goal I have a problem with - the goal is admirable and something to work towards - it's the how.
For example, this section rightly calls out the ills in public education and then suggests home schooling as the solution. I want to *fix* public education, not withdraw from it. A very radical choice here would be to encourage those not attending parent teacher meetings and school board meetings to get involved. Be heard. Fight loud. Hopefully we will live up to this when my daughter starts school - public or otherwise.
Honestly, we (Richelle, my wife, and I) might be looking back at this and realize our choices were incorrect. So our views on this are liable to change over time to those more in agreement with the paper or maybe in some other direction. Parenting is definitively learn-as-you-go and we're going to adjust as we do so for what works Emma, our daughter.
Then there is the section also advocates opting out of politics. My generation had already done that prior to 2000 and look what happened - George Bush Jr. was elected. My generations' belief that politics were inconsequential had real consequence. No one thinks the last ten years would have been the same had Al Gore been president. I'm happy to see my generation opting in now. Hopefully its not too late. Sure politics is a game within a game as the paper rightly posits. But change is more likely to happen when there are those on the inside as well as out fighting for it.
And its that last thought that carries for me. Read it. Be challenged. Think.
Don't do like I did - don't skim. Read it and let it stir. The world needs people awake and aware. The only way that happens is by confronting ourselves with things that don't fit our comfort zones, and instead of violently screaming out 'You Lie!' - taking a deep breath and recognizing not only are there different points of view, but maybe they have something to teach us. That's what the "The Freak Manifesto" ultimately is about to me.
I owe the authors an apology for that original interpretation - Thank you for writing it and getting it out here.
One of the most surprising implications of this new research concerns baby consciousness, or what babies actually experience as they interact with the outside world. While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults - this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia - that view is being overturned. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. "For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time," Gopnik says. "Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You'll quickly realize that they're seeing things you don't even notice."
Metaphors aren't just how we talk and write, they're how we think. At some level, we actually do seem to understand temperament as a form of temperature, and we expect people's personalities to behave accordingly. What's more, without our body's instinctive sense for temperature--or position, texture, size, shape, or weight--abstract concepts like kindness and power, difficulty and purpose, and intimacy and importance would simply not make any sense to us.
In the end, the most lasting effect of the Tools of the Mind studies may be to challenge some of our basic ideas about the boundary between work and play. Today, play is seen by most teachers and education scholars as a break from hard work or a reward for positive behaviors, not a place to work on cognitive skills. But in Tools of the Mind classrooms, that distinction disappears: work looks a lot like play, and play is treated more like work. When I asked Duckworth about this, she said it went to the heart of what was new and potentially important about the program. "We often think about play as relaxing and doing what you want to do," she explained. "Maybe it's an American thing: We work really hard, and then we go on vacation and have fun. But in fact, very few truly pleasurable moments come from complete hedonism. What Tools does -- and maybe what we all need to do -- is to blur the line a bit between what is work and what is play. Just because something is effortful and difficult and involves some amount of constraint doesn't mean it can't be fun."
The real problem with Kohn's articles is that, already, there is a lot of confusion about when to praise, and his pieces just add to it. They give the impression that parents must make a choice between unconditional love on the one side, and praise and punishment on the other. And that's just not true.
Most research finds that kids need rules and structure - not as a form of prison, but a scaffold of autonomy they can build on.
Oberlin College professor Nancy Darling has surveyed thousands of adolescents, in the US, the Philippines, and Chile. She's found that when parents set no rules, or when parents fail to enforce rules they've set, it sends a message that parents simply don't care about their kids' well-being or the kids' actions. The adolescents think the parents just can't be bothered by their transgressions.
While combining praise with a statement of love is problematic. For example, "You're such a smart girl, and I love you," sends a child a message that if she's no longer is smart, the love will stop. But there's nothing in the research that says parents should stop saying, "I love you." It just that they should stop combining displays of love and affection and praise for achievement. Keep them separate. Once again, this isn't an either or situation.
Stanford professor Carol Dweck's perspective on praise is that - when we praise or punish - we need to make it clear that we are responding to what a child does, not who they are. We shouldn't say "Bad Boy!" when the kid breaks a vase, and we shouldn't say "Boy Genius!" when he made a vase in art class. Both "Bad Boy" and "Boy Genius" are wild overstatements of what we really think.
Instead, we can simply say, "You know you shouldn't play ball in the house," and "You worked really hard on that vase, didn't you?" those are fine.
Beyond the moment, they teach children that we pay attention to what they are doing, and that we can be trusted to give them a fair and accurate response when they need it. Lessons we want them to remember when they're 17, and they have a broken heart or just had a fender-bender.
As I said earlier, we just don't have to make a choice between praise, punishment and unconditional love. That's just a false choice.
There's a lot in the piece that resonates, but the parts that cheer you on to opt-out of various things, well they stand in opposition to connection, to "coming off the mountaintop" as the paper puts it. So it is a piece that is at odds with itself.
And from Bruce Eckel comes some related thoughts after reading Po Bronson's "What Should I Do With My Life?":
I'm reading Po Bronson's "What Should I Do With My Life?" which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it's the anti-self-help book; it's just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.
And it's dense, by which I mean not fluffy but packed with insight. He spent years researching and developing this book, and his own struggle is woven into it. Indeed, it's not about formulas and answers, but about the struggle itself.
One observation set me back. There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got "practical" and did something else "first." The idea was that they'd be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.
But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the "practical" career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you're doing.
By Karl on September 12, 2009 10:54 AM
|2 Comments
Shelley Powers was outright slandered by taking a sentence out of context from a comment she made: link.
This is part of the game of modern politics and modern media. The lack of apology from those involved is pretty damning, because no one wants to admit they participate in it or are part of the larger problem. A larger problem that is leading all of us to be less informed about the world around us when there is so much media available.
We have a responsibility one another. When you write from a position of trust - don't abuse it.
Certain realities also shape these procedures, such as the schedules of working parents, unsafe neighborhoods and school transportation cuts.
But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Some school buses now have been fitted with surveillance cameras, watching for beatings and bullying.
Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children's names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out.
When to detach the parental leash? The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school-bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.
David Johnson, a senior statistician with the Census Bureau, says the increase is clearly linked to jobs.
"Children in nonworking families, children in female-headed households, children in families that receive food stamps, their poverty rate didn't change much," Johnson says. "Whereas children in earner households, the poverty was affected a lot. So you see a lot of it tied to the earnings change in 2007, 2008."
That makes a lot of people nervous. If things were so bad last year, what about now?
"These numbers are grim -- grimmer than we expected," says Robert Greenstein, head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He notes that joblessness continues to rise.
"This creates a very serious concern, that if we already were at just under 40 million Americans in poverty in 2008 -- before the biggest increases in unemployment -- poverty is going to go much higher than that in 2009 and 2010," Greenstein says.
In fact, he predicts that it could go higher than it's been in 50 years.
Material production is only one of many activities that enrich a society. Public goods like safety and utilities and infrastructure and parks are part of the wealth that we share in common. So are many private goods that sometimes are best provided by the public, like public education and inexpensive healthcare.
By all means, then, let us celebrate virtuous capital owners and visionary investors as "wealth creators" on Labor Day. And let us celebrate as well as the other creators of private wealth, on the assembly line and in the office cubicle and in the janitorial closet, and the creators of public wealth in the form of roads and subways and parks, and the police officers and soldiers without whom a high level of public and private wealth could neither be created nor preserved. There are criminals and parasites among all classes of society, but most of us are wealth creators, and we deserve to be recognized as such.
Paul Graham created a "disagreement hierarchy" that is an outline of arguing technique, from most base, to most complete. I'm hesitant to say "most effective" because as we've seen online - he or she with the most links can win an argument, no matter how 'right' or how 'wrong' - especially when the most fact filled refutation is considered opinion. Like Paul Graham, I'd love to see people consider it, because as he says, moving up the hierarchy makes people 'less mean'. That's because you move from making an argument about the person making the counter argument, to making your assertion stand on the weight of the facts you are presenting.
Sadly, anyone in any debate better be familiar with, and capable of using the first three rings of the ladder here, because an adversary most certainly will.
A huge round of thanks needs to go to the folks behind iSepta for showing just what is possible.
This and more was discussed at this year's Personal Democracy Forum - which I missed, which I hopefully won't next year. Sounds like it was a great event.
You lose your job. You have trouble paying your bills. Your credit report suffers. Your credit report then gets used by some potential employers as a reason not to hire you.
We spent Memorial Day Spring cleaning, Emma, Richelle, and now me, dealing with some nasty sniffles and coughs. As the day wound down, Emma's Grandparents came by for some hamburgers and hot dogs, and I got the opportunity to tell Emma that the day was a holiday for people like her Granddad who served in the military, serving all of us.
Why is it that we don't hold our elected officials - hold ourselves - to ethical codes (if not similar then complimentary) that we honor our military for? Is it because we don't permit ourselves to share such burden that we are, as Rafe Colburn says, losing our moral compass?
New Yorker: The secret of self-control. - let your toddler's imagination be free, encourage creativity, to try and try again, and understand that we have the power of choice.
NYTimes: Marc C. Taylor: End the University as We Know It - straight up inspiration about tearing down the status quo to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.
Two efforts to collect what people want from Philly governments online efforts and the data it makes available have been launched by participants in the discussion:
Holocaust survivor Hans Salomon, 86, will tell his story tonight with Tracy Strong, 93, the soldier who helped save him at the Congregations of Shaare Shamayim, in Northeast Philly.
Yesterday afternoon, encouraged by Roz, I found a way to attend BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. I'm happy I listened to her. It was a great event.
I was late, but in time for four discussions, the biggest highglight of those was TechnicallyPhilly. They gave an enthusiastic, concise description of what they do, how central community and chosen niche were to it, and even had some hints on how to earn a living doing it. Other interesting discussions included Scott Karp's presentation on Publish2 and collaborative news rooms, and the folks behind copress.org, who while working to solve problems commonly found in college online news organizations, are inadvertently addressing many of the problems found in large mainstream online news organizations. There is another presentation, on how to make money on the Internet, that was infuriating for how it looked down on people. As Chris Krewson ponintedly asked, "The take away seems to be that the public is stupid and so are your advertisers".
Yesterday was quite a day. In the morning I went out with fellow co-workers to Hunting Park to help do some clean up and planting for Comcast Cares Day. It was a small personal victory for me. Previous two years I haven't been able to attend due to the back pain issue. This year, not only could I attend, but I was able to assist for a few hours. There are pictures up on Flickr. Felt great to go out and lend a helping hand with fellow friends.
...I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds.
...The software proved to be more sophisticated than the people who used it, and that has caused the whole world a lot of problems.
I never would have thought, in my most extreme paranoid fantasies, that my software, and the others like it, would have enabled Wall Street to decimate the investments of everyone in my family. Not even the most jaded observer saw that coming. I can't deny that it allowed a privileged few to exploit the unsuspecting many. But catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses? The fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing.
Our software was rolled out to ride the latest wave. Traders loved it. What had taken days before now took minutes. They could design bonds out of bonds, to provide the precise rate of return that an investor wanted. I used to go to the trading floor and watch my software in use amid the sea of screens. A programmer doesn't admire his creation so much for what it does but for how it does it. This stuff was beautiful and elegant.
The aim of software is, in a sense, to create an alternative reality. After all, when you use your cell phone, you simply want to push the fewest buttons possible and call, text, purchase, listen, download, e-mail, or browse. The power we all hold in our hands is shocking, yet it's controlled by a few swipes of a finger. The drive to simplify the user's contact with the machine has an inherent side effect of disguising the complexity of a given task. Over time, the users of any software are inured to the intricate nature of what they are doing. Also, as the software does more of the "thinking," the user does less.
Last month, my neighbor, a retired schoolteacher, offered to deliver my oysters into the city. He had lost half his savings, and his pension had been cut by 30 percent. The chain of events from my computer to this guy's pension is lengthy and intricate. But it's there, somewhere. Buried like a keel in the sand. If you dive deep enough, you'll see it. To know that a dozen years of diligent work somehow soured, and instead of benefiting society unhinged it, is humbling. I was never a player, a big swinger. I was behind the scenes, inside the boxes.
His story raises many powerful, deep questions about what we do, who we do it for, why we do it, and repercussions. It was courageous, even if I don't necessarily agree. I tend to believe that software does not change human nature - but there are people in the industry who swear that what we do is literally changing mankind. If so - should they be looking in the mirror? Should we all?
This post is participating in @weeklyblogpost: week8: tools. Checkout other posts there about the topic and feel free to join in.
During Dan Gillmor's stint as guest blogger at boing boing he posted some fine pieces on his subject matter of focus - journalism and its future - but one post should have reached a wider audience "When It All Falls Apart". It's a song. A song of the apocalypse. With some good lyrics and melody. Turns out Dan used to play in a band a long time ago. It's a strangely timely song. Check out the discussion thread which was just terrific to follow.
Here are some random songs about the end of the world, any that you know come immediately to mind?
"End of the World as We Know It", R.E.M.
"1999", Prince
"The Four Horsemen" , Metallica
"Blackened", Metallica
"The End", The Doors
"War Pigs", Black Sabbath
"Children of the Grave", Black Sabbath
Ever hear of Glass-Steagall? Well, maybe if we did, or understood its implications more widely when it was repealed in 1999, according to Boing Boing this crisis may have been averted.
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
That is a quote from Neil Postman's book, "Amusing Ourselves to Death". That, and Huxley's "Brave New World" are on my to read list. What do you think? Either of them right about the world we live in or will live in?
I spent last night, like many recently, riffing in Scratch to Emma's direction. You might wonder what the goal of that would be with a 3 year old - but its simple - programming can be - and is - fun. While we play there on the laptop - Emma has no idea that we're programming - just that we're being creative in a way that is similar to when we play music, or color, or sing and dance, or build with our legos. Next step is to get her a keyboard and mouse she can tear apart if so inspired. Like her own ukulele, or her lego brick creations, what she'll come up with on her own is bound to be awesome.
I mention this because, as the title of the post says, yesterday was Ada Lovelace day. Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and can be considered the world's first computer programmer. She was born in 1815.
For those not in the industry, it probably comes as some kind of shock that the person considered a computer programmer is a woman. That shock is no doubt due to the fact that the industry has so few women participating in it. It wasn't always so. And it suffers because of it.
Here are some good reads and links:
Kimberly Blessing: Honoring Ada, Inspiring Women (the story of women in computer programming is commonly taught to begin and end with Ada - which is very incorrect)
It *appears* that the slightest news breeze, positive or negative, seems capable of triggering domino effects where traders swing the market - and the nation's health - for the good or ill - on the turn of a dime. This doesn't make too much sense - traders have tons and tons of data to back up their decisions. The weight of over a hundred years experience in understanding the information contained within.
Garret suggests that maybe an alternative to Wall Street is in order. He may or may not have something but I have something I'd like to throw into the mix - maybe we're finally seeing the result of "too much" poorly filtered and understood information. That, and an increasingly "think fast" culture that rewards first moves over smart decisions. Traders get rewarded on good (not necessarily growth) decisions that are made quickly.
I have no idea what I'm talking about here. I'm just a poorly educated software engineer. But I think there is an opportunity for those who can provide better filters to those who can effect matters collectively - filters that can encourage a culture of long term growth over short term gain.
Overseas markets are rising this morning - supposedly due to Geithner plan news. Tomorrow, someone may sneeze in Japan and America's market will catch a cold.
News, data, our interconnectedness are more apparent now than ever before. Our tools and our culture need to catch up.
During one of my bouts not having a place to sleep, I ended up taking residence in a motel. It was a bad financial decision, borne in the circumstances I was in. When your credit gets shaky, its hard to find an apartment that will accept your application. This is doubly true when you haven't saved enough for two months security. You end up being a rat in a maze, a maze whose exit gets harder and harder to find the longer you're in it.
Greg Hayworth, 44, graduated from Syracuse University and made a good living in his home state, California, from real estate and mortgage finance. Then that business crashed, and early last year the bank foreclosed on the house his family was renting, forcing their eviction.
Now the Hayworths and their three children represent a new face of homelessness in Orange County: formerly middle income, living week to week in a cramped motel room.
Job losses, home foreclosures and a deepening recession are sending scores of newly homeless people into a makeshift camp along the banks of the American River in Sacramento, Calif.
The tent city, spread over an area the size of several football fields, has local officials scrambling over how to handle the area's homeless crisis.
The contrast to the news this weekend is beyond understanding.
Yahoo!: House of Cards: The Faces Behind Foreclosures: We have entered the one-strike-and-you're-out era. One lost job. One medical emergency. One bad risk or misjudgment of the heart.
Flickr: Photo gallery of Forest Haven - "a children's developmental center in Laurel, Maryland. It is sometimes referred to (inaccurately) as "DC Children's Center", although this was not an official moniker. It was notorious for its poor conditions and abuse of patients. It was shut down in 1991 by a federal court.
The interesting thing about this piece, written way back in 1995, is that it leaves wide open the concept of information.
Just what is information? People instinctively grasp for "facts" as their definition. But in computing, we think otherwise. Can music be described as information - sure can. Opinions? Yep. Visual arts? Certainly. Video. Yes, even video. Anything that can be described in ones and zeroes can be thought of as information that can be transmitted and shared on a network.
Well, what about advertising? Yes, that too.
Jeneane Sussum: The Value of Words: These. People. Are. Lying. To. You. And. Themselves.
There is a paradox at work here. As the cost of generating and transmitting information decreases, more of it becomes available, thus increasing the need for better filters.
Advertising, Newspapers, and Libraries were the premier filters of the pre-Internet age.
So were the 'big 3' TV stations, radio conglomerates, record companies, book stores and magazine stands for that matter.
Search engines, blogs, social networks, and smart aggregators are those of the now.
How the practices of the old evolve in the infrastructure of the new, how new disciplines arise to meet the needs of today and tomorrow, will determine how informed, or how uninformed, we will be as a society.
Jon Stewart challenges Lawrence Lindsey and asks Lindsey about the viability of Stewart's own plan - giving the bailout money to the people of the United States to pay of their debts, which in turn, brings liquidity back to the banks.
While something approaching libertarianism (letting the free market rule without reasoned oversight) got us into this - it just maybe something approaching libertarianism that gets us out.
As John Stewart and Garret say, "Give us the cash, let it trickle up."
... The homeless say that this year's census will show their numbers are swelling. Tent City is a microcosm of the homeless, with recovering addicts, jobless veterans and the mentally ill - ages 22 to 74 - all represented, Banks said.
In each tent, amid piles of donated blankets and cans of ethanol used for heat, there is a tale of heartbreak.
...Tent City is also known as Veterans Camp, for the several Vietnam War vets who live there, or J-Camp, for Banks' native Jamaica. In the summer, Banks said, as many as 60 people stay there.
Some of those interviewed yesterday have been at Tent City for only a few months, and most don't plan to stay.
"I still have dreams," Floyd said. "I still have things I want to do. I want to be a father, a family man. I don't plan to stay here all my life. I told [my daughters] I'd make it."
Speaking under a steady, freezing rain, Floyd declared: "It can't stay rainy every day."
I tell the people I serve to start from the premise that all things are possible. Work backwards from there. Charles Kettering's wise counsel that "Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future," was never more true.
Here's hoping that more of my geek friends can develop that outlook.
Q: Well, what should 21st-century education be about?
A: The most critical thing about the 20th and 21st centuries is that there's a bunch of new invented ideas--many of them connected with modern civilization--that our nervous systems are not at all set up to automatically understand. Equal rights, for example. Or calculus. You won't find these ideas in ancient or traditional societies.
If you take all the anthropological universals and lay them out, those are the things that you can expect children to learn from their environment--and they do. But the point of school is to teach all those things that are inventions and that are hard to learn because we're not explicitly wired for them. Like reading and writing.
Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.
I'm uncomfortable with where Richard Medley headed - he blames 'math geeks' for the financial crisis. It's uncomfortable, so that is why I share it. Not that I necessarily agree.
There's nothing new about greed -- when Chuck Prince, who then headed Citigroup, said in 2007, "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance," he was just saying what every person who had any access to capital was thinking -- but technology comes in waves, and it made this intersection of tech and the free market particularly toxic.
From time immemorial, we've had a financial system run mainly by men in their fifties and sixties that worked like this: Banks made money by loaning capital and making deals and taking the risk that they would not be paid back or that the deal would fall apart. That was simple enough. But then along came the math geeks who convinced many of us that instead of making loans and taking risk, we could make loans, "securitize" them, and then sell those securities to idiots in Europe and China.
When the old guys asked how that would work, they were shown sheets of paper with equations on them, and instead of saying, "I don't understand one damn thing on this page," they said, "So you're sure it'll work?"
That opened the door to an entirely new concept for banking: Let's make loans to deadbeats and sell them off in "tranches" to idiots in Europe who don't even know what a "tranche" is but like the idea that the S&P rates them highly and that they can make 6 percent a year on one with no risk. (Come here, little kitty.) As long as everyone looked the other way and stock prices kept rising, there was no pressure to do anything differently. Once the house of cards collapsed, all they were going to have to do was claim to have been blinded by science and point to the nerds who designed the strategy. (Which is exactly where Congress's investigation is heading.)
In hindsight, it is clear that government regulation was lacking in the early stages of AIG's CDS boom. As they were building it, AIG executives regarded their CDS business as virtually risk-free -- "like catastrophe insurance for events that would never happen," according to the Post series. This something-for-nothing aspect of the business should have been a red flag for the government -- and for the ratings agencies, too. Yet another lesson of the AIG saga is the sheer difficulty of comprehending the myriad pathways of modern finance. The trick in regulating financial derivatives will be to preserve their efficiency-enhancing attributes while eliminating those factors that tend to concentrate systemic risk where it cannot be easily detected. AIG built up its CDS business in the interstices of governmental authority; those gaps can and should be closed without choking the arteries of capitalism.
Washington Post: The Crash: What Went Wrong - Washington Post series drilling down into where things went wrong - in particular - at AIG
NYTimes: The Reckoning - New York Times series covering the Crash.
...The percentage of persons on food stamps now, is similar to that seen prior to Clinton's welfare reforms. In other words, we've lost whatever progress we made.
...Personally, I don't care a whole lot if some executive is sitting in a beach house in the Hamptons, sipping 1979 Krug Clos Du Mesnil, paid for by his or her fellow citizens. What bothers me is the number of food stamps that can't be printed for the $5,700 that the champagne cost.
No, it isn't really that. What bothers me is how the collapse of the economic system will lead to unnecessary starvation. Most will occur overseas, but some will occur here. American MDs will have to acquaint themselves with treatment of kwashiorkor.
Yes, economic disparity is inevitable. Economic cycles and crashes may be inevitable. But it was not inevitable that we would waste our last, best chance for sustainability.
There were warnings along the way. Cassandras who feared that exotic financial innovation, specifically unregulated at the behest of both Democratic and Republican politicians, was setting the stage for a major systemic shock. But their voices were drowned out by a chorus of status quo defenders who told us, again and again, that financial innovation was making the world a safer, less risky place.
By slicing and dicing risk and redistributing it across the world, we were told, the chance that any one shock could destabilize the entire system had diminished. Even better, ran the argument, policymakers had learned the lessons of the Great Depression so well that there was no chance there could be another depression. One of Ben Bernanke's claims to fame was as the proselytizer of the idea that we live in the age of the Great Moderation, an era in which recessions would be mild, growth stable and financial panics a thing of antiquity.
They were wrong. If there is one lesson to take from 2008 it is that the majority of analysts, economists and Wall Street financiers were flat-out wrong. Instead of redistributing risk to make us safer, they tied the whole world up into such a tightly wound ball of interconnections that when one piece of the system broke, the repercussions spread everywhere, immediately.
As a consequence, the self-satisfaction bequeathed to Americans by their victory in the Cold War and their unchallenged status as superpower has been irretrievably punctured and replaced by fear. The world seems far more fragile than it did a year ago. It baffles comprehension that so much could go so wrong so fast.
Doc Searls: Beyond mediation: We are all media now, right? That's what we, the mediating, tell ourselves. (Or some of us, anyway.) But what if that's not how we feel about it? What if the roles we play are not to pass along substances called "data" or "information" but rather to feed hungry minds? That's different.
When we criticize 'the media' we are criticizing ourselves. Media is intermingled. It's everywhere and each of us take part from the smallest of web forums to the largest of social networks. That implies a civic responsibility.
People hate that word - responsibility - but there it is. And when it comes to media - the responsibilities that spring from it are now shared by us all.
David Cohn has published to his blog his final project to graduate with a Masters from Columbia's journalism school - a report on the technology and people behind the Dean campaign of 2004 - Drupal Nation: Software to Power the Left.
LATimes: - - 52 mpg and the darkness before dawn: On a test drive of a - - last week in West L.A. traffic, I managed, without much trouble, to get 52 mpg in mixed city-highway driving. Wait, so, has somebody invented the car of the future and didn't tell us?
I've dashed out the name because people come with their own prejudices and probably won't click.
A 52MPG FAMILY CAR. A car platform that Consumer Reports has graded as above average in quality, as an equal to any in the world.
The automobile industry was revolutionized with the invention of the hybrid engine that could capture and store energy that would otherwise go up in smoke. Now, there's a counterpart invention for the housing market that extracts the energy wasted by buildings, and uses it to power economic recovery.
It takes the form of a plan that promises to save consumers $142.33 billion to $200.88 billion in energy costs and mortgage payments over a five-year period, significantly reducing the risk of mortgage failure while increasing disposable income and creating millions of new jobs.
The plan of action is now in the hands of the Obama transition team and could rewrite the book on how the stimulus package gets put together. It's called the 2030 Challenge Stimulus Plan and it was authored by Ed Mazria and his team at Architecture 2030.
Horrible case in point, reported in the LATimes, is the story of the Himmel family - now living in a SUV - their daughter, Destiny, 16, was diagnosed with leukemia.
...Hickey knew she would need loans to complete her degree, so she went to the campus financial aid office as a freshman. After she filled out paperwork, Brooks Institute set her up in a loan program administered by Sallie Mae, the nation's biggest student lender.
Sallie Mae was chartered by the federal government in 1972, and most of its business is in issuing federally insured student loans. But while it may appear to be a quasi-government agency, it is in fact a for-profit company whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange.
Hickey ended up with $20,000 in low-interest federally guaranteed loans issued by Sallie Mae, and $120,000 in higher-interest private loans issued by Sallie Mae.
Hickey said no one explained the difference to her.
"The financial aid officer just said that my federal loans weren't enough to pay the tuition, but that was OK because they had these great alternative loans," Hickey said. "They made it sound so good that I didn't ask that many questions."
Tim Halsey, vice president of finance for Brooks Institute, declined to discuss Hickey's case directly, citing federal privacy laws. But he said the school's financial aid officers take great pains to explain the differences between loans and to guide students to the best deals.
"It is really to our advantage to get the loans and interest rates as low as possible," Halsey said.
"My motivation is to get that person to come to the school, if that's what they want to do. If I can get those costs as low as possible, it benefits us both."
In Philadelphia, former school district CEO Paul Vallas tried to give students a fairer shake by covering the cost for them to take on-line and face-to-face SAT classes from private companies.
But the classroom SAT prep was halted in 2006 as a budget deficit opened, and the online course was dropped this year, also for lack of money.
Top city and school district officials said last week that, despite budget restraints, they would restore funding for SAT prep classes. They are also planning a call-in center for students to get help on college admissions.
...Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said last week she was stunned upon arriving in June to find how little time counselors spend on college and career guidance and is redirecting their priorities.
The dearth of services is painfully apparent to Philadelphia Futures and White-Williams Scholars, nonprofits that help promising district students get to college.
"Students in the comprehensive high schools must badger their overworked counselors for everything they need in the college admission process," said Joan Mazzotti, executive director of Philadelphia Futures.
"They do not have the luxury of being badgered by their counselors."
Overbrook High Principal Ethelyn Payne Young said the outcome was obvious.
"Some of them end up maybe not going anywhere [to college] or not going to where we know they really could go. . . . When you don't have enough resources, enough manpower to touch every kid, you lose some. You lose many.
The troubles in the economy come closer and closer to home. Via TechCrunch: "Tech Layoffs Surge Past 100,000" - but hey, at least you're not a journalist or auto worker - because if you were - it would be your fault right? (without context - that sarcasm wouldn't make any sense - I don't mean that AT ALL - but some pundits seem to think that's the God's honest truth). The economy is hurting everyone across the board far and wide. In an age where information flows as freely as air - this crash wasn't avoided and solutions are not forthcoming from our common conversation.
Blame it on changing technology, blame it on the journalists, blame it on shortsighted management, blame it on missing that oncoming glacier, blame it on the economy (everyone is WAY to concerned with throwing stones right now if you ask me) everyone is feeling pain right now and many institutions people rely on are being shook.
I shared this previously, but it is worth a repost (many reposts), via Jay Rosen (as does title!). I'd say my entire career has been formed by this effect one way or another. And I am thankful.
When we think about the problems we face today, here is how the Internet provides a participatory platform to help. There's nothing in here that refutes human nature - it just celebrates an important facet of it: When we gather around communities of interest we care deeply about - we look out for others within that community of interest. The Internet changes the stage for which we can connect across those passions.
...many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.
Kevin Barbieux, "The Homeless Guy", takes note of the growing lines for feedings from the Salvation Army.
The Salvation Army was there for my family when I was young. As a host for my Cub Scouts pack. As a place we could afford to shop. As a provider of a Santa Claus that would visit us to deliver toys when Mom didn't have the money to afford to buy them.
So when you see those people ringing those bells and asking for money, realize, the Salvation Army helps. More than you can imagine.
In Episode 6 of "Shadow World", David S. Kessler took a break from giving interviews to let the location speak for itself - Front and Berks - the Berks El Station.
I can still recall the elderly man following me from the train station, as the sun was setting, when I was just a kid. He propositioned me for a blow job. He said he would pay me money. I walked faster and acted as if I couldn't hear him. Eventually, he got the hint.
Right around that corner, on a different day, maybe that same year, I was jumped and earned one of the broken noses I'd keep as souvenirs of my days in Fishtown and Kensington.
David S. Kessler's effort, to me, qualifies as a powerful act of journalism. One that provides insight into a world many of us in Philadelphia are familiar with, but to those on the outside, would have a hard time fathoming.
He spent a year recording short, under five minute, video interviews with those he met under the Frankford El in Kensington. Philadelphia Weekly wrote about the effort last year but you can experience it yourself at undertheheel.blogspot.com.
Another great piece of journalism that documents the true life story of four teens who commit murderer in Fishtown is "Fishtown". It was was recently published in hardback. You can read more about "Fishtown" at Geekadelphia.
Update 11-30-08: Alfred Lubrano, in the Inquirer, writes aboutWitness to Hunger, a program of Drexel University that distributed digital cameras to 40 women in North Philly who documented their stories, and in the process exposed realities of living in poverty in North Philadelphia. Make sure to visit the site.
Imagine if the project's next step was to enable these families to publish to Flickr and YouTube next. It would enable them to reach wider audiences and raise awareness so much further.
Fred Clark offers up his theory as to why things are as dire as they are for the newspaper industry - that the expectation for profit margins has been grown to something unrealistic these past twenty years: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?:
So why oh why don't we have a better press corps?
Part of the answer to that question is that our newspapers are being asked to do something they were never designed to do and something they are fundamentally and structurally incapable of doing: they're being asked to provide shareholders with double-digit and ever-increasing profit margins.
This is a ridiculous expectation. If you are an investor looking for a 15- or 20-percent return on your investment and you've purchased newspaper stock, then you're a bad investor. You are, in fact, a stupid and a silly investor. You have invested in the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and you are expecting the wrong results. You are expecting impossible results.
Newspapers have a solid and reliable, but modest, business model. Owning a newspaper -- even now, even with competition from cable news and the Internet, and even with Craigslist all but eliminating the classified ad market -- is like owning a license to print money. But only a modest amount of money. Buying newspaper stock is thus much like investing in CDs. It's safe, but humble.
Remember the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s? That's what's happening right now with newspapers.
Amy Webb is wondering why so many are arguing about arguments instead of focusing on what really counts (I am guilty as charged unfortunately) : Reshaping the Conversation:
Raise your hands: Who's got an hour today to learn about the geospatial web? What about reality mining using cellular data? What about semantic tagging? 2d barcodes? Mobile frameworks using advanced SMS?
That's what I thought.
Here's the real problem facing our newsrooms. Most people are out there playing checkers while companies like Google and Adobe are playing chess. NOTHING WILL CHANGE in journalism unless the conversation is refocused on what matters most: How can the ever-hastening disruptive change be either met or overcome by adapting technology and creative business models?
There's an old social norm at work here that is, I think, an extension of old media, which says: You put yourself out there, so you put yourself at risk for getting attacked. This implies it is almost your fault for getting attacked. This is a basis of the public-figure defense in libel, the presumed right to go after people in the public eye. Once you become public, you give up the cloak and protection of privacy.
But now we are all public. Does that norm still hold online, when 180 million people have started blogs and countless more put videos on YouTube and photos on Flickr? Are they all, should they all be targets for the snipers and snarkers? Well, they all could be. But what's our attitude about that? Is there a new norm emerging?
Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats - until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers- we aren't fully an information age society.
When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he's operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society's tolerance for digital ephemera changes.
What I wonder, though, is whether we're going to see some kind of crest in terms of how harshly people are punished for their previous online behavior. When there are embarrassing photos of everyone online, then by definition their existence will no longer be sensational.
Yep. Me too. Reaching that crest will be painful, ugly, and people are going to be hurt. I still don't know if we will go over that ledge however, to reach the other side that Jarvis says is already here or Schneier says is on the way someday.
As the stock market continues its free fall into the Clinton era, and the economic news grows worse and worse, we are cheered by the report of a study that indicates that "Teenagers' Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing." Of course, irony being the fifth fundamental force of the universe, that little online headline was placed immediately across from this one: "Woman Who Posed as Boy Testifies in Case That Ended in Suicide of 13-Year-Old."
Technology changes, social trends change, hairstyles change, but people - the actual human animals inside all that technology, sociology and tonsorial grooming -- are the same as they have been for thousands of years. Grab a time machine, go back to ancient Egypt, and swap an infant there with an infant from today, and in twenty years you'll likely find two people perfectly well integrated into their cultures because there is no difference in the human animal between now and then. Even within generations (which are an artificial construct in themselves, but never mind that now) there's enough variation to drive you a little batty: The same generation that gave us the hippies went for Nixon in 1972, and that same generation gave us both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Go figure.
In one of the most striking moments in that talk, Carl says:
"What can I change? Just me. For anything else, I send a message, I say please, and I hope for the best."
Then he laughs and adds:
"Does this sound like some circumstances you are familiar with?"
Having thought deeply, for 40 years, about the intersection of computation and human affairs, he has arrived at an elegant synthesis: The same organizational and communication patterns govern both realms.
The Legislature on Friday revised an unusual law permitting parents to hand children up to age 18 over to state custody without prosecution, instead limiting its reach to infants up to 30 days old.
The original law, enacted earlier this year, was intended to protect newborns from being abandoned or killed by panicked young mothers. But since Sept. 1, to the shock of officials and the public in Nebraska, 35 older children, many from 10 to 17 years in age, have been dropped off at hospitals. Most were left by desperate parents who said the children were uncontrollable and violent and needed more counseling or psychiatric services than they could find or pay for.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then, more than sixty universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have established cognitive science programs, and many others have instituted courses in cognitive science.
No one is above criticism, but the knock Jeff Jarvis took from Slate from Ron Rosenbaum missed the mark badly. It attempted to paint Jarvis as just another new media guru in pursuit of a buck it at the expense of others. Jarvis responded here. Many of Jeff Jarvis's ideas are very much up for debate - I don't think journalists are anywhere near as responsible over what's happening as much as he does (shortsighted publishers, corporations, management, business and technology changes are *far* more to blame (read "The Innovator's Dilema" - NOW)) and his tone can be brutal in the face of so much pain (so many jobs lost, so many families thrown into upheaval), but he's willing to debate his ideas and seek out those of others. The author went personal and attempted to de-legitimize ongoing efforts that Jarvis has been leading that are important to journalism, like the recent conference on the future of news at CUNY or hosting so much relevant conversation on his blog. It's a shame because argument is needed to address where we were, where we are going, what the consequences are. Blunt, honest talk. The Slate piece was a distraction from that.
"Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works." - Ad Savvy on Philip Zimbardo, whose talk at TED explains how ordinary people can become monsters.
...the world his early films anticipated is the world we inhabit now. Like no filmmaker before or since, Watkins captures the constant manipulation and countermanipulation of the modern media, the push-pull of image projection and message management that has blurred the line between news and propaganda. His films are testaments to central truths of the current media environment: that mere logic is powerless against a brilliant projection of personality, that self-conscious "objectivity" and truth-telling are very different things, and that compelling narrative is impervious to facts. From the selling of the Iraq War to the selling of Sarah Palin, Watkins, like Orwell before him, shows how we are lied to, and how we lie to ourselves.
At least we know one thing: it's possible to have about the same number of men and women in computer science classes. That just about describes classrooms of 25 years ago.
Malcom Gladwell's new book is getting trashed by some rather big name bloggers. Me thinks they doth protest too much because - for once - one of his books runs counter to Web's domineering libertarian culture. If you've read "Blink", read "Tipping Point" - what I consider a far better book and more applicable to the Web. His new one, named "Outliers" looks like a must read.
To Watch: "Strive For Happiness" - a documentary about sensitive subject matter - what the lives are like for those in families with loved ones dealing with mental illness.
R&B singer Sean Levert entered the Cuyahoga County Jail on March 24 clutching the prescribed medication he took regularly for anxiety.
Jail staff took the bottle of Xanax away from him and failed to give him a single pill during the six days he was there, investigators said. Even when he began suffering horrifying delusions, he wasn't given his medication and never saw a doctor.
Instead, on March 30, jailers strapped Levert into a restraint chair, still fighting the monstrous visions in his head caused by withdrawal from the medication. Minutes later, the 39-year-old son of O'Jays star Eddie Levert stopped breathing. His heart then stopped and doctors couldn't save him.
David Cohn, contributor at Columbia Journalism Review, Seed Magazine and Wired has been exploring the future of journalism for a long time now, notably on his blog, at NewAssignment.net and NewsTrust.net.
His latest effort, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is Spot.us - a service founded on the principal that journalism is a process and not a product.
It's an interesting effort. It joins other non-profit journalism resources such as NPR and ProPublica in working to solve the funding question that has been consuming those who want to see journalism flourish as business models and technologies shift. In this particular solution - it is YOU who determines what stories you fund directly.
Data visualizations can sometimes spur us into contemplative directions. Sometimes they can put us to sleep. These are some of the more interesting election visualizations I've come across:
Mark Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan: Election Maps
Robert J. Vanderbei, Professor and Chair, Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton: Purple America
David Kuhn: Politico: That huge voter turnout? Didn't happen: "Between 60.7 percent and 61.7 percent of the 208.3 million eligible voters cast ballots this year, compared with 60.6 percent of those eligible in 2004"
Andrew Sullivan: He Saw It Coming: McCain/Palin ran a post-modern campaign (unlike Sullivan, I think it almost worked).
Salon.com: How Obama won, by the numbers: "The 18-to-29-year-old cohort supported Obama by a 2-to-1 margin (66-32), and while it is too soon to gauge precise turnout measures, their numbers clearly grew."
I never have bought into 'the one'. But the good thing is Obama has never bought into that either - it's always been about us as a community, as a country, as a people.
Obama is the first Gen X Presidential candidate -- for better and for worse.
He's the son of a baby boomer -- his mother, Anne, was born in 1942 -- and although his birth in 1961 puts him slightly ahead of the textbook mid-1960s start date of Gen X, he is the same age as the man who coined the term "Generation X," author Douglas Coupland.
Like many Gen Xers, Obama is a child of divorce. His anthropologist mother embodied the restless drift and countercultural curiosity of the baby boomer generation. His grandparents' lives were more typical of the "greatest generation" -- with struggles through the Great Depression and then the Second World War, followed by a more conventional, even conservative, life.
His mother married a Kenyan; his grandparents voted for Nixon -- Barack tried to bridge the divide.
Reconciling these generational tensions has been the unwelcome responsibility of Gen X. We have been living in the wake of the Boomers all our lives. We've benefited from the civil rights struggles and enjoyed the opening of our culture, from rock music to the sexual revolution.
But we've also experienced the fallout from their excesses -- drug abuse, racial strife, fractured families, homelessness, AIDS, a decaying environment and dangerous inner cities. Gen Xers have been left to clean up after the Baby Boomers' party, to put up with the societal growing pains, and try to reconcile the warring factions.
The youth vote came out in force in 2004. It will especially so this election cycle. As we go into this day - will it be enough? Will Gen X and Gen Y turn the page on on the last 30 years of politics by division?
Here's to hoping. I think so. But if the numbers aren't there - McCain wins.
There's something special taking place in America - whether we realize it or not - it is the hand-off (or wrenching off) of national political representation from the Boomer generation to Generation-X.
GenX was labeled early on by Boomers as the "Baby-bust" generation. A generation supposedly filled with nothing more than slackers, know-nothings, non-participants, and materialists. We were the first generation in many to have to make due with "less" than our generational precedents.
Even as this moment approaches, the press still takes part in labeling Gen-X, the Ignored Generation.
These characterizations of long been proven false. Look around you - Google, Craigslist, Microsoft, Apple, YouTube, eBay, Amazon.com - all founded by members of GenX. The Netroots movement? Same.
"In 2000, there was this realization for people my age: Hell, there is a difference between Democrats and Republicans. George Bush proved that," Armstrong says. It was also clear that the only force that could stop the Bush bandwagon was, for better or worse, the Democratic Party. Third parties were no longer the answer -- even though many X-ers had voted for Ralph Nader in the past -- and X-ers had never embraced street protests like the boomers. So they turned to the medium most of them knew best: the Internet.
If George Bush introduced X-ers to the value of partisanship, the Internet offered something just as valuable in the jittery aftermath of 9/11: community. "It's easy to forget how amazing this felt back then. But for many of us there was a feeling of being lost and politically isolated," Armstrong says. The feeling was not limited to X-ers, but they were a generation that had long been defined by an aversion to groups. "It was more anti-fake community," says Armstrong. "We didn't like being controlled or defined by an association with these fake communities like nationality, or religion or [corporate] brands." The Internet always carried the potential for connection, but X-ers would use it to create a vast array of political and purely social blogs, networking sites and other forms of community, which we now refer to as Web 2.0.
As the "stolen" elections were quickly followed by 9/11, its aftermath and then the invasion of Iraq, X-ers were uniquely situated to create a new form of activism that blended technology with political resistance. "The Millennials were too young to be heavily into politics at the time," says Armstrong. "But we also understood the technology in a way that baby boomers did not." X-ers were better able to develop the potential of online activism -- from raising money to organizing meet-ups -- having been present and intimately involved in the development of the web during the dot-com heyday. To be clear, the X-ers are not the netroots -- which includes progressives of all ages -- but they are indisputably its creators.
So lets be clear - while Boomers may have invented much of it - the information revolution - the Internet's astounding growth and establishment into the mainstream of the world - is driven by the passions, aspirations and yes - ideals - of GenX. Likewise it will be Generation Y who determine what the Internet will ultimately mean for society as a whole.
So what are these so called ideals and how do they apply to Obama for President?
First, lets get something out of the way real fast - all GenXers are honorary pre-World Series Winning Phillies Philadelphians. Listen to Jeff Gordinier, author of "X Saves the World" talking about his initial reaction to hearing Obama at the 2004 convention:
I remember when my wife and I saw the Democratic National Convention on TV in 2004, and Obama spoke, and I was crying. Shit. I mean, real tears. I cried. I was like, "Fuck! What's happening? This guy's awesome!" My wife said, "I'd follow this guy anywhere. I'd vote for this guy. Who is this guy?" It was just a remarkable speech. And then we thought, "We'll get burned. We'll get burned. Let's face it. Don't believe in this. You know, he's a cool guy, but let's not get all full of hope or anything. Hope is a trick."
Tell me fellow Philadelphians and GenXers, don't you relate?
Now its one thing to say you are afraid of embracing Hope and quite another to say you don't stand behind what you want to stand behind.
In Philly we have (had) a proud tradition of supporting our teams right up to the end, even though part of us holds out on being sappy fans that exclaim "it will be okay - we'll win if we believe". Because we think we know better. There is a hard earned pragmatism here. When Tug McGraw told Philly "You Gotta Believe" it was a challenge to most Philadelphians.
Rocky Balboa said "It ain't about how hard you can hit. It's about how hard you can GET hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep - moving - forward" - that's Philadelphians for you. You take a smack, shake it off with a "whatever" and keep on keepin' on.
That describes GenX pretty well too when you think about it. In the face of so much negative information heaped on it about its future, our reaction is to not panic, to recognize the world will still be here tomorrow, that if you are hearing a message from someplace, you are, more than likely, being sold a bill of goods.
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are GenXers. Think about that and what it reflects upon our relationship to media.
Back in 1999 Ted Halstead in The Atlantic wrote of the political voice of GenX:
Whatever this voice may be, it does not fit comfortably within existing partisan camps. "The old left-right paradigm is not working anymore," according to the novelist Douglas Coupland, who coined the term "Generation X." Neil Howe and William Strauss, who have written extensively on generational issues, have argued in these pages that from the Generation X perspective "America's greatest need these days is to clear out the underbrush of name-calling and ideology so that simple things can work again." If Xers have any ideology, it is surely pragmatism. In an attempt to be more specific Coupland has claimed, "Coming down the pipe are an extraordinarily large number of fiscal conservatives who are socially left." The underlying assumption here is that the Xer political world view stems simplistically from a combination of the 1960s social revolution and the 1980s economic revolution. This kind of thinking has led some to describe young adults as a generation of libertarians, who basically want government out of their bedrooms and out of their pocketbooks. As it turns out, however, the political views of most Xers are more complex and more interesting than that.
To say that Xers are fiscal conservatives is to miss half the economic story; the other and equally powerful force at play can best be described as economic populism. In fact, the Xer consensus represents a novel hybrid of two distinct currents of economic thought that have rarely combined in the history of American politics. It might well be called "balanced-budget populism."
...Fiscal prudence, economic populism, social investment, campaign reform, shared sacrifice, and environmental conservation -- this constellation of beliefs transcends the existing left-right spectrum. It should be immediately apparent that this generation's voice is not represented by any of the established leaders or factions in the political mainstream. And Xers seem to recognize as much -- 61 percent agree with the statement "Politicians and political leaders have failed my generation." So how would American politics change if the voice of Generation X were suddenly heard?
If we parse these three paragraphs we can see the call from our generation for a Barrak Obama.
Lets break it down.
Addressing the the Boomer driven Liberal-Conservative war
Obama's candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America--finally--past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly--and uncomfortably--at you.
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war--not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade--but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war--and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama--and Obama alone--offers the possibility of a truce.
Being a pragmatist when it comes to economic policy
So I asked Obama whether he thought he had been able to tell an effective story about the economy during this campaign. Specifically, I wondered, did he think he had a message that compared with Reagan's simple call for less government and lower taxes.
He paused for a few seconds and then said this:
"I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan's insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn't arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it's now a global marketplace.
"Now, that's the story. Now, telling it elegantly -- 'low taxes, smaller government' -- the way the Republicans have, I think is more of a challenge."
Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.
The final argument for the presidency of Barack Obama is the enormous competence he has shown in running his campaign. He has demonstrated unprecedented ability to motivate people, to gather support for his vision and his programs, and to surround himself with people who can execute on that vision. For the past two years, he's managed what you could easily think of as the fastest growing and best-funded startup in America, and as CEO of that startup, he's come through with flying colors.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain's presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.
"This election is not about issues," said Davis. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."
GenX recognizes sales pitches from 500 meters away. To say that this election is not about the issues - that it is about personality is a dodge to sell something. My bet is we're not going to fall for it. That GenX is part of the reality based community. That's where we live and breathe.
"Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what's needed to be done. Today we are called once more--and it is time for our generation to answer that call," declared Barack Obama, uttering the word "generation" no fewer than thirteen times in his speech announcing his intention to run for President. There is no mistaking his campaign theme: it's time for the old to move over and make way for the new.
More and more families are facing homelessness. According to Reuters, Wal-Mart customers are delaying buying necessities till payday, including infant's formula. It wasn't that long ago I can forget, where I was living payday to payday, check cash to check cash. But I didn't have a family to support back then. It would be a terrible struggle to be in such a place in this day and age.
Penny Arcade! posted a comic that summarizes what many think of online anonymity and the Internet: John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.
Up until the past few weeks, I would have agreed. But now I am starting to adopt a more nuanced view.
I don't want to get into what has triggered the change of heart, and no - I am not anonymously blogging - my name lends credibility that I am not willing to trade. However, I have come to realize there are those who need to be able to speak out, and without anonymity cannot do so.
It's confusing subject matter, so here are a few links of various viewpoints:
Business Week: Busting a Rogue Blogger: Troll Tracker has been unmasked as a patent lawyer for Cisco. Now they're both facing litigation
SSRN: Anonymous Blogging and Defamation: Balancing Interests of the Internet: It is important not to silence communication on the Internet, but it is just as important not to silence victims of defamation. Therefore, this comment argues for the protection of libel plaintiffs facing defamatory comments from anonymous bloggers.
Global Voices Online: Global Voices Advocacy: A project of Global Voices Online, we seek to build a global anti-censorship network of bloggers and online activists dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and free access to information online.
Forbes: The Economics of Trust - Capitalism requires trust. Break the foundations of trust between people and institutions and something like this is inevitable.
Google's Matt Cutts asked this very same question a while back and followed up. Know any yourself? In particular, those that you can donate to via the United Way?
In software engineering we have a concept called 'Duck Typing'. Basically, some languages trust developers more so than others (lets say Python versus Java), and you can trust that if an object 'walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck'.
You end up writing far less code due to the trust you have that things are what they appear to be.
In this year's Presidential campaign, you have a candidate that looks like a normal Joe, walks like a normal Joe, and talks like a normal Joe, but whose income is anything but.
While you can download the book for free legally from the website, I'm going to want to buy a copy for the bookshelf - it's a great book so far.
One of the best purchases of mine these past few months was following his comic book series "Futuristic Tales" from IDW. As a sci-fi and comic book fan, I gotta tell ya, it was worth every penny.
As a software engineer and as a person with an interest in sociology and communications, it's clear this presents a set of opportunities to be explored, problems to be solved. How do we learn of 'truth' when our echo chambers (our social networks, our friends, family, co-workers) are the best tools to keep us from the noise of modern media?
In a presentation at TED.com, Jonathan Haidt explains why Tim Berners-Lee's new foundation is both timely and has such a hard fight ahead. The presentation reinforces that the questions I've been asking in somelatestposts aren't that invalid, and there is something more here to explore.
Shout out to Shelley Powers for posting about this (even if so few seem wanting to discuss) and to Antonella Pavese for the heads up on the video.
By Karl on September 17, 2008 6:30 AM
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The World Wide Web Foundation has a broad scope as described in its one page concept paper, but in short, where the w3c focuses on technologies and interoperability the w3f looks to to focus on technology and society.
Take the current campaign for President. How could a labeling scheme help or hurt?
Take a walk outside of your political bias for a moment, and realize, you might not be part of the majority, nor may your take on 'truth' be the prevailing 'truth' as per attention influence on the Web (anyone with high SERPs on Google for example).
For this season has given us the first truly postmodern election. Modern political campaigns are amalgams of politics, spectacle and entertainment. Postmodern campaigns teem with fluid identities, unmoored meanings and blurred boundaries to the point that stable terms like "politics," "spectacle" and "entertainment" barely exist as separate concepts. These innovations, if you will, are shifts in the culture, and the total submersion of politics in a cultural atmosphere is a trend perfectly suited to the party of organic culture.
In my book "True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society", published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call "media fragmentation"--the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio--lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don't, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it's clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.
If postmodern behavior is just human nature (and I am not convinced), then 'truth' is in serious trouble since the Web mirrors human nature.
I guarantee you a labeling scheme, in the political sphere, would favor the those who could utilize attention influence the most effectively, and have little to do with actual 'truth'.
Is the reason why Steven Colbert rocks so damn hard is because he confronts us with our lack of belief in a common 'truth' ?
What to do or not do? Are there technological solutions, or does technology have no role to play? Or are we dealing with human nature at work, and if so, is it something to embrace, and we've come to a core reason why computer programming is so... flawed - that software is an attempt to model processes where there is no true or false, with a tool that only understands true or false?
Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.
In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.
Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist's Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his "After Darwin" column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O'Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the "Biological Models of Computation" track for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conferences.
Among his must read essays for anyone developing a social app of any kind:
By Karl on September 15, 2008 6:39 AM
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The news in the newspaper media and creeping on to TV news as 'breaking' (this was building for a while), is what sounds like real trouble in the investor markets.
If you were an average 401k investor, what should you do to try and save your retirement money?
My instinct, since I am not retiring any time soon, since I have a fixed rate mortgage and manage my debt responsibly, is to stand pat. But I wonder if that is the right path if you are about to retire? Or if you rely on your investment income.
Don't look to the policial blogosphere either. They were too busy talking about 'lipstick on a pig' and 'ominious photos' to have discussed this. There are financial centered blogs - but as with all media - we subscribe to what fits our communities of interest. Hopefully you were subscribed to a good finance blogger. Not me. Wish I was.
Shout out to Metafilter, while a general interest link community, there have been a few discussions over the years indicating issues in the economy leading to today.
Update 7:01AM: Bloomberg TV just called it "the biggest financial shakeup since the Great Depression".
Look into my eyes, what do you see?
Cult of Personality
I know your anger, I know your dreams
I've been everything you want to be
I'm the Cult of Personality
Like Mussolini and Kennedy
I'm the Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Neon lights, A Nobel Price
The mirror speaks, the reflection lies
You don't have to follow me
Only you can set me free
I sell the things you need to be
I'm the smiling face on your T.V.
I'm the Cult of Personality
I exploit you still you love me
I tell you one and one makes three
I'm the Cult of Personality
Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi
I'm the Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Cult of Personality
Neon lights a Nobel Prize
A leader speaks, that leader dies
You don't have to follow me
Only you can set you free
You gave me fortune
You gave me fame
You me power in your God's name
I'm every person you need to be
I'm
The
Cult
Of
Per
Son
Al
Ity!
But will the much more influential TV newscasts follow suit or keep the 'controversy of the day' story-lines that are to blame for turning so many folks off and away from voting (I know a number of folks who have grown disgusted these past few weeks and are not voting now - great work national newscasts).
erhaps the persistence of the question is due to our shock at being shown who we really are. When all you can see of yourself is what the sanitized mass media show you and what you can see around you in your physical environs, the differences the Net makes visible unsettle us profoundly.
Sounds like some in the tech community are starting to wake up.
The Web is not built on love. It is a reflection of humanity. That is a vital difference.
The conversation at Doc Searls had a few folks circling in on some interesting conclusions about framing and what I call 'attention influence'.
My friend Daniel Rubin, at the Inquirer thinks this is due to 'stupid media tricks'. I hope he is including all of social media and bloggerdom in his definition of media. Memeorandum pretty much reveals that any media where controlling attention matters is subject to get involved in 'lipstick on a pig' activity. We're in this together. It really is 'We the Media'.
By Karl on September 14, 2008 11:47 AM
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BBC News: Saudi judge condemns 'immoral TV': The most senior judge in Saudi Arabia has said it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV channels which broadcast immoral programmes.
By Karl on September 12, 2008 5:51 AM
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What's your reaction to Sarah Palin's performance in her interview with Dave Gibson last night? If you were a conservative, it most likely was positive. If you were liberal, most likely negative.
How can I confirm such a crazy statement? How can there be two opposing opinions of the same event? Two different takes on the 'truth' of it?
Go to memeorandum and follow the discussion on blogs that match your political view point and follow the discussion on blogs that don't.
Or switch between CNN and Fox News if you want a massively bad head ache.
Witness reality torn asunder.
Back in 1997 Dave Winer wrote a piece about programming that helped solidify how I felt about my career choice - he summed it up as a pursuit of truth: Programmers:
Programmers have a very precise understanding of truth. You can't lie to a compiler. Try it sometime. Garbage in, garbage out. Booleans, the ones and zeros, trues and falses, make up the world programmers live in. That's all there is! I think programming is deep, it teaches us about the non-cyber universe we live in. There's something spiritual about computers, and I want to understand it.
...When a programmer catches fire it's because he or she groks the system, its underlying truth has been revealed. I've seen this happen many times, a programmer languishes for months, chipping at the edges of a problem. Then all of a sudden, a breakthrough happens, the pieces start fitting together. A few months later the software works, and you go forward.
When I look at memorandum each day and click away from the warm confines of blogs that share my political view, I am confronted with the the fact that truth is greatly determined by our point of view.
Thank you Obi-wan Kenobi, you bastard.
John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as Vice President is both interpreted as a disaster by liberals and as an inspired move by conservatives.
But one thing is for sure, the move has dominated our attention and driven us a way from weightier topics like the economy and moves taking place across the world, with light weight controversies and indignities (kinda like Britney Spears news does every once and a while).
On this point, two folks I read daily for their points of view (usually opposing), greatly agree:
I don't know if the McCain campaign actually intended for this to happen, but the way it looks to me right now, it'll work. Palin is single-handedly turning Barack Obama into John Kerry: a policy wonk quarantined to the bottom end of the FM dial. It's amazing to watch.
...as I watched the media coverage around the announcement, and that of the self-important, self-aggrandizing "blogosphere," it became clear, to me anyway, just what this was about.
While this is at least partially about winning attention for McCain's candidacy, some of it even negative attention, it is mostly about taking attention away from Obama's campaign. And, in that regard, it's been a brilliant tactical move. Whether it will be enough to swing the election his way remains to be seen.
Obama at the bottom of the FM dial. And so moved are the policies and important events of the world taking place, while we are dazzled and spun every which way.
John McCain's convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the "angry left," Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago '68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.
At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were.
From the moment Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin declared that she had opposed the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," critics, the news media and nonpartisan fact checkers have called it a fabrication or, at best, a half-truth. But yesterday in Lebanon, Ohio, and again in Lancaster, Pa., she crossed that bridge again.
Fact is the media, mass and independent, are being played like marionettes in a game to control your attention and keep Obama, policies, or real impacting events like the economy, from the public discourse.
Glenn Greenwald at Salon did a good job of tracking one of the latest false controversies - the 'lipstick on a pig' quote that was taken out of context. He mistakenly attributes the mass media as being the first on the story when Memeorandum was spreading the meme a day before it broke across the country: New heights of stupidity:
It isn't surprising that the McCain campaign wants this sort of tawdry, Freak Show/Reality Show vapidity to determine the outcome of the election. If you were them, wouldn't you want that, too? And though it's not news that establishment media outlets are so easily and happily manipulated by these tactics, tactics which enable them to cover "stories" which their empty-headed reporters can easily comprehend, it is still striking to watch the now-decades-old process unfold and observe how absolutely nothing has changed.
It makes you wonder if 'truth' really matters anymore. Marc Fisher at Washington Post goes so far as to wonder if the Boomer ingrained distrust of authority has morphed into something far more ominous: For Working Moms, 'Flawed' Palin Is the Perfect Choice:
In this hyperdemocratized society, the national conviction that anyone can succeed is morphing into a belief that experience and knowledge may almost be disqualifying credentials.
Like many at the rally, Victoria Robinson-Worst sees Palin's lack of experience as an asset. "I know people who have experience who are totally incompetent," said Robinson-Worst, who lives in Loudoun County, designs wedding flowers and raises two children. "And I know people who have no experience who step in and get it right. I mean, women can do amazing things."
This is where culture wars, identity politics and self-suffocating academic theories of deconstructionism have led us: Authority is suspect. Experience is corrupting. Ignorance is strength?
Next will be "war is peace." Or have we already heard that one?
Manjoo makes a good case. He walks through a number of net-based conspiracy theories on both sides of the political spectrum, speaks with their adherents, the experts who claim it's all bogus, and then to cognitive scientists and other scientists who explain the gigantic gap between what is so obvious to non-partisans and what is blindingly, passionately important to the adherents.
Grounded in history and science, True Enough paints a dismal picture of a species with a limitless capacity for self-deception and selective reasoning. But Manjoo doesn't ascribe the rise of truthiness to fragmented media alone: he calls out PR firms, media outlets and others who have profited from the erosion of the truth.
As a programmer with a drive to find and share 'truth' I have no idea whatsoever. To me, 2+2 will always equal 4. Trusting a sound bite is like criticizing a system's infrastructure without recognizing the context it was built in. I don't give a damn what a politician says on the matter. We should all be looking for the big balls of mud that provide us with truth.
But slacktivist has an idea (which I don't agree with) and that is to fight fire with fire - witness his latest post - John McCain, Friend of NAMBLA.
Annenberg's FactCheck.org: is doing a great job fact checking our candidates. Anyone listening?
SciAm.com: The Political Brain - Brain-imaging study shows political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias. How we see reality is biased towards our own currently held beliefs.
I don't talk about my poltical views as much as I used to here on my blog. There are a few reasons for that, more than likely dealing with burnout after the 2004 election and the fact that I know that my co-workers read this (hi folks!) now. So it feels... a little weird.
But still, I can't keep quiet when I see something so infuriating take place.
Our two-party political conversation is little more than marketing pitches for two different corporations. Corporations whose goal is not to gain money, but to gain influence and an opportunity to be written into history via public service.
When an organization is selling us something it is confronted with a certain marketing reality - "benefits sell, features tell". That was drilled into me a long time ago as a telemarketer for Sears, later as a trainer and supervisor.
It is no different here.
So what were the benefits each convention were selling us?
Both conventions closed with inspiring calls to service, wrapped in the clothing of "change". But before those last few minutes, there where three to four days of pitches to the party faithful and the rest of the country that informed us that they were the party we could relate to, that cared about us the most, and that the other choice wasn't a choice at all.
It's kinda like Mac versus Windows. Both offer us the same features in the end. They even run on the same hardware these days. But the benefits they sell us thru soft features like interface, branding, and look and feel divide users into two warring camps. Don't ever tell someone in the Apple faithful that a PC can do just about the same things, or vice versa. People will fight for their chosen brand and avoid the reality that they have bought into a brand in the first place.
This time, in this election, there really are different 'features' each will offer us. But those issues aren't being discussed in the public sphere loudly since they rouse so much passion - for example - women's right to choose. Which one of these parties would deny everyone else.
When that convention goer says that "freedom of choice" is different than being "pro-choice" - that is a triumph of marketing.
Instead, both parties sold benefits, soft features, like the inspiring call to the future and bridging of the red-blue divide that is Obama/Biden and and the call to reinforce country and family that is McCain/Palin.
One party offered uplifting oratory and generalizations.
The other offered 'us versus them' with does of sarcasm. And within that, a hella-load of lies.
A McCain staffer said "This election is not about issues,".. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.".
They mean it folks. The marketing and the packaging bare that out. They are marketing directly to a large population of Americans who are angry and afraid of the future since so many of the cornerstones that were relied on have been knocked away.
So it comes down to which party will America choose? The one that uses divisive marketing to divide us into warring camps, to cast blame, or the other which reminds us that we worship a mighty God in the blue states as well as the red, that there's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America - that we're in this together.
That's a real quote folks. Parse it carefully. Take it for what it is - a rare moment of revealing honesty.
Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain's presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.
"This election is not about issues," said Davis. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."
It's human nature that drives us to choose leaders that remind us of ourselves in someway. Who we can relate to or hopefully relate to.
McCain is exploiting this, in the most craven, reckless way I have yet seen in my short life.
We need to stop looking at our leader's personal lives to find things we can relate to or denounce and we need to cast light on our leaders policies and how they effect us.
But will that happen for this election? Will we rise to the challenge?
BTW - did ya know that Mayor Palin wanted to ban books (via rc3.org) that disagreed with her religious views?
Or that she slashed funding that helped teenage moms in need?
Or that she's proud of her daughter's decision to keep her baby? (Note that word - decision - shouldn't everyone have that right?)
There is more than enough on the face of the issues to wage a good conversation over who is best to represent and lead the country.
It's been an interesting week and a half in American politics, but today, the Web is going to take a special role, the blogosphere in particular, and in an a real ugly way.
There are pictures floating around of some MySpace pages, with titles and comments that are easily misunderstood not given appropriate context.
And based upon our biases we will automatically believe what we want to believe about them.
While we all take special delight in exposing hypocrisy, as we should as it reveals much about character, sometimes things go way, way too far. And I have a feeling this is about to.
We're all flawed human beings and the sooner we each recognize that, and be understanding towards that, the better this world will be. From all sides of the political isle.
I think Obama's speech last week was a bit of an inspiration. And this is an expression of that.
Recommendation systems don't help me much. They only suggest things similar to other things I've shown interest in. Increasingly that just frustrates me. The most delightful recommendations are those that connect me with things that interest me in unpredictable ways. That happens serendipitously, and I haven't yet found a reliable way to manufacture the serendipity.
So whether you like political blogs will depend to some extent on whether you prefer deliberation across party lines to participation, or vice versa. Personally (at least as regards political efficacy in the current era), I'm on the vice versa side, but we leave this question deliberately open, as people from different perspectives may disagree &c &c.
Voters who insist that they are undecided about a contentious issue are sometimes fooling themselves, having already made a choice at a subconscious level, a new study suggests.
The electorate has already made up its collective mind who it will vote for in November. Even many of those all-important and highly coveted undecided voters aren't really undecided.
They may think they are carefully weighing their choices, but their decision is rigged in advance by their subconscious minds, say psychologists, and they just aren't aware of it.
There are, of course, many others. The point is not that some blogs covered the conflict well, and fulfilled the promise of a blog network that transcends the spin and amplifies ignored voices: it is that the majority of blogs did not. Watching the most prominent blogs turn into their own worst enemies largely deflates much of their egalitarian mystique--and drives home just how important it is to remain a skeptical reader.
Slate: What's Really Killing Newspapers: Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition.
It is almost impossible to overstate how utterly the supply of news and information available to most Americans has changed during the past 35 years. Within a single generation, the Supply & Demand equation has gone from relative scarcity to certain surplus. People now have so much access to information that some are complaining about 'data smog'.
This is an old question. We discussed it at USV Sessions two years ago - I think it was phrased, "What's the value of data in an open world". And even then, little insight was generated.
It's the wrong question. Data isn't the valuable.
In fact, data's a commodity. We're drowning in data.
Think about it this way: the lower the cost of interaction, by definition, the more abundant data is - because every interaction creates reams of data. More data is created tomorrow than was created yesterday. And so on.
What is valuable are the things that create data: markets, networks, and communities.
Chicago Tribune interviews Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock.com and Django: Cyberstar.
My wife, Richelle, has been encouraging me to talk more about Mom, including here on the blog. I don't talk about her that much because I have yet to find the words that can adequately express my childhood, but I grew up with a mother who wrestled with a condition called "Schizoaffective Disorder". I can go into detail about how the disease affected her reasoning and capacity to deal with day to day life, maybe one day I will, but for now, it probably says much by simply indicating that she was aware she had a problem, she sought out help, and that it was episodic, and that those episodes could be heart rendering.
It's scary talking about such subject matter, many are dealing with such issues in our lives, in our families, and feel forced to conceal such knowledge from others for fear of how it will reflect.
That's why blogs that talk about mental illness are so important. They are few and far between. And some face insurmountable pressure to represent the views of one establishment or another.
I want to mention two blogs that are worthy of your RSS reader:
Furious Seasons: Ran by a journalist, and psych patient Philip Dawdy, Furious Seasons wrestles with the ongoing, terrible state of psychiatric care.
The Trouble With Spikol: Ran by executive editor of the Philadelphia Weekly, Liz Spikol documents her fight against her illness and her takes on all matters that strike her to write.
Of course I'm biased due to the experience of growing up with Mom, but both these blogs stand as the most courageous I have encountered on the Web.
You know you are dealing with these issues in your life somewhere. Subscribe. Read. Relate. Maybe even comment.
"The musicians I knew had gone through that transition ... I'm listening to Bob Dylan ... and I realize these artists are using their talent to project their feelings and ideas... not just please people ... I was in the wrong place. In 1967 ... I was thirty. I was entertaining people in nightclubs who were forty. They were at war with their kids who were twenty. There was a generation war. I was in the middle of it. I said 'what the fuck am I doing over here?' [The twenty year olds] are the people who will understand me and give me a chance ... I took two years to change and it happened on television ... happened on ... shows like Della Reese, Virgina Graham and Steve Allen," He added, "Virginia Graham was a real shit stirrer. She just loved to get me to talk about smoking pot and Henry Mancini... she got Henry Mancini to cop out to being a pot smoker on TV ... I went on there ... my beard was growing ... my attitudes ... were changing. And I talked about my changes on the panel... a lot."
Mark Glaser asked his audience to imagine "a Future Tense for Newspapers", back in February 2007, inspired by a post by Jeff Jarvis. Among many great responses, I added my own two bits:
The way it is:: Newspapers judge readership size/demographics via subscription numbers and use these numbers to make themselves attractive to classified advertisers
The way it will be: A combination of metrics that combine traffic with online relationships/connectivity statistics will become the new way news sites make themselves attractive to advertisers.
The way it is: Newspapers finance the cost of in-depth journalism via the selling of classifieds.
The way it will be: I have no idea.
This is a problem because newspapers provide the financial, legal, organizational and attention driving infrastructure that acts of journalism largely require.
To lend credence to how much this is a problem, consider the results of Pew's News IQ Quiz (take it - I dare you - it is short and fun!). Do you think a community so ill-informed can drive its government effectively? Try driving with one eye closed (no don't do that!).
Newspaper demand has never been higher. The problem is revenues have never been lower. So people are reading the newspaper they're just not reading it in a way where the newspapers can make money on it. This is a shared problem. We have to solve it. There's no obviously good solution right now."
strictly speaking, the American public does not pay for its journalism - nor has it ever, really.
Advertising and Classifieds subsidized journalism as a side-effect - not directly.
So I tend to disagree with Leonard Witt when he says that "if advertising and journalism are forever linked, we will not have a problem."
Advertising never directly paid for journalism. Acts of journalism bolstered the reputations and influence of newspapers, that drew demographics, that advertisers wanted to reach. It was the audience that advertisers were paying for.
Attention driving influence is flowing elsewhere now. Like Twitter (yes, I'm on Twitter now).
You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide. As falling circulation indicates, fewer do. And the newspaper isn't the only media hub suffering in the new era. Radio, which once served a similar social role with its menu of music, news, and talk, is plummeting.
One of the more interesting research exercises in all this is examining how we got here.
Christopher Anderson is doing a terrific job of that working on his dissertation, "Networking the News: Work, Knowledge and Occupational Authority in the New Metropolitan Journalism" in the Philadelphia area.
I say this as a former employee of Philadelphia Newspapers and Knight Ridder.
So if you are interested in the topic, and want to read the thoughts of a non-insider who is doing considerable research in the trenches, go forth and read.
Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it's been "The Daily Show" that has tenaciously tracked big, "super depressing" issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.
For that matter, the Comedy Central program -- which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh -- has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. "The Daily Show" resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart's frequent exclamation "Are you insane?!" seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-"Catch-22" reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace -- an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
To protest the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a large portion of the Web had turned their site's background color black. Read about it on Wikipedia and read Howard Rheingold's thoughts on the historic day.
It's interesting to hink about the collective action that it represented and to think about that in today's context. I mean - Yahoo! turned its home page black!
Either Paris Hilton is a genius, or we are so wrapped up in our own points of view that we look for ANYTHING to reinforce it.
Maybe both is true. But that's a stretch right? Right?!?!?!
Beyond that, there is literally two takes on reality playing out over the video. And there are no links to opposing points of view - it is as if the opposing view point doesn't even exist.
Wha, that last link threw you a bit? Why is that? Is it that we are more comfortable confronting racism then sexism? And has the Presidential campaign reflected that? Why?
How we go about fighting racism and sexism, while protecting free speech is confusing territory.
I figure the best way is by speaking out loudly, and clearly.
While I haven't figured out who is my favorite historical figure, Antonella's tagging of me seems especially relevant in the wake of Hillary Clinton's run for the Presidency.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that while she did some self-inflicted damage to her own campaign, and her knocks to Obama made her seem hypocritical, much of the news media, in retrospect, was biased, and its behavior towards her couldn't be considered anything else then sexist.
I hope history recognizes her as someone who broke down barriers for those that will follow.
A great fellow Philly blogger, upon seeing that recent CNN video of a person ran over with no one helping posted a passionate piece questioning where our society is headed when a group of people can act so unconcerned about someone else's welfare.
In his comments, I felt the need to remind him of Kitty Genovese.
Phil Ochs's wrote a song about her in 1967, that, with its refrain, is all too painful.
The lyrics make me feel uncomfortable, and if they make you feel the same, then that says something about their ongoing relevancy.
"Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends":
Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.
Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff
Thirteen cars are piled up, they're hanging on a cliff.
Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain
But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it's gonna rain
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.
Sweating in the ghetto with the (colored/panthers) and the poor
The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor
Now wouldn't it be a riot if they really blew their tops?
But they got too much already and besides, we got the cops
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.
Oh, there's a dirty paper using sex to make a sale
The Supreme Court was so upset, they sent him off to jail.
Maybe we should help the fiend and take away his fine.
But we're busy reading playboy and the Sunday New York Times
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends
Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer,
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years
Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why
But demonstrations are a drag, besides, we're much too high
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends
Oh, look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends
Down in Santiago where they took away our mines
We cut off all their money, so they robbed the storehouse blind
Now maybe we should ask some questions, maybe shed a tear
But I bet you a copper penny, it cannot happen here
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends
I tend to think that the human condition is made of sterner stuff than our culture can throw at it. For good or ill.
That's why we need to shout from the rooftops the good wherever we may find it. It is out here. There are great stories to tell. Heroes who break the mold everyday.
I know I don't talk about them enough myself.
But the question is - does anyone care outside our circle of friends?
I haven't been commenting on this year's political race. For the most part, because I have been happy with the thought of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama becoming our president.
The reason why I supported Mr. Obama (I voted for him in the primary) is that I feel he represents an urge on the part of Gen-Xers and Millennials to move past politics of division. That we've had enough of 60s "long haired hippies are bad/conservatives are bad/religious types are bad/whites are bad/blacks are bad/women are bad/men are bad" winning through division arguments.
The irony is that there is evidence that won't be enough.
It is time for everyone to realize that whichever the candidate was going to be - Clinton or Obama - that overcoming fear and ignorance would be the biggest obstacles to be overcome.
Fact: People are hugely misinformed even with the vast amounts of media available to us all on the Web, on Radio, on Cable, and elsewhere.
Prediction: This race will be closer than people expect.
A John McCain win is very possible and instead of pointing to his worthiness as a candidate, most likely, it would be blamed on ignorance or racism, and while there might be some credence, I believe it is simpler than that....
We believe in untruths and have media choices that reinforce our predispositions and prejudices. Across every income, education and political group.
There are those among us, who think the act of getting informed is something that each needs to take up as a self-discipline - "if they don't get it - they don't get it", instead of a social practice where each of us has a responsibility to the rest of us.
Information, we observed, is derived from the verb inform, which is related to the verb form. To inform is not to "deliver information", but rather to form the other party. If you tell me something I didn't know before, I am changed by that. If I believe you, and value what you say, I have granted you authority. Meaning, I have given you the right to author what I know. Therefore, we are all authors of each other. This is a profoundly human condition in any case, but it is an especially important aspect of the open source value system. By forming each other, as we also form useful software, we are making the world. Not merely changing it.
That's a powerful idea and ideal. It is one that we are not living up to. And one that will have reverberations in this campaign.
But for now, congratulations America. We've come a long way. The blood of so many led us to today. So onward with tomorrow.
Update: Upon further consideration - If you consider how the press has covered Hillary Clinton's run - and our response to it - it's pretty clear we still have a long, long way to go.
...At this point, Obama appears to have a tougher barrier to break through on race than McCain does on age.
An AP-Yahoo News study comparing November figures to April figures found that McCain has won over many people initially worried about age, while Obama has made little headway so far among people who are most uncomfortable about race.
Roughly 13 percent of those who said in November they would be very uncomfortable voting for a black candidate now say they would vote for Obama, while 51 percent of them would vote for McCain. And 31 percent of those who said they were very uncomfortable with the idea of voting for someone over age 70 would now vote for McCain, while 40 percent would vote for Obama.
And, for now at least, it's unclear whether experience or change matters more to voters.
The same study found that people who favor a Washington outsider who will change the way things are done split about evenly between McCain and Obama, while those who favor someone with Washington experience slightly favor McCain.
However, those who are optimistic that things actually can be changed in Washington favor Obama over McCain by a large margin, 43 percent to 31 percent. Those who are pessimistic about whether Washington can change favor McCain over Obama by an even wider margin, 43 percent to 23 percent.
Livia Labate, Principal of Information Architecture for Comcast Interactive Media, my team at Comcast, is asking some hard questions around why there are not more women speakers at conferences. She raises the issue here and follows up here.
Livia, meet Jeneane Sessum, writer, consultant, marketing pro, all round social media expert. In her latest post she runs the Industry Standard over the rails for doing what so many other media publications seem apt to do - publish a list of (top or must read) bloggers and not include women.
Livia, meet Shelley Powers, author, Javascript/AJAX extraordinaire who has written a number of posts on the subject, here are two: Progress, Invisible.
Shelley and Jeneane, meet Livia.
Before I mention anything from my point of view and experiences, two more links - one a shocker, and one a think piece:
NYTimes: Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain: Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of "The X Files." On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls. The section this article appeared in? Fashion. Not Business. Not Technology.
I've written in the past about why I feel diversity is crucial to a successful gathering where information discussion is the goal.
I've never shared the difficulty I had in helping manage the Norg Unconference to meet that ideal.
The Norg Unconference was to build bridges between media technologists, independent bloggers, and traditional newspaper media, to help newspapers, indeed all of us, find a path to build the new news organization, or norg, as Will Bunch called it.
Many in attendance thought it was groundbreaking how it brought together such radically different world views in media such as members of IndyMedia and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
But part of me walked away feeling it wasn't such a big success - the participants in attendance weren't a true representation of the real diversity in Philly - and in assisting Wendy Warren of the Philadelphia Daily News and Susie Madrak, in organizing the meeting, which was taking place in the lead up to Emma being born, and me burning the candle at both ends, I burnt some bridges myself, as I fought, prior to the conference, to get folks to work together across views of each other. I partially failed, and lost some friends I believe. For an ideal. I won't go into details, as I hope bridges can one day be restored, I have no bad feelings.
I leave it at this - it is very, very hard to get people to open up to what others can bring to the table - and do so pro-actively - while looking outside the usual suspects to make it happen. For all my love of the Web's capability to widen the scope of conversation, it also empowers us to be discriminating in who we give attention to. It's human nature at play - the Web is an attention economy. You think it's bad at conferences? Check out who is considered the 'thought leaders' in any niche blogging conversation, who is considered the A-list in any blogging topic space.
Aren't we collectively building an architecture of participation? Our face to face gatherings should mirror that. And if they don't - then they reveal who we truly care about - don't they?
Boston.com: The sting of poverty: The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.
NYTimes: Paul Krugman: Poverty is Poison:To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child's brain.
Philly.com: The new mandate: First, find them a home: Deborah Harmon, 43 and mentally ill, was released from jail for panhandling, and again faced living on the streets or in a shelter. Runell McKnight, 25, had no place to go with her two young children after she broke up with the man she was living with. Today, both women have apartments of their own, with each a beneficiary of programs that aggressively promote the notion that, above all, the homeless need homes.
The Gospel of Consumption: "Nothing," he claimed, "breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure."
Elizabeth Warren interview at UC Berkley: It is partly about politics. If you don't email your congresswoman or your congressman and your senator, then you are part of the problem today. You've got to tell them that this is an issue that matters to you, that this really, truly matters.
Dan Gillmor is right to knock the press in its coverage of the housing bubble. It didn't do its job. But I thought we were in the age of the crowd having more information than the experts? In the age of news that bubbles up from the conversation where knowledge of something as disastrous as a oncoming financial collapse of the country would umm... be somewhat noticeable.
Beat up on the press all you want Dan. They are an easy punching bag in an age where over 60% of the public have lost confidence in them.
While I am sure we can find voices in the blogosphere that were warning us to impending troubles, as we probably can in the press, it didn't get surfaced to wide enough audience.
The media failed certainly. And so did We the Media fail.
And it is something that must be confronted.
I am a big trumpeter of social media and how it can empower each of us to connect in ways that were impossible just a short while ago. I'm planning to share some great examples here in later posts. But as you say Dan, there's plenty of blame to go around in this mess.
Emma is waking up at her grandparents right now and Richelle and me are just getting out of bed, making calls, and getting ready for the day. It's a tradition we started last year, that I'm looking forward to as the years come.
Easter is a weird holiday, in that, as the article from Slate states below, has resisted commercialization and has retained much of its religious meaning. Having grown up in a house without organized worship of any kind, I don't have many memories of Easter eggs or baskets. In fact, my fondest memory of Easter is one of recent years - that of my mom, calling me the night before from the nursing home, reminding me to bring her a chocolate egg.
That egg was important to her. To her, a Catholic who had doubts about the faith's practices, Easter had to do with family and new beginnings.
I think the tradition we are setting up with Emma, with Richelle's parents, is very much in keeping with that.
The events in Christ's life, death and resurrection, point you in that direction, thinking about renewal, and what it means for your faith - for your life.
Every year I kick myself at not getting back in the habit of going to church. A habit I had only a short while as an adult that ended when Hunter, my nephew, died immediately after my confession on Saturday, September 15th 2001. A few days after 9/11.
For so many, they find solace in religion during times like that. I wish I could be like that. My instinctual reaction was the opposite.
As I get older, I am starting to realize that doubt, reason and faith are not necessarily at odds. That it is we human beings that demand straight lines and simple rules to dictate our universe and paradoxes upset our world so mightily that it can be hard to face the day when any light is shone on them.
today is one of the most holy days for Christians around the world.
today is the day that the Christian messiah, Jesus, came down from Heaven
and walked around and said, see, told ya I'm God.
everyone pretty much freaked out.
funny thing about Christians, they basically run the world
yet when it comes to their holiest days they act ashamed.
instead of wearing t-shirts that say Jesus
or putting a nice picture of Jesus on their door
or a nice poster of Jesus in their window
and say, Right On, Jesus,
they buy candy and paint eggs and hide them
and wear hats and have brunch
just like they've never even heard of Jesus
and dont marvel at what he did for them.
they act like dirty heathens, basically.
...the good book says that it's not
the things that go in our mouths
that we should worry about
it's the things that come out
of our mouths
that matter.
...get yourself in situations
where you get to say some badass shit
Despite the awesome theological implications (Christians believe that the infant lying in the manger is the son of God), the Christmas story is easily reduced to pablum. How pleasant it is in mid-December to open a Christmas card with a pretty picture of Mary and Joseph gazing beatifically at their son, with the shepherds and the angels beaming in delight. The Christmas story, with its friendly resonances of marriage, family, babies, animals, angels, andâ€"thanks to the wise menâ€"gifts, is eminently marketable to popular culture. It's a Thomas Kinkade painting come to life.
On the other hand, a card bearing the image of a near-naked man being stripped, beaten, tortured, and nailed through his hands and feet onto a wooden crucifix is a markedly less pleasant piece of mail.
The Easter story is relentlessly disconcerting and, in a way, is the antithesis of the Christmas story. No matter how much you try to water down its particulars, Easter retains some of the shock it had for those who first participated in the events during the first century. The man who spent the final three years of his life preaching a message of love and forgiveness (and, along the way, healing the sick and raising the dead) is betrayed by one of his closest friends, turned over to the representatives of a brutal occupying power, and is tortured, mocked, and executed in the manner that Rome reserved for the worst of its criminals.
We may even sense resonances with some painful political issues still before us. Jesus of Nazareth was not only physically brutalized but also casually humiliated during his torture, echoing the abuses at Abu Ghraib. In 21st-century Iraq, some American soldiers posed prisoners with women's underwear on their heads as a way of scorning their manhood. In first-century Palestine, some Roman soldiers pressed down a crown of thorns onto Jesus' head and clothed him in a purple robe to scorn the kingship his followers claimed for him. After this, Jesus suffered the most degrading of all Roman deaths: crucifixion. Jesus remains the world's most famous victim of capital punishment.
To his followers, therefore, his execution was not only tragic and terrifying but shameful. It is difficult not to wonder what the Apostles would have thought of a crucifix as a fashion accessory. Imagine wearing an image of a hooded Abu Ghraib victim around your neck as holiday bling.
Even though you wouldn't know it by my name - I'm Irish. It's something I was was dimly aware of as a teenager, and something I've come to embrace as I've gotten older and realized my last name isn't that of my biological father.
So what is St. Patrick's Day? According to my friend Ron and a link he posted, something mighty bad. According to David Plotz at Slate, something to take pause of and be thankful for.
Me? The lack of cultural upbringing I had leads me to think of something far more recent - the North Ireland peace process and the hope it brings for the world. Differences that seem intractable and unbridgeable can be met. And not always does it need to lead to blood.
I recently re-read Rebecca Blood's 2003 BlogTalk presentation: "waging peace: using our powers for good". It is worth revisiting by anyone who is a blog evangelist or critic. Taking a look at the daily lack of cross linkage on memeorandum.com, unfortunately, it seems almost prophetic.
...People agree most readily with the things they already believe, and everyone has only 24 hours in a day. Because of these two factors, weblogs are too often enclosed in echo-chambers of their own making.
In the book 'Data Smog', David Shenk says: 'Birds of a feather flock virtually together' and this is certainly true of weblogs. He goes on to say: 'The problem... is that people are tuning in and becoming informed--but they're tuning into niche media and they're acquiring specialized knowledge. As our information supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease. Technically, we possess an unprecedented amount of information; however, what is commonly known has dwindled to a smaller and smaller percentage every year. This should be a sobering realization for a democratic nation, a society that must share information in order to remain a union.'
Let me add that it's not just specialized knowledge that we are accessing. It's news and opinion about current events. The Web has given us the ability to retrieve news accounts from around the world. It used to be that most people got their news from just a few sources. This limited access meant that most of us were evaluating events from a common pool of information about the world, or at least a pool that was common to the people around us. But Web users can choose to get their news from wherever they like. And factual accounts of the same events quite often differ substantially in their wording, emphasis, and in the conclusions they draw. We now have the ability to choose from among news accounts until we find one that we feel gets it right.
Now, I don't advocate returning to the pre-Web world of local newspapers. But there are consequences to the wide access we have gained.
Democracy depends on groups of people coming to terms with one another, and devising solutions that will address the needs of most, if not all, of its citizens. Even a system like mine, in the United States, where majority rules, cannot afford to completely ignore the needs of anyone not in the winning party. Democracies simply cannot function unless citizens and policy-makers can talk to one another and achieve some sort of common ground in addressing the issues of the day.
However, when people can choose their news and information from an unlimited variety of sources, they usually will choose sources that confirm their pre-existing biases. According to theFolklorist.com, confirmation bias is 'a tendency on the part of human beings to seek support or confirmation for their beliefs.' It makes sense, if you think about it. The only basis we have in evaluating any source of information is the set of information--including opinions--that we have already decided is true. Very few people will be inclined to choose primary sources of information that consistently put forth ideas that just seem wrong.
This isn't deliberate malice. It's a simple matter of choosing, from the available sources, those that seem most accurate, and those that seem most accurate will always be those that most closely reflect one's own view of the world. So while the Web, in theory, makes it possible to explore many more points of view than ever before, in practice, few people actually do this to the extent that they can.
We have a clue we are being spun. And I bet that niche media's pursuit of 'authenticity' - the practice of wrapping news in greater and greater extremes of opinion to seem 'genuine' - folks probably feel at an instinctive level the exploitation.
In this environment, it has become more and more difficult to find investigative journalism you might care about or might need to know about.
There are many initiatives that have sprung up over the past few years that attempt to address how investigative journalism can be pursued, developed, created and funded.
Scott Rosenberg shares his doubts about one of the latest, "ProPublica", a non-profit driven by some big names in traditional journalism.
Think about a story the Philadelphia Inquirer recently published: "Philadelphia faces shortage of housing for mentally ill". It was front page of the Local section. Some editor thought that I, as a reader, would find that story interesting or pertinent.
In a world driven purely by linkage, PageRank, traffic counts, and other topic based story algorithm filtering systems - would I see that story? Would that story even be written? Who is its audience?
Think about it. And what it means for your knowledge of others that sit outside your topical or social spheres.
Now I'm not saying that algorithm driven - or crowd driven - news filtering is bad. Far from it.
Nor am I saying that a world where only 'experts' provide access to the news stories is good. Again far from it.
But the folks who *do* say one or the other are selling something. And it is at our expense.
the things we accept,
those we defend without shame,
reveal who we are.
You would think a company expanding a service that helps homeless get off the streets (by providing them with a consistent means of being contacted) would be a non-controversial thing.
After all, providing one service to the homeless (lets say clothes) doesn't preclude providing other services (lets say, job training, or housing). And having choices for services isn't necessarily a bad thing. Thankfully we have a number of service providers for homeless families and individuals in our area.
In fact, I'd say the verdict from the digerati - overall - was cynical and negative.
All I know is that I wish - I wish - services like these existed when I fought through my bout of living on the streets. I know from experience how important it is to have a steady means of contact when looking for work, dealing with family, or simply finding a place to sleep.
We maybe on the eve of a new war (USAToday: Poll finds Americans split on taking military action in Iran). Do *you* think you're doing all you can to inform your fellow citizen of facts or opinions? Do you think it matters? Do you think people are informed enough to weigh in on this? Why do you think that is and who gets the praise or the fault?
and matt good sings
youre gonna get what you deserve
and not a penny less
bible says its easier for a camel to get thru the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven.
because we are attached to the wrong things.
and we're such liars. saying we're a christian nation
we dont read the bible and we ignore everything in it when its read to us.
then bitch when someone tells us that we're not going to heaven.
youre not going to heaven because you hate everything pure on earth
youre not going to heaven because you reject good right here
youre not going to heaven because you dont value love
and heaven is love incarnate. so fuck your whines and fuck your earthly goals.
money is not the way. pretty boy quarterbacks arent the way
dumb blonde beauty queens are not the way.
george bush ryan seacrest maroon five dave matthews
The sad thing is, predictably, pundits and experts on both sides of the new media debate (something I have yet to understand) will inevitably point fingers.
Fact: Despite the information revolution, despite the advent of 24/7 cable news, despite the advent of 24/7 talk radio, despite the Internet, set aside the Web and participatory media for just a minute, it's already been determined we're no better informed about our world than in 1989.
So those who long for the good old days can point your fingers at bloggers all you want.
And those who say today far better than the past can point your fingers at 'traditional' media journalists all you want.
The failure is complete. It is across the board.
And it portends terrible things for our democracy and society as a whole.
Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.
"Look, I don't know, maybe I haven't made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again," said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. "Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don't. And to be honest, I'm really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand."
Worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, God said His name has been invoked countless times over the centuries as a reason to kill in what He called "an unending cycle of violence."
"I don't care how holy somebody claims to be," God said. "If a person tells you it's My will that they kill someone, they're wrong. Got it? I don't care what religion you are, or who you think your enemy is, here it is one more time: No killing, in My name or anyone else's, ever again."
...Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: "Can't you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism... every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you're supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It's not that hard a concept to grasp."
"Why would you think I'd want anything else? Humans don't need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other - you've been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!" God said. "The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?"
"I'm talking to all of you, here!" continued God, His voice rising to a shout. "Do you hear Me? I don't want you to kill anybody. I'm against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don't kill each other anymore - ever! I'm fucking serious!"
Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God's shoulders began to shake, and He wept.
The Onion: September 26, 2001: "American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie": "In the movies, when the president says, 'It's war,' that usually means the good part is just about to begin," said hardware-store owner Thom Garner of Cedar Rapids, IA. "Why doesn't it feel that way now? It doesn't feel like the good part is about to begin at all. It feels there's never going to be another good part again."
The Onion: September 26, 2001: "Bush Sr. Apologizes To Son For Funding Bin Laden In '80s": "I'm sorry, son," Bush told President George W. Bush. "We thought it was a good idea at the time because he was part of a group fighting communism in Central Asia. We called them 'freedom fighters' back then. I know it sounds weird. You sort of had to be there."
"The United States is a free country, a strong country, a prosperous country," Schuitt said. "Many veterans gave their lives so we would have the right to focus our attention and energies on the DVD release of Joe Dirt, the latest web-browsing cell phones, and how-low-can-you-go hip-hugging jeans. It is a sign of our collective strength as a nation that we genuinely give a shit about the latest developments in the Cruise-Cruz romance. When Mariah Carey's latest breakdown is once again treated as front-page news, that is the day the healing will have truly begun."
POST POSTSCRIPT - Six years later, Bin Laden is still free, our troops are deployed in a nation building exercise in a previously dictator led country we decided to dismantle that had nothing to do with the attack - and Afghanistan is sliding back towards the Taliban.
And the day before the sixth anniversary of the attacks headlines were dominated by Britney Spears.
The biggest blogs these days are actually getting TV shows - Perez Hilton and TMZ.com.
Ya know, I'm sure this is a bit of fear mongering, but yesterday I cursed out loud "holy fuck" when I saw this headline in the New York Times: Some Baby Bibs Said to Contain Levels of Lead.
It would appear, every day a new story pops up to remind us that the infrastructure we rely on, to provide us the capacity to do seemingly ordinary things in our lives - from brushing our teeth, to crossing a bridge, to hanging out on a corner with friends in safety - isn't all that reliable anymore.
Despite the information and communication revolutionary time we live in, Americans remain in the dark about our world.
Pew released a survey back in April detailing Americans knowledge of current affairs, comparing the status quo to that of 1989.
We've had a literal explosion of new media and communications services and tools come into being these past 15 years. They have completely reshaped how we get our news and how we connect with our communities.
Social Networks, Blogs, RSS, News Aggregators, Email, Email Lists, Message Boards, Websites, News portals, the Web, the Internet, Cable network 24/hr. news, talk radio, online magazines, collaborative news filters, algorithmic news filters, the list goes on and on.
You would think with so many choices, so many avenues to get informed, we'd actually be better informed.
You'd be wrong.
On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.
In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle's name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.
The survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs.
I'm among a bunch of folks who tend to trumpet online services as a cure-all for our past lack of information awareness and communications access.
On the opposite side of the bench have been those who have sounded alarm after alarm about how our ever growing media-and-communications-scape will fragment us ever further and result in ever tightening echo chambers, making us less informed about subject matter as a whole.
Turns out both perspectives are wrong.
Here we are, with so much new technology, so much new media, transforming the way we live our lives, and yet we are as informed, as ill informed, as we were in 1989.
I'm in the process of writing a piece on Philly Future, about it's future, titled, "Philly Future, is it in 'the dip' or in a cul-de-sac?". If you've read Seth Godin's "the dip" you would immediately get the reference.
The thing is, every time I start to write it, I can't help but feel demoralized.
Depressed. Run down. Beaten up.
If I think about how things are at PF right now, it is full of unexplored and sometimes broken promise. It's taken all the free time I've had just to keep it running.
It doesn't meet my personal standards for what I expect a great service to be. And I'm never satisfied simply running in place. So things there need to change.
With my day job being as full tilt as it has become (in a good way, my team is building something to be proud of, I hope to share more sometime), with my body as wracked with pain as it has been on and off, I've felt stretched for time as I haven't since I was maybe ten years ago, when I still working at Sears, putting all else aside so that I could learn software engineering.
Shoot - the pain is so frustrating that I haven't played my guitar longer than five minutes the last six months. I'm good at managing it. I'm functional. And I've improved quite a bit since I earned the herniated disk. And for that I am thankful. I'm not forced into surgery they way some are.
But sometimes I find myself spinning.
The great thing - the unbelievable thing - is that I've learned that it's easy to get centered again.
Sometimes it's simply hearing a friend's or my brother's voice on the phone. Sometimes, all I need to do is turn to my wife, my daughter, and even my dog on the couch and smile at my blessings as my heart fills.
As long as I have that - I have everything in the world :)
Whether you are interested in the social software/media as a toolset for activism and participatory politics, or reporting the news, or simply community, there is something for you in Digby's speech at Take Back America 2007. Take the time and give a listen to her today:
In my twenties I was lucky to observe two terrific dads - my wife's, and my brother. But that was my twenties, growing up I had zero male role models. I didn't have a dad, and I can only recall one male school teacher (Lawton Elementary's sixth grade teacher, Mr. Crel) who had an impact on my upbringing in a positive way. As a teenager, my peers spoke of any possibility of becoming a father with derision and fear. If I knew someone who had a dad, he or she wasn't happy about it.
I had to learn about fatherhood through entertainment media. Older stuff like "Happy Days" and "The Brady Bunch" seemed out of whack with reality. Most entertainment of my era (the 80s) presented fathers as the dumb or broken players in any family ("Married With Children" anybody?). Shit, take a look at any entertainment media of today. Is it any different?
I'm lucky I had Mr. Rogers when I did, before I grew into the hard, cynical teenager I was.
Cynicism that's been wearing away from me as I get older. A process that's speed up considerably as I've been blessed with fatherhood. With Emma.
I thought I knew so much. I thought I had felt all there is to feel.
And then I saw her face. And held her in my arms. And heard her laugh. And heard her say "daddy". And watched her hug her mommy. And watched her crawl for the first time. And saw her stand up and take her first steps. And cringed when she fell on her face, and looked for our reaction (which we shifted very, very fast to supporting), and smiled and got back up. And heard her yell when her grandpop and grandmom visit. And saw her snuggle with her Elmo and Philly Phanatic dolls. And watched her rip into her bookshelf, sit down in a pile of books, and paged through them one by one. And heard her laugh the hardest laugh you've ever heard when Zena was rolling over and running on by. And was able to look at my wife's face, and share these moments with her.
So when Elmer Smith in the Daily News says we need to speak out about the joys of fatherhood, in the following, it sounds like truth to me.
...Plain truth is that most men have never learned to talk about being fathers. Somehow it always ends up sounding like signing up for the draft.
That's a man thing. I've heard men who have been happily married for 30 years make it sound like they're being held hostage. We rarely talk about our children the way mothers do.
Women talk about their children and it makes you think everybody ought to have one. Men make it sound like something that happens when you're not careful.
It's a tougher sell for a lot of young men today than it was for me. They see more baby's daddies than custodial fathers. Marriage comes later, if at all.
The men I grew up around and paid attention to were all fathers. They were the most respected men in my world. If they showed up at a parent-teacher night at school, teachers couldn't wait to talk with them.
By the time I became a man, I wanted to be a father. But I didn't want it for my yet-to-be-born child. I wanted it for me.
We can tell that story. If we're going to arrest a trend that threatens to destroy the fabric of life in our communities, we must tell that story.
Young men don't just need to hear what's going to happen to their children if they're not there to raise them. They need to hear what it feels like to teach their sons how to ride a bike or catch a ball.
They need to know that no one, not even a mother, can make their daughters feel desirable and worthy of being loved the way they can.
They need to know there is nothing you can shoot up or snort up or rub on that can match the feeling you get when you see your child starting to walk like you or talk the way you do.
A lot of us have had moments like that, defining moments. That's what we get out of being fathers.
Kay Miller is one of the first five Philadelphia recipients of free laptops provided by Impact Services Corp in their welfare to work program. Impact Services provided me the tutoring I needed to get my G.E.D., and I am forever thankful for the time I spent with them.
Laptops and low cost Wi-fi can make a difference in the lives of the working poor. The Web provides access to information and resources that are not easy to find otherwise - especially with the crush of time you suffer when working multiple jobs and possibly having to take care of a family simultaneously.
While there is far too much digital utopianism sprouted by some, it's important to remember just how empowering the Web can be.
I say this from direct, measurable, personal experience.
Five welfare-to-work women in West Kensington just became the first city residents to earn free laptops and Internet service from Wireless Philadelphia, the mission of which is to connect low-income workers to the Web so they can get better jobs and provide better lives for their families.
The five women represent the tiny start of Wireless Philadelphia's citywide dream.
...Gathered at Impact Services Corp., the welfare-to-work agency on Allegheny Avenue near 19th Street where they earned their wireless bundles by holding a steady job for a year, the five women are the first to receive a high-tech makeover that Wireless Philadelphia hopes to give to 500 low-income workers by year's end, thousands in years to come.
"Access to information is access to opportunity," said CEO Greg H. Goldman while Chief Operations Officer Agnes Ogletree's eyes welled up at finally seeing three years of plans realized.
I posted an editorial, from a deeply personal perspective, about being uninsured and health care to Philly Future and Young Philly Politics. There's a bit about me in there you might not know about.
We gotta speak out sometimes. And sometimes that requires sharing parts of ourselves we may not want to.
I gotta get my guts back.
Here is the post for you:
Hello,
This is a difficult piece to share, and is a bit out of the norm for me, so apologies if it rambles a bit.
A few months ago, on my way home from a physical rehabilitation session for my herniated disk and spondylolisthesis, I fell down some steps on the way to the Regional Rail and fractured my right foot.
All of the next day, especially upon learning that the fracture was minor, I laughed at my predicament. The irony of it. Oh I was in pain, be sure of that. A whole hell-a-lot of it. I still am. But I could laugh because just over ten years earlier, I would not have had health insurance - and my situation would be considerably more dire.
Dan Urevivk-Ackelsberg of Young Philly Politics has asked me to share with you some of my personal experience with being uninsured.
My name is Karl Martino. A few of you know me as Co-Host of Philly Future. Philly Future isn't designed to pay it's bills, it's a labor of love, so by day I work as a software engineer for a great employer, where I have health insurance as a benefit.
As I mentioned, just a short time ago, I would not be looking at my predicament and be considering myself so blessed. I was working a string of part time jobs, that either did not offer benefits, or gave benefits to those who worked full-time. A status reached when you worked a number of weeks in a row 36 hours or more. Employers would never let me work the required hours for those number of weeks straight. This kept benefits tantalizingly out of reach. It went like this for approximately six years.
Six years without a dental visit. Six years where the emergency room would be my source of primary care. Six years between the day I was thrown out of my mother's home and had worked my way to a place that could be considered "middle-class".
As a teenager, I made the difficult decision to quit High School and find work. My home situation was tenuous and I did not know if I would have a home to sleep in one day from the next. Making this decision put me out of the reach of counselors or advisers. I had no one I could talk to I felt could help. And one day, in my late teens, I did find myself looking for a place to keep warm and get rest.
It was the 90s. It seems so long ago now, and it is hard to recall, but it was a time of great opportunity. A time where employers, unburdened with the environment of fear we live in today, might take a chance on a hard worker and help that person get a leg up. An environment where millions of people could succeed in their struggle against the cycle of poverty. So that's the route I went - I taught myself software engineering and built a career.
Looking back, I realize how truly blessed I was. I had no serious health issues to address. I had no family to take care of. If I had either, I could not consume myself with my work as I did. How do single mothers and single fathers, fighting every day at jobs that barely pay the bills do it? Their choices are far more stark then mine ever were.
It's difficult to speak about my past, but I recognize I have a responsibility to my community to do so.
Responsibility is a tricky word. We live in an age of 'me', where our responsibilities to each other have been subsumed by those responsibilities have to ourselves.
Governor Rendell's health care plan may offer us an opportunity.
An opportunity to insure that no child need go without a preventive medical visit and end up in a costly emergency room visit. An opportunity to make our state an example that others will want to follow, one that will make us more attractive to employers and home makers alike. An opportunity to insure that working class people, people that want to provide a healthy home for their families, people that want to climb up the ladder of our American dream, have the tools to do so.
We have an opportunity, an opportunity to live up to our responsibility to each other.
- Karl Martino
PS - This post points to some reasons why I haven't been active on the web and in the community as of late. My apologies to everyone.
In a post a couple weeks ago I mentioned that David Shenk in his book "Data Smog" should have put down Law 13 of Data Smog to be "Cyberspace is Libertarian" instead of "Cyberspace is Republican". He stopped by and posted a comment - I didn't realize this - but in the paperback, he had made that change.
The moment the writers of the Gospels set down the words of Jesus they began to kill the message. There is no room for prophets within religious institutions - indeed within any institutions - for as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets. Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority. Samuel Beckett's voice is one of modernity's most authentically religious. Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist. He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves. He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom.
A thought to ponder for the day. (actually a few...)
I made a few important edits to my post yesterday. Added links that gave context. Removed a typo here and there. Did you notice?
Well that's your fault you see. You're not media literate.
You are expected to revisit my posts to see edits and updates. As a good host, I should indicate my edits in one fashion or another (which I didn't do).
Very, very related if you want to see the societal shift this is part of: BusinessWeek: "I Want My Safety Net".
We are shifting risk from institutions, the producers of things, to the consumers of things.
The expectation is that since we are all now producers, we must individually keep BS meters up and running at all times, otherwise, it's our own damn fault if we get fooled by something.
While people point to blogs as the primary purveyors of this kind of thought, in actuality, it seems prevalent in all forms of media.
...saying the answer to the crisis in journalism today is "better media literacy" is like saying the answer to the crisis in education is "better learning skills."
He says this sarcastically but the redistribution of risk is a trend in everything from the food we give our dogs, to the education we give our children, from what we expect from our government (just re-look at Katrina), to the relationships we have with our neighbors.
The lesson - keep your guard up. You are on your own. Trust nothing and no one except yourself.
Good or bad? You decide.
The title of this post refers to a "law of data smog" in David Shenk's terrific book, "Data Smog". He was referring to the libertarian impulse that was prevalent in the late 90s Republican movement. He should have said "Cyberspace is Libertarian" and it would have been timeless.
Update:David Shenk posts a comment in this post's thread that in the paperback version of "Data Smog" he put down Law 13 of Data Smog to be "Cyberspace is Libertarian" instead of "Cyberspace is Republican"!
...The fire that incinerated the North Philadelphia rowhouse had begun in the basement, probably ignited by someone cooking crack. The house was inhabited at the time by Blakeley's father, a man who had climbed high and fallen fast.
"My mother was very blunt," Cooper remembers. "She said, 'This is what drugs will do to you. You want to throw your life away? This is the end result.' "
Cooper, then 5, was so impressed he made a vow: "I will be better than my father."
In the years that followed, it became his mantra, especially in times of stress and discouragement. "It became the sole motivating force in all I did," Cooper says.
Today, Cooper, 30, is a senior information technology engineer at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals in Frazer, Chester County. His job is to devise code that enables computer systems to talk to each other. In night school at Wharton, he's taking business courses and he plans to pursue an MBA.
But it could all have turned out so differently.
"I grew up on the same streets where murders have occurred," he says. "But I was able to steer clear of that because I had people who had my best interests at heart and were willing to show me another way."
How Cooper traveled from where he came from to where he is now is a testament to his innate drive and motivation, to that amalgam of traits and values we call "character." But, as Cooper readily admits, he benefited also from family - in his case, a determined and dedicated single mother, and a civic-minded elderly couple who mentored and supported him.
You may have read my blog about my concerns around technology. At the same time, I also believe that if you are conscious and committed and vigilant about how you use it, technology can be a huge enabler for helping make a difference in people's lives. That was actually one of the key reasons I chose computers as a career path when I first started in the mid-eighties.
Even the regional online community I help host, Philly Future has little posted.
Philadelphia's larger community of aggregated local bloggers are talking, but maybe not with each other, and mostly to their own independent communities.
You would think the obscene loss of life in our city would merit a few links, a few mentions, a few drops of interest.
But no. Not a whit. It doesn't register. It doesn't rank.
You could argue that there has been no 'defining event' to draw interest - like a mass murder.
Or that the national mainstream media (damn I hate that term) has largely ignored it as well.
But those excuses don't detract from the fact that what's happening here - and elsewhere in other urban centers across this nation - is news.
And that for some reason - our current social media environment - just looks the other way.
Mathew Ingram, when looking at Pew's latest research on who is using participatory media, wonders if the Web is half full or half empty? Greg Searling at search engine land and Jordan McCollum answer, although not as bluntly as I.
We have a long way to go.
A long way to go for those who are weak and powerless to be given a voice here.
A long way to go for those who have no influence a representation here.
A long way to go for those who have no visibility a means to communicate their importance here.
A long way to go for the news that affects our *daily* lives, the kind that percolates slowly, needs context to be understood, and is about subject matter we may not care to know about, but should, to be produced and distributed here.
This may lead to a place that elites find so distasteful, so raw, so low brow, so mundane and reflective of *all* of human society, they go off to establish something shiny and new.
IN THE BIBLICAL Book of Job, the anguished hero is visited by three friends who attempt to comfort him by drawing airy and sententious lessons from his agonies. Of course, they end up adding to his troubles; Job endures not only the real pains of grief and sickness but the indignity of having his suffering milked for rhetorical effect.
If only it were true that Monday's mass murder on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was the kind of tragedy that moves us to quiet reflection. In fact, the shootings that killed more than 30 people and wounded nearly 30 others occasioned a blizzard of hasty conclusions, instant position-taking and the rehashing of old arguments. For the sake of the dead, for the sake of the living, and even for the sake of honoring this grim milestone — the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — we should remember that there are times when silence is the best response.
Events like these are almost impossible to react to sanely. A group of people you don't know have been killed in a senseless crime. Too young to have established much of a past, they've been robbed of present and future; the weight of the offense, the rotten meaninglessness of it, makes it awkward not to have something to say.
So the ghastly death toll — perhaps inflicted by one man with a pair of semiautomatic handguns — becomes an obvious argument for enhanced gun control. Or, conversely, for the right to bear arms because Virginia Tech is a "gun-free zone," and the Virginia Legislature last year killed a bill that would have allowed students to carry guns on campus.
For those who support universities' in loco parentis functions, the school's apparently unconscionable delay in alerting the student body to the presence of a gunman on campus is at the heart of the tragedy. Then there's the male-violence angle, supported by a shooter's apparent rage at an ex-girlfriend. Most pernicious of all, perhaps, is the request to put the matter "into perspective."
"I have heard many such things," Job says. "Miserable comforters are ye all." No newspaper is in a position to criticize anybody for capitalizing on tragedy or taking convenient positions. There will be time for both in the days to come. But now is a time to respect, quietly, the tears and the pain of this terrible event.
The push to have blogs adopt a 'Code of Conduct', including content warnings for visitors, reminds me of the P.M.R.C. and the "Warning, Explicit Content" stickers that are smacked on on just about every album worthy to buy.
I wonder what Frank Zappa would have to say?
Watch the whole Frank Zappa video. Then read Tim O'Reilly's post and comments about the proposed 'Code of Conduct'. Then revisit the conversation taking place about it (more links later). The overtones are there.
Question... where can I find the blogosphere equivalent of the "Filthy Fifteen" so I can subscribe to their RSS feeds?
Update: Frank Paynter has a way forward that sounds right to me - and I think it can still be effective.
Jeff Jarvis: No twinkie badges here.; "This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone - they'll do us the favor - can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But as Doc Searls has taught me, it's not. It's a place.
Shelley Powers: badges: I've seen as many vicious comments in men's weblogs, as I've seen in women's. I think the perceived 'threat to all women' supposedly inherent in weblogging has been exaggerated-not to our benefit, either.
Boing Boing: Blogger "code of conduct" trades freedom for politeness: Tim O'Reilly's well-intentioned Blogger Code of Conduct is an attempt to come up with a voluntary set of behavioural norms that will keep blogs civil and honest. However, I was very uncomfortable with Tim's draft, as it seemed to preclude real anonymity and invite censorship.
Dan Gillmor: In Blogosphere, Honor Should Rule: They're creating a bit of a monster, as they discuss asking people to put logos on their work defining various categories of behavior. Who'd be the judge of it? The government? Libel lawyers? Uh, oh.
Nicholas Carr: Thanks, Tim and Jimbo!: In the future, blogs that can safely be ignored will be marked with a cute little badge..
Dave Winer: O'Reilly's code of conduct: We all seem to be speaking with one voice today, this code of conduct idea is not a good one.
Robert Scoble: Code of conduct or not?: So, for now, I guess I'd have to wear the "anything goes" badge.
Seth Finkelstein: "Blogging Code of Conduct" - WHO ENFORCES IT?: I am simply shouting to the wind here out of frustration with the failure of blogging to provide any defense whatsoever: WHO ENFORCES THE CODE-OF-CONDUCT?
TNL.net: Blogger's Code of Conduct: a Dissection: Because of such lapses and because I believe that "the interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship," I have to say that this code is not only a bad idea but one that should strenuously be rejected by members of the blogosphere.
"I think I'm still very concerned that saying you take responsibility for the comments on your blog means you actually take *legal* responsibility for them.
The only people who can take such responsibility are those with time on their hands - with money and resources.
Which leads to thinking that only those with money should enable comments on their blog.
Maybe I'm the only one concerned about this angle because I'm the rare exception of someone still in touch with poverty and being poor and folks that aren't tech savy - in this discussion mainly filled with technologists and such.
I'm sorry but that and the addition of the badges make this feel like a form of self-segregation - just another way of identifying 'us' against whomever 'them' is.
Aggregators will be able to use such badging to further filter the Web, keeping other voices from its edges from being heard.
Having commenting policies makes a ton of sense. That's obvious. But what this is evolving into....
I'm sorry, IMHO it's reactive and needs a re-think."
The past few days there seems an opening in the ongoing conversation talking place about speaker lists at tech conferences and their lack of diversity. A subject Shelley Powers has rightly brought up to various of promoters and organizers of conferences to their regular dismay.
Take some time and read around:
Eric Meyer: Diverse It Gets: In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don't feel that I have anything to address next time around. What's important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That's it.
Shelley Powers: Diversity isn't important...and neither are standards or accessibility: Maybe I've been weblogging too long, but it seems to me that a lot of people are doing a lot of crap in the name of 'marketability'. If you want to be self-serving jerks, that's fine with me, but at least be honest about it: don't wrap it in 'marketability' and think it noble.
Kottke: Gender diversity at web conferences: From this list, it seems to me that either the above concerns are not getting through to conference organizers or that gender diversity doesn't matter as much to conference organizers as they publicly say it does.
Dori Smith: Gender diversity at web conferences: The number of conferences I'm currently scheduled to speak at this year about JavaScript/Ajax is the same as the number of conferences that have asked me to speak - zero. So I have to say that no, these folks aren't even trying.
Anil Dash: The Old Boys Club is for Losers: Those of you who are defending this status quo are defending a culture of failure.
Rafe Colburn : Women and men: Diversity is a worthwhile end unto itself.
Sometimes it requires a series of kicks in the ass to move things forward. As things stand - if tech conferences are a reflection of the Web industry (see Kottke's post for some figures) - then the Web industry is *exclusive* rather than inclusive. A reflection of society's status quo. Vint Cerf, might agree.
Aren't we collectively building an architecture of participation? Our face to face gatherings should mirror that. And if they don't - then they reveal who we truly care about - don't they?
Anil Dash: The Essentials of Web 2.0 Your Event Doesn't Cover: To conference organizers: If you haven't heard of these people or their work, or you think that Yet Another Bookmarking To-Do List Guy is more important, perhaps you owe some refunds.
Shelley Powers: Progress: Consider this: every time this topic comes up, about women in the industry and women in tech conferences, who are the people who get the most links? The most attention? The most respect? Who appear in Techmeme, Tailrank, and Megite? Kottke, Dash, Myer, Messino, Scoble, Searls, Winer-do you see something odd about this? Regardless of how many women write on this, it's the men who get the attention. I'd say if we want to look at what's 'wrong', we start right here.
And with that last insightful quote, human aggregator Karl is ummm... going to spend time with his daughter now. Shelley has a point - a few glances at various aggregators pretty much bore it out today - and all I could think - being the guy I am - is how sadly ironic it was.
Update: More Links
Troutgirl: The gender of conference speakers: With one exception, technical (or tech-biz) conference organizers do NOTHING proactive to seek out or push for female speakers -- and I wish they would just stop claiming that they do. I am a long-time LAMP dev and author, a founding member of Dojo, leader of a Comet project, a proven scaler of graph-based systems, CTO of a venture-backed Web 2.0 company, vocal proponent of women in tech, experienced speaker at technical conferences, and friends with many of the people who program talks, panels, and tracks. If I'm not being proactively sought out to speak, I can be confident few other women are either.
He's going to jail, and there are calls to put him to death. Yet the blogosphere, the Tech blogosphere, the Left blogosphere, and most of the Right, just don't seem to care. Boing Boing has extensive linkage about Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer, and what he faces, for sharing thoughts about political oppression, discrimination against women, and more on his blog. Much more at Free Kareem!.
Update: Global Voices has a post sharing other Egyptian bloggers speaking out. via Ed Cone.
I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." The world must hear this. I pray to God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.
I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.
It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.
Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together.
The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.
This is where we are. "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind," and the best way to start is to put an end to war in Vietnam, because if it continues, we will inevitably come to the point of confronting China which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation.
It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
It was a terrific day for democracy wasn't it? When I look out and about on the web and in the media however, I find some real nasty spinning, everyone pointing fingers and claiming it was some slice of the populace that made a difference. Counting upon who you read it's the progressives, the liberals, the middle class, the independents, the disgruntled Republicans who didn't vote, the evangelicals who went back to the Democratic party, even Lou Dobbs Democrats.
I think a few things are clear:
1. The Neo-Cons are ummm... toast. Rummy resigning yesterday and Dubya's ever growing ties with earlier Republican administration officials (in particular his father's - an old fashioned conservative if there ever was one) are sure signs that Neo-Con ideology is being ejected from this Administration, just as its proponents distance themselves from it. Can the damage they've wrought be repaired anytime soon?
2. Karl Rove isn't the genius everyone makes him out to be. Wedge issues suddenly were being thrown as election day approached, and it wasn't enough to turn the tide of public sentiment. This time.
3. If the margin is wide enough - the vote can't be stolen.
4. With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The web empowered thousands of people to become watchdogs, that had to have some kind of effect. That isn't to say that folks shouldn't take the eye off the ball when it comes to voting machines and the voting infrastructure. There were troubling signs across election day.
5. The web is now established as an environment you MUST campaign in. It has empowered both politicians to get their message to audiences before not reached, routing around news media filters (via YouTube and other participatory media), and it has empowered citizens to organize, fundraise, and be heard as never before (via the same).
6. TV commercials got nuts this year, didn't they? I was waiting for a candidate to accuse their opponent of eating children. When the analysis comes in, I bet there will be a realization it was money spent that had little to no effect.
7. A diverse coalition of people came together for a moment to say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH - and the American people spoke.
When you hear pundits and politicians berating the 'other side' as the cause of all this country's problems, consider that we've had one party rule of the three branches of our government for some time now.
Ask yourself, where has it gotten us? One party in power. The other with no capacity to contribute but scream from the peanut gallery. There's no accountability, no oversight.
Our governmental system works best with checks and balances.
One party rule, for as long as we've had it, has left us in a state that serves only to re-elect those already in office, and for them to gather more power as a matter of course.
There's no question that this is the most corrupt Congress ever. It serves only to rubber stamp anything the Administration puts its way.
That’s not the way the founders of this country intended it. And it needs to stop now.
I'm voting straight Democrat on Tuesday. That's not something I typically would endorse. But we live in a time where our government no longer answers to its people. That has to change.
While I'm not one to throw around conspiracy theories, there's a good deal of early evidence that would lead one to expect plenty of voting problems on Tuesday. It's going to be up to all of us to keep an eye out and and spread word when or if that happens.
Craig Newmark doesn't plan to cash in on the current tech media bubble: "We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they're not any the happier. They also need bodyguards."
Seth Finkelstein in the Guardian writes why you might not want a Wikipedia piece on yourself. Leads me to comment on his blog, "I feel craven and souless - but I *want* someone to care about what I've done so much as to contribute to Wikipedia article on me and Philly Future. But I'm not *notable*. Just an average Joe. And as some would say (Ben Franklin I believe) - I guess I haven't done anything worthy of being written about yet."
Newsvine plans to expand into local news coverage according to Mike Davidson in a thread at paid Content having to do with the economics of local news coverage and an interesting article at The Seattle Times on Citizen Journalism.
Does Bob Woodward have enough juice left to influence the debate on Iraq? Or will his book be looked at as just another partisan hit job (ridiculous considering the other books he's published painting Bush in a positive light)? Do facts matter anymore? Or is all that matters in this post-modern me-media age is our own points of view?
I'm starting to see technologists waking up to the political situation in the country now. About time. Lets ask ourselves, in this age of uber-connectivity and communications tools - why are we growing ever more divided, and ever more frightened?
Jay Rosen is taking questions about Citizen Journalism at Slashdot.
Remember that Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it easily accessible. That ought to be the core goal of any Media 2.0 business, because that's where the eyeballs and the money will be. We can either be contributors to the knowledge/information base by supplying content (the expensive end of the value chain), be the aggregator of local the local knowledge/information base, or we can do both. Let's see, hmm. Which path should we take?
Hitwise opens up to reveal some interesting information from its datacenter. Look at the market share the top 25 have. It strikes me that it is so... small. Think about it.
Google Reader, Google's RSS personal aggregator, upgrades. Its new functionality and UI are good enough to provide Bloglines with its first real challenger, as far as I'm concerned. I think I'm switching.
Jeff Jarvis gets on ABC with a clever piece about participatory media.
By Karl on September 29, 2006 6:52 AM
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FDR: Oh, I'm sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we're coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How's that going to feel?
CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We'll be in the pub, flipping you off. I'm slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I'm sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.
JFK: You're going to put nukes where? I don't fucking think so.
REAGAN: Okay commrade, you've gone and built enough nuclear weapons to radiate the world. You have spies stealing state secrets and minions spreading ideology from one continent to the next. But. ummm, I'm sorry red, you still don't get it. You're the evil empire but that doesn't scare us, we have faith in our system of government, in our people. Sit down with us - negotiate - or show the world the coward you are. Don't even think of attacking us. Put down your guns. Wage peace while you have the chance. Tear down this wall.
US. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike ... NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!
WE GOTTA PUT UP SOME WALLS! HURRY! Anything that stands in our way is pre-9/11 thinking, including that document interpreted by activist judges (I think that's called the Constitution, damned liberals).
Politics is an on again, off again subject here, but like Rafe, I found I couldn't help myself. "How can people not get it?" I don't know man. I don't know.
By Karl on September 28, 2006 7:46 AM
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I can't help but begin to think my generation, and the boomer generation that has preceded it, has failed our children, and their children. We build castles in the sky while our foundations beneath our feet become quicksand.
For all our connective technology, are we going to leave the world less free, more uncertain, and divided unlike ever before?
Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error.
These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:
Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.
The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.
Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.
Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.
Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.
Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.
Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.
•There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.
We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.
They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
It's not too late to call. Susie Madrak has some instructions for who and how and Matt Stoller at MyDD has some political analysis of the fallout here.
My 6th grade teacher, Mr. Crell, had a yearly tradition where he'd produce a video, by his students, for the entire school. A play or short story would be chosen that his class would act out and he would direct. My class got the educational experience of putting together a production of a Twilight Zone episode titled "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street".
After watching the original, we had a discussion over some of its themes, how they might apply in our lives, and they reflected on our country's history. The take away was that fear and paranoia were dangerous, and could be used to manipulate us. I had the honor of playing Rod Serling. Honestly, I probably got the part because I didn't want to be on camera all that much, and I spoke very clear and deliberate back then, in an effort to overcome a speech impediment.
Like Pax it was a small pleasure hearing it referenced in one of Keith Olbermann's commentaries last week. This one, particularly impassioned, having to do with 9/11's fifth anniversary. It fit well. Sadly.
If you haven't watched yet, well just take a few minutes.
Your memory plays tricks on you. It can be so selective. What one remembers, another experiencing the same event, might recall entirely different. For me, well it seems I've already forgotten so much of my past.
But the morning of 9/11, and the following two weeks remain so crystal clear. For me, for my wife, for anyone who I've talked to. The horror, the anger, the realization that life can change in an instant, no matter how many layers of denial we attempt to hide behind.
How many of us swore to change our lives in those following weeks? Resolve to be better citizens? Better family members? Better friends? I did. I know you did.
For many, that day prompted reaching out. Connecting. Making contact. It would emerge as the moment that gave birth to blogging. In the seemingly spontaneous outpouring of grief, anger, support and viewpoint, thousands poured their hearts and souls into this social space of spaces.
That 15th I went to confession. Not knowing that later that day my nephew would pass from S.I.D.S.. I had asked my priest, what should I do? How should I help? I was ready to get in a car and drive to New York City. He told me to stop and think. Be a good husband. Be a good brother. Be a good uncle. Be present and be there for them. The absolute tear in our hearts that would happen that afternoon made clear to me that I needed to withdraw from the web. Shutter Philly Future. Hunter was just three months old when he left us. I didn't get a chance to know him. And that was my fault.
Besides, the web was *already* an integral part of my life. I had put so much of myself into my work, into this, I felt I had to take five steps back to find my footing.
In some ways, the change was for naught. Some moved away. Others disappeared into online gaming. A mailing list of close friends imploaded under personal attacks brought about by political differences that couldn't be bridged. And here I am, back on the web, participating even more then I did prior to 9/11. I guess it's part of who I am. And I guess that's life, it goes on. But I'm still left every day with the question - is this making a difference?
What will Emma, my daughter, think of it all one day?
I'm mirroring The World Mourns here at paradox1x, since its 30 or so pages remind me so vividly of the spirit that rose in the horror of 9/11. A spirit that united the world, in interconnectedness, that lasted until the lead up to the Iraq war.
To me, if anything, it is what needs to be reminded of that day, and of the following days. In the face of so much evil, humanity has the potential to find common ground, to rise above differences, in goals, in minds, in deeds, and in hearts.
Our leadership has failed to bring to justice those that attacked us on 9/11. Instead of encouraging discourse and conversation, optimism and vision, it has encouraged fear and silence. And we're playing our parts. All too well. Forgotten is that opportunity. That hope.
Our children are watching our example. What are we are teaching? What are we are leaving behind?
An American businessman, traveling in India when the planes struck the towers, made his way back to the U.S. the following week as quickly as he could. That meant hopscotching across the Middle East, stopping in Athens overnight to change planes. He spent the evening having supper in a local taverna. No one else in the restaurant spoke English, but when the owner realized he had an American in the house just two nights after 9/11, he asked his guest to stand up, face the other diners and listen to a toast.
And indeed, the entire room stood up, raised their glasses and said, as one, "Shoulder to shoulder, until justice is done."
Five years later, after an invasion of Afghanistan and an occupation of Iraq, and amid talk of war with Iran, it is fair to ask:
Would they say it again tonight?
Would we say it to one another?
This has become the loss with no grave, no chance for mourning, because we still live it every day--the loss of that transcendent unity, global goodwill, common purpose born of righteous anger that wrapped us like a bandage those first months after the attacks: a President with a 90% approval rating, a Congress working as one, expressions of sympathy and offers of help from every corner of the planet. WE ARE ALL AMERICANS, said Le Monde.
That unity was never going to last.
...In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion. And yet five years later, more than two-thirds of Americans say they are unhappy with how things are going--exactly the opposite of the weeks after the attacks, when people were crushed, but hopeful. We saw back then what we were capable of at our best, and now find ourselves just moving on, willing to listen to our leaders but not necessarily believe them, supporting the troops but disputing their mission, waiting, more resigned than resolved, for the next twist in the plot.
The folks at ABC are screening comments and mine looks to not appear on their "Path to 9/11" blog. I assure you I posted nothing offensive. It was a pointed question. I guess too pointed. Later I might be able to dig up the comment and post it here.
The more I've read about this "docudrama" the more concern I've felt. While it looks like the findings of the 9/11 Commission need to get out further, as the movie's producers claim this to do, they also admit it is a work of fiction. A work of fiction that lays blame, scorn, and according to those who have written the commision report and were actors in the events, falsehoods, on the Clinton Administration.
There is a good thread on Metafilter. Editor & Publisher has a summary of the film here. And the Washington Post reports here. And lastly, a petition over at Think Progress.
I've long thought that this was the case and talked of it in conversation with friends and family. Wouldn't dare post it online because it comes close to conspiracy talk and I don't fancy myself as some kind of expert or pundit. But now it looks like this is seeing daylight.
Democrats should increase the call for answers as to why Bin Laden hasn't been captured or killed yet. Or why those that *currently* harbor his organization have not been touched.
Watch close over the next few days folks. Either this blows up into a political storm, and Bin Laden is finally - finally - taken out. Or the reality of it will get twisted and turned in the news, and it will get downed out, in the ceaseless din of our media-rich days.
We took resources away from the Afghanistan effort, an effort that every American across the country supported, that would have resulted in Osama's head on a stick, to pursue a theory in transforming the Middle East. A theory!
The evil bastards that attacked us on 9/11 go on, taunting, threatening, while our leadership used the resources of this country to pursue an adventure in nation building. To the tune of thousands dead, and our enemies still roaming this good Earth.
As a friend told me, "We found a potential child molesting murderer Thailand. If we could do that, finding Osama should be as easy as finding mouse ears in Disneyland."
Here we are. We look weaker, shakier, and more threatening, in the eyes of the world. A world that, many forget, stood with us after 9/11 (re-watch those photos).
I'm a natural optimist and believe that people can do anything they set their minds to. It's part of my make up. But the world grows crazier by the day. No voices calling for peace. No leaders with a vision to get us there.
Update: Removed my disclaimer. I think most on the Left agree with this opinion, and that more than a few folks on the Right are waking up. Take a look at Memeorandum.
The world owes AOL a big thanks for its data privacy breach because it�s becoming clear that nothing you do on the Internet is anonymous, a basic fact of the digital era that few people really understand. The New York Times has two worthwhile pieces today on the issue of Internet privacy, the first of which provides practical advice on how to keep your net activities private.
It's not your IP address that identifies you. Tools like those mentioned in "How to Digitally Hide" only help so much. It's what you share. No matter how anonymous you think you may be.
Possibly now, a real discussion can take place about our new social realm, what danah boyd calls "the super public", one that remembers everything, for everyone, for all of time:
...Persistence, searchability, the collapse of distance and time, copyability... These are not factors that most everyday people consider when living unmediated lives. Yet, they are increasingly becoming normative in society. Throughout the 20th century, mass media forced journalists and "public" figures to come to terms with this, but digital structures force everyone to do so. People's notion of public radically changes when they have to account for the Kenyan farmer, their lurking boss, and the person who will access their speech months from now. People's idea of a public is traditionally bounded by space, time and audience - the park is a public that people understand. And, yet, this is all being disrupted.
Chris touched on something big in his post on today's primary in Connecticut - today will be a test of how well the web works to shorten the distance between someone who is selling something, in this case a politician, and consumers/participants, in this case voters. The Ned Lamont campaign's use of viral marketing (Internet campaigning), while suffering some faults and trip-ups as any political campaign does, should be looked at as a case study in how to connect people to causes they care about and generating buzz.
Last year I had no idea who Ned Lamont was. And if it wasn't for the web - I doubt few in Philadelphia would be so concerned, let alone the entire country. But here we are. Think about it.
So let the talk of partisanship and division wash over you for a second. Partisanship and division in politics and within political parties isn't all that new is it?
What *is* new (well at least was long missing) and is very, very heartening, is the infectious enthusiasm and growth of a politically aware and involved public.
Lieberman stood for something once upon a time. Whatever it was he stood for, though, was lost in the 9/11 attacks. He lost his perspective, and now he�s lost the race. Running as an independent, as he has threatened, just shows that he�s about to lose the one thing left: his dignity.
On the other hand, the �people� weren�t entirely the winners, as has been proclaimed. The Lieberman challenger, Lamont, may have made effective use of the grassroots to run his compaign, but he also made a great deal of use of his personal wealth. He wasn�t exactly one of the little people.
Still, hopefully this will shake up the Dems enough to force the party into something other than Republican Light.
I'd say it's dead Mathew. And that most folks just don't realize it unless it personally impacts them.
Case in point, this article in CNet has it all wrong on how to protect yourself. It's not your IP address that gives you away. No amount of cloaking can help you when it's what you type that identifies you. As this NYTimes article proves.
Oh, and want to unlock your kid's profile on MySpace, there's a way now.
As Mr. Edelson, of Stealth Ideas says, It's not like you�re stealing a key out of their drawer and reading their diary,� says Mr. Edelson. �This is public information."
That's the way a whole lot of people and organizations seem to feel about the information we unknowingly devulge everyday.
According to to Pew's latest study, "Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers", "Bloggers are about as likely as the general internet population to pursue non-partisan news sources. Forty-five percent of bloggers (and 50% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that do not have a particular political point of view. Twenty-four percent of bloggers (and 18% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that challenge their political point of view. Eighteen percent of bloggers (and 22% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that share their political point of view.".
That's interesting since linking patterns of fellow bloggers suggest otherwise. But maybe, just maybe, folks are reading what they are not linking to.
One place to get exposed to new and different conversations and discussions is Global Voices Online. It's a Philly Future style service that "seeks to amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online - with a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe. We are committed to developing tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices everywhere to be heard.". Sounds a lot like our mission.
It's a great service, one I wish there were more emulating, but the business model might not be there and that maybe why we see so few try.
Having the possibility to open our minds so simply, by just a few clicks, is a large part of what the web offers that excites me so much. Of course, the web can help us hear other points of view, in the end it may not change how we listen. We still need to click, even if we don't link. The great thing is that according to Pew, we do. Let's hope they are right.
Read Will Bunch's terrific post for a breath of fresh air:
...The Democrat's positions are very much in the majority -- a new kind of "silent majority" that leans to center-left as opposed to Nixon's center-right grouping.
They are not the people posting multiple diaries on blogs like Daily Kos, or obsessing over the latest doings inside the Beltway -- as you probably do if you're reading this. They're too busy making a modest living.
They are, instead, the people that we see so often when TV or radio tries some rare "man on the street" reporting -- bashing the war in Iraq or asking the government to stay out of their bedroom, and occasionally getting funny looks from reporters who fail to realize just how "mainstream" these points of view actually are.
They are cab drivers and nurses, waitresses and insurance agents. They don't read blogs but most of them vote -- and so it's why the Democrats got the most ballots for president in 1992, 1996, and 2000, and came within an eyelash of ousting "a war president" in 2004.
The things that this "silent majority" believes may not boil down easily to a single word or a short soundbite, but they are common sense ideals, and truly American. And so they believe in family values and probably in a God as well, but not in the government intruding on their private lives, let along reading their emails. They believe in a strong defense, but not in wars that America starts first. They believe in free-market capitalism, as long as rich people pay their fair share and the environment is protected.
True, in many ways they are a different "silent majority" from the one that elected Richard Nixon in 1968. Times have changed. America is both more diverse and -- Lou Dobbs and his noisy minority of fanatics notwithstanding -- tolerates more diversity.
And so they are all around you, and yet this "silent majority" is able to hide in plain sight, not just from the news media but even from the leaders of the Democratic Party, the partisans who would seem best positioned to represent them in D.C.
And so we watch a Democratic Party that is splitting itself in two, arguing what's the real message and what's the best way to woo over a mass of people who might very well tell you -- if you would just listen -- that "you had me at 'hello.'" And we guess there will always be debates over strategy and tactics -- that's why consultants and even a few bloggers get paid the big bucks.
But at the end of the day, should it really be hard for a Democrat like Sherrod Brown to win in 2006?
Everyone should just stop yelling for a moment...and listen to your silent majority.
If you are pro-life, then it's this that should concern you: CNN.com:
American babies are three times more likely to die in their first month as children born in Japan, and newborn mortality is 2.5 times higher in the United States than in Finland, Iceland or Norway.
...The "Mothers' Index" in the report ranks 125 nations according to 10 gauges of well-being -- six for mothers and four for children -- including objective measures such as lifetime mortality risk for mothers and infant mortality rate and subjective measures such as the political status of women.
Charles MacCormack, president and CEO of Save the Children, said the report card "illustrates the direct line between the status of mothers and the status of their children."
"In countries where mothers do well, children do well," he said in a written statement accompanying the report.
...As Americans celebrate Mother's Day on Sunday, "5,000 mothers will mourn the loss of the newborn they bear that very day in the developing world," said Anne Tinker, director of Save the Children's Saving Newborn Lives initiative.
"All children, no matter where they are born, deserve a healthy start in life," Melinda Gates wrote in a foreword to the report, which was funded in part by the foundation she runs with her husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
...The report highlights the three areas it says have the most influence on child well-being: female education, presence of a trained attendant at birth and use of family planning services.
Educated women, the report said, are more likely to marry and give birth later in life, to seek health care and to encourage education for their children, including girls.
The report said that family planning and increased contraception use leads to lower maternal and infant death rates. Many women and children in developing nations, it said, die as a result of births that come at the wrong time -- too close together, too early or too late in the mother's life.
Once the color barrier has been broken, minority contractors seeking government work may need to overcome the Bush barrier.
That's the message U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson seemed to send during an April 28 talk in Dallas.
Jackson, a former president and CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority, was among the featured speakers at a forum sponsored by the Real Estate Executive Council, a national minority real estate consortium.
After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.
"He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years," Jackson said of the prospective contractor. "He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something ... he said, 'I have a problem with your president.'
"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect -- the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell the secretary.'
"He didn't get the contract," Jackson continued. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."
Now he's denying he ever said that. More at Google News.
Read Atrios's "We're the Decider". I think it lists what a consensus of the "liberal netroots" believes in admirably, and by the looks of it, that includes me. Let me add however one thing:
Bring focus to the war on terror - bring to justice those that attacked us on 9/11. Now.
The longer they are on the loose, the worst we look and the more unstable the world. It is rediculous that five years down the line we are still getting video tapes by this gang. It is a sign of just how incompetent and unfocussed this Administration has been.
It's also a sign of how far too many put loyalty to party above what is important to the country. The G.O.P. the party of national security? After these past five years of a consolidated one party rule in Washington - do you feel safer? Really? What is it you smoking then?
But the web is far more empowering. Not like passive media at all. If MySpace was available when I was a teenager - I would have been all over it. I probably would have found new outlets for expression. I probably wouldn't have felt so lonely.
But maybe I'm lucky it wasn't?
The great many things I know I fucked up while learning to be a man, aren't all over the web, to be findable and usable forever by those that want to do so.
I didn't have responsible and knowing parenting that would have educated me to the consequences of living life so in the open with so many. And I haven't grown so old as to forget that my teenage years were messy, confusing, and sometimes downright ugly. I'm happy to have lived them - I wouldn't change them - they made me who I am - but thank the Lord it's difficult to exploit them. They are difficult to exploit because because they weren't public, cached, searchable and available for all to see in perpetuity.
Maybe my childhood is an example of an edge case. But I feel a responsibility to ask if is not.
"I think letting *small* children watch TV is like giving them Quaaludes. I also think kids in their *most *formative years*..."
So I'm talking about young kids here: from 1 to 6 years old; or, to stretch it a bit, through age 9 or 10.
Thirteen year olds are another matter. I wasn't talking about them, and I'll gladly defer to the expertise of Danah and others on what MySpace and Xanga and Second Life and World of Warcraft might mean for them.
Meanwhile, I've got a 9-year-old kid who still believes in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and who loves to swim and play basketball and read books. From what I can tell so far, the stories and lessons he's getting from those books, and from his Waldorf School (where none of his peers, for what it's worth, watch much TV or use computers... yet), will help equip him to be a discerning and independent soul in the Connected World where he and his peers will spend plenty of time in their teenage years and beyond.
I definitely missed the modifiers. Read his post again. He did make a distinction between being a teenager and not.
Download a high quality version here. Colbert's piece begins at 0:52:10. 625 Seeders and 1677 Leechers so far. Wow. This will be remembered for a long, long time.
My thoughts: the negative reaction coming from many on the pro-Bush bandwagon is, unfortunately, par for the course these days�as is the celebration of Bush�s �bravery,� especially when there are no real consequences for engaging in meanspirited political humor other than, say, being thought a dick.
Politically, I think it�s fair to observe that we�ve reached that point of partisan purity wherein a certain activist segment of the American Right has decided, en masse, to pretend to believe a whole number of things that are objectively false (including, in this case, Bush�s genius)�and they have decided to do so in order to build consensus and then use groupthink as a political bludgeon, even it comes at the expense of their integrity and intellectual honesty.
Ends justify the means, man. Ends justify the means�
And yes, these three paragraphs are a complete reversal of Jeff Goldstein's words, simply replacing "fawning" for "negative", "Bush" for "Colbert" and "Right" for "Left'.
I need to write a bookmarklet that anyone can use on any blog post by those that follow their party no matter where it goes, even if it's off a cliff, fighting to defend its brand over facing reality.
If everything was okay with the administration, why the major shake up? Don't you think a few admissions of error or fault are going on here? If not, do you mean to say that the administration is bowing pubic sentiment? Really? So you admit that the majority of the American people are upset with the Bush administration? Really?
USAToday took a risk on a subject that no one wants to touch with a twenty foot pole. So why have so few followed up on their reporting that we're in for voting machine trouble this year?
Did you know that there was a final push going on for a bill to support voter-verified permanent paper records? Me neither. See Daily Kos. Bill details here. Get informed. Get involved.
Speaking of underreported, only a few bloggers (catch them on TailRank) mentioned when Bush signed the Patriot Act reauthorization, he quietly signed a statement exempting himself from it! The press has been notably silent except for an op-ed here and there. The Right leaning blogosphere, who you would think would be ideologically opposed to the increasing concentration of power in the Executive branch of the Federal government - well they are entirely mute.
I know uncomfortable news like this doesn't get the clicks like Britney Spears, but common.
Oh, and check out WeSmirch. You folks who think that intelligent aggregators can't compete in markets other then tech and politics will be in for an eye opener.
Albert had two disturbing emails sent to him today that may impact his run for committeeperson in his ward. Please go to his site. If you have any information to share with him - please do. If Albert is a Republican then I am a Martian.
The Alito confirmation continues and soon women may lose the right to a safe abortion.
Yesterday, Marisa posted one of the most courageous pieces I've read on the web. It's as as one of her commenters said: "It's stories like these that make Roe vs. Wade so valuable. No woman should EVER die from an illegal abortion in this country ever again no matter what one's religions views may be." Read it. Pass it on.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.
...Dr. King shows the best possible way to testify, the highest calling of declaring one's faith publicly. Most public declarations of faith are unseemly, full of preening and judgement. I grew up in an area where it seemed most Christians acted anything but, so it was a revelation to me for a public figure to have championed his religion so humbly, honestly and respectfully. Before I encountered Dr. King's speeches, I didn't understand that true manifestations of faith could cause someone to embrace those who were different or those with whom we disagree. It's obvious why so many, regardless of their own faith or lack thereof, found common cause and a comfort in Dr. King's values.
Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."
The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.
Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.
Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?
It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.
...The Ohio Patriot Act has made it to the Taft's desk, and with the stroke of a pen, it would most likely become the toughest terrorism bill in the country. The lengthy piece of legislation would let police arrest people in public places who will not give their names, address and birth dates, even if they are not doing anything wrong.
WEWS reported it would also pave the way for everyone entering critical transportation sites such as, train stations, airports and bus stations to show ID.
"It brings us frighteningly close to a show me your papers society," said Carrie Davis of the ACLU, which opposes the Ohio Patriot Act.
There are many others who oppose the bill as well.
"The variety of people who opposed to this is not just a group of the usual suspects. We have people far right to the left opposing the bill who think it is a bad idea," said Al McGinty, NewsChannel5's terrorism expert.
McGinty said he isn't sure the law would do what it's intended to do.
"I think anything we do to enhance security and give power to protect the public to police officers is a good idea," he said. "It is a good law in the wrong direction."
Gov. Bob Taft will make the ultimate decision on whether to sign the bill.
WEWS was told that Taft is expected to sign the bill into law, but legal experts expect that it will be challenged in courts.
Washington Post: Jack Abramoff pleads guilty: The biggest corruption scandal to infect Congress in a generation took down one of the best-connected lobbyists in Washington yesterday. The questions echoing around the capital were what other careers -- and what other familiar ways of doing business -- are endangered.
Lakeisha Nicole Robinson, 15, has been missing since December 1st, and according to The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, is one of 12 from our region alone. Lakeisha was last seen at home on December 1, 2005. She has pierced ears, a scar on her forehead, and a scar on her chest. Her nicknames are KeKe and Keisha. If you have any information, contact The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 (1-800-THE-LOST). See the link for further details.
First, here at home: The New York Times publishes an editorial on Diebold and The Business of Voting: Paper trails are important, but they are no substitute for voting machine manufacturers of unquestioned integrity.
Diebold is inching ever closer to mainstream news coverage. Speaking of questionable voting systems....
...The first results from the parliamentary election last week show the country is dividing between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions.
Religious fundamentalists now have the upper hand. The secular and nationalist candidate backed by the US and Britain was humiliatingly defeated.
The Shia religious coalition has won a total victory in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Sunni Arab parties who openly or covertly support armed resistance to the US are likely to win large majorities in Sunni provinces. The Kurds have already achieved quasi-independence and their voting reflected that.
The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-Western secular democracy in a united Iraq.
...Iran will be pleased that the Shia religious parties which it has supported, have become the strongest political force.
..."People underestimate how religious Iraq has become," said one Iraqi observer. "Iran is really a secular society with a religious leadership, but Iraq will be a religious society with a religious leadership."
...The break-up of Iraq has been brought closer by the election. The great majority of people who went to the polls voted as Shia, Sunni or Kurds - and not as Iraqis. The forces pulling Iraq apart are stronger than those holding it together.
Atrios says the news today is a test, because anyone that claims to stand for the principals of conservatism should be up in arms over it.
Well here's California Conservative: Homeland Security: Spies & Lies:If eavesdropping on our thrilling telephone conversations, listening to us rant about politics or use vulgar epithets in reference to certain public officials, is required to prevent another 9/11, “bring it on.” We got nothing to hide. Who does?
Is this the real face of conservatism these days? Is the party of small government is now the party of big brother? The next few days will be telling.
Miami Herald.com: 12/15/05: New tests fuel doubts about vote machines: Ion Sancho, Leon County's election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold's optical-scan machines. After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold's system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho's machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.
SecurityFocus: 12/15/05: Diebold troubled by e-voting security: Computer scientists have questioned both the reliability and security of the systems, as well as pointing out that the confusing and secretive certification process made testing of the systems is essentially meaningless.
BlackBoxVoting: 12/13/05: Devastating hack proven: Finnish security expert Harri Hursti, together with Black Box Voting, demonstrated that Diebold made misrepresentations to Secretaries of State across the nation when Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the "memory card" (the credit-card-sized ballot box used by computerized voting machines.
AP: 12/12/05: O'Dell Resigns As Diebold CEO, Chairman: Diebold Inc., a maker of automatic teller machines, said Monday that Chairman and Chief Executive Walden W. O'Dell has resigned "for personal reasons."
EFF: 12/8/05: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Thursday filed a complaint against the North Carolina Board of Elections and the North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services on behalf of voting integrity advocate Joyce McCloy, asking that the Superior Court void the recent illegal certification of three electronic voting systems.
Wired: 11/29/05: Another Blow to E-Voting Company: One of the nation's leading suppliers of electronic voting machines may decide against selling new equipment in North Carolina after a judge declined Monday to protect it from criminal prosecution should it fail to disclose software code as required by state law.
philly: 11/29/05: Diebold in North Carolina: Albert's thoughts on what was occuring in North Carolina at the time.
Metafilter: 11/16/05: Deafening silence over GAO e-voting report, new evidence of abuse: Ultimately, there is no real security on these machines; the report shows that overturning election results would not be at all difficult for even a single moderately skilled attacker.
Brad Friedman: 11/3/05: Mainstream Media to American Democracy: Drop Dead:t's been a full two weeks now since the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO came out with their 107-page report [PDF] confirming what so many of us have been trying to ring the bell about for so long: The Electronic Voting Machines which are proliferating counties and states across America even as I type, are not secure, not accountable, not recountable, not transparent, not accurate and not adequately monitored or certified by anybody.
A service like the following would have been very helpful when I was homeless. I had to convince someone to act as my "residence" and answering service. It was a crucial part in finding stable work. In fact, I believe it helped me land my job at Sears. The rest is, as they say, history.
Another part of my success was making sure I always had transportation - a monthly SEPTA transpass. It was a major expense that was very much worth it. You never knew if there was a job opportunity someplace, and having the transpass insured I had a way to get there, along with, for a period of time once, a place to sleep. It would be a worthy effort make available transpasses for those who need them.
Before you get in an uproar - this was not written by me - it was emailed to me. After looking up the passages in the Old Testament, and linking to them, it became quite thought provoking. In light of the news that certain chuches will be closed on Christmas... well I couldn't help but post this.
Dear President Bush,
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from you and understand why you would propose and support a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. As you said, "in the eyes of God marriage is based between a man a woman." I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination... End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanness - Lev15: 19-24. The problem is how do tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.
4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is, my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them . Should I smite them?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?
7. Lev.21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev. 24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help.
Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
Remember - today is election day. Get out and vote.
Now we return you to your regularly scheduled .... ummm...
Seriously - I've been far to busy at work, with Philly Future and with other matters to update this personal site this past week or so. It's important to keep focused and I'm not going to let my compulsion to blog get in the way (sounds like I'm convincing myself don't it?). But it's true - I've gotten a terrific amount done this past week.
In other news however - my band plays the Hollywood Bistro this Saturday. Hope to see you there.
Well, Project H.O.M.E.'s inaugural Young Friends Event appears to have been a smashing success, going off last night without a hitch. For those who missed it, there are photos, as our resident shutterbug Albert Yee was live on the scene; so were several other members of the Philly Future team. The picture to the right signifies one of several highlights from the evening, as Lasheild Myers read "The Never Ending Story", an uplifting poem reflecting her experience with Project H.O.M.E.
The list of recognizable faces in the crowd included the likes of City Councilman Darrell Clarke and IBEW Local 98 chief John
Dougherty. But perhaps the largest contingent of local personalities was from Philly's burgeoning online scene. Among them were five representatives from Philly Future, as well as other online luminaries from sites like Philly1.com, Philly IMC and Young Philly Politics.
The program was enlightening, and the silent auction included bidding on everything from gift certificates, sports tickets and memorabilia to a bona fide Mummers costume. And the room was practically buzzing with conversation all night.
But the real message of the night was the one printed across the foot of the banner in the photo:
In light of yesterday's article at the NYTimes, maybe some will have a new appreciation of this. The article summarizes a memo (downloadable here pdf) in which Wal-Mart's board of directors propose ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits. Ways that those of us who have been among the working poor are all too familiar with. Ways that have been in practice for years - not just at Wal-Mart, but at other employers. Practices that are passed down word of mouth. It's practices like these that make it near impossible to move from poverty to working class, from working class to middle class. Wal-Mart just got caught putting it in writing. Good. Hopefully this will shed some light on what we have gone thru and what others face every day. I'll have much more to say, relating personal experience in a later Philly Future post.
As for now - I'm looking forward to tonight and the Young Friends of Project H.O.M.E. event we are participating in. If you've been following Philly Future recently, we've been trying to raise discussion and interest about the event and in Project H.O.M.E. itself, for the important work they do in our community. More at PhillyFuture:
This evening, from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m., the first ever Project H.O.M.E. Young Friends Event will be happening at the University of the Arts. It will be a great opportunity for concerned folks in the Philadelphia area to come down and have the opportunity to meet some of the movers and shakers behind Project H.O.M.E., a hometown organization that has helped more than 7,000 individuals break the cycle of homelessness and poverty since 1989.
The evening will include light supper and drinks, a silent auction, as well as performances and artwork from some of the people taking part in Project H.O.M.E.'s extraordinary programs. WXPN's Michaela Majoun is the emcee, and among the others in attendance will be at least half of the Philly Future team.
This is a perfect chance to come out and learn more about a great organization, share some great conversation, and further a good cause while you're at it. If you haven't already made reservations, you can still get in at the door for $50. And it's all for a truly worthy cause, so if you can make it, why not come down? And even if you can't make the event, perhaps you can afford to part with a few dollars for the cause. If so, please consider a donation to Project H.O.M.E.
I was going to write a bland platitude such as “Rosa Parks has passed away, but her legacy will live on.”
But the truth is that her legacy will not live on by itself. The battle for civil rights, for racial equality, is an ongoing struggle, an ever-present fight. Only by engaging the problems in America’s past, and understanding the ways in which they continue to plague its present, can we hope to brighten America’s future.
Project H.O.M.E.’s Inaugural Young Friends Event is October 27th, 2005 from 5:30-8pm. In order to raise awareness of Project H.O.M.E.'s efforts I decide to lay it on the line and share more of my personal history then ever before to express the homeless aren't who you think they are.
While Nick Bradbury shares some thoughts about what Web 2.01 should entail (good post btw), something occured on Friday that is not being discussed in the corners of the web I would exepect it to: Craigslist has asked Oodle to stop using its classifieds. See here and here. Neither post has outlined the reasons for the request. I'm very sure that Craigslist is within its rights to do so - lets not argue that - publishers must maintain their rights - but can Web 2.0 work in what Lawrence Lessig calls a permission culture? Was Oodle properly giving credit for the classifieds? Since I run an aggregator at Philly Future, this discussion is a good one to have. Where will it lead?
In a related conversation Dave Winer, commenting on the recent massive growth of splogs, says that "Links are now devalued". Think about it. He's right. PageRank is under attack. Those who have most to lose might be the ones speaking up right now - but in the end - like Dan Gillmor says - we will all will lose if sploggers win this fight. Chris Pirillo really jump-started this conversation yesterday. I just hope that in the effort against splogs - aggregators like ours don't get mistakenly included. The aggregator is part of Philly Future - an important part - but not the only part.
Ed Bacon (yes Kevin Bacon's father) - Philadelphia planning directory for 21 years - 95 - passed away this Friday. He left an indellable mark on this city and helped Philadelphia avoid the fate of Detroit and others.
Edmund Bacon was the father of modern-day Philadelphia. As the city's chief planning director for 21 years, he left his mark on this city like no politician or captain of industry ever could.
He took a city that, through its haphazard growth, was betraying William Penn's plan for a town in harmony with nature and with the nature of man. Bacon dragged Philadelphia kicking and screaming into the 20th century, rescuing it from its own worst instincts.
Just take a walking tour of the city and behold his works.
From the office high-rises of Penn Center, to the retail magnet that is Market East and the Gallery, to the charm of Society Hill that brought a vibrant middle- and upper-class to Center City, to the vastness of Independence Mall, Bacon had a hand in creating all the modern spaces that now define Philadelphia - for good and for ill.
It is not too much to say he invented planning in Philadelphia. After World War II, he returned home from several years of traveling and working elsewhere and helped draft the bill creating the city's first Planning Commission. With his appointment as executive director in 1949, he dominated all discussions about the city's form and function until his retirement in 1970. No planning director since Bacon has been so influential, and today Philadelphia suffers from too little planning.
Bacon's single-minded vision played a giant role in saving Philadelphia from the fate of other old cities, such as Detroit or Cincinnati.
For Philadelphia to compete in the modern world, he understood that it would need to upgrade its urban infrastructure. During his 21 years as the city's chief planner, he forced Philadelphia to create a modern, high-rise office district (Penn Center), a modern retail center (the Gallery), and a modern downtown neighborhood (Society Hill).
Too often, Bacon's grand visions didn't turn out as well as he hoped. The Gallery was never meant to be a blank-walled, suburban-style shopping box. The Market Street office corridor was never intended to be devoid of shops. According to Gregory Heller, who runs the Ed Bacon Foundation, Bacon focused more on the big picture than the details.
Sometimes, Bacon's conflicting visions undercut one another. He was way ahead of his time when he proposed converting Philadelphia's dying industrial waterfront to a leisure area called Penn's Landing. Then, just as it was being completed, he allowed I-95 to cut off the new waterfront playground from the city. He was similarly prepared to strangle Center City with the South Street Expressway, which thankfully was never built.
Society Hill is generally considered Bacon's greatest and most influential achievement. During the '60s, when other cities were using federal money to level their historic cores, Bacon rejected wholesale clearance. He adopted a more sensitive plan to prune the Victorian structures and leave most of the Colonial ones. The city used various strategies to encourage urban homesteaders to renovate the surviving structures. Today, Bacon might be faulted for creating a fiction that the area was entirely colonial.
It is ironic that Bacon's greatest projects - Society Hill, Penn Center, the Gallery - are flawed. It's one of the things that makes it so infuriatingly hard to evaluate his historic legacy. He was imperfect, but it is hard to imagine what Philadelphia would be like without those imperfections.
"Great cities are not great because of individual buildings. They're great because of the way things fit together," he said.
When he first proposed the concept of Penn Center, he said, "I was chastised by the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects because I presumed to make a plan where there was no client and no program. You're not supposed to do a design for a building unless someone engages you to do it. Everything I did was unconventional."
I give our local main stream media some blogging tips at Philly Future, more important, I introduce a new section of particpation on the site - Breaking the Cycle.
Speaking of that list, Philly Future was overlooked again. I am starting to feel that this talk of a grassroots participatory movement by some is a ruse. Whenever I see one of these lists - like the one above - they are comprised of funded efforts, or efforts comprised of folks that earn a living doing this, or efforts backed by a larger media concern. I hope I'm proven wrong.
...No one is to ‘blame’ for being in the way of catastrophe, and as we know, any one of us could be the next victim. There are no safe spots where nothing is likely to happen; no places of invulnerability. To help others is to help ourselves; the days of geographical isolation are at an end and we have a responsibility to each other regardless of country, race, or religion.
But if we react to each event in a frenzy, soon we’ll burn out and truly catastrophic events will go by with barely a blink. We’re seeing this with Pakistan: it’s not that people aren’t caring; it’s that we’ve just been through one cycle of frantic giving following another a short 8 months ago. It may get to a point where a country would gain help for having an ‘early’ disaster, as compared to a country having a disaster later in the year. Perhaps these countries could stage their catastrophes close to Christmas.
Rather than react impulsively (and stop reacting just as impulsively), we need to establish a habit of giving that will hopefully provide enough support for organizations that meet the needs of people in stricken communities. We should budget in a monthly donation, even if it’s only a few dollars, and contribute consistently: both to international relief organizations and those that are domestic. We should also look at organizations that help in the longterm: with education, family planning, support of basic human rights, and other means to improve overall quality of life.
We should also learn to apply filters when listening to much of the news. Stories from New Orleans match stories from Pakistan where the number of dead leaps by tens of thousands by the minute, and people searching for food in stores become tales of rampant crime and looting. The news emphasizes the worst in all matters, and it’s easy to either develop a sense of despair or disappointment. What’s important is getting help to people, and providing what support we can–facts will fall out later.
She goes on to describe what charities she plans to support international and national, immediate need and long-term. She suggests all of us putting a a 'giving ribbon bar' in our sidebars for permenent display. It's a great idea. Check out Albert's. I'll have a related follow-up tomorrow.
Let me second Jeneane Sessum in offering well wishes and good luck to Shelley Powers who is about to be deployed by the Red Cross to points unknown to people who need help. Like Jeneane, I am very proud to know Shelley (well online at least :)). She's taking the compassion she shares online to help in the most direct way possible. It takes guts and heart.
Rollyo lets you roll your own search engine, and the results, I think, exemplify the utility of a Memeorandum seeded with a specific set of feeds. Rollyo looks like to be another great webservice. One to watch (and to use!). In fact, a long, long time ago, Philly.com hosted a search engine - Philly Finder - that was seeded with only high quality sites reviewed by its editorial staff - I miss that search engine. RSS search at Philly Future will solve a similar problem once I have it up and running.
If you do anything online today, make some time for Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 presentation at OSCON. Thought provoking and spot on.
Browse. Search. Subscribe.:Damn straight Dave. Damn straight. There have been solutions talked about, but none have taken hold. It's a problem that still stands begging to be solved.
Decline in male college attendance is a serious national problem. - but no one is talking about it. How about instead of blaming efforts to improve women education we look at the effects of poverty and culture on today's men? Nah.. this will probably denigrate into a blame fest and so it sits as a growing problem.
Google is preparing a move into classifieds search. If I was working at CareerBuilder - I'd be worried - "Commercial classifieds sites such as CareerBuilder, Cars.com and others have to weigh the additional audience Google could deliver against the potential loss of revenue. Analysts, including us, predict that advertisers will move to free sites if they become convinced that they will reach an audience as large - or larger - on a search engine than on a paid advertising site."
LiveJournal has added a feature that lets you navigate communities by school. It gets slagged at Metafilter but I think this feature is very cool.
Garret points to an interesting article (and site for the bookmarks) Urban Food Production: Evolution, Official Support and Significance. He comments that with such a current emphasis on 'self reliance' and events like Katrina showing that we are - indeed - on our own - you should see more links out there like this one.
Speaking of self-reliance, no matter what folks might think, it's hard to have good teeth without health insurance or good health insurance that provides for regular dentist visits. Jeneane Sussum is wondering if America is setting itself up to be a nation of people with crappy smiles...So we let go what we have to let go. Our teeth. And we make due. And we're glad if we can just make our health insurance premiums every month. And those of us who once wouldn't be seen without perfect enamel and every six month cleanings smile a little less often these days.... The New Yorker, in stomach twisting piece would seem to agree.
Rafe Colburn and Ted Leung (who deleted my comment while cleaning out spam - I can relate - did that myself quite a few times), second a thought I've had on improving Memeorandum - feeding it a group of RSS feeds that you care about. They are thinking in terms of a personal aggregator - I would like to make that personalized page public as as service.
Jay Rosen gives his thoughts on TimesSelect and shares a compliment for mine on this week's newspaper staff reductions (thanks!). Me? I will never link to a TimesSelect article. It's bad enough linking to something that eventually falls behind an archive wall, but I can't link to a for-pay article. It's what keeps me from linking more often to The Atlantic as well.
At Fool.com, by Seth Jayson: "Why I Fear Google WiFi": "How much of your life do you want to put at Google's disposal?"
And for you porn hunters - a job for you - the FBI is looking for recruits: "The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against "manufacturers and purveyors" of pornography -- not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults" War on terror? Got that handled. We have other priorities. Your tax dollars at work.
Katrina has opened up an opportunity to talk about class and race in America. If you read anything today, read "Still Separate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid" in Harpers magazine. There has been terrific progress in Philadelphia, but there are many, many factors stacked against us. A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer shares a major case in point - "Philadelphia (is) among the nation's poorest counties and Chester, Burlington and Bucks among its richest". How do you think this helps or hurts education funding? And don't you think that's self-reinforcing?
Ed Cone takes note of John Edwards who has been championing how "Personal responsibility combined with smart government can beat poverty, that's the message. Don't have babies out of wedlock in your teens and we'll make sure you've got a chance." That's Bill Clinton's old message. Notice the two part goal here: Personal responsibility and smart government. It's a message I believe in.
Speaking of Bill Clinton, he has finally begun to share his views on how things have been going - and it's not pretty. Tellingly, if you watch Memeorandum it appears that most folks talking about this are Republicans who are appalled that Clinton opened his mouth. And most Democrats are just sitting idly by when they should be cheering him on. Just like old times. Pandagon tears apart one of the popular ones.
America's response to Katrina, and the two-tier society it exposed for all to see is not looking so good abroad, even in Britain. Just look at the tone of recent articles in the Mirror or Sky News.
Amongst the stories of system failure that have come out of Katrina, folks should recognize there are many more times the number of stories of survival (Washington Post) that tell of strength, ingenuity, quick thinking, courage and compassion.
A shout out of thanks to all who have been donating and finding ways to help in the wake of Katrina. There are so many great examples to share across the web, but one I've been meaning to mention is Shelley Powers and her Critters for Critters campaign. The auction she is running I believe ends tomorrow, check it out. And if you can donate to the Humane Society.
Some of my friends will disagree, but I feel Bush sounded the perfect tone last night, even if, embedded in his speech, were many troubling items like money funneling from the government to churches, and a refusal to raise federal funding via keeping taxes stable or increasing them, and an increased military role on domestic soil. Cognitive dissonance will keep many from keying in on those. My bet was late - I expected a 10% approval rating bump two weeks after Katrina - it's on the way now. Especially with putting Karl Rove in charge of the reconstruction effort. The man behind his talking points. His political advisor. His brain. This move, I'm afraid, will slip by the press and will get mentioned as an aside - which is terrible because it reveals all you need to know about this President and his motivations. Read The All Spin Zone, Talking Points Memo, Billmon and Metafilter for more.
Joshua Micah Marshall: This is a time when the country needs an opposition party. Every Democrat should be hitting on this. Take the politics out of the reconstruction effort. He put his chief spin-doctor in charge of the biggest reconstruction and refugee crisis the country's probably ever faced. That tells you all you need to know about his values.
In related/unrelated news employer-sponsored health insurance is becoming scarcer and more expensive. A report out says premiums for job-based health insurance rose 9.2 percent on average nationwide in 2005, about three times the general rate of inflation and the percentage of businesses offering health benefits to employees dropped to 60 percent in 2005, down from 69 percent in 2000
It's as if he was standing in the rubble of Bush's Katrina debacle. Masterfully, and inspirationally, he ties together race, war, poverty,values and the military into one sweeping narrative that defines the best of what liberalism could be.
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." Amen.
If he were alive today, King would be chewed up in the right-wing character assassination machine, but things were more straightforward 40 years ago... they just straight up assassinated him -- one year to the day after giving this speech.
Read or listen to it. Even the parts about Vietnam -- they are eerily appropriate in the context of today's Humvee democracy.
It takes a hurricane. It takes a catastrophe like Katrina to strip away the old evasions, hypocrisies and not-so-benign neglect. It takes the sight of the United States with a big black eye—visible around the world—to help the rest of us begin to see again. For the moment, at least, Americans are ready to fix their restless gaze on enduring problems of poverty, race and class that have escaped their attention. Does this mean a new war on poverty? No, especially with Katrina's gargantuan price tag. But this disaster may offer a chance to start a skirmish, or at least make Washington think harder about why part of the richest country on earth looks like the Third World.
"I hope we realize that the people of New Orleans weren't just abandoned during the hurricane," Sen. Barack Obama said last week on the floor of the Senate. "They were abandoned long ago—to murder and mayhem in the streets, to substandard schools, to dilapidated housing, to inadequate health care, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness."
The question now is whether the floodwaters can create a sea change in public perceptions. "Americans tend to think of poor people as being responsible for their own economic woes," says sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University. "But this was a case where the poor were clearly not at fault. It was a reminder that we have a moral obligation to provide every American with a decent life."
I think a turning point in Katrina coverage has been reached. There has been some good news of progress being made in the relief effort. Parts of New Orleans are reopening shortly. Newsmagazines and newspapers have detailed and blasted the response to the catastrophy. And yesterday, finally, Bush admited some responsibility. A dangerous point. Now folks need to keep in mind Duncan's call to keep light here as the stories grow more complicated and sometimes more repetitive and mundane.
The chorus of activists and pundits that have called for the armed forces to act sooner, have raised questions over the domestic use of troops (USAToday). A dangerous and scary discussion needs to happen here. Let's not hope for a new Patriot Act that permits rapid use of the armed forces on American soil. Let's hope for a National Guard that is used as it should be.
Daily Mail: We had to kill our patients: Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Related Metafilter discussion.
USAToday: Nursing home owners charged in 34 deaths: Neighbors described a horrible scene that unfolded on Aug. 29... Floodwaters rose to the roof of the one-story nursing home in St. Bernard, outside New Orleans, trapping elderly and infirm residents... Neighbors came in boats and smashed a hole in the roof. "We tried to get out as many as we could," said Steve Snyder, 29, an oil rig worker. "All we could go by was the hollering and screaming, 'Help, help!' " "We got 25 to 27 people out alive," Snyder said. "And then we didn't hear any more screaming...The Manganos surrendered to authorities on Tuesday and were charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide.
If you can't keep track of the comings and goings of your staff.... well wow. Check out the video. The guy should have been fired. Hopefully Brown is not just the sacrificial idiot and a deeper look will take place into what went wrong.
I'd like to know when Democratic liberals are going to address this particular problem with some kind of plan to turn it around. But no, racists are always "those people�? who live somewhere else, preferably south of the Mason-Dixon line, and liberals want nothing to do with them because "we're better than that.�? (Remember the heat Howard Dean took for saying he wanted the guys with the pickup trucks and the Confederate flag decals? And how the liberal establishment was all a-twitter? He was right, goddamnit.)
Such horseshit. Really.
Most people are racist out of sheer ignorance and fear. Most of that fear is grounded in resentment at their own narrow economic options. What I want to know is, when are liberals going to address that particular issue instead of tsk-tsking the afflicted and insisting they all stay quarantined somewhere else?
The road to racial equality lies somewhere in the general vicinity of economic prosperity. The Republican agenda has the working poor of all colors fighting over very small slices of an ever- shrinking pie. No wonder racism's so effective - the poor are so busy fighting each other, they don't even notice the thieves at the top. (emphasis mine - Karl)
Damn if that doesn't get to the heart of it. I opined in her commetents for a movement to support and unite poor, the working poor, labor, the infirm and the elderly of all colors and religions. Our parties are more interested in pursuing votes - after all - these segments of our country don't - then in pursuing justice and common good. Imgaine what would happen this changed?
Police agencies to the south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds trying to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, two paramedics who were in the crowd said.
The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people, who, instead of complying immediately with orders to leave the bridge, pleaded to be let through, the paramedics and two other witnesses said. The witnesses said they had been told by the New Orleans police to cross that same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.
Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.
"The police kept saying, 'We don't want another Superdome,' and 'This isn't New Orleans,' " said Larry Bradshaw, a San Francisco paramedic who was among those fleeing.
Arthur Lawson, chief of the Gretna, La., Police Department, confirmed that his officers, along with those from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office and the Crescent City Connection Police, sealed the bridge.
"There was no place for them to come on our side," Mr. Lawson said.
...it could be said that Jefferson Parish is in some ways like a lot of American suburbs -- comprised of white-flight refugees from a decaying city, and overly anxious to keep out what they left behind.
And sadly, in a time of chaos, they just did what came naturally. With a few warning shots, for good measure.
Must reads are articles in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Lots of blame to go around. Complete failure of leadership from top to bottom. And saddly it looks like those nearest the horror had the fewest resources to deal with it - and when they asked for help - it was slow in responding.
It's going to be boring, monotonous, dreary work, mostly leading to a bunch of boring, monotonous stories that no one cares much about. It's going to involve maps and city council meetings and minutes and documents and building permits and construction contracts and titles. But, it will, if done right, also involve people.
Please, press, both local and national, do your job following the saga of the reconstruction of New Orleans. There are going to be land grabs and corruption and bribery and efforts by the NO elite to keep the poor from returning.
Please, follow the story. You'll be the only watchdog for this.
By Karl on September 11, 2005 11:56 AM
|2 Comments
A prayer for all those that stand in harms way to protect what we hold dear, a prayer for families who have lost so much, and a prayer for peace in our time. Remember.Reflect. Learn.
I have this to say, and apologies to all those I offend: Four years. Four years after the horror of 9-11. Four years, and the bastards that committed their evil are still permitted to walk this earth, their message has spread, and they have committed more horrible acts. Four years and the unprecedented one party rule of our Senate, House, and Executive branch hasn't sealed the deal. Four years, and it would appear, observing our response to Katrina, that we are no safer than we were. Four years. Four years. Four years. Don't just remember and stew in anger. Reflect and learn. Then find a way and act. Three is work to be done.
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "2005?!?! My god, fill me in. These last few weeks have been rough! Give me some hope, okay?"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Well..."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "Come on! Four years! Where did they finally find Osama? And what did they do to him?"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Well..."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "I assume the Taliban are long gone from Afghanistan, right? This war we're fighting can't take too much longer."
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Well..."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "And what with the outpouring of international support for the U.S. these days, there must be some wonderful achievements in global cooperation!"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Well..."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "Oh, yeah, now there are these bizarre anthrax incidents... Who was it, anyway? What a relief it must have been to find that out!"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Well..."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "You're not saying very much. What gives?"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "You remember all that talk about Iraq at the start of the first Bush administration? They invaded."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "Yeah? Don't tell me -- Saddam was behind the anthrax!"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "No, no..."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "Or, what, did he finally find a way to launch his own terrorist attack?"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Nope."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "They caught him building a nuke!"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Well, no."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "So...?"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "They told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But we never found the weapons, even after we toppled him. Then they told us it didn't matter because we were building a better democratic Iraq. Then they told us not to give up despite thousands of American casualties, because if we pulled out we'd be dishonoring the soldiers who'd already died."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "Damn. I guess that means Bush lost the election in '04, huh?"
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Well..."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "Anyway, the most important thing is that, four years later, the U.S. has had enough time to plan and prepare for another horror. The next time an American city is endangered, we'll be all set, right? Swift response. Leaders who spring into action. Better communications. Organization. The can-do American spirit."
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Well..."
2001 Scott Rosenberg: "Enough! Get back to the future already! You're just bumming me out."
2005 Scott Rosenberg: "Hey, you're bumming me out, too!"
The story I shared yesterday is now getting exposure all over the web. Rogers Cadenhead summarized it to its core and his message thread is filled with outrage (and trolls):
As the situation grew steadily worse in New Orleans last week, you might have wondered why people didn't just leave on foot. The Louisiana Superdome is less than two miles from a bridge that leads over the Mississippi River out of the city.
The answer: Any crowd that tried to do so was met by suburban police, some of whom fired guns to disperse the group and seized their water.
Around 500 people stuck in downtown New Orleans after the storm banded together for self-preservation, making sure the oldest and youngest among them were taken care of before looking after their own needs.
Two San Francisco paramedics who were staying in the French Quarter for a convention have written a first-hand account that describes their appalling treatment at the hands of Louisiana police, a story confirmed today by the San Francisco Chronicle, UPI, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
They won't let them walk out of there because I'm standing right above that Convention Center, and what they've done is they've locked them in there.
The government said you go here and you'll get help or you go in that Superdome and you'll get help. And they didn't get help.
They got locked in there. And they watched people being killed around them. And they watched people starving. And they watched elderly people not getting any medicine.
And now they know it's happening because we've been telling them. Repeatidly. Over and over every day.
And you know what they're doing now? And I'm not blaming anyone, I'm you telling what's happening.
They've setup a checkpoint at the bottom of this bridge. This is the bridge that takes you from New Orleans over into Gretna. From Orleans Parish, into Jefferson Parish. It's the only way out. It's the connection to the rest of the world. And they've set up a checkpoint and anyone who walks up, out of that city now is turned around.
You are not allowed to go to Gretna Louisiana, from New Orleans Louisiana.
Over there is hope. Over there is electricity. Over there is food and water. But you cannot go from there to there. The government will not allow you to do it.
It can all seem so... pointless... at a time like this. When faced with so much pain. So much death.
It's like a veil has been cast back and we can see - clearly for a moment - how things really are - and it fills our hearts with sorrow and dread. That veil will soon be placed back. Things will flow to back to 'normal' (what ever that is) for most of us. But before that happens many will take stock.
At times like this, especially a times like this, along with grieving, along with sharing - many feel an overwhelming need to reach out and do something - taking our horror and doing something with it - shape it - mold it - redirect it - try and do some good with it.
The dimensions of that are different counting upon who we are - and what we do. For artists and musicians, some attempt to record it and relate meaning. For pundits and analysts, well it's in the truth telling. For others, tool builders and engineers, it's in building solutions to cope with the the aftermath and the future. For many it is in direct volunteering and fund raising. For some it is reaching out to family members, some we've pushed away for years. For others, it is simply in telling those we love - we love them. And maybe a few strangers too.
Not all folks are like this - you know the ones - who even now seem oblivious. Maybe you are jeallous of them to a degree. Cognitive dissonance, willful ignorance, whatever you want to call it, these folks are not demonstratably moved and are just going about their business.
One of the questions many of us are talking about is what we are doing online. Billmon at Whisky Bar in "Hitting the Wall" shares he's planning to take a break for a bit - and it is understandable why:
...last night I came across an account of the search for real bodies -- not metaphorical ones -- in the stinking ruins of New Orleans. It's like something out of the charnel houses of World War II
...It is reported that the state of Louisiana has placed an order for 25,000 body bags.
For some reason, it wasn't until I read that story that the full horror of what happened in New Orleans finally hit home for me. Maybe it's because I was on the road part of last week, and missed most of the live broadcasts during the days when the city was in complete chaos. Maybe it's because I don't watch TV much even when I am home. But until now I've thought about the catastrophe more in terms of the loss of a great American city -- and less in terms of the individual human lives that were destroyed.
No longer. The image -- of a man frantically trying to breath through a pipe stuck in a ventilator grate as the waters rise over his head -- is too searingly to hold at an emotional distance. How long did he survive, submerged in total darkness? And how many others died in the same bizarre trap -- too weak or terrified to break through the layers of plywood and asphalt that had suddenly become the lids on their underwater coffins?
Thinking about those deaths is like looking at pictures of people jumping, hand in hand, from the windows of the World Trade Center on 9/11 -- forced in a moment of howling panic to choose between the flames and the long fall to the pavement below. Such images are unendurable. The mind recoils from them as if we ourselves were caught in the same trap.
And suddenly all the backbiting over who failed first -- or most often, or most spectacularly -- seems too vile to worry about, much less write about. Even the big, important questions -- the future of New Orleans, the threat of global warming, the paralyzing problems of race and poverty in America -- have lost their intellectual appeal. Too many people have died, and too much has been destroyed to try to make sense of it now. And as stupid and obnoxious and insane as the powers that be have been this past week, they don't seem very funny now -- not even Dick Cheney.
I need a break, in other words -- time to simply grieve for New Orleans and its dead, and for their lost world, now slipping into history. Which means I may not be posting much for the next few days.
By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".
We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."
We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
...a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media... obvious members of the media... armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It's a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.
At 16:29 (CST) today, RW Royal Jr. Incident Commander of the JIC (Joint Information Committee) has denied Austin Airwaves the ability to run the emergency low power FM radio station inside of the dome. This is contrary to the FCC licenses that have been issued to Austin Airwaves. However RW Royal Jr is a member of the JIC. He has decided to deny the request. When they asked why they were being turned down, they were told that the Astrodome could not provide them with electricity. When the Austin Airwaves team offered to run on battery backup, they were still denied.
The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected journalists' requests to accompany rescue boats searching for storm victims.
The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, heavily criticized for its slow response to the devastation caused by the hurricane, rejected journalists' requests to accompany rescue boats searching for storm victims.
Congressional Republicans, persisting in hopes of enacting some form of private Social Security option despite opposition from the public and the Democrats, are considering the same kind of maneuver that enabled them to pass a controversial Medicare drug bill two years ago.
...Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., chairman of the Ways and Means Committee... said without giving details that his panel would introduce a retirement security bill in September.
Because the Senate had passed a similar bill, Republicans could take the measure to a Senate-House conference. By excluding most Democrats from any role, they crafted the kind of bill they wanted in the first place.
That would appear to be their hope for private Social Security accounts – pass a bill in the House authorizing private accounts, accept any Social Security vehicle in the Senate that gets the issue to conference and write a final version letting the White House proclaim success.
I can't describe how I felt reading the following. It was overwhelming.
John Scalzi shared in "Being Poor" a list describing what it is like. An instant community sprung up of folks who could relate, and shared points of their own, including myself. Here are a few (make sure to read his post and comments):
Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they're what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there's not an $800 car in America that's worth a damn.
Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.
Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends' houses but never has friends over to yours.
Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won't hear you say "I get free lunch" when you get to the cashier.
Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.
Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.
Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.
Being poor is relying on people who don't give a damn about you.
Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.
Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.
Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.
Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.
Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.
Being poor is not taking the job because you can't find someone you trust to watch your kids.
Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.
Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.
Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.
Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually stupid.
Being poor is people surprised to discover you're not actually lazy.
Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.
Being poor is knowing you're being judged.
Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.
Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.
Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.
Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.
Being poor is seeing how few options you have.
Being poor is running in place.
Being poor is people wondering why you didn't leave.
Here goes a few I contributed to the conversation:
Being poor is pausing to answer when someone asks, "what do you parents do for a living?"
Being poor is pausing to answer when someone asks, "where is your father?"
Being poor is waiting on Christmas morning for the Salvation Army Santa Claus to visit.
Being poor is believing that a happy, healthy family is a TV fantasy.
Being poor is thinking "I'm going to die before I'm 30 anyway".
Being poor is finally getting a decent job, and it turns out it is in the burbs, which requires you to get a car, that you can't pay for.
Being poor is finally getting a credit card, and it's at 21% interest.
Being poor is finally getting a decent job, which requires dropping state insurance, which means your children will go uninsured.
Being poor means working a job 40 hours for 10 weeks and 36 hours for 2 - so that the employer can dodge paying full time benefits.
Being poor is having your nose broken, not having health insurance, and living with the cosmetic change the rest of your life.
I believe that big problems can quickly overwhelm if not broken down into smaller, achievable tasks. Sometimes they look so big as to be intractable - unchangeable. I tend to believe that if each of us do what we can - using the expertise, experience and skills we have - within our own spheres of influence - to effect small change here - small change there - well we can make a difference in a very big way.
Read Dave Rogers's questioning and powerful piece: Change.
I can't help it - in the face of all this - I remain an optimist. A believer that things can change. And that those changes happen with very small, and sometimes seemingly unrelated, steps.
Richelle held a hell of a barbecue for me at my place for my 33rd birthday this Saturday (my birthday was Sunday). I am a blessed man. My growing family was there (welcome Cindy!). Friends I have made online, friends from work, and life long friends - who have known me from high school - were in attendence. Not everyone was there - but old relationships go thru their stages ya know. But for those that were - well we had a good time.
It started 3PM in the afternoon and went on till 3AM in the morning. Although, by that time, I was paying the price for getting very, very drunk. Probably as bad as my bachelor party. The meaning of this week, I think, in the back of my mind.
Katrina, like 9/11 before it, leaves you faced with the fact that time is very, very precious. Just a little needs to pass - and everything can change. How we spend it means everything.
After 9/11 I walked away from weblogging. I walked away from Philly Future. I devoted myself to spending more time with my family, more time with my friends. Bringing Philly Future back online, and seeing it grow as successfully as it has - well it brings everything around full circle. How am I spending my time? Is it being spent wisely?
The following links are of folks in my sphere of work that are doing things to help in the wake of Katrina:
What is "the Mantra"? A set of words sprouted by those in government to deny or direct away responsibility. As Susie Madrak points out, it's spreading:
I was watching MSNBC last night and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is now repeating the BushCo mantra: Faith-based groups, neighbors helping neighbors, government being "too big and too slow" to really help people, etc.
I made a terrible bet with some folks last week - that the Bush Administration will use similar language - while blaming local incompetence - and making grand photo ops - to get an approval ratings spike or bump by ten points. It sounds crazy, but I don't think so. We shall see.
Cold, callus, and calculating. Think that quote will get much play in today's news? Doubt it. Way too revealing. The Bush family has always been masterful at playing the media like a fiddle. Then again there are signs that broadcast media is waking up. Let's hope so.
It took a massive disaster to reveal it - but now it's visible for the world to see - underneath the shiney surface of America is growing population of those in such poverty that they had little means to avoid the disaster coming their way and to react afterwards: The Times Online: From the murky water of doubt emerges an uncomfortable truth:
It isn't the failure to act in New Orleans that is the story here, it's the sheer, uninsured, uncared for, self-disenfranchised scale of the poverty that lies revealed. It looks like a scene from the Third World because that's the truth.
After 9/11 we had hoped the reorganization of homeland security departments (FEMA, FBI, and others) would help the country be more secure. By far, it doesn't look like the case. The response to Katrina was unacceptably slow. We maybe worst off for the reorganization that has took place. Did you know that "Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died. (Metafilter). Me neither. But it goes to show you that planning can make a difference.
A roundup of writings that caught my eye yesterday:
Jeneane Sessum: "We didn't understand the magnitude.... Help is on the way." ON THE WAY? It's Past too late.
From Suburban Guerrilla - a NYTimes editorial: "Life in the Bottom 80 Percent": When President Bush talks about the economy, he invariably boasts about good economic growth. But he doesn't acknowledge what is apparent from the census figures: as the very rich get even richer, their gains can mask the stagnation and deterioration at less lofty income levels....When Congress returns from its monthlong summer vacation next week, two of the leadership's top priorities include renewing the push to repeal the estate tax, which affects only the wealthiest of families, and extending the tax cuts for investment income, which flow largely to the richest Americans. At the other end of the spectrum, lawmakers have stubbornly refused to raise the minimum wage: $5.15 an hour since 1997. They will also be taking up proposals for deep budget cuts in programs that ameliorate income inequality, like Medicaid, food stamps and federal student loans. They should be ashamed of themselves.
rc3.org: What this really illustrates is the cost of bad government. ... Beyond mere partisanship, the most important thing is to elect responsible adults who can and will solve problems. That capability seems to be missing these days.
Jeff Jarvis: The convention center in New Orleans is a symbol of shame. How can we not figure out how to get water there? Babies are starving. People are dying. There is no authority; police have pulled back to defend their own stations or, according to CNN, deserted their posts. Authorities — from Bush down to cabinet officials down to legislators down to state officials down to the soon-to-be-former-mayor down to those police — have failed these people.
Sidney Blumenthal:In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
Trapped in the Superdome:A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered the restroom. Blood stains the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers. The Louisiana Superdome, once a mighty testament to architecture and ingenuity, became the biggest storm shelter in New Orleans the day before Katrina's arrival Monday. About 16,000 people eventually settled in. Within two days, it had degenerated into unspeakable hole.
CNN's Jim Spellman: The convention center is a place that people were told to go to because it would be safe. In fact, it is a scene of anarchy. There is absolutely nobody in control. There is no National Guard, no police, no information to be had. The convention center is next to the Mississippi River. Many people who are sleeping there feel that a boat is going to come and get them. Or they think a bus is going to come. But no buses have come. No boats have come. They think water is going come. No water has come. And they have no food. As we drove by, people screamed out to us -- "Do you have water? Do you have food? Do you have any information for us?" We had none of those. Probably the most disturbing thing is that people at the convention center are starting to pass away and there is simply nothing to do with their bodies.
Shelley Powers: The city is destroyed. Well, now, I take exception to that one. You can’t destroy a city unless you kill off every last one of the people who live in and love the city. You would also have to remove every reference to it in history, and all of its culture, and every last bit of influence it has ever had in the past, present, and we presume, future.
This post is inspired by one at Eschaton. What I'm about to share is both private and painful.
I don't want to politicize Katrina - but there are too many Right wingers already doing that - so it's time to speak up.
More than likely my family would not have survived, if we were in the same circumstances we were when I was a kid - and been in New Orleans the day Katrina hit.
I don't talk much about growing up - my childhood - because many would not understand. Some would make incorrect judgments. Others would look down on me. Some would take pity. I've never wanted any of that. Never asked for any of that. And I am proud to have made it to where I am pulling up my own bootstraps.
But as a kid - me and my family lived Social Security check to Social Security check. It would get to us on the 1st of the month. Each month the 1st was a happy day. But as the month wore on - there would be less and less of everything - including food.
Katrina hit on the 29th. We would not have had cash to leave town. We would not have had cash for public transportation. We would not have had cash for food. We would not have had cash for water.
Since we moved so often, and knew no neighbors - our choice would be stark: to give up and die - or be among those foraging for food – “looters� to you hate mongers - and treking our way out of town. I think the later. Because we're fighters.
My family survived the circumstances of our childhood poverty. But for those poor in Katrina's wake - who the Right is vilifying with a broad brush - their nightmare goes on.
I hope no one in my family is upset I posted this. When I got reminded about the 29th of the month... I had to share. My heart is heavy for those who have been hit - and those who are fighting to survive.
Oh, and as for the President, well I expect his approval ratings to jump back to normal when he lands in New Orleans. It won't mean *anything* for those in the thick of it however. Won't mean a damn thing.
I've been trying to tune this out, but can't since the media isn't going after this with appropriate gusto. I just have a few things to say to Pat and Fred...
Thank you Pat for making it so easy for me to continue to look like a hypocrite for being a Christian and an American. Thanks. Doesn't matter if you apologized. Too late to take something like that back with a little "well...I'm sorry".
Check out GlobalVoices for reactions across the world to your extremism.
And Fred, yes you Fred Phelps, thanks for helping Pat in spreading extremism off shore. If you didn't know my good readers, he's gone off to Sweden to threaten their God-less king and damn them to an eternity in hell. No really. Click the link.
Robertson isn't alone in steering political discourse toward violence. In 2003, conservative pundit Ann Coulter told The New York Observer that "my only regret with Timothy McVeigh [the terrorist who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City] is he did not go to The New York Times building."
We need to reclaim American politics from these extremists, who think it's okay to call for assassinations and the bombing of newspapers and government agencies. Responsible leaders of both parties must find their tongues and quit looking the other way as the Robertsons of the right wing spread their poison in the land.
Dan Gillmor has been calling conservative bloggers out to comment on this - but he'll be disappointed. If they do, they will dismiss Robertson's influence and status in America. They will say he is nothing but an old crock. Oh it looks like the Daily Show has already borne that out with TV's unbiased punditry.
And speaking of Ann Coulter (this is the first time I've mentioned her on this blog - and I hope never to do again), did you know she actually suggested New Yorkers are cowards? I know many New Yorkers. They are the ONLY folks I know that compare to Philadelphians in terms of being tough.
The HuffingtonPost has put out a call for New Yorkers to share their 9/11 story here. The brave firemen, policemen, EMTs of New York have been slandered. More here and here.
She's one of a growing chorus of opportunists that seek to divide the country for their own gain. She knows her fan base - Southerners - and plays to it very well. Check out the link and watch the video. A sad eye opener.
It looks like true conservatives are growing further and further disheartened by President Bush's policies. Maybe the negatives are finally overcoming the cognitive dissonance (Tatteredcoat) that has been the only explanation, to me, for their denial of the facts, for so long. We need more folks seeing clearly - and we need it now:
It's time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. We control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary for one of the few times in my nearly 5 decades, but what have we really accomplished? Is government smaller? Have we hacked away at the nanny state? Are the unborn any more protected? Have we really set the stage for a durable conservative majority?
Meanwhile, Bush continues to insult our intelligence with tripe like this:
"Our troops know that they're fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere to protect their fellow Americans from a savage enemy," Bush said in his weekly radio address. {Ed: Full text here}
"They know that if we do not confront these evil men abroad, we will have to face them one day in our own cities and streets, and they know that the safety and security of every American is at stake in this war," he said.
I guess that's all he has left. After all, if Iraq's alleged WMD programs were the casus belli, why aren't we at war with Iran and North Korea? Not to mention Pakistan, which remains the odds-on favorite to supply the Islamofascists with a working nuke. If Saddam's cruelty to his own people was the casus belli, why aren't we taking out Kim Jong Il or any number of other nasty dictators? Indeed, what happened to the W of 2000, who correctly proclaimed nation building a failed cause and an inappropriate use of American military might? And why are we apparently going to allow the Islamists to write a more significant role for Islamic law into the new Iraqi constitution? If throwing a scare into the Saudis was the policy, so as to get them to rethink their deals with the jihadists, which has always struck me as the best rationale for the war, have things really improved on that front?
The trouble with Bush's justification for the war is that it uses American troops as fly paper.
This is a tough post to write, tough because I am calling into question the actions not only of the media, but of ourselves, in producing a blogswarm to confront the media's bias in it's coverage of Latoyia Figueroa versus Natalee Halloway.
Natalee Halloway, white, blond, missing teen in Aruba. A story a major portion of the public can relate to. A story that sends fear in the hearts of parents across the country. Her plight, along with other notable white girls and women who have gone missing, has been all over the news. Developments have been few. But reports have been many. So how much of this reporting offers us "news"? Is there a responsibility for those who portend to bring us journalism while delivering the news? Or is their job to report to us what we want - driven by the voyeuristic instincts that are possibly inside us all - and be rewarded with high ratings?
Anderson Cooper of CNN shockingly almost came out and said as much. A real mind blower considering that CNN is as guilty of this as anyone else. Still a refreshing thing to hear from someone so watched.
Latoyia Figueroa, young, beautiful, pregnant, and.... black... went missing for nine days before Richard Cranium and The All Spin Zone kicked up a blogswarm by publicizing his letter to CNN. It was blunt. It was honest. It inspired bloggers all around Philadelphia to spread the word about Latoyia Figueroa and decry the obvious bias our "news" corporations deliver us. Philly Future played a role in urging folks to get involved. Notably, when SpinDentist, of the All Spin Zone appeared on The Situation With Carlson Tucker he pretty much got Tucker to admit that television news seeks to provide its audience with what it wants - over what it should. Read the transcript - Tucker tried to shape the discussion into one of right vs left instead of press vs ratings and SpinDentist cornered him to say the truth.
The national press responded with coverage of Latoyia Figueroa. And with the increased light - so did our police department - moving the case to the homicide unit so that it had increased resources devoted to it.
Jay Rosen in a recent thought provoking piece at Press Think "Things I Used to Teach That I No Longer Believe" said recently that "For many years I taught in my criticism classes that pointing out bias in the news media was an important, interesting, and even subversive activity. At the very least an intellectual challenge. Now it is virtually meaningless. Media bias is a proxy in countless political fights and the culture war. It’s effectiveness as a corrective is virtually zero.".
I had to challenge that assertion in his comments thread. After all, this case proves otherwise, but Jay said something that, for a moment, struck me hard: The example you gave of a similar crime the news media isn't looking into because the victim isn't a white girl may have been effective, and necessary, and even just, but in making your points did you also say that these kinds of stories, when television news gets ahold of them, are overdone and manipulative no matter what the race of the victim (they exploit the suffering of the families, so as to bring the audience in on the drama) and we should have less of them? That's what I mean by truth-seeking.
In my criticism of the press, nor in the many others have I read, is this point made: These stories - when television gets a hold of them, can be overdone and manipulative - no matter the race of the victim. They exploit - for ratings - the suffering of families - to bring audience to the drama. There's a lot of undeniable truth to this.
But there is a bug in me I can't shake - I can't help but think that it should not discourage us from trying to do the right thing.
The fact is - here we are. The press - was moved to possibly its better instincts. The All Spin Zone shares with us another example with Bob Costas refusing to host a Larry King segment because it was exploitive. Just the other day Jack Cafferty at CNN confronts Wolf Blitzer on the BTK Killer coverage accusing it of the same.
Maybe something is afoot? We can only hope. Maybe John Stewart's appearance on Crossfire has had a longer tail then most folks realize. Maybe blogs do have a role in helping shed light on journalists who have lost their way by seeking ratings over substance and on topics that have gotten lost in the noise.
Take, for example, the Be A Witness campaign. An empowered, participatory media - meaning *us* - has a responsibility to each other - to our communities - to the world at large - to speak out. It is not a worthless excercise to try.
It never is.
The other thing I know is that there is a role for blogs in spreading public service news. The All Spin Zone exemplified it and we hope to build a system that will empower blog publishers to take some screen real estate and devote it to them - first with our Missing Persons Network. There are many people in need - not just the young and pretty. And who knows what we can do if we try?
My thoughts again go out to Latoyia Figueroa, her family, and to all suffering similar tragedy.
Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin's wisdom not biblical; it's counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans-most American Christians-are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.
Asking Christians what Christ taught isn't a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation-and, overwhelmingly, we do-it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.
And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior. That paradox-more important, perhaps, than the much touted ability of French women to stay thin on a diet of chocolate and cheese-illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture.
This Catholic says AMEN. This article would act as a kick in the head to most Christians I know, if they read it with an open mind.
You may remember being surprised yourself. The infamously factious Democrats were fiercely unified—Ralph Nader garnered only about 0.38 percent of the national vote while the Republicans were split, with a vocal anti-Bush front that included anti-Clinton warrior Bob Barr of Georgia; Ike's son John Eisenhower; Ronald Reagan's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, William J. Crowe Jr.; former Air Force Chief of Staff and onetime “Veteran for Bush� General Merrill “Tony� McPeak; founding neocon Francis Fukuyama; Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, and various large alliances of military officers, diplomats, and business professors. The American Conservative, co-founded by Pat Buchanan, endorsed five candidates for president, including both Bush and Kerry, while the Financial Times and The Economist came out for Kerry alone. At least fifty-nine daily newspapers that backed Bush in the previous election endorsed Kerry (or no one) in this election. The national turnout in 2004 was the highest since 1968, when another unpopular war had swept the ruling party from the White House. And on Election Day, twenty-six state exit polls incorrectly predicted wins for Kerry, a statistical failure so colossal and unprecedented that the odds against its happening, according to a report last May by the National Election Data Archive Project, were 16.5 million to 1. Yet this ever-less beloved president, this president who had united liberals and conservatives and nearly all the world against himself—this president somehow bested his opponent by 3,000,176 votes. How did he do it? To that most important question the commentariat, briskly prompted by Republicans, supplied an answer. Americans of faith—a silent majority heretofore unmoved by any other politician—had poured forth by the millions to vote “Yes!� for Jesus' buddy in the White House. Bush's 51 percent, according to this thesis, were roused primarily by “family values.� Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, called gay marriage “the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term.� The pundits eagerly pronounced their amens—“Moral values,� Tucker Carlson said on CNN, “drove President Bush and other Republican candidates to victory this week�—although it is not clear why. The primary evidence of our Great Awakening was a post-election poll by the Pew Research Center in which 27 percent of the respondents, when asked which issue “mattered most� to them in the election, selected something called “moral values.� This slight plurality of impulse becomes still less impressive when we note that, as the pollsters went to great pains to make clear, “the relative importance of moral values depends greatly on how the question is framed.� In fact, when voters were asked to “name in their own words the most important factor in their vote,� only 14 percent managed to come up with “moral values.� Strangely, this detail went little mentioned in the postelectoral commentary.[1]
The press has had little to say about most of the strange details of the election—except, that is, to ridicule all efforts to discuss them.
Sad how the election and ideas of election reform have dropped from the news - especially when now is an opportune time to be active in fixing things.
The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
...The ferocious debate over a new constitution has particularly driven home the gap between the original U.S. goals and the realities after almost 28 months. The U.S. decision to invade Iraq was justified in part by the goal of establishing a secular and modern Iraq that honors human rights and unites disparate ethnic and religious communities.
But whatever the outcome on specific disputes, the document on which Iraq's future is to be built will require laws to be compliant with Islam (emphasis mine).
..."We set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic (mine again)," said another U.S. official familiar with policymaking from the beginning, who like some others interviewed would speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity.
..."We didn't calculate the depths of feeling in both the Kurdish and Shiite communities for a winner-take-all attitude," said Judith S. Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq analyst at the National Defense University.
..."We've said we won't leave a day before it's necessary. But necessary is the key word -- necessary for them or for us? When we finally depart, it will probably be for us," a U.S. official said.
I can go to Opensecrets.org and tell who gave which politician money. There is no similar service to find the same type of information about us, or members of the media for that matter. Who gave which blogger money? I can't imagine a service like this would ever be built. It would veer into privacy concerns. However, those who voluntarily agreed to be part of such a service would earn great trust.
The following quotes aren't directly related to this, but their posts are good for thought. In one, Duncan Black is giving some great advice to local politicians in where to reach out to the netroots. In another Jeff Jarvis is turning down a request to attend and blog about a conference that he doesn't agree with, and feels unconfortable being paid for:
I get far far less of this kind of thing than I imagine Kos does (very little, in fact, which is fine by me), but the best way for candidates to reach out to the netroots now is to begin by reaching out to local bloggers. No matter how much research I do I can't possibly have any decent sense of the 470 odd federal races that will happen in '06. More importantly, local races require local press and as we've seen local press will pay attention to local blogs in these kinds of things.
The real value of the netroots to campaigns won't really be, for the most part, their ability to raise money. Sure, campaigns are always trying to get donations from anywhere they can and I can certainly understand that. I'm happy to suggest candidates for the Eschaton community to support. But, an email or phone call from a campaign manager isn't going to do squat to encourage me to do that.
The buzz about campaigns, and the "infiltrating" into the netroots, is for the most part going to come from the ground up now. Reach out to local bloggers.
I got a most odd invitation to come to Nashville to blog Justice Sunday II Tom DeLay, Zell Miller, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, and Phyllis Schlafly. I got email with the offer but there’s also an open invitation here. That’s most odd, since I’ve held these events — and politicians sucking up to them — in disdain. But what’s interesting is that they offered to cover travel expenses. I said no thanks for a few reasons: don’t want to publicize their event, don’t want to take the money. But if any blogger does take their money, I hope it is disclosed.
President Bush draws antiwar protesters just about wherever he goes, but few generate the kind of attention that Cindy Sheehan has since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here this weekend and sought to tell him face to face that he must pull all Americans troops out of Iraq now.
Ms. Sheehan's son, Casey, was killed last year in Iraq, after which she became an antiwar activist. She says she and her family met with the president two months later at Fort Lewis in Washington State.
But when she was blocked by the police a few miles from Mr. Bush's 1,600-acre spread on Saturday, the 48-year-old Ms. Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., was transformed into a news media phenomenon, the new face of opposition to the Iraq conflict at a moment when public opinion is in flux and the politics of the war have grown more complicated for the president and the Republican Party.
Thursday evening on Comcast CN8, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum explained on a talk show that he is "not a believer of birth control."
From his point of view, he explained, "I think it's harmful to women...and society." Further, it has "harmful long-term consequences."
Although Senator Santorum clarified that from a government perspective he has always voted in favor of birth control, he personally thinks it is detrimental. "It goes down the line of being able to do what you want to do without having the responsibility that comes with that," he explained.
The conversation can be viewed here. Thanks to Echidne for the tip.
...At least some youth seem more directionless than deprived.
In some ways, Mr. Hussain and other elders say, the young people have had it easy. At the age when their fathers worked like mules, the sons are playing cricket, studying, hanging out. Compared with their parents, they are well educated, thoroughly literate, fluent in English and the Internet.
Some know family businesses are waiting for them to take over. Some go on welfare as soon as they reach adulthood. Some sell drugs. "They are getting lazy, getting spoiled from the government," said Abu Hanifa, 60, another shopkeeper who works around the clock.
And yet Mr. Hussain and others think the young have also had it harder. In an alien culture, work ballasted the migrants, as did the traditional values they had imported from home. The young have no such anchors; they sometimes seem to be living in rooms without walls.
...Religiously, the young men came at Islam like converts - questioning everything, accepting nothing. If they were going to practice, they wanted to do it in what they considered the right way. If they wanted to go to heaven, they felt, they had to find the purest form. They wanted evidence for whatever they did in the Koran.
All of the young men quickly rejected the Islam of their parents, who practice a Sufi-influenced strain of the subcontinent called Barelvi. Shaped partly by Hindu and folk customs, it believes in the power of pirs, or holy men, and their shrines.
The young men, Mr. Khan especially vehement among them, believed such "innovations" contaminated Islam.
They stopped praying at their parents' mosque, even as they used its basement gym to warn youth against the type of Islam their parents practiced upstairs.
They turned, instead, to the more rigid, orthodox Deobandi school of Islam, which also had a mosque in town. The adherents of Deobandism include the Taliban of Afghanistan; they take what they see as a literal approach to the faith. In Britain, as in Pakistan, this school is growing fast - starting seminaries, producing English-speaking preachers and drawing youths away from the more liberal Islam of their parents.
Eventually Mr. Khan and his friends left the Deobandi mosque, too, saying its approach to outreach was too narrow, its focus too apolitical. And the young zealots felt only frustration and contempt for the mosques' imams, who were often brought from the subcontinent, spoke minimal English, knew nothing of the moral maze young British Muslims face, and abided by an injunction by mosque elders that politics or current events involving Muslims should stay outside the mosque.
And Hillary Clinton has already slid to the right in asking for $90 million of taxpayer dollars to study the effects video games on children - something that's been done quite a bit already.
I have this to say to Mrs. Clinton - You have identified yourself as this generation's Tipper Gore. The metalheads reading this know exactly what I mean. Reaching out to the right with gestures this hollow and expensive play into the hands of those against you.
To divert resources that can be better used fighting known, real problems in this country - for a dubious endeavor at best - for what appears to be a middle-America vote advertisement - is wrong.
Call me naive but I expect Democratic leaders to represent working and poor Americans who keep this country running every day. To be the party of the American dream. This has NOTHING to do with that.
...The hallmark of a "backlash conservative" is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it."[3] These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding.
...what Karl Rove called a "mobilization election" in which victory would go to the party that best rallied its faithful. What this meant in practice was backlash all the way: an appeal to class resentment and cultural dread that was unprecedented in its breadth; ingenious state-level ballot initiatives on "values" questions that would energize voters; massive church-based get-out-the-vote efforts; and paranoid suggestions from all sides inviting voters to believe the worst about those tyrannical liberal snobs.
Senator Sam Brownback's activities at the Republican convention offer us a glimpse of this strategy in microcosm. In his speech before the assembled delegates and the eyes of the world, the godly Kansan came off as a thoughtful, caring Republican who wanted only to heal the sick and halt religious persecution overseas; when he spoke at a private meeting of evangelical Christians, however, he took on the tone of affronted middle-American victimhood, complaining to a roomful of Christian conservatives that "the press beats up on you like there's something wrong with faith, family and freedom" and exhorting them to "win this culture war."[4] For the conservative rank and file, this election was to be the culture-war Armageddon, and they were battling for the Lord.
Whenever Democrats play the Republican class-culture war game - it's a win for Republicans. Democrats need to pursue policies - not cultural politics - that help give a leg up (not a hand-out) - this is the real moral that needs to be addressed - and that what I expect the Democratic party to represent.
From the article linked above:
...the most powerful evocation of the backlash spirit always comes from personal testimony, a tale of how one man came to realize that liberals weren't the friends of common folks but just the opposite. In the past it was figures like George Wallace and Norman Podhoretz and Ronald Reagan who declared that they hadn't left the Democratic Party, the party had left them; in 2004 that traditional role fell to Zell Miller, Democratic senator from Georgia, whose thunderous indictment of his liberal colleagues from the podium of the Republican convention caused such excitement in conservative circles. Here was Miller to assure Republicans that everything they'd ever suspected was true: that the real problem with American politics was that the Democrats had swerved too far to the left; that those same Democrats were led by self-hating people who think "America is the problem, not the solution"; that their presidential candidate was so beguiled by Frenchness—a classic stand-in for devitalized upper-classness—that he "would let Paris decide when America needs defending."[9]
Oddly enough, this same Zell Miller had once been known as a fairly formidable class warrior on the left, blasting Bush's father in a famous 1992 speech as a clueless "aristocrat" who knew nothing of hard work and then dropping this memorable zinger on Dan Quayle: "Not all of us can be born rich, handsome, and lucky, and that's why we have a Democratic Party."
"Not all of us can be born rich, handsome, and lucky, and that's why we have a Democratic Party."
I like to believe we still have a Democratic party. We need it now more than ever.
When all else fails, change the slogan! No seriously, the new slogan reflects thinking what right-wingers decried was unnecessary after 9-11, and what many on the left have always stressed - defeating terrorism requires social, economic, and political tracks along with military - and it requires a shared sacrifice by all - not just our soldiers and their families. So I say it's about time the Administration has shifted its thinking. FOUR YEARS about time. I bet you will hear silence among the right-blogapunditry on this today. Not something they would like to admit.
The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.
In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation's senior military officer have spoken of "a global struggle against violent extremism" rather than "the global war on terror," which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.
...Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that "terror is the method they use."
Although the military is heavily engaged in the mission now, he said, future efforts require "all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities' national power." The solution is "more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military," he concluded.
...Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Rumsfeld spoke in the new terms on Friday when he addressed an audience in Annapolis, Md., for the retirement ceremony of Adm. Vern Clark as chief of naval operations. Mr. Rumsfeld described America's efforts as it "wages the global struggle against the enemies of freedom, the enemies of civilization."
The shifting language is one of the most public changes in the administration's strategy to battle Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and it tracks closely with Mr. Bush's recent speeches emphasizing freedom, democracy and the worldwide clash of ideas.
"It is more than just a military war on terror," Steven J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in a telephone interview. "It's broader than that. It's a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative."
...Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, said in an interview that if the nation's efforts were limited to "protecting the homeland and attacking and disrupting terrorist networks, you're on a treadmill that is likely to get faster and faster with time." The key to "ultimately winning the war," he said, "is addressing the ideological part of the war that deals with how the terrorists recruit and indoctrinate new terrorists."
No matter what your views on the law, you should get educated as to what it means - for our safety yes, but more importantly in my eyes - for our freedom.
In America assault weapons are legal. Crazy question - but what if the terrorists in London had guns? What if the passengers did? What could have happened?
A Colorado congressman told a radio show host that the U.S. could "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalist terrorists attacked the country with nuclear weapons.
Rep. Tom Tancredo made his remarks Friday on WFLA-AM in Orlando, Florida. His spokesman stressed he was only speaking hypothetically.
Talk show host Pat Campbell asked the Littleton Republican how the country should respond if terrorists struck several U.S. cities with nuclear weapons.
"Well, what if you said something like -- if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites," Tancredo answered.
"You're talking about bombing Mecca," Campbell said.
Top aides to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were intensely focused on discrediting former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV in the days after he wrote an op-ed article for the New York Times suggesting the administration manipulated intelligence to justify going to war in Iraq, federal investigators have been told.
Prosecutors investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson's credibility, according to people familiar with the inquiry.
Although lower-level White House staffers typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.
A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove's interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove reportedly responded: "He's a Democrat."
..If confirmed by the Senate, the conservative Roberts would replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who gained a reputation as a moderate swing voter in her 24 terms on the nation's highest court.
The conservative group Progress for America rallied in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington on Tuesday night, carrying signs reading "Confirm."
A liberal advocacy group, People for the American Way, sent out 400,000 e-mails to supporters after the announcement, according to the group's president, Ralph Neas.
...A prominent liberal advocacy group -- NARAL Pro-Choice America -- opposed Roberts' second nomination to the appeals court, saying he has worked to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that struck down state laws outlawing abortion.
Arguing a case for the first Bush administration in 1990 when he was deputy solicitor general, Roberts said Roe v. Wade "was wrongly decided and should be overruled."
In his 2003 confirmation hearing, however, he told senators he was acting as an advocate for his client, rather than presenting his own positions.
He told senators Roe was "the settled law of the land" and said "there's nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent."
Roberts, a native of Buffalo, New York, who now lives in Maryland, is married and has two children. He is a Roman Catholic.
I hear, more and more, mainstream rightwing news organizations attacking blogs on the left, and indeed blogs in general. A whole bunch of generalizations that could apply to the left or the right. They are attempting to frame the word "blog" the way they framed the word "liberal". Consider this a warning.
...Democratic party seems to be under the impression that bloggers are an enormous, important constituency--and that it must go to whatever lengths necessary to win the hearts and minds of this virtual community.
...This seems like a major miscalculation, because the politics of the left-wing blogs are far out of the American mainstream. Where most of the 120 million Americans who voted in the last election bear a benign indifference to political matters, the left half of the blogosphere seethes with hatred for George W. Bush and his supporters. What's more, the blogs take numerous positions that would strike all but the most passionate Democratic partisans as patently preposterous. For example, several of the left-wing blogs recently ran an advertisement that referred to West Virginia Senator and former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd as an "American Hero."
Also, the level of discourse on the Daily Kos and other prominent liberal blogs is not something that would be attractive to the majority of the American public. The writings are often obscene and usually relentlessly hostile and negative. Crude personal attacks, whether aimed at right-wing bloggers or politicians, are the order of the day.
Osama bin Laden's standing has dropped significantly in some pivotal Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has "declined dramatically," according to a new survey released yesterday.
...The one exception is attitudes toward suicide bombings of U.S and Western targets in Iraq, a subject on which Muslims were divided. Roughly half of Muslims in Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco said such attacks are justifiable, while sizable majorities in Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia disagreed. Yet, support for suicide bombings in Iraq still declined by as much as 20 percent compared with a poll taken last year.
The results, which also reveal widespread support for democracy, show how profoundly opinions have changed in parts of the Muslim world since Pew took similar surveys in recent years.
During a routine patrol in Baghdad June 2, Army Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, hiding in a van just 75 yards away. The incident was filmed by the insurgents.
Tschiderer, with E Troop, 101st "Saber" Cavalry Division, attached to 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, was knocked to the ground from the impact, but he popped right back up, took cover and located the enemy’s position.
After tracking down the now-wounded sniper with a team from B Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Iraqi Army Brigade, Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs and gave medical aid to the terrorist who’d tried to kill him just minutes before.
...several House Republicans cautioned that not enough money was being budgeted this year for veterans health care given the number of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The House refused to provide more money. Two of the congressmen who sounded the alarm were pulled from their committee chairmanships.
The predictions of too few dollars for veterans care proved accurate. The Bush administration has now acknowledged a shortfall of at least $1.2 billion, and embarrassed Republican lawmakers are scrambling to provide it.
Iraq is slipping into all-out civil war, a Shia leader declared yesterday, as a devastating onslaught of suicide bombers slaughtered more than 150 people, most of them Shias, around the capital at the weekend.
One bomber killed almost 100 people when he blew up a fuel tanker south of Baghdad, an attack aimed at snapping Shia patience and triggering the full-blown sectarian war that al-Qaeda has been trying to foment for almost two years.
Iraq’s security forces have been overwhelmed by the scale of the suicide bombings — 11 on Friday alone and many more over the weekend — ordered by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
"What is truly happening, and what shall happen, is clear: a war against the Shias," Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a prominent Shia cleric and MP, told the Iraqi parliament.
George Bush Sr. fired Karl Rove in 1992 for planting a negative story with columnist Robert Novak. If you are doing a double take, just read the sentence again. History repeats doesn't it? Read the full, original tale as told by Ron Suskind in Esquire, back in Janurary 2003, at the wayback machine.
Today, I'd like to take a few moments to express profound thanks to Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the US Senate. In fact, all Bostonians should thank him for sharing his incredible wisdom and insight about this city and its depraved ways.
Specifically, here's what Santorum wrote about the church pedophile scandal on a religious website called Catholic Online. ''When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."
So thank you, senator, for setting us straight about the problems with the clergy. Thank you for letting us know that all those pedophilic priests and the church leaders who covered up their crimes are the fault of every Bostonian.
...I asked a Santorum spokesman whether the senator still believed what he said about Boston. I mean, guilt might be our greatest natural resource, but do we really have to fall on our collective sword over wayward priests?
"It's an open secret that you have Harvard University and MIT that tend to tilt to the left in terms of academic biases," said Robert Traynham, the Santorum aide. "I think that's what the senator was speaking to."
On news that Bush's personal credibility rating with the American public is falling, I bet that "leaks" from the Whitehouse, on who they plan to nominate, will move Rove from featuring prominently in the news. Push it right off the map. Bush Co. is very good at changing the subject.
Actually, this prediction comes from a friend - he doesn't have a blog - so I claim the prediction :)
...Now the question remains whether I care. Sorry, but if I went to a party and heard one group dissecting Plame/Rove and another group dissecting War of the Worlds, I'd join the latter conversation. In a blog, it's hard to feign interest.
Well, the powerful voice of pop music
Solve the problems, feed the world
So what if there weren't any blacks involved?
There was Everything but the Girl
Bob Geldof has no ego
That man should get the Nobel Prize
By the time he sang the solo on "Feed the World"
I thought he should be canonized
I felt guilty about the starving
But I felt good to be alive
And I must admit I shed a tear or two
In the very moving video for that great Cars song "Drive"
Saint Bob made me feel like shit
So I got out an envelope, opened it
Put in a very crisp ten pound note
(It was the same one I used earlier to snort my coke)
And that made me feel good inside
(Sending the money, not snorting the coke)
how ironic that our pal the instapundit would have the cajones to post that something was underreported when he has been noticeably quiet about karl rove (who has also been suddenly silent) and TreasonGate.
is part of the lack of Instapundit coverage due to the fact that he called it officially bogus in December of '03?
or Rove lied to Scotty when the Press Secretary told reporters that Rove had nothing to do with leaking the story about Wilson's wife being CIA. we have all found out, so will you "burn" Scotty or Rove the way you tried to throttle Wilson last summer?
QUESTION: Scott, this is ridiculous. The notion that you're going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you've decided not to talk. You've got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?
MCCLELLAN: I'm well aware, like you, of what was previously said. And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the investigation...
QUESTION: (inaudible) when it's appropriate and when it's inappropriate?
MCCLELLAN: If you'll let me finish.
QUESTION: No, you're not finishing. You're not saying anything. You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson's wife. So don't you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn't he?
MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it.
...what if the "source" that Miller (and Cooper) have been protecting may have committed a serious crime, naming an undercover CIA agent and possibly even exposing her to fatal consequences, as happened when American spies were "outed" in the 1970s. In the "slippery slope" argument, those facts are irrelevant. If Judy Miller goes to jail today, under this thinking, it makes it more likely for a good and honest journalist who's on the brink of exposing true corruption to be jailed tomorrow.
Today, we realized that the "slippery slope" argument is wrong, and so were we. We're not happy that Judy Miller is going to jail, but we think -- in this case -- that if she won't cooperate with the grand jury, then it's the right thing.
That's because Judy Miller's actions in recent years -- a pattern that includes this case -- have been the very antithesis of what we think journalism is and should be all about. Ultimately, the heart and soul of real journalism is not so much protecting "sources" at any cost. It is, rather, living up to the 19th Century maxim set forth by Peter Finley Dunne, that journalists should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
That is why the ability of reporters to keep the identity of their true sources confidential is protected by shield laws in 31 states and the District of Columbia (although not in federal courts). Without such protections, the government official would not be able to report the wrongdoing of a president (remember "Deep Throat," the ultimate confidential source?), nor would the corporate executive feel free to rat out a crooked CEO. The comfortable and corrupt could not be afflicted.
But the Times' Judy Miller has not been afflicting the comfortable. She has been protecting them, advancing their objectives, and helping them to mislead a now very afflicted American public. In fact, thinking again about Watergate and Deep Throat is a good way to understand why Judy Miller should not be protected today. Because in Watergate, a reporter acting like Miller would not be meeting the FBI's Mark Felt in an underground parking garage. She would be obsessively on the phone with H.R. Haldeman or John Dean, listening to malicious gossip about Carl Bernstein or their plans to make Judge Sirica look bad.
So says Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald investigating the Valerie Plame identity leak affair.
For my friends who have no idea what this is about. A quick review.
1. Joseph C.Wilson was a U.S. ambassador assigned to investigate Iraq-Niger WMD production claims. He reported he found none. When President Bush, later in his State of the Union address claimed there were, Wilson went public.
2. Shortly after, his wife Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative, had her identity leaked to CNN personality Robert Novak - who revealed it in a newspaper column. It is believed that the revealing of her identity was in retaliation for his going public.
3. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative is illegal. An investigation has begun into who leaked her identity to Novak and to other journalists across the country, notably Judy Miller at the New York Times and Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper.
4. Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper has helped reveal his source as George Bush's primary politcal advisor Karl Rove. Judy Miller, refusing to reveal her source, and has since been sent to jail. Article at the Guardian.
I, for one, have had it with Robert Novak. And if all the journalists who are talking today about "chilling effects" and individual conscience mean what they say, they will, as a matter of conscience and pride, start giving Novak himself the big chill.
That means if you're a Washington columnist maybe you don't go on CNN with him-- until he explains. If you're a newspaper editor you consider suspending his column until he explains. If you're Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/US, you take him off the air until he decides to go on the air and explain. If you're John Barron, editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, you suspend your columnist (with pay, I should think); and if Barron won't do it then publisher John Cruickshank should.
If Novak says he can't talk until the case is over, then he shouldn't be allowed to publish or opine on the air until the case is over. He should know the rage some of his colleagues feel. Claiming to be "baffled" by Novak's behavior may have been plausible for a while. With reporter Judith Miller now sitting in jail, and possibly facing criminal charges later, "baffled" is sounding lame.
After the decision yesterday someone asked Bill Keller, top editor of the New York Times, if this was really a whistle-blowing case. Keller answered: "you go to court with the case you've got." I understood what he meant, but that answer was incomplete.
For in certain ways the case that sent Judy Miller to jail is about a classic whistler blower: diplomat Joseph C. Wilson. Those "two senior administration officials" in Novak's column had a message for him: stick your neck out and we'll stick it to your wife. (They did: her career as an operative is over.) Might that have some chilling effect?
Thank God for the bombing of London's subway today - July 7, 2005 - wherein dozens were killed and hundreds seriously injured. Wish it was many more. "But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction; truth is perished, and is cut off from their mouth." Jer. 7:28. England: Island of the Sodomite Damned
I see from a stroll around the blogosphere that the conservatives aren't the only ones playing the blame game and sharpening the attack lines. And I just got an email from some allegedly left-wing son of bitch chortling about imperial chickens coming home to roost and Michael Collins raising a toast in hell.
To which, all I can say is: What the fuck is wrong with you people??
Thirty seven innocents are dead, hundreds more are wounded, a city is paralyzed, and you're acting like this is the spin room at the last presidential debate -- or your own private revenge fantasy.
It's almost as bad as the columnist for the Guardian who blithely referred to America in the wake of 9/11 as a "bully with a bloody nose" -- smugly oblivious to the fact that the blood in question was the blood of more than 3,000 innocent human beings.
There will be plenty of time later to argue whether London does or does not demonstrate the failure of the flypaper strategy, whether the Rovians did or did not deliberately blew the cover on a British counterterrorism operation, and whether the right-wing media is or is not milking today's attack for political gain.
But right now I gotta agree with Kevin Drum: Just for today -- or what's left of it -- can't we drop the politics and the armchair quarterbacking and treat this like the terrible human tragedy that is? Just this once?
Now is not the time to point to each other, almost in joy, because, to paraphrase, "we're covering the story better than the BBC.
Now is not the time to bring up the incriminations of why this happened and use it as fodder and ammunition in this stupid oneupmanship that characterizes too many of the popular web sites.
Write on our shared sorrow for the people in London. Or write on flowers and trips to Maine and life in general, because life is good. Life is good. But not this. Don't use this event to promote weblogging.
You're right, and I know I'm guilty of this myself.
We are taking a huge step Saturday and are taking a distributed approach to covering Live 8. Not only will Albert be posting to Philly Future, but he will be posting photos to his Flickr account, many of which we will highlight from its RSS feed.
Despite months of American military assaults on supposed insurgent bases, General John Abizaid, the regional US commander, admitted to Congress last week that opposition strength was "bout the same" as six months ago and that "there's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency".
That work now includes secret negotiations with rebel leaders, according to the Iraqi sources.
..."You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do."
Cruise looked like a man possessed -- or at least in need of an Ativan -- leaning insistently forward in his chair, hammering Lauer when the host suggested that some people were actually, you know, helped when doctors prescribed psychiatric drugs. Lauer sparred with Cruise specifically over whether it made sense for Brooke Shields to have sought therapy and taken antidepressants for postpartum depression -- a decision that Cruise had previously criticized.
...As a top-level celebrity believer in Scientology, Cruise has been steeped in the lingo and policies of the late church founder, L. Ron Hubbard. (Hearing Cruise use a term like "ideal scene" during his exchange with Lauer would perk up the ears of anyone who's been in Scientology's orbit before.)
Hubbard launched his self-help movement in the 1950s with a book called "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health," and from early on, he battled with psychologists and psychiatrists. Indeed, Hubbard once wrote in an internal policy statement: "Our war has been forced to become to take over absolutely the field of mental healing on this planet in all forms."
BTW, Katie Holmes has a Scientology minder who is following her as she promotes "Batman Begins".
And Scarlett Johansson was turned down for a role in MI:3 after she doesn't embrace the "religion".
No nation can negotiate with terrorists. For there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death.
George W. Bush
Remarks to Reporters
April 4, 2002
After weeks of delicate negotiation . . . a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies. The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings . . . further talks are planned in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq.
The Sunday Times of London
US 'in talks with Iraq rebels'
June 26, 2005
Wow. So our administration is now making a distinction between "insurgents" and "terrorists"? So "insurgents" who car bomb innocent civilians aren't terrorists?
A giant in the online gambling business, PartyGaming is an often-overlooked megasurvivor from the dot-com crash of the late 1990's. As hundreds of profitless commercial sites disappeared into the digital ether, PartyGaming's popular gambling sites - like PartyPoker.com - soared, with revenues and profits growing exponentially year after year.
This week, the company will go public in what is expected to be the largest offering in years on the London Stock Exchange, one that will make billionaires out of its ragtag assortment of founders and major stockholders - including a California lawyer who earned her first fortune in online pornography and phone-sex lines. All told, as much as $9 billion is expected to be raised, with all of the cash going to private shareholders selling portions of their stakes.
But there will be no Wall Street investment houses lapping up fees in the giant deal, no victory dances in the offices of American corporate lawyers. That is because PartyGaming, based in Gibraltar, has no assets in the United States, and its officers or directors could risk being served with a civil suit - or an arrest warrant - if they came to the United States on business.
The reason? The Justice Department and numerous state attorneys general maintain that providing the opportunity for online gambling is against the law in the United States - and PartyGaming does it anyway. Indeed, of its $600 million in revenue and $350 million in profit in 2004, almost 90 percent came from the wallets and bank accounts of American gamblers.
To justify this, PartyGaming walks a very thin line. Providing online gambling is not illegal per se in the United States, the company argues - federal prosecutors just say it is. The company has already received an e-mail message from the Louisiana attorney general demanding that it cease providing online gambling in that state; PartyGaming simply ignored the communication and waited for additional action that never came.
The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.
As a liberal, I'm not insulted by Karl Rove's remark that "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." He's just demagoging based on a seed of truth: I do want to understand our attackers (because it's stupid in n dimensions not to understand the people you're fighting) and I do want a nuanced, well-thought-out response that will actually make my children safer, rather than the kneejerk Bomb Someone strategery we got from Bush and Rove. So, fine, politicians exaggerate the positions they don't like and even end up stating utter falsehoods like Rove's.
No, what gets my goat is his unthought assumption that every issue and event is fodder for political advantage. So he goes into the very city where firefighters ran up the stairs instead of down, and he mouths off to score some points at a fund-raiser? Tell me now who doesn't take 9/11 seriously, the liberals or callow, unfeeling, assroves like him? This split from reality - he was in New York City! - is where evil takes root.
On a side note... how come my first name is spelled the same way by two people I care not to be associated with, one of whom is one of the most evil to walk this Earth? Pisses me off when I see Karl Rove referred to as "Karl".
I just took part in a terrific Live 8 related conference call organized by David Sifry of Technorati, John Hinderaker of Powerlineblog.com, Joe Trippi and Daren Berringer of JoeTrippi.com.
Special guests were Mike McCurry, a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign and former White House spokesman and Mark McKinnon, Vice Chairman of Public Strategies and advisor to President Bush. Read more about their efforts with the One campaign at Data.org.
"The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead."
The pre-fab "Ask President Bush" town hall-style meetings held during last year's campaign (typical question: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?") were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York's Daily News, "unsuspecting viewers" tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were "watching a completely open forum." A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind?
Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, "a great president." Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush's decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.
Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.
News judgment used to be king. If the press ruled against you, you just weren't news. But if you weren't news how would anyone know enough about you to contest the ruling? Today, the World Wide Web is the sovereign force, and journalists live and work according to its rules."
Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake -- not to convince or condemn or even because you think it might right the wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a lie by remaining silent.
However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a politician. Even the good ones -- or rather, the less bad ones -- tend to treat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly rationed in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the other hand, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.
Which is why I did a double take when I saw what Sen. Durban of Illinois said on the Senate floor yesterday...
The Fed chief than added that the 80 percent of the workforce represented by nonsupervisory workers has recently seen little, if any, income growth at all. The top 20 percent of supervisory, salaried, and other workers has.
The result of this, said Greenspan, is that the US now has a significant divergence in the fortunes of different groups in its labor market. "As I've often said, this is not the type of thing which a democratic society - a capitalist democratic society - can really accept without addressing," Greenspan told the congressional hearing.
The cause of this problem? Education, according to Greenspan. Specifically, high school education. US children test above world average levels at the 4th grade level, he noted. By the 12th grade, they do not. "We have to do something to prevent that from happening," said Greenspan.
...Rather than the scary fragmentation of our society into a nation of disconnected people doing their own thing, I think we're reforming into thousands of cultural tribes, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests. Whether we think of it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously, often overlapping (geek culture and Lego), often not (tennis and punk-funk).
What's interesting is that the same Long Tail forces and technologies that are leading to an explosion of variety and abundant choice in the content we consume are also helping to connect us to other consumers, whether through Amazon and Netflix reviews, blogs, p2p networks or playlist sharing.
Here goes how I see it: Web 1.0 technologies helped us to define our own personal niches by letting us filter: find and consume entertainment, goods, services information exactly to our liking. This empowered us to focus our attention and consumption to our own idiosyncratic tastes. Web 2.0 technologies enable us to communicate and connect with others who share these preferences, concerns, and joys - but only if we are so motivated.
Chris Bowers of MyDD posts a roaring call to arms and announces he is going local - he wants to pursue reform of the local Philadelphia Democratic party.
I just mentioned three Democratic leaning bloggers pushing for either reform of their own party, or leaving it all together.
How much of this is blowback from November? How much of it is because we feel empowered to make change? Or maybe more precisely - how much of it is because we don't feel empowered - that we don't feel a collective ownership of the party?
A commenter in the MyDD thread rebuts that instead of forming whole new organizations that maybe we should be working actively to change what is already here: "If you want to make changes, contact your committeeperson, say you'd like to go to the next ward meeting and get involved, then go. Being a footsoldier in local politics is a thankless job and volunteers for it are few - you won't have much competition. Or volunteer to work at the polls. Don't know how it is in other wards, but after the election, all the pollworkers in my ward are invited to a post-election party where one can smooze and network."
"These are people who might have 20 or 40 years left in their careers, who have already demonstrated some interest in college," said David B. Thornburgh, executive director of the Pennsylvania Economy League. "You can make a substantial difference in someone's life and in the economic vitality of the city if you can get that 25-year-old back to school."
Getting working adults, many with family obligations, to reenroll is no easy feat, which Thornburgh and others who worked on the report concede.
But compared with other workforce-enhancement alternatives - such as massive improvement in Philadelphia's K-12 education or stanching the "brain drain" of college graduates - reaching out to comebackers could prove a relatively quick fix, said Sallie A. Glickman, executive director of the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board.
The tentative goal, Glickman said, is to coax 12,000 dropouts back to school by 2010, which would fill a projected gap in Philadelphia's demand for college-educated workers.
"We want people to just zero in on that ranking: 92d out of 100," Thornburgh said. "I mean, this is all hands on deck. We're just not going to build a new economy with that kind of a labor force."
An initiative called Graduate! Philadelphia, led by the report's author, Hadass Sheffer, seeks to raise the alarm.
Sheffer's plans include a "reengagement center," where returning students can receive counseling and help in navigating red tape, and a "cohort" approach, where comebackers take courses together to provide positive peer pressure.
The report calls on schools and employers to do more as well. Comebackers need flexible schedules on the job and night and weekend courses from schools. Tuition and fee breaks, help with child care, and paid time off for classes were also recommended.
Wow. You don't see any of this happening on the right. I'm noticing Democrats/Liberals/Progressives tearing each other to ribbons regularly now. I wonder if it has always been this way, or if this is a relatively new phenominon. Is it simply a case of "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"?
"This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.". So begins the "Downing Street Memo" and contained within is the revelation that "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" - way back in July of 2002!
A week or so ago I opined on how little attention this has garnered in the press.
Now I'm not a blog triumphalist (err... maybe I am?) but PSoTD has been studiously tracking how bloggers have been keeping this story alive while organizations we trust to provide us with the news have passed on it.
The Daily News Daily News: "Deep Throat is 91. He and the rigorous media that held a president accountable are footnotes in history. Their contemporary counterpart? Deep Indifference."
Of note: Bolton is implicated in trying to keep weapons inspectors from Iraq: "John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat... A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani "had to go," particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war."
...Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000.
Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000.
The alternative minimum tax, created 36 years ago to make sure the very richest paid taxes, takes back a growing share of the tax cuts over time from the majority of families earning $75,000 to $1 million - thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars annually. Far fewer of the very wealthiest will be affected by this tax.
...One way to understand the growing gap is to compare earnings increases over time by the vast majority of taxpayers - say, everyone in the lower 90 percent - with those at the top, say, in the uppermost 0.01 percent (now about 14,000 households, each with $5.5 million or more in income last year).
From 1950 to 1970, for example, for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162, according to the Times analysis. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000.
...While most economists recognize that the richest are pulling away, they disagree on what this means. Those who contend that the extraordinary accumulation of wealth is a good thing say that while the rich are indeed getting richer, so are most people who work hard and save. They say that the tax cuts encourage the investment and the innovation that will make everyone better off.
"In this income data I see a snapshot of a very innovative society," said Tim Kane, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. "Lower taxes and lower marginal tax rates are leading to more growth. There's an explosion of wealth. We are so wealthy in a world that is profoundly poor."
But some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and Ted Turner, have warned that such a concentration of wealth can turn a meritocracy into an aristocracy and ultimately stifle economic growth by putting too much of the nation's capital in the hands of inheritors rather than strivers and innovators. Speaking of the increasing concentration of incomes, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, warned in Congressional testimony a year ago: "For the democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow it to happen."
Others say most Americans have no problem with this trend. The central question is mobility, said Bruce R. Bartlett, an advocate of lower taxes who served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. "As long as people think they have a chance of getting to the top, they just don't care how rich the rich are."
But in fact, economic mobility - moving from one income group to another over a lifetime - has actually stopped rising in the United States, researchers say. Some recent studies suggest it has even declined over the last generation.
"Under the Bush tax cuts, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes - a minimum of $87 million in 2000, the last year for which the government will release such data - now pay income, Medicare and Social Security taxes amounting to virtually the same percentage of their incomes as people making $50,000 to $75,000. Those earning more than $10 million a year now pay a lesser share of their income in these taxes than those making $100,000 to $200,000."
TPMCafe has had an impressive first week. Various top notch bloggers posted interesting and thought provoking stories and John Edwards even stopped by. TPMCafe is the new political collaborative journalism and activism effort by Joshua Micah Marshall. It joins the already established left leaning Daily Kos, MyDD, TalkLeft and the All Spin Zone online communities.
Drudge's latest attack against Bill Clinton includes looking back on a 1998 article by Sally Quinn in the Washington Post. He misreads it real bad. Turns out, according to Eschaton, it's "the biggest self-indictment of the beltway kool kids ever written". Makes Clinton look all the more appealing if you ask me.
Thank you to all the soldiers and their families who have sacrificed so much to secure what me and so many of the rest of us take for granted - our freedom.
It occurs to me that the greatest way to honor that sacrifice is to use our freedom to the fullest: Have you made a life altering choice in the past year? Have you voted in the past two? Do you read the news to stay informed (this one is easy considering my readership!)? Do you take part in debate over the course of the country, of your town?
Times Online: Read the secret Downing Street memo. It's shocking in the context of the time it was written. The major news media doesn't seem to care. No heat on this at all.
Fundable is an interesting web service that lets groups of people pool money to raise funds or make purchases. The tool takes advantage of the distributed nature of the web and reminds me of one of the seven habits - "Win/Win or No Deal". If goals aren't reached - everyone gets their money back.
Lets see...
* Have a trip you need to finance that your community might chip in for?
* Have a non-profit you want to send money to that deserves more than what you alone could send?
* Have an event you need to fund but have no idea where to get the money?
I try and tell myself that where I come from is a strength. That it doesn't bear negative weight on who I am and where I am. But some days I just can't shake the feeling that I don't belong - that I am a creature of another environment - and that everyone knows it too.
..."I think class is everything, I really do," she said recently. "When you're poor and from a low socioeconomic group, you don't have a lot of choices in life. To me, being from an upper class is all about confidence. It's knowing you have choices, knowing you set the standards, knowing you have connections."
..."The shock of going to live in wealth, with Joe and Virginia, it was like Little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers," Ms. Justice said. "It was not easy. I was shy and socially inept. For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn't have any idea what the right clothes were. I didn't know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making a wrong move. When we had a school trip for chorus, we went to a restaurant. I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn't know how to eat it, so I just sat there, staring at it and starving, and said I didn't feel well."
... "I couldn't play Trivial Pursuit, because I had no general knowledge of the world," she said. "And while I knew East Kentucky, they all knew a whole lot about Massachusetts and the Northeast. They all knew who was important, whose father was a federal judge. They never doubted that they had the right thing to say. They never worried about anything."
Most of all, they all had connections that fed into a huge web of people with power. "Somehow, they all just knew each other," she said.
..."The norm is, people that are born with money have money, and people who weren't don't," she said recently. "I know that. I know that just to climb the three inches I have, which I've not gone very far, took all of my effort. I have worked hard since I was a kid and I've done nothing but work to try and pull myself out."
The class a person is born into, she said, is the starting point on the continuum. "If your goal is to become, on a national scale, a very important person, you can't start way back on the continuum, because you have too much to make up in one lifetime. You have to make up the distance you can in your lifetime so that your kids can then make up the distance in their lifetime."
...And though in terms of her work Ms. Justice is now one of Pikeville's leading citizens, she is still troubled by the old doubts and insecurities. "My stomach's always in knots getting ready to go to a party, wondering if I'm wearing the right thing, if I'll know what to do," she said. "I'm always thinking: How does everybody else know that? How do they know how to act? Why do they all seem so at ease?"
Dianah Neff, CIO of Philadelphia, is stopping by to answer questions direct from you, about Wireless Philadelphia, her job as CIO, and more. It's *your* interview with her. This is a rare opportunity and we're honored to have her at the site posting answers to your questions.
A new series in the New York Times discussing social class in America is opening discussions in various blogs I read: Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide. I haven't had a chance to read the first article yet, but for now here goes the relevant posts:
Want a simple rule to define class in America? I have one - and it is sure to offend:
On average: If you shop at Dunkin Donuts for your coffee - you're middle, working class or poor. If you shop at Starbucks for your coffee - you're upper middle class or richer.
That's it.
I am the only person I know who shops at both. Most thumb their noses one way or the other. I go to Starbucks in the afternoon at work - even though might I bitch and moan to my co-workers that Dunkin Donuts costs less and has better coffee. Sometimes we do a double stop - we go to Starbucks for them and they walk with me to Dunkin Donuts for mine. These same co-workers chide me when I buy a drink there every now and then. Three dollars for a small hot chocolate. Three dollars for six ounces! I admit it - I've had a few of them!
Dunkin Donuts is a left over from my economic past. I continue to drink it because Starbucks smells of elitism to me - even if I can supposedly afford it - and I love it over Starbucks - even some try to convince me that Starbucks is just better.
PCWorld.com - Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents: "Next time you make a printout from your color laser printer, shine an LED flashlight beam on it and examine it closely with a magnifying glass. You might be able to see the small, scattered yellow dots printed there that could be used to trace the document back to you."
May 17th isn't being talked about in the news to any great degree. There is little discussion about local politics besides that of corruption. Is there any wonder why turnout has been so low in local primary races?
...Considering how the election turned out, asked a young man describing himself as a former Howard Dean volunteer, what have you learned?
Edwards has heard this question before. In typical Edwards style, he already has a standard answer for it. "The American people want strength, conviction and a core set of beliefs that you will fight for," replied the former senator, presidential candidate and vice-presidential nominee. Discussing "how to maneuver our way through the political landscape," he added, is a fool's errand. "How about if the Democratic Party actually stands for the values the Democratic Party has always stood for?" asked Edwards. "We shouldn't change what we believe and what we stand for because of one election or even two elections."
...One nagging question remains: What, exactly, do the Democrats stand for?
...It is also the question John Edwards has taken up more directly than any other potential 2008 presidential candidate. "We stand for work and opportunity," Edwards said earlier this year. At times he has talked of creating an "opportunity society." At Harvard he spoke of allowing all Americans "the dignity and honor in hard work." The precise formula is a work in progress, but Edwards envisions a campaign in which the Democrats do not merely list good policy ideas, but emphasize the moral foundations of social justice, and depict the party's ideas as representing the essential American values.
If you're a Democrat, you should read the following article. It goes a long way towards explaining why I don't always feel welcome in the party of my choice. via rc3. Read it. Read it will ya? And don't get so defensive you elitist snob.
...A newcomer to American politics, after observing this strategy in action in 2004, would have been justified in believing that the Democrats were the party in power, so complacent did they seem and so unwilling were they to criticize the actual occupant of the White House. Republicans, meanwhile, were playing another game entirely. The hallmark of a "backlash conservative" is that he or she approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order or as a genteel aristocrat but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) upper class. The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it."[3] These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding.
...The reason conservatives are always thought to be tough and liberals to be effete milquetoasts (two favorite epithets from the early days of the backlash) even when they aren't is the same reason Americans believe the French to be a nation of sissies and the same reason the Dead End Kids found it both easy and satisfying to beat up the posh boy from the luxury apartment building: the cultural symbolism of class. If you relish chardonnay/lattes/ snowboarding, you will not fight. If you talk like a Texan, you are a two-fisted he-man who knows life's hardships and are ready to scrap at a moment's notice. This is the reason conservative authors and radio demagogues find it so easy to connect liberals and terrorists. It is the same reason, by extension, that old-time political nicknames like "the Fighting Liberal" make no sense to us anymore and that current foreign policy failures like North Korean nuclear proliferation do not bring lasting discredit on President Bush: in the face of such crises one is either a wimp or a hard guy, and we've already got a hard guy in there.
As the campaign dragged on, nearly every news story seemed to confirm the backlash fantasy. For example, when CBS News examined Dubya's years in the National Guard and based its conclusions on documents whose provenance could not be verified, the age-old charge of liberal bias suddenly became the topic of the day. While the distortions of the Swifties had brought no discredit on Republican campaign efforts, the CBS program was immediately understood not as an honest mistake but as a politically motivated hatchet job, the final proof that the nation's news organizations were out to get conservatives.
Then came what must rank as one of the most ill-conceived liberal electoral efforts of all time: in October the British Guardian newspaper launched a campaign to persuade one contested, blue-collar county in Ohio to vote against President Bush. The idea was to have Guardian readers in Britain write personal letters to voters in Ohio, whose names and addresses the newspaper had secured from registration rolls. Unsurprisingly, the Ohioans strongly resented being lectured to on the foolishness of their national leader by some random bunch of erudite Europeans. Indeed, the episode was so outrageous that there was almost no need for columnists and talk-radio hosts to sputter about the "pansy-ass, tea-sipping" liberal elitists who thought they knew best—the arrogance of the wretched thing spoke for itself.[8] The county had gone for Gore in 2000, but this time, like the state, like the nation, it chose Bush. And why not? Biased newscasters, conceited foreigners: to hell with them all.
Home schooling has traditionally been given to kids whose parents are on the extreme fringes of society, hippes on the left and bible bashers on the right.
Because of the growth in religious extremism, there has been a similar growth in home schooling, meaning that some schools have had their budgets cut as they lose pupils and per pupil funding.
To woo pupils back, a school in Oregon is changing its curriculum to include creationism in science classes and biblical texts in English literature classes, leading to a crappy science and boring, one-dimensional art education for everyone.
So for those that do point out that the US is by and large moderate, here is a concrete example of how the passion of a mindless minority over the apathy of the majority leads to an undemocratic situation where the minority view is enforced rather than tolerated.
The whole South Park Conservative thing doesn't ring true for me except for a small subset of Conservatives, and certainly not those folks in Washington.
blonde sagacity, featured blog at Philly Future, has mentioned that she is a 'South Park Conservative'. I believe her. She's gotten hate mail from other 'conservatives' and 'liberals' alike. Her writting is challenging and open to dialog.
I'm a 'South Park Democrat'.
So you 'South Park Conservatives' out there - can we be friends?
Can we call ourselves 'South Park Citizens' and dump the conservative/liberal division and talk?
There is a common misperception that this Metafilter thread kinda exposes: That blogs lean liberal. It's just not true. By my estimation (not scientific in the least), there appears to be a near 50/50 split among partisan political blogs.
CNN: Researchers: Half of bankruptcies caused by health costs - Feb. 2, 2005: "From 1982 to 1989, I reviewed every bankruptcy petition filed in South Carolina, and during that period I came to the conclusion that there were two major causes of bankruptcy: medical bills and divorce," said George Cauthen, a lawyer at Columbia-based law firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP. "Each accounted, roughly, for about a third of all individual filings in South Carolina." He said fewer than 1 percent of all bankruptcy filings were due to credit card debt."
CNN: Bankruptcy bill unfair - Mar. 3, 2005: "The new "means" test in the legislation is intended to determine whether those seeking bankruptcy protection must repay their debts or are allowed to have them canceled. Under the current system, bankruptcy judges have the discretion to decide that. Supporters of the bill hope for passage before lawmakers adjourn in mid-March for the spring recess. Banks, credit card companies and retailers have pushed since 1997 for a bill overhauling the bankruptcy laws. Consumer and civil rights groups and unions say the legislation would shred a safety net for those who have lost their jobs or face mounting medical bills."
And the bill is liable to pass. The mass media on this? Well they'll report it after it has been voted on and settled of course.
Bradly Smith, a commissioner at the Federal Election Commission warns that campaign finance laws will apply to bloggers. Read about it at CNET: The coming crackdown on blogging.
But, in one of the greatest ironies of the U.S. intervention, Iraqis
instead went to the polls and elected a government with a strong
religious base -- and very close ties to the Islamic republic next
door. It is the last thing the administration expected from its costly
Iraq policy -- $300 billion and counting, U.S. and regional analysts
say.
...State Sen. Ken Toole, D-Helena, the bill's sponsor, says Montana residents are tired of subsidizing big-box stores whose low prices -- and high profits -- depend on paying workers low wages.
"When you don't pay workers, they get public assistance," he said. "Guess who pays for that?"
A state Senate tax panel is scheduled to hear the bill, which has irked retailers and prompted Costco to postpone plans to build a larger store in Kalispell, population 13,000, in the northwest corner of the state.
"We're waiting to see how the legislation shakes out," said Doug Schutt, head of operations for Costco's northern division. "The bill singles out retailers and we think that's unfair."
The measure would impose a 1 percent tax on stores with more than $20 million in sales. It would rise to 1.5 percent for more than $30 million and 2 percent for sales of more than $40 million.
The tax would apply to 160 stores, accounting for about half the state's total retail activity, and funnel about $20 million a year to state coffers, Toole said.
The proposed levy -- in a sparsely populated state with no sales tax -- would apply to stores whose part-time employees make up more than a quarter of the work force and whose full-time workers earn annual compensation of less than $22,000.
Go and read his remarks. I have a great feeling about Dean as Chairman. He got to this position the old fashioned way, by the people's choice. And that speaks to a better future for the Democratic party.
So... there was a "reporter"/activist, using an alias, who got denied Congressional press credentials, who got approved to be a a White House correspondent, who lobbed softball questions to President.
I want to say to those in Iraq who decided to vote in an atmosphere of violence and cynicism - you're heroes. I pray that whatever the final outcome, the people of Iraq will keep their spirits up, because I expect the next few weeks to be brutal as many will pile on to discredit the vote, to destroy the elected, to rip the heart out of those who braved violence today to cast their ballot. And to those righties who infer that to oppose Bush is to somehow be against freedom - shame on you. Shame on your divisive lying and hatred. Shame on you for using the Iraq people as a political football. Hopefully those elected will help to stabilize a terrible situation and they will need honest support to do so. Not blind obedience to any political party.
...Now we're told that the upcoming elections in Iraq are a sign that everything is on the right track, and that once Iraqis elect their own leaders things will get better. I'm doubtful, but I hope I'm wrong. Every day when I think about Iraq, I think about the people there who want a better future. Not insurgents, or terrorists, or people milking the occupation for power and profit, but regular people who want to live in a safe, prosperous, modern country. There have to be millions of them. That's the basic aspiration of most people in the world, and I'm sure it's the basic aspiration of most Iraqis. Where do they go from here? What can we do for them? I don't care if most of those people love or hate America at this point, I feel like they are the people to whom we are obliged. And as cynical as I feel about the lies, the mistakes, and the false reality in which President Bush and his advisors seem to live, I can't get those people out of my mind.
Wish I could share my thoughts this clearly. Is it me or is Rafe blogging more often? via dangerousmeta.
On a related note that hasn't gotten much mention from bloggers on the right or left: the Palestinian elections have moved things in the right direction. Lets hope progress towards peace goes on from here.
"The biggest regret is that we didn't stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret that a lot."
While all of you are having fun covering a $40 million dollar waste of taxpayer money, Richard Armitage, admits his true feelings to the public. Of course it happens as he is leaving the Bush Administration. If there is any quote, any link I'd be passing around right now.. it's this quote and interview.
Update:This just might be bigger news however. More in Metafilter.
You should subscribe to The Atlantic. The current issue features a frightening article by Richard Clarke (yes that Richard Clarke) that is a fictional write up looking back on the next ten years. Much of it based on what would happen if we attack Iran. Scary stuff.
I'll stick by with what I said. I'll add that the timing of this is real unfortunate because it is distracting folks from something that occured that used your money for an illegal purpose.
I despise folks that attempt to make people look bad for their political gain.
There is a tremendous difference between this and the Williams situation: one was paid off with tax payer dollars, the others were paid off to be part of a campaign they clearly believed in, with campaign funds. One was illegal. One was not. One did not make disclosures. The others did.
Being paid to do what you love is no wrong thing. In fact - that's the right idea if you ask me. But can you trust a pundit/journalist who is being paid by some entity to faithfully report about that same entity? That's tough. Sometimes getting paid helps you become an expert in your field. At other times - it leaves you nothing more than a paid hack.
The question has come up many times before. The way Dan Gillmor has handled this in the past has always impressed me.
Similarly, you rarely hear me mention Comcast, Philly.com, KRD, or any of my previous employers because you can't trust what I say about them 100%.
The search (has) ended almost two years after President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, citing concerns that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction and may have hidden weapons stockpiles
NYTimes: Exit, Snarling: "Mr. Stewart's "Daily Show," which is especially popular with young people, is a reminder that television was supposed to be a "cool" medium, best suited to people whose jugular veins aren't throbbing. And last month, when the tsunami hit Asia, viewers got a chance to notice what they were in danger of losing to talk TV. CNN, with a comparatively large international army of journalists at its disposal, went out and covered the story. Fox News and MSNBC had to depend more on conversationalists in the studio, all of whom agreed that tidal waves were very, very bad."
via dangerousmeta which makes a great point about primary sources.
Here's the deal: a little known TV pundit was paid a quarter million dollars in your taxpayer money to sell the Bush administration agenda. So far you won't find this on mainstream TV news shows. The right wing blogger pundit clique is spinning the story on Williams being a sell out. Clearly it's to avoid discussion that this administration illegally used your money to push its propaganda. Hypocrites.
My prediction: Some stupid stiff at the Department of Education will be the fall guy and Williams will become famous.
Jeff Jarvis warns bloggers not to sell their credibility like Williams. Full disclosure of business arrangements is the only way for pundits and journalists alike. Agreed. But lets cast the light both ways. The administration paid off a pundit. A person people go to for trusted opinion. And while Williams might have lost a job - he just got a ton of free exposure. We all know what they say about "bad press" right? (Update:Jeff's follow up post agrees with me and he's actually doing something about it - a FOIA request.)
I didn't know who Williams was before this story started to break.
If they were willing to pay a pundit with such a small audience (I know that's an assumption on my part, but among friends and family, no one knows this guy either) who else have they paid? Which bloggers? Which pundits? Not just on Social Security, but the Iraq war and more. And lets get beyond money... how about other benefits this administration has bestowed on its media (including blogger) lackeys. How deep does this rabbit hole go?
...My inner dialog was comparing the current situation to that of Darfur, where tens of thousands have died and hundreds of thousands displaced during a civil war, an ongoing disaster in which Western attention, aid and intervention could halt further additions to the numbers affected.
Yet not only has there been no public campaign for humanitarian aid donations, the rest of the world has done little but talk at the warring sides and gotten in turn what appears to be little but words. I'm not pointing the finger at America, or the Bush Crew, in particular, because I don't see any government really driving this issue. Kristof has a point, that public and private giving in America is far lower than any other nation to which it can reasonably be compared.
Here we stand: an outpouring of generosity rarely seen on an international scale for one problem with many other problems undiminished. Humanity, as a whole, has a command over global resources of a level that could cure all the world's ailments traceable to historical scarcity. Hunger, lack of modern shelter, diseases for which there are known cures could be resolved if the richer nations made a decision to do it.
This can be achieved with minimized ecological impact and positive economic growth if, and only if, our tendency towards greed and selfishness are able to be forced aside...
Could even my success happen in this day and age? If I was in the same boat I was in during the early nineties, now, could do the same thing? According to this Economist article, it's probably nowhere near as likely.
The most vivid evidence of social sclerosis comes from politics. A country where every child is supposed to be able to dream of becoming president is beginning to produce a self-perpetuating political elite. George Bush is the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and the sprig of America's business aristocracy. John Kerry, thanks to a rich wife, is the richest man in a Senate full of plutocrats. He is also a Boston brahmin, educated at St Paul's, a posh private school, and Yale?where, like the Bushes, he belonged to the ultra-select Skull and Bones society.
Mr Kerry's predecessor as the Democrats' presidential nominee, Al Gore, was the son of a senator. Mr Gore, too, was educated at a posh private school, St Albans, and then at Harvard. And Mr Kerry's main challenger from the left of his party? Howard Brush Dean was the product of the same blue-blooded world of private schools and unchanging middle names as Mr Bush (one of Mr Bush's grandmothers was even a bridesmaid to one of Mr Dean's). Mr Dean grew up in the Hamptons and on New York's Park Avenue.
The most remarkable feature of the continuing power of America's elite?and its growing grip on the political system?is how little comment it arouses. Britain would be in high dudgeon if its party leaders all came from Eton and Harrow. Perhaps one reason why the rise of caste politics raises so little comment is that something similar is happening throughout American society. Everywhere you look in modern America?in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts?you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening and a gap widening between the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of ordinary working stiffs.
2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry will file today, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, papers in support of the Green Party/Libertarian Party recount effort. Specifically, Kerry will be filing a request for expedited discovery regarding Triad Systems voting machines, as well as a motion for a preservation order to protect any and all discovery and preserve any evidence on this matter...
Kerry's entry into this recount effort changes the math on this matter dramatically. He can likewise show irreperable harm, and unlike the Green and Libertarian candidates, he can also prove a substantial chance for success on the merits because he lost the Ohio vote by a statistical whisker.
It should be noted that Kerry's filing of these requests does not indicate his complete entry into the recount process, but does clearly indicate that he is moving decisively in that direction. His previous stance on the matter was based simply on his desire to defend the right to have a recount in the first place. The evidence of election tampering in Ohio, specifically surrounding Triad, has motivated him to actively join the fight. The Democratic Party is also quietly putting financial resources into the Ohio recount effort.
Speaking of which, Alex has posted a terrific idea at his site that makes it easy for you to help our soldiers keep in touch with their families. He's encouraging folks to pass it around, and I agree.
Remarks made by Governor Howard Dean on the Future of the Democratic Party. Given at The George Washington University on December 8, 2004.
Thank you for that introduction. It's a pleasure to be here.
Let me tell you what my plan for this Party is:
We're going to win in Mississippi
...and Alabama
...and Idaho
...and South Carolina.
Four years ago, the President won 49 percent of the vote. The Republican Party treated it like it was a mandate, and we let them get away with it.
Fifty one percent is not a mandate either. And this time we're not going to let them get away with it.
Our challenge today is not to re-hash what has happened, but to look forward, to make the Democratic Party a 50-state party again, and, most importantly, to win.
To win the White House and a majority in Congress, yes. But also to do the real work that will make these victories possible -- to put Democratic ideas and Democratic candidates in every office -- whether it be Secretary of State, supervisor of elections, county commissioner or school board member.
Here in Washington, it seems that after every losing election, there's a consensus reached among decision-makers in the Democratic Party is that the way to win is to be more like Republicans.
I suppose you could call that philosophy: if you didn't beat 'em, join them.
I'm not one for making predictions -- but if we accept that philosophy this time around, another Democrat will be standing here in four years giving this same speech. we cannot win by being "Republican-lite." We've tried it; it doesn't work. The question is not whether we move left or right. It's not about our direction. What we need to start focusing on... is the destination.
There are some practical elements to the destination.
The destination of the Democratic Party requires that it be financially viable, able to raise money not only from big donors but small contributors, not only through dinners and telephone solicitations and direct mail, but also through the Internet and person-to-person outreach.
The destination of the Democratic Party means making it a party that can communicate with its supporters and with all Americans. Politics is at its best when we create and inspire a sense of community. The tools that were pioneered in my campaign -- like blogs, and meetups, and streaming video -- are just a start. We must use all of the power and potential of technology as part of an aggressive outreach to meet and include voters, to work with the state parties, and to influence media coverage.
Dean and DFA are doing terrific work keeping the passion that arose during the presidential campaign alive and focused. Howard Dean will be webcasting a major speech today. I'll let the email many of us were sent speak for itself:
Dear Karl,
Live Webcast December 8, 2004
Governor Dean will lay out a vision for the future of the Democratic Party this Wednesday at 12 p.m. Eastern in Washington, D.C.
He will outline not just a direction for our party, but a concrete destination: a party built from the ground up.
That means a party powered by millions of small donors, not millionaires. It means a party that speaks plainly and commits to concrete outcomes that affect real people. And it means a party that competes in every single race, for every single vote, in all fifty states.
You can watch live video of the speech on Wednesday morning at the Democracy for America web site:
Be sure to join us for the live webcast on Wednesday at 12 p.m. Eastern. Thank you.
Thank you,
Tom McMahon
Executive Director
Democracy for America
P.S. -- Since I last wrote to you, about the need to protect every vote in the Washington Governor's race, over 15,000 small donations poured in to put the Washington Democratic Party over the top -- they raised enough money to pay for a full hand count and ensure that every vote counts.
Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire's campaign manager wrote a personal thank-you to the Democracy for America community. Read his letter and all the latest news at the blog: www.democracyforamerica.com
Wow, I'd imagine it took a lot to push the forum maintainers at DU to do this. It's always a shame when people decide to use invector to make an argument instead of arguing the merits of their point. I have a real hard time trusting people like that and they can hurt the cause they are pursuing. There is passion and their is self destruction. Keep your passion on the goal - not on trying to control people already on your side.
...When it came to the formation of the democracies of the West, the concepts of liberalism and democracy, while not inseparable, were surely complementary, with the emphasis on the former. Among the founders of the American republic were serious men who were more dubious about democracy than about liberty. They certainly did not believe in -- indeed, they feared -- populism; populism that, unlike a century ago, has now become (and not only in the United States) the political instrument of "conservatives," of so-called men of the "Right." It is significant that in Europe, too, the appeal of the term "liberal" has declined, while "democratic" is the adopted name of a variety of parties, many of them not only antiliberal but also extreme right-wing nationalist.
Liberalism in its noblest, and also in its most essential, sense has always meant (and, to be fair, here and there it still means) an exaltation, a defense of the fundamental value and category of human dignity. But much of scientism and technology (yes, including the orthodoxy of Darwinism and the absolute belief in progress) declares that there was, there is, and there remains no fundamental difference between human beings and all other living beings. But if that is so, what happens to the emphasis on human dignity? Either human beings are unique or they are not. Either thesis may be credible, but not both. That is not just a question for religion.
still looks like 
to me.
Your memory plays tricks on you. It can be so selective. What one remembers, another experiencing the same event, might recall entirely different. For me, well it seems I've already forgotten so much of my past.
But the morning of 9/11, and the following two weeks remain so crystal clear. For me, for my wife, for anyone who I've talked to. The horror, the anger, the realization that life can change in an instant, no matter how many layers of denial we attempt to hide behind.
How many of us swore to change our lives in those following weeks? Resolve to be better citizens? Better family members? Better friends? I did. I know you did.
For many, that day prompted reaching out. Connecting. Making contact. It would emerge as the moment that 
That 15th I went to confession. Not knowing that later that day 
Besides, the web was *already* an integral part of my life. I had put so much of myself into my work, into this, I felt I had to take five steps back to find my footing.
In some ways, the change was for naught. Some moved away. Others disappeared into online gaming. A mailing list of close friends imploaded under personal attacks brought about by political differences that couldn't be bridged. And here I am, back on the web, participating even more then I did prior to 9/11. I guess it's part of who I am. And I guess that's life, it goes on. But I'm still left every day with the question - is this making a difference? 
I'm mirroring 
I have a line in one of my songs that laments that 
A growing group of regional blogs, largely led by 
Howard at 
