More stuff you should be reading instead of wasting your time reading convention coverage…

• I had forgotten about the Internet Archive until I stumbled across a reference to it again yesterday. What a marvelous resource – video, audio, text, and web pages all archived and searchable!

• Lawrence Lessig has written an open letter to Bill O’Reilly asking him to stop verbally abusing Jeremy Glick. Glick, whose father was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11, was invited on the show to discuss why he had signed a full page anti-war ad run in national newspapers. On the show, O’Reilly behaved boorishly (you can watch the video of the interview and a clip about the segment from Outfoxed via links from Lessig’s letter). Since the show, O’Reilly has badly mischaracterized Glick’s statements. Thank you for standing up for Mr. Glick, Lawrence. Well said. (via Boing Boing)

• The Bush administration is seeking to remove citizens’ control over health care issues. The New York Times reports that lawyers for the government are arguing in court that “consumers cannot recover damages for [prescription drug and medical device-related injuries if the products have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.” Curious. For a conservative administration, they sure put a lot of faith in Big Government.

• Jay Rosen at PressThink posts his Newsday article today about bloggers at the political conventions. Rosen will be blogging the convention himself, and I think he’s right on target with the difference between bloggers and journalists:

“Journalists have learned to split themselves off from the public, and talk about it as an “other,” almost a thing with behavior patterns of its own. Bloggers are more embedded with the public, which to them is not so much an “it” as a “we.”

Exactly. Bloggers can do what journalists should do: make news stories relevant and meaningful to ordinary Americans. Of course being a blogger doesn’t automatically make you brilliant and incisive, but bloggers who just talk out of their ass will be filtered out, or other bloggers will counter them. Balance in the blogosphere will be more meaningful than that presented in major media. That’s not an assertion I can support, but it is what I believe.

• By the way, you can catch up with all the convention-related blog postings at ConventionBloggers.com.

• If you’re protesting the convention, you may have to do it inside a cage. I agree with TalkLeft – this stinks on ice.

• In a great Molly Ivins column from this week, Molly feels her head spinning around like that little girl in The Exorcist. (via Sysiphus Shrugged)

More stuff you should be reading instead of pretending to be a law-abiding citizen…

• Um, tell me this doesn’t sound like a Gestappo tactic: According to the Rocky Mountain News, the FBI is now making preemptive house calls to people they suspect might protest at one of the upcoming political conventions. (via TalkLeft)

• Kevin Drum points us to more Bush flipping and flopping.

• The New York Times digests the 9/11 Commission Report and suggests that much of what we thought we knew about the attacks is wrong. Government officials, according to the article, apparently lied, obfuscated, and covered their asses in order to make themselves look as taken off guard as the rest of us were.

• Okay, I’m no biker, I don’t really follow cycling, but what Lance Armstrong is about to do has got to be one of the all-time great feats in sports history. (BBC News)

• Some records that were supposedly destroyed have miraculously turned up, and they seem to show that Bush technically deserted from the Air National Guard. So, why are news outlets saying there’s nothing new here? (Eschaton)

• Cassini sees lightning on Saturn, starts counting, “One one-thousand, two one-thousand, ...”

• When blogging is mentioned as “the hottest new enterprise tool” and Microsoft is getting behind the idea, you know it’s over. Blogging is so June ‘04. Wikis are where it’s at.

• For pure vitriolic hate spewing, I’m not sure even the most radical right-wing religious nutball could top BitterWaitress.com’s database of shitty tippers. (via Boing Boing)

• Why is the Justice Department ordering documents with titles such as “Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure” and “Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes” to be destroyed? According to The Memory Hole, a memo was sent out to Federal Depository Librarians to destroy a these documents and more “to prevent disclosure of their contents.” Why? Is this unusual?
• There’s a searchable copy of the 9/11 Commission Report available online. (via Boing Boing) The most relevant chapter seems to be Chapter 8, which I’ve downloaded but not yet read. John Emerson at Seeing the Forest, though, reads the chapter as an indictment of Bush’s handling of the gathering threat. (via TalkLeft)

• You want indictments? You got ‘em. David Corn has read the 9/11 Report, and posts an assessment.

• Holden, Pie, Athenae, et al, did a nice job maintaining Eschaton for a time, but it’s damn nice to have Atrios back inna house. See this post on Richard Cohen and the failure of leadership.

• At The Talent Show, Greg notes that George W. Bush is one of our most forward-looking presidents.

• The ACLU explains the PATRIOT ACT’s assault on the Fourth Amendment. (via TalkLeft)

• Have you no decency, Congress? At long last, have you no sense of decency? Kevin Drum alerts us to a move by the House of Representatives to deny gay and lesbian Americans their opportunity to appeal to federal courts for marriage rights.

• The mainstream press is getting pretty creeped out by all the bloggers reporting from the political conventions. Could they be worried that they’ll be shown up? (Rhetorica)

• Corante is covering the INDUCE Act hearings and the progress of the bill. At the hearings yesterday, the head of the Copyright Office actually argued that INDUCE doesn’t go far enough! See Corante’s take here.

• Wired News’ coverage of the INDUCE Act hearings included a link to Open Secrets, which monitors campaign donations. I went to the site, plugged in my zip code, and had loads of info on top donors and top recipients of campaign contributions in my little corner of Seattle. I know it’s not an original thought, but I found myself a little sick to my stomach when I saw just how much money my representatives are being given by private industry. It doesn’t seem like we have a system that promotes representatives who are responsible to the voters.

• I love being able to give a shout out to Republicans every once in a while. Don’t know if there’s some lurking beast hidden in this bill, but on the face of it Representative Ron Paul’s (R-TX) Voter Freedom Act seems like a righteous move. (via Reason Hit & Run)

• Finally, you remember Annie Jacobsen, the lady who wrote the piece about the 14 suspicious Middle Easterners on her flight? Kevin Drum wraps up the story. Seems the real deal is that is was Mrs. Jacobsen who was the problem; she was panicked and overreacting. Well, I got taken in. Just goes to show.

Okay, so commenter Robotech_Master made a fair point about Salon.com’s ad policy and prompted me to go back and read the Alan Moore interview I mentioned yesterday. I was a little annoyed by the distracting ads flashing and jumping while I was reading the article, but it was worth the effort, and I’m looking forward to picking up some of Moore’s work.

Here are just a couple of random things that jumped out at me:

And I do tend to think that, given the upsurge of the religious right over the last couple of decades, these are the last spasms of those dinosaur organisms.

Why do you think that?

Because they are standing in the way of history, trying to turn everything, politically and spiritually, back to a medieval vision of the world. Whereas they’re perfectly entitled to have whatever worldview they like, I would suggest that humanity is moving in a forward direction. And that any attempt to turn the clock back to a mythical, simpler, or better age would probably be about as effective as Britain’s ancient King Canute, who famously sat on his throne along the tide line and ordered the waves to go back.

I’d like to believe this, but I’m not sure I buy it. I do think it’s weird that, on the one hand, technology is moving society into an unprecedented level of connectivity and collaboration, of a type that will probably make the religious right increasingly foolish. However, on the other hand, the power base in this country is moving further to the right, and in al Qaeda and other groups we see the global rise of radical fundamentalism, so there’s a rather complex fault line forming and it’s anyone’s guess as to what the landscape will look like after the earthquake.
———————————
bq. If we look back a few generations to perhaps our great-grandparents, we’ve got a very different world in terms of its information content. You have a world where the people’s heads were more than likely filled with the details of their own lives. I know that sounds completely unlikely from our cultural standpoint, where our heads are filled with the doings of Joey, Chandler, Ross, Fabian, whoever the other ones are, I can’t remember.

Sacrilege!

How quickly we forget! [Laughs.] But, yeah, people’s heads are stuffed with a fantastic amount of information, and I think all too often they cannot assimilate, digest or connect up that incredible amount of data into a coherent worldview.

Yeah. This is something Joseph Campbell pointed to; our culture has developed so rapidly that our the old mythology doesn’t apply and the new myth hasn’t been created yet that will help us assimilate. It’ll happen, but we have to go through this unsettling flux first.
———————————
bq. I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don’t know because I can’t imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I’m not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we’ve evolved from.

You’re saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.

Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it’s a completely different substance altogether. And that’s what I see looming for society—and it’s probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary.

This is the concept of the Singularity that I’ve been hearing so much about lately. I think we’re already in the midst of this, we just haven’t quite reached that boiling point yet.

Really interesting, stimulating article. Thanks for nudging me back over there.

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Via Boing Boing, there’s an article in the Guardian which looks at the Oberholzer-Gee/Strumpf study on file-sharing’s effect on CD sales. The study concludes that file sharing has virtually no effect on music sales, and may have some positive benefit in some instances. What I don’t get is why the recording industry continues to pig-headedly pooh-pooh this report. In god’s name, why don’t they start using file sharing to transform their business?

• We may find part of the answer to that question at Ars Technica, which reports today that spyware-laden P2P distributor iMesh has settled with the RIAA for $4.1 million. In this article, RIAA Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol is quoted as saying, “Peer-to-peer technologies hold real promise.” Looks to me like the RIAA’s game has been all about control. With their hands on the iMesh name and technology, the recording industry can start to insinuate itself into the file-sharing industry. This won’t be good.

• Speaking of piracy, is there a little black pot throwing stones in black houses thing going on in the gaming industry? (Boing Boing)

• Meanwhile, the open-source philosophy continues to gain ground. Wired News reports that a Bakersfield, CA, newspaper has launched an online, participatory news site. An editor reviews news submissions from community members and posts them on the site as long as they meet minimum journalistic requirements. “Then, a small editorial team decides what content the 22,000 households in the area will receive in the newspaper version each week.” Very exciting. Very cool.

• Have I been cutting the gummint too much slack? I expected that the Valerie Plame outing would result in a thorough, methodical investigation. Kevin Drum points out where their priorities really lie. Josh Marshall has his say, too.

• As noted at Slashdot, NASA has released new photos from the Apollo 11 mission, and they are absolutely stunning.

• Boing Boing quotes a bit of an interview with British comic book writer Alan Moore. I didn’t read the whole thing because Salon requires you to read ads to access its site, but the bit on Boing Boing looks interesting, so I found the Alan Moore fan site which is chock-a-block with info and interviews.

• In an attempt to balance the budget, the Scottish military is undergoing a big shakeup. Military units such as the Black Watch, with hundreds of years of tradition behind them, will be merged into a single unit. Scottish officers are understandably angry with the move. Lest anyone out there start snickering about soldiers in dresses, think back to the movie Braveheart for a second. Scottish military units have distinguished themselves throughout history with their fearless and ferocious abilities in battle. Hopefully, the current shakeup will only hurt for a little while. Heck, maybe it’ll even give them more incentive to nasty-it-up on the battlefield.

More things you should be reading instead of this lousy sentence…

• More from The Nation on the Bush Administration’s disastrous disregard for science. This quote from the article seems to me to be on target:

Dr. Kurt Gottfried, the chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in an interview last week that a second Bush term would “further the demoralization of the professional staff now in service…If Bush is reelected, they would lose hope,” Gottfried argued, and “the people most likely to leave [in a second Bush Administration] are the most valuable scientists at the NIH and the CDC, an exodus from which it would take decades for America to recover.

• Meanwhile, the Administration’s loss of interest in the Middle East peace process threatens to dramatically weaken US influence in the region.

• The Sandy Berger story threatens to be a real distraction, mostly because pundits like Josh Marshall, who should know better, continue to give it play. It’s highly embarrassing for Mr. Berger, but let’s keep our focus, people. Berger’s lapse of judgment apparently caused no harm. The Administration’s lies and poor judgments, on the other hand, are costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Read more on reasons for ignoring this story…for now at Functional Ambivalent and Body & Soul.

• PBS’s The American Experience reminds us that new technology often causes fearful overreactions, as the Kodak camera did when it was introduced in 1888! (via Boing Boing) Meanwhile, Nigerians are living in fear that they can be killed instantly by cell phone calls. (Reason Hit & Run)

• Is the country finally mellowing over marijuana? Well, maybe not. (Reason Hit & Run)

• The Daily Show with John Stewart wins the 2004 Television Critics Award for outstanding news and information programming. In your face, Nightline!

• If you’re changing email addresses, try using ReturnPath to keep long lost friends in the loop.

• Thanks to Sisyphus Shrugged for alerting us that the Bulwer-Lytton awards have been announced. The entries, as always, are a hoot to read.

• The Scotsman is reporting on a new, all-commercial cable station. Well, why not? We’ve got everything else we need.

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Ashcroft covering up the statue of Justice is seeming more and more like a telling omen. Over at Eschaton, Pie links to the latest Ashtrocity – trumping up relatively minor charges into terrorist activities.

• Nice. Digby shares a little bitchsnipe from the Kerry campaign.

• There’s lots of grumbling out there about the proliferation of sites requiring registration. This trend is especially noticeable among online newspapers. Wired News has an article about the problem, and there are comments at Boing Boing and Gadgetopia.

One thing that struck me in the Wired News article is how clueless people running the registration sites seem to be. Elaine Zinngrabe, who runs the LA Times’ online service, is quoted as saying, “I think if people are annoyed at anything, it’s that it takes them the minute or whatever they have to do it.” Dipik Rai, Zinngrabe’s counterpart at Knight-Ridder says he “doesn’t see the information gathering as an invasion of readers’ privacy,” and that the company ” has received only a small number of complaints” about online registration. I think these guys are living in a fantasy land.

First of all, it’s not the time that it takes me to register that’s the problem; it’s that I’ve already registered at a couple of different papers, and I really don’t want to have to repeat the process every time I want to read an article at a site I haven’t visited before. Plus, I have to actually keep track of all the different login names and passwords.

Secondly, information gathering is—in my opinion—an invasion of my privacy. That’s how I choose to see it, and Mr. Raj’s comments notwithstanding, that’s how many people see it. When I encounter a site that asks for my registration now, I leave it and I don’t take the time to post a complaint… and I don’t come back.

Newspapers seem to think that people use their sites the way they use their newspapers, as one-stop shops for news and information. But the fact is that I might hit a dozen different newspaper sites in the course of an hour or so, depending on where I’m directed while reading blogs and so on. Maintaining registration lists, giving up my personal information, and logging in to separate sites is a major hassle. If newspapers were smart, they’d drop the idea altogether.

• I think this self-contained one-off book-printing machine is a cool idea with a lot of merit that will never catch on. (Engadget)

More stuff you should be reading…

• Via MaxSpeak, You Listen! it’s the Presidential race set to music. Tee hee. Presidential races set to music are funnee.

• For a while we were hearing a lot about superbugs—bacteria that had evolved resistance to our current crop of antibiotics. Apparently, the MRSA superbug is a big problem in Scotland, and a new disinfectant is being introduced to stop its spread.

• Lanceair makes kit planes that can be pressurized for high-altitude flight. I want one.

• Apparently, this is the way politics works now. The Gubernator’s idea of achieving consensus is to bully and berate instead of patiently working with lawmakers. Who knew politics was such a macho sport? (via Reason: Hit & Run)

• Watch for the growth of web publishing, as tools such as Macromedia’s new Web Publishing System and Wikimedia Foundation’s MediaWiki become more mature and widely available.

• Spend $120,000 on an education, get a free iPod! Duke University is giving away iPods to incoming freshmen this year in an effort to spawn “creative uses of technology in education and campus life,” Although at first glance this might seem like a frivolous use of tuition fees, the MacCentral article notes that the “iPods will be preloaded with content related to Duke campus life, including freshman orientation information and the academic calendar. What’s more, a special Duke Web site modeled on Apple’s own iTunes site will offer course content for download, including language lessons, music, recorded lectures and audio books.” What a great use of a new technology! Could this be the future of libraries?

• Can I just say how much I love LaunchBar for Mac OS X? It’s f-ing cool. I can launch all my applications from the keyboard with just a few keystrokes, access contacts and web addresses, and even open particular documents from anywhere on my hard drive. It is a handy and natural extension to Panther.

• Dr. Cline writes in his journal, “I agree with David Shaw that it’s time for journalism to give up the competitive urge to be first with a story.” I agree with Dr. Cline.

• Orcinus looks at the latest Bush smear against Kerry and concludes that Bush’s conservative credentials come up wanting.

• Via Wired News... This is awesome. OutragedModerates.org is distributing thousands of PDFs of public documents over P2P networks in order to make these government papers available quickly and easily to concerned citizens everywhere. In addition to providing a valuable public service, the site’s Download for Democracy project shoots an arrow right through the heart of the justification for banning Peer to Peer technology by proving (as if proof were needed) that the software can be used for legitimately useful purposes instead of just for distributing copyrighted material. I’m inspired to include permanent links here at Stumax.com to this site and to The Memory Hole, as well as to the Disinfopedia. With all there is to be pessimistic about when it comes to government secrecy and the passive press corps, courageous and committed online activists continue to make the Internet a powerful and relevant democratic tool.

• Greg’s comparison of Bush and David Koresh may be a little glib, but only just a little. (The Talent Show)

• Well, that explains a few things. Apparently, they teach priests sex education right in the seminary these days.

• Geez. Why am I so chilled by this? Digby links us to what could be – should be? is? – the new Kerry campaign ad.

• The First Amendment Center offers a wrap-up of the recent SCOTUS session. Is free speech taking a backseat to other concerns? (via Reason Hit & Run)

• Oh, it’s already done been broughten! New details emerge about the Cheney/Leahy brouhaha. (The New Yorker, via Eschaton)

• And the lies just keep on comin’! Saddam’s mass graves? Not so massive.

More stuff you should be reading instead of wasting my bandwidth…

• Thanks to the second most inappropriately-named software in the world (the first being Microsoft Works), Microsoft’s Excel has apparently been “helping” genetic researchers to screw up their databases. (Boing Boing) Excel’s autocorrect function has been changing data into dates, unbeknownst to the researchers, rendering reams of spreadsheets worthless.

Look, folks, it’s a design philosophy. Microsoft is your fatally flawed, wannabe utopian überlord. Apple is your embracing Zen master. Windows wants to get its way. OS X gives you tools to help you do it your way. Price, interoperability, and software availability are no longer considerations which favor Windows to any great degree, especially when you consider how much frustration is built in to the OS. There are no more excuses… BUY MACs!

• Over at Eschaton, Pie asks the essential question (they’re good at that over there), Can someone explain why outing Plame was a good thing. How can conservatives not be outraged at this unpatriotic, vicious, deadly serious felony?

• I linked to an Annie Jacobsen column a couple of days ago which described suspicious activity on a flight she took from Detroit to LA. Although it is a harrowing tale, it seems I was right to be a little skeptical. See World O’ Crap for the rundown.

More stuff you should be reading instead of this lousy blog…

• Listen, if Sir Elton John starts saying how anti-free speech America is, you’d better pay attention. Actually, he makes some pretty good points, like where’s the anti-war concerts? What, are our current crop of artists political panty-waists?

• Brad DeLong quotes a bit of a Paul Krugman speech (PDF) given back in May at the London School of Economics. It’s an 18-page PDF, and well worth a read. It hits on a fair number of things about the rise of the neo-conservatives, the overall swing toward conservative politics, the increasing polarization of political views, the widening income gap, the complete lunacy of the current administration’s economic policy, the increasing power and influence of the economic elite over the media and policy, and more. The speech is not a polemic, but rather an economists attempt to explain why things are the way they are today. Together with Franklin Foer’s Closing of the Presidential Mind article I mentioned a few days ago, one can begin to read here the dangerous imbalances that could affect our society for years to come.

• In a similar vein, the idea of America becoming undemocratic is something I’ve been pondering over the past few months. Digby gives the idea some shape so that I don’t have to.

• Very thought-provoking post at Six Apart about the past and future of blogging

• MacNewsWorld has proof – sort of – that Mac users are smarter than everyone else. Uh… duh! (via Gizmodo)

• There’s an insightful essay over at Groklaw on why computer code isn’t the same as a novel (ergo, why restrictive patents on computer coding processes are dangerous restrictions on innovation.)

• Greg at The Talent Show shares a list of what the President is not.

• Over at Eschaton, Pie asks Who’s running Iraq? Which is kinda what I want to know. Also, Athenae suggests it’s time to rethink our values.

• Kevin Drum reminds us of just a few things President Bush has completely failed at.