Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.

 
The Second-Worst Thing About the Murder of Pim Fortuyn
Speaking of things with which I am sympathetic: Dawn is appalled by the exhumation of Adam Curry due to his residence in Amsterdam and reportage on the recent murder of Pim Fortuyn. Since I started observing blogs last fall, I have occasionally run into a link to Curry's site and EVERY SINGLE TIME I have ever clicked over there, I have been repelled as if by magnetic force away from his utterly banal, disengaged, lifeless, preening - did I mention as BORING as watching a mannequin mouth song titles, oh wait, that's Adam - poorly-written drivel.

I can understand some enthusiasm for having an American perspective from the scene, but Curry should shut the hell up and go back to spraying his hair and his unnatural relationship with his computers. Now that I think of it, it would explain a lot if Curry WAS a machine instead of an exceptionally dull, self-absorbed person, but that's insulting to machines.
posted by Anonymous at 5:24 PM

 
"What a Body Is Obliged to Do"
I want to make sure I have not left the impression that I have a problem with Glenn Reynold's concerns regarding the economics of blogging. He clearly does not object to making money from blogging, as he stated when he linked my post:

I want to be clear, though: I don't think that money is necessarily corrupting. But I'm keenly aware of what Mark Twain said in Tom Sawyer -- that work consists of what a body is obliged to do. If I became "obliged" to produce a couple of dozen (or more) interesting posts a day, I'd probably enjoy it a lot less. That's my concern, and it's why I like a donation model: people can donate money if they appreciate it, but there's no long-term obligation.

What he objects to is being paid by someone else to, in essence, "take over his hobby." I can understand this and sympathize with his concern. The model being discussed now by Jeff Jarvis and Reid Stott would involve hands-off underwriting of work that is already being done. I don't interpret this as a "work-for" situation, since it is the independence and voluntarily communal aspects of blogging from which the underwriter would presumably wish to benefit.

I can certainly see Mickey Kaus at Slate, or Dan Gillmor at the San Jose Mercury News as performing "jobs" for employers. And I can understand concern over subtle, even unconscious self-imposed constriction of editorial content - and simply the requirement to post at all - as draining the fun out of blogging; but I see "as is" underwriting by those who would wish to avail themselves of the spirit of blogs in their "natural state" as being a win-win situation for all involved.
posted by Anonymous at 4:52 PM

 
Groucho, Not Woody
Sandra Miller writes to correct me that Groucho Marx and not Woody Allen said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." She is correct; my memory was of Allen quoting Marx, but I forgot about the quoting part. Thanks!
posted by Anonymous at 4:24 PM

 
Occidentalism Redux
Reader Anders Weinstein reminds us that Victor Davis Hanson isn't the first to use the term "Occidentalism": that Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma named their brilliant NY Review of Books piece from January on a similar theme just that. Thanks for the reminder.
posted by Anonymous at 3:32 PM

 
"Blowback"
I have been wondering why Andrew Sullivan hasn't appeared of late in the NY Times Magazine, for which he wrote one of the very most influential 9/11 pieces, "This Is a Religious War," wherein he boldly cut through the conventional wisdom of the time (October 7, 2001) and said attitudes inherent to Islam deeply influenced the terrorist attacks.

Yesterday, Sullivan attributed his Times absence to "blowback":

If, like me, you both write for the mainstream media and also snarl at it on a regular basis, some editors can take revenge and cut you off. Most of the time, people in big media, being journalists, don't mind criticism, especially from a piddling one-man blog. But others take offense, and you get canned. In my case, I have been barred indefinitely from writing any more for the New York Times Magazine. Although I have long had a fantastic relationship with the editors there, and have written some of my best journalism for them, their boss, Howell Raines, has sent down a ruling. My presence in the Times, I'm told, makes him "uncomfortable," and I am off limits for the indefinite future. A great sadness to me, but completely his editorial prerogative and, given the sharpness of some of my broadsides, understandable. I'm lucky I have other outlets - and this blog of course! - but it does tend to show that the notion that new media and old media are effortlessly complementary is not completely true. When you bite the hand that feeds you, sometimes you'll get a good slapping. But don't worry. I'll keep biting.

Mickey Kaus confirms Sullivan's suspicions (via Glenn):

This resonates with what I've been told, by another source, is Raines' M.O.. ... Betting pool: Raines will now (a) Publish a token Sullivan piece to prove him wrong; (b) Conduct a Queeg-like inquiry to find out who leaked to Sullivan that Raines was "uncomfortable" with Sullivan's presence in the Times; or (c) Do nothing. ... I predict (a). ... Note to Sullivan: Can't you get Maureen to go to bat for you? ... If not, you maybe can adopt the motto I was once planning to use for kausfiles -- "Friendless, Therefore Fearless." [You mean "Fearless, Therefore Friendless"?--ed. Yes. Of course. That's the ticket.]

Interestingly, Sullivan practices a peculiar form of reverse discrimination vis-a-vis other bloggers. For all of his grand pronouncements about the revolutionary nature of the blogosphere, Sullivan rarely mentions other bloggers (more of late, but they tend to be obscure "discoveries" he has made offering up technical assessments of one thing or another), and when he does he often doesn't link them (when I was obsessing about why the media wasn't mentioning the USS Cole connection to Abu Zubaydah about a month ago, he picked up on the information but didn't credit us or link to us), or he links them improperly (Freudian?), or he links them without mentioning their name. There is no question that in the recesses of Sullivan's mind, a blog post is a lesser ontological entity than ANY mainstream media report.

Examples? His permanent link section lists only FIVE blogs: InstaPundit, Kausfiles, Overlawyered.com, Virginia Postrel, and Romenesko's MediaNews. This is spreading the wealth around not. Just by comparision, InstaPundit has 84 permalinks. Clearly Sullivan and Reynolds are different kinds of bloggers running different kinds of sites, but the comparison is rather stark, isn't it?

I'm afraid that Andrew, consciously or unconsciously, wants to be THE blogger - a spokesman for a generation as it were - and as titular head, he is loathe to dispense his blandishments willy nilly. To paraphrase Sullivan's NY Times post, this is "a great sadness to me, but completely his editorial prerogative."

Yet if he wishes for the blogosphere to be something more than "Sullivan and company" (which I am beginning to doubt), then he should take a bit more proactive interest in assisting the development of the blogosphere by treating it as an actual community of which he is a member, and not a fiefdom over which he presides. Perhaps, like Woody Allen, Sullivan doesn't want to belong to any club that would have him as a member, but unless he wishes to be a mere adjunct to the movement - a satellite of the blogosphere - he should get with the program and take a good hard look at his own prejudices. Unilateralism is fine, I guess, but isolationism is rather self-defeating, and in this case, hypocritical.
posted by Anonymous at 2:49 PM

 
Blogging For Dollars?
Of a sudden, the previously sotto voce issue of economics in blogging has blared into the open. First Mickey Kaus got sucked up by Slate, as announced with a grand flourish by Glenn Reynolds:

Mickey Kaus has inked an awe-inspiring and deeply lucrative deal with Slate to take his blog "indoors." Out of the blogosphere, into the lucrasphere! Mickey responds here to important questions:


Why are you selling out to a giant soulless monopolistic corporation?

I’m not selling. I’m renting! I can leave anytime I want, and take kausfiles with me. And they can cancel me anytime they want. They’re willing to be extremely flexible and play it by ear, which is one of the great virtues of Slate.

If I were a total schmuck, which I hope I’m not, I could even stay on Slate for a few months, get some new readers, and then move the blog somewhere else. You could move the site around like one of those disco events that’s held at a different venue each week. Readers will never have to worry which site I’m on. If they type in www.kausfiles.com they’ll always be automatically taken to wherever the blog is.

But I think and hope it will find a happy home on Slate. I’ve been writing longer items for them for years, as you know. The Slate people are all friends, and Slate is looking very lively these days, you may have noticed. (No thanks to me). They don't tell me what to write, or what not to write, yet they give me ideas I can steal. And they have three frigging million readers!

Why’d you do it?

There are only so many glamorous blogger parties you can attend before you ask yourself, ‘Is this all there is?” What about -- I’d ask this to myself when I was alone, in the middle of the night – what about making some money and using it to buy consumer goods?

I will get a bit more money from Slate. I’ll also get more readers, if it goes as planned. I couldn’t think of any better way to get either of those things. I also owed it to Slate. I was spending more and more time writing for the blog – because it was fun, in large part -- but I was producing fewer and fewer of the longer pieces to sell to them. These longer pieces had occasionally been collections of shorter items – but now the shorter items all go into the blog, so the longer pieces were getting longer, and less frequent. This solves that problem. Now they get the longer pieces and the blog too. It’s all on Slate.

As far as Reynolds' internal climate regarding the matter, the ending reveals his ambivalence.

Is this the future of blogging? Maybe in a small way. Would I do this? Probably not -- er, unless the money was really good and they let me keep doing what I'm doing now. But unlike Mickey, I don't have to support myself this way, either!

That seems to be the key for Glenn: he doesn't want to think of it as a job. He prefers to blog as an amateur. I get the sense that he fears his serious but carefree approach might be imbalanced by the addition of dinero to the equation, pressure may drain pleasure in his estimation.

The amateur model is fine but the vast majority of "full-time" bloggers would love to make it a "job" by having what they do, what feels so right, start humping some freight. Prior to this week of economic exposure, only Andrew Sullivan had spent much time speaking about economic models, as he did eloquently last February is his "Bloggers Manifesto":

So webloggers simply begged. They put little buttons on their sites that allowed readers to donate money to keep the blogs going. Slowly, cash dribbled in. In 2001, $27,000 came into my site via donations. Almost all of it went to pay for design and bandwidth costs, but before too long, a modest income source began to make blogging less like charity and more like minimum wage labor. Most major blog sites now have electronic begging bowls - although for most, the income is chump-change. Another option was what's called "affiliate advertising." The blog runs ads from, say, J.Crew.com or Home Depot or the Gap. The companies pay nothing for the ad, but if someone clicks through the ad to buy something from the Gap site, the blogger gets a small cut of the proceeds. In effect, the blogger becomes a sort of web shop-window. He gets readers to stop and look, and a few may go on to buy things. The commissions are small, but if the volume is sufficient, the income can grow.

The genius of the blogging model, after all, is the lack of overhead. Unlike loss-making online magazines, bloggers tend to have no offices to rent, and no staff to pay. After start-up costs for even snazzy sites, most income is profit. So even small amounts can make a difference. This month, I tried something else. I started a book club online so that my readers could read a book in real time with me and each other, post their comments as they read, and also get the author to write in his opinions during and after the online debate. The online bookseller Amazon co-operated, giving us a 15 percent commission on every book we sold. In our first month, we sold close to 1,000 books. At roughly $2.50 a book, that's real money. Even more interesting was the fact that readers, once they arrived on the Amazon site, also bought one non-book item for every two books they purchased. In the last fortnight, we made 5 percent off an electric tooth-brush and a cuddly toy. Sure enough, while providing a completely legit and even high-brow book-club, we made a profit for the first time. No subscriptions; no pop-up ads; no advertising; no marketing. Just an online community reading and thinking and paying for itself.

Sullivan admits he is about the only one who could work this model at this point, but at least he was willing to discuss MONEY and get the subject out in the open.

Then yesterday, with Kaus absconding to Slate (which didn't surprise me much, by the way: Kaus has always seemed more like a political columnist sans portfolio waiting for the next gig to come along than an actual blogger, besides he already worked for Slate) - this item appeared in the Guardian: an interview/profile with Chris Locke stating his vision of blogtopia-as-marketing-model for the Internet in general:

What replaces mass market, broadcast advertising is Locke's "gonzo marketing", which is not really marketing but "market advocacy" through participation, sponsorship and support. The Internet replaces the us-and-them relationship (creative people broadcasting to couch potatoes) with a network of conversations, which is all markets are, really.

....What I'm telling them is: drop this invasive, intrusive advertising - it's not going to work any more - and build relationships around shared interests, and that will create good will towards your company. Instead of turning people off, you can turn them on by hooking them up and getting out of the way. And if this works, I see trillions of dollars shifting towards a bottom-up artistic web renaissance.

Amorphous, fuzzy, even utopian, but Jeff Jarvis came along and worked the ore:

Locke's idea -- which I've been pitching to most anybody who'll listen -- is that instead of intrusive advertising, the wise marketer will recognize the power of blogs and join that power by joining the community. Instead of buying ads on blogs (which we'd all love, but which would not work even if it happened... witness other failed Internet ad movements; we will be spared that humiliation thanks to timing) the wise marketer will recognize a community of shared interest and will underwrite that community, will help make it possible, will say by that act "we share an interest and affection for this community." Thus the marketer joins with the audience and stays on the edge of buzz.

Demonstrating that the blogosphere is indeed a string of conversations, or a series of jewelers ever more finely honing a gem, PhotoDude Reid Stott then refined Jarvis further:

Like most everything in advertising, this is a concept that has to be sold on cost. That's the only terms advertisers can parse. Advertising is an amazingly expensive business, and has been for a long time. Sponsors are used to six figure print budgets, or seven figure TV budgets. Make them a four or five figure proposal, and you'll get their attention. Explain to them that for the same money they would spend on a one page ad in a specialist publication, they can sponsor ten or twelve specialist communities. Show them cost benefit. Give them guerrilla tactics: "tell your boss these people will thing you're a cool company because you're helping them, but not shoving tons of ads down their throat. Tell him it's hard for a corporation to buy 'cool,' but this community of enthusiasts is willing to sell it to you. Cheap."

And this concept will be best sold by removing all the middlemen. Including those steering the ClueTrain. I can only speak for myself, but as the digital mayor of a small non-profit photo community, if a company like Nikon were interested in some form of sponsorship, I'd be willing to talk about rotating text ads on the home page. Or a new and heavily Nikon branded tech section. Or small ads on the secondary pages. Or a co-branded header/footer. Or any number of things I didn't think of in the past 20 seconds.

All of a sudden we have a rather concrete, detailed plan. I myself would have no problem with "tasteful" ads of some sort on my site: more in the NPR model of "support" rather than screaming "buy me's," but as long as the cheese factor was kept in check - and no God-forsaken pop-up ads - then no problem, buddy.

But then, picking up the gem, Jarvis responded further:

I have talked to a few marketers myself about this and for very little money (small to the marketers; to the bloggers, it'd be enough to buy plenty of Fat Burgers) these smart folks could sell their products to a targeted audience in a quality product and measure and test the results. One person wants to sell subscriptions this way. The real barrier: Getting the right collection of blogs (which is my next business... but that's another story for another day). Still, these are high barriers indeed. So Reid's absolutely right that we'd better speak in neon-obvious terms and we'd better give the marketers -- the advertisers -- just what they want if we ever have the slightest hope of making a penny. Reid brings up an even more important point, though: Depending on ad agencies to support something new is dangerous. No, it's deadly. For that's what happened to the Internet, folks.

...Ad agencies have a job to do: They sell products. We, on the media side (even this, the amateur end of media) have our job to do: We deliver a quality product and a devoted audience. If we can do that well and simply, as Reid counsels, I think we could actually make something out of this. But it will take a great deal of work and selling (not begging) ... and praying.

All of that in about 24 hours.

My friend Michael Heaton, the Minister of Culture, a very fine columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, asked me the other day: "So, how is this any different from writing a column, for free?" - he, understandably, of the lifetime newspaper mentality.

The little exercise above is how: the blogosphere is collaborative, people pick up on each other's best thoughts - everyone has at least ONE good thought - and refine them, hone them, polish them down until they sparkle and shine, all within a VERY short period of time. This is the "community" that Locke refers to: the community that takes up an idea and works it, fusses over it, until it reveals itself as a diamond or a really shiny turd and is discarded. Alex Beam's howler still sits uncorrected on the Boston Globe site - that's the difference.

We'll see what happens with the collective blog marketing idea, but it's out in the open now and many fine minds will have a go at it, and if it's possible to make it happen, it will happen. This is how I want to make my living - it's a very exciting time.
posted by Anonymous at 10:37 PM

 
"You Can't Use My Word"
Dan Hartung of the reinvigorated Lake Effect has some follow-up to this post from last night on the etymology of "blog."

Yep, and the objection was raised about five minutes after Peter Merholz coined the term back in '99 ...
:-)
Actually, usually people were pretty snotty about it. "That word already means something!" You guys are pretty accepting which is the attitude I always took. "PC" and "PC" seem to get along fine, after all.
Dan

posted by Anonymous at 7:03 PM

 
Occidentalism
Our good friend Noah Lakritz feels strongly about the new VDH article:

Terrific article on NRO today by Victor Davis Hanson: "Occidentalism." The title - and article itself - turn the tables adroitly on the "Orientalism" that Edward Said and followers have made a career out of as they have relentlessly impugned the West's understanding, motives and policies toward the Arab world. As Hanson points out, the Islamic world's conception of and behavior toward the West reflects mostly irrationality, resentment, and hypocrisy, adding up to a hostile and malevolent cluelessness.

Re the practical effects of the "Orientalism" of Said and company, a good case can be made for the proposition that their domination of the academic Middle Eastern Studies establishment in the last decade was a significant factor in the U.S. being so unprepared for 9/11.

A now infamous quote from an academic in this crowd, Sarah Lawrence Professor Fawaz Gerges, came six months prior to the attack on the World Trade Center:


“Should not observers and academics be skeptical about the U.S. government's assessment of the terrorist threat? To what extent do terrorist ‘experts’ indirectly perpetuate this irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on far-fetched horrible scenarios?”

See "Ivory Towers On Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America" by Martin Kramer for more on this subject. Noah

posted by Anonymous at 6:09 PM

 
Pictures of Lily
Apparently there is some confusion: yes, this is our daughter Lily. Tony kind of fudged the interview a bit, but it is quite in character. Thanks again T!!
posted by Anonymous at 4:15 PM

 
In a Nutshell
Dawn explains it all, and makes sense. Her point about Columbine and 9/11 is quite insightful.
posted by Anonymous at 4:10 PM

 
Tom Was There
Hey, it's always nice to be appreciated, but it's better still when the appreciation is even better than the original item being appreciated in the first place. Now that's some circular reasoning.

On May 4th, to commemorate the shootings at Kent State, I wrote this presenting my theory that Youth Culture was born in 1955 with the release of The Blackboard Jungle film, which introduced "Rock Around the Clock" to the world. I also opined that May 4, 1970 was the day Youth Culture became THE dominant culture of the country.

That's all well and good, but Tom Shugart of Insiteview has turned out something much more interesting than cultural theory, he was there:

Yes, yours truly was there (the movie--not the college). I was one of the crazed ones, screaming in delight, jumping up and down in the aisles, pushing other guys with shoves of joy when that magic moment arrived. And it was happening all across the country. I'm sure that "what the fuck?" was the reaction of theater managers everywhere.


It's a memory that will remain vibrantly clear with me for the rest of my days.


1955… The full bloom of the bullshit veneer of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best covering over the creeping dysfunction of the new suburbias springing up everywhere. The smug, myopic contentment with the government of the popular war hero, Ike, while crosses burned, fundamental rights were trampled, the FBI spied on the intellectual giants of the day, and Communism was the oh-so convenient bogeyman for all of the ills of the world. The myth of happy kids in souped-up Chevys, ponytails, and sock hops--yet underneath a vague, directionless rage was building, seething against the Big Lie that pervaded everything (yes, I'm talking James Dean here. He was the real 50's--not all that sugar-coated shit that's been so mythologized) Kerouac and Ginsberg doing their first hits of psilocybin; the powerful, megawatt signal of legendary station, WLAC, black music, never heard on conventional radio, drifting north at night from Nashville, infecting eager whiteboy ears.


The boys were ready. For what, they didn't know, but something was there, primed, lying in wait. This was my 1955.


The coming attractions were previewed, the theater lights went dark. Then Pow! Hitting you right in the solar plexus, blasting you straight out of your seat, "One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock rock..We're gonna rock, rock, rock till broad daylight!" A guttural roar swept across the theater like an ocean wave. Every time I'm feeling feisty, or fucked over, I will hear that sound--after all these years.


We were so enervated we could hardly watch the movie. We did manage to cheer, though, every time the bad guys fucked with the teachers.


It must seem all very innocent and naïve by today's standards. How could one catchy little rock tune produce such a reaction? But something was stirred, some raw nerve was touched, and I've always believed that's where it really all started--the War Between the Generations--and it was a war, believe me--a Music to call our own--for the first time ever, music BY us FOR us--a first blush of recognition of how much we resented all the clueless fairytale shit being shoved down our throats.

But the revolution took a long time to come to fruition. Olsen is dead-on when he says that Kent State is where it became mainstream. It's where the Youth won the war even as they lost a shameful, deadly battle. As Olsen points out:


"Another factor often forgotten is that by 1970 a teenager rioting in the aisles at a 1955 showing of The Blackboard Jungle was 30 years old and in many cases still determined to never “grow old” or to identify with “them.”



And, by and large, I think we did a pretty good job of staying true to our determination. We blew the lid off at least some of the deception that infected our culture. Our music was honest. Our relationships with our kids are honest. The kind of relationship that I enjoy with my sons, and that my peers seem to have with their twenty-somethings, was a rare thing indeed in the days of Bill Haley and the Comets.

Now that is something. Thanks Tom - it's nice to be agreed with, but it's better to have inspired some truly extraordinary writing.
posted by Anonymous at 3:36 PM

 
Buzz Wisdom
There are great minds out there: I did a quick and breezy report on a Chris Locke interview in the Guardian where he pointed to the blog community as a model for targeted Internet marketing. Jeff Jarvis, of course, takes the concept to its logical extension and fleshes it out:

Locke's idea -- which I've been pitching to most anybody who'll listen -- is that instead of intrustive advertising, the wise marketer will recognize the power of blogs and join that power by joining the community. Instead of buying ads on blogs (which we'd all love, but which would not work even if it happened... witness other failed Internet ad movements; we will be spared that humiliation thanks to timing) the wise marketer will recognize a community of shared interest and will underwrite that community, will help make it possible, will say by that act "we share an interest and affection for this community." Thus the marketer joins with the audience and stays on the edge of buzz. If this works, it will start with special-interest blogs. And if it works, it will spread. It won't be a way to get rich, but it will be a new layer of advertising and marketing that has not been discovered yet. It will be a new way to build a relationship of true value with the audience, the consumers, us. Would I look kindly on a company that helps bring us Layne, Welch, Johnson, Denton, et al? Yes... even moreso than a company that helps bring us palaver about poetry on NPR. I buy it.

posted by Anonymous at 9:30 AM

 
Global Vigilance and "Terror"
In addition to setting himself up to the arduous and time-consuming task of providing a Global News Watch, sort of a conservative Cursor, Howard Owens has also been writing thoughtful position pieces on just about everything going on of importance. An excellent supplement to my complaint from yesterday about Reuter's refusal to use the word "terrorist" is his discussion of what makes a terrorist:

To escape the quagmire, I propose a three-point test. If an act of violence meets the following criteria, it is terrorism:

1) The act is politically motivated. 2) The intended targets are civilian. 3) The perpetrators are not part of a structured military and do not have legitimate military, strategic goals.

Yep, yesterday's bomb attack in Dagestan was terrorism - snap out of it Reuters.

In matters of a different nature entirely - Howard also found that while such a thing as a Porn Blog exists, the pickings are mighty slim: this site has not been attended to in some time; and I don't know exactly what this is, something about Quakers hijacking "disturbing" search requests. It's a crazy world.
posted by Anonymous at 9:02 AM

 
Mad Swedes and Temperate Norwegians
Eric the Mad Swede has a wealth of goodies on his site: his current Smarter Harpers Index looks at nukes in the Middle East and more; his Readings and Observations does background work into Islam and the Middle East; and his Rants section exumes Eric Hoffer's extraordinary True Believer book. Check him out from one Eric to another.
posted by Anonymous at 8:39 AM

 
Sweet Dreams
There can be no finer way to close out an evening than this January/May discussion between Lily Olsen and the ever-charming Tony Pierce. Lily is the blonde. Tony has a way with the ladies. May his rule be everlasting.
posted by Anonymous at 11:55 PM

 
Drink a Blog to Blogs
Anne Wilson passes on this tender tidbit from a friend that

"blog" was the fan slang term for alcoholic concoctions served at [SF fanzine] convention parties. Not to be dignified with the term punch but it included different kinds of liquor, mixers, fruit, whathave you.

I often feel drunk after a hard day of blogging, though the hangover isn't nearly as bad.

posted by Anonymous at 9:26 PM

 
Turning Japanese?
"Perhaps parents should be more observant of what their children are doing online," is my favorite line from this story:

Asian Internet users flocked to pornographic Web sites in March, with Singaporean executives and South Korean students topping the list, a four-country report by NetValue shows.

Some 10.7 million South Koreans headed to adult sites in March, a hefty 72 percent jump from the year before, the Internet measurement firm said in a statement on Thursday.

Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore all saw a 30-40 percent jump in the number of visitors to the sites. In Taiwan, 2.5 million unique users clicked on porn sites, with 715,700 in Hong Kong and 373,100 in Singapore.

Maybe we need a porn blog.
posted by Anonymous at 9:06 PM

 
Webcasters vs. Legion of Satan
What? You didn't notice our silence? Then we'll talk to you instead:

Over two dozen Web radio companies plan to speak to members of Congress on Thursday and Friday to protest proposed royalty rates they say could put many members of the nascent industry out of business.

The lobbying by the Webcasters follows a "silent" protest staged last week by hundreds of Web radio station operators who oppose rates that were recommended in February by a Copyright Royalty Arbitration Panel working for the U.S. Copyright Office.

posted by Anonymous at 9:02 PM

 
Mass Says No
I've said it all along: if you're going to take the fool's route of state-sanctioned gambling, then at least be consistent and legalize and regulate prostitution and drugs as well. Only Nevada has had the balls to even go for 2 out of 3. The good pilgrims of Massachusetts put casinos off for another year:

The Massachusetts House on Thursday spurned proposals to help close a $2.7 billion budget gap by opening the door to casinos and slot machines, slamming the door for at least one year on measures that could have given resorts in New Jersey and Connecticut new competition.

There are sensible people and fools in every party:

The Massachusetts House's debate did not follow neat party lines.

House member John Slattery, a Peabody Democrat, fought for the casino measure, arguing the state already had opened the door to gaming by taking part in the lottery. "We don't need people denouncing race track owners as greedy and casino owners...because we're doing the same thing ourselves with the lottery," he told Boston reporters.

But a Republican from Plymouth, Vinnie deMacedo, fought the gaming measures, saying: "It's just one of those fool's gold (issues) in front of us. We are looking at something that doesn't exist and will not improve the quality of life in Massachusetts."

posted by Anonymous at 8:48 PM

 
Shirts and Skins
Norah Vincent says the world is dividing into two camps: Jews/honorary Jews vs. anti-Semites.

the present Palestinian leadership and its loudest supporters in the Arab world are hopelessly tainted by their toleration and even overt fostering of appalling Jew-hating, jingoistic rants that appear regularly in the Arab press.

Take columnist Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud's recent piece in the Egyptian government daily Al Akhbar complaining to Hitler about the "fabrication" of the Holocaust: "If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief [without] their evil and sin."

The Middle East Media Research Institute documented that, along with this screed from a weekly column in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat by Yasser Arafat aide Bassam Abu Sharif. Accusing Israel of shooting at the statue of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem, he wrote: "This, of course, was a failed attempt to murder peace, love and tolerance, just as their forefathers tried to murder the prophetic message when they hammered their nails and iron stakes through the body of Jesus into the wooden cross."

Even Christians gave that one up long ago when they remembered that Jesus was a Jew.

Supporters of this kind of filth are enemies of fairness, sanity and liberalism. So, pick a side, folks; there are only two.

Let's see, on the one hand we have all the wonders of the modern world stretched before us in its bounty of democracy, liberalism and capitalism, on the other hand we have superstition, squalor, hatred, and a life expectancy of about 48. Since I know that wearing an electric belt won't firm my abs, I'll take the former.
posted by Anonymous at 8:29 PM

 
Swampland and Bridges For Sale
For the last fish-freaking time, citizens, there IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH. When you see infomercials or hear ads on the radio caterwauling about "lose weight overnight with NO EFFORT," or "our scientific formula could grow hair on a baby's butt," or "with a touch of a button, you go from flabby abs to rock-hard abs without breaking a sweat," you know IT'S A BIG FAT, SWINGING, SWEATING, BALDFACED LIE. Okay? If people weren't so eager to believe that afternoon repasts were laying around every street corner, there wouldn't be issues like this:

The FTC filings contend that the ads:

* Falsely represented that the ab machines cause fat and inch loss, give users well-defined stomach muscles and are just as good or better than conventional stomach exercises, such as sit-ups and crunches.

* Falsely claimed that the devices are safe and failed to adequately mention health hazards.

* Misrepresented the money-back guarantees, and in many cases, failed to provide timely refunds. The FTC has received hundreds of consumer complaints.

The companies can either work with the FTC to resolve the agency's issues, or they can go to court.

Now go do some sit-ups, flabby.
posted by Anonymous at 7:56 PM

 
Thar She Blows!
You know there are a lot of jokes that could accompany this story about a ban on "mountaintop removal" mining in West Virginia, but let's just say that if I lived down there I might be a bit miffed if I was settin' with my corn cob pipe and sippin' whiskey out on the back porch in the shade of Mt. JerryWest, and suddenly the top blew off the mountain and landed in my lap. Might give a feller the frights. Not too good for property values either, or water quality. Figure out another way to get at the goodies, y'all.

posted by Anonymous at 7:33 PM

 
Headline: Anthrax Traces At Fed Could Be False Positives
My question is this: Are False Positives the same as True Negatives? My study of logic is a bit fuzzy at this point. If your positive anthrax test is false, wouldn't this make your negative test true? I guess we're happy either way as long as no one starts pustulating.
posted by Anonymous at 7:21 PM

 
Baseball Arne
My brother Arne sent this in:

Each year I pick a Indians player as my project. Two years ago it was Einar Diaz: Most doubles in the AL by a catcher last year! Last year it was Marty Cordova: most improved batting average in AL last year. This year it's Russell Branyan.

Last night Branyan capped off the Indians' scoring in the eighth when he launched a long, towering homer that went as high as far - his eighth of the season - off Orioles reliever Rick Bauer. It marked the first time in his career he has homered in three consecutive games!

This kid is averaging a home run every 12.3 at bats.
Mark McGwire lifetime is 11.1
Barry Bonds is 14.7

Now Branyan just needs to get his batting average up to .275 or more like those guys: currently only .222 with a strike-out every 3 at bats, but he was at .177 two weeks ago so things are looking up!
Arne

Keep Smiling
Talk about conceptual art project: blowing up mailboxes in the pattern of a smiley face is beyond anything the Uptown crowd could have come up with. I'm afraid we have no lack of young, creatively insane people of our own. Have a nice incarceration.

A portion of Lucas John Helder's manifesto:

"I often wonder why so many people spend their entire lives consuming what is fed to them, without knowing if they are consuming anything at all," the letter said. "All of my family and friends were raised to believe . . . to be gullible . . . to be materialistic . . . to fear authority . . . to blindly follow.

"Do you wonder why people blow themselves up to hurt others?" it continued. "Do you wonder why you are here? Do you wonder what is out there . . . way out there? I remember those days of uncertainty, and I can't tell you how great it is to know, to know eternally, and to be."

He's no Unabomber. The rest of his rather meandering piffle is here. Even more wild speculation and bemusement from friends and acquaintances can be found in this report by the editor of the Badger-Herald, Helder's school newspaper.


Afghanistan Is Outside the Smiley Face Pattern
The CIA tried to blow up unpleasant warlord and hard-line Islamic Gulbuddin Hekmatyar with a Hellfire missile strike this week, but missed and blew up other people instead. He's pretty much always been bad:

Following the Soviet withdrawal in 1992, Hekmatyar turned on rival Mujahideen leaders in the civil war that erupted for control of the country. His bombardment of Kabul destroyed large parts of the city center, which had survived almost intact during the 10-year Soviet war, and killed thousands.

He's bad still:

The senior U.S. official refused to discuss any details of the attack. The New York Times cited reports that said Hekmatyar could have been traveling in a convoy or standing with a group of people when the missile was fired.

But the official told Reuters that the United States had gathered strong intelligence that Hekmatyar was pushing efforts both to try and bring down the Karzai government and to organize attacks against American and Western coalition troops hunting al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

I guess we should have Luked him.
posted by Anonymous at 6:54 PM

 
Those Who Commit Terrorist Acts Are, By Definition, Terrorists
Reuters, which refuses to call even Osama bin Laden a "terrorist" (their quotes, not mine), is at it again. In their report on the horrific bomb blast today at a Victory Day parade in the Russian republic of Dagestan that killed at least 32 people, including 12 children, they give us these remarkable paragraphs:

President Vladimir Putin vowed to hunt down and punish the attackers, whom he described as "scum" who should be treated like Nazis.

He blamed the attack on "terrorists," the usual Kremlin term to describe separatist rebels in Chechnya, which neighbors the impoverished province of Dagestan where the attack took place.

The report ends with this gem:

Bomb blasts have rocked Russian regions, mostly those close to Chechnya, since Moscow sent troops back into the secessionist province to bring it back to its fold. The authorities routinely blame the blasts on separatist guerrillas.

This sophistic refusal to call terrorists "terrorists" says nothing about "fairness" or "impartiality" and everything about a Chomsky-like perversion of language. You aren't taking sides on the merits of a matter to call a terrorist a terrorist. You can be even sympathetic to the cause in question and still call a terrorist act "terrorism." A remote-control nail bomb attack timed to kill as many children as possible at a public parade IS THE VERY ESSENCE OF TERRORISM. If the word "terrorism" has any meaning at all, it has to applied here. By dismissing and even mocking Putin's use of the word under these circumstances, Reuters has let it be known where their sympathies lie: with the Chechan TERRORISTS. You can't get much farther from neutrality than that.
posted by Anonymous at 2:14 PM

 
Smash-Ups

Neil Strauss has a piece in the NYT today about the rise (or really, his discovery) of "bootleg" songs (a.k.a. "smash-ups") that namechecks an old friend, Mark Gunderson of the Evolution Control Committee as a pioneer in the field going back to their Herb Alpert/Public Enemy Whipped Cream Mixes 7" in 1993.

John Oswald/Plunderphonics, Negativland and even the Tape-beatles get mentioned, which is amazing to me, as this is stuff I used to play off cassette on my radio show between 1983-1986.

ECC has been around a long time with such classics as the "Rocked By Rape" 7" (Dan Rather vs. AC/DC) that got played on NPR and the current "Love Shag" (B-52's vs. the entire 70's). The Seals and Croft intro should tell you where it's headed. Brilliant stuff...


posted by tofu at 2:10 PM

 
Osama bin Decomposing?
Perhaps confirming what Glenn Reynolds has said all along - that Osama bin Laden is dead - this report indicates the discovery of something all to familiar.
posted by Anonymous at 1:10 PM

 
Blogs Model For Internet Marketing
In an interview/profile in the Guardian, RageBoy Chris Locke sees independent but connected bloggers as the new marketing model for the Internet in general:

What replaces mass market, broadcast advertising is Locke's "gonzo marketing", which is not really marketing but "market advocacy" through participation, sponsorship and support. The internet replaces the us-and-them relationship (creative people broadcasting to couch potatoes) with a network of conversations, which is all markets are, really.

It's the difference between a media empire such as AOL CNN IPC Time Warner and 100 million bloggers. The explosion in the popularity of blogging, peer-to-peer file-sharing, cooperative (open source) programming and similar movements means Locke's ideas are now being taken seriously by major corporations including merchant banks and the BBC, the latter having paid for his latest trip to London.

Locke sums it up:

What I'm telling them is: drop this invasive, intrusive advertising - it's not going to work any more - and build relationships around shared interests, and that will create good will towards your company. Instead of turning people off, you can turn them on by hooking them up and getting out of the way. And if this works, I see trillions of dollars shifting towards a bottom-up artistic web renaissance. What could come out of that is a cultural flowering that we can't imagine, just as the middle ages couldn't imagine the Renaissance. I don't think that's a whacked-out vision. "Capitalism has to engage with society. At the moment, companies don't have to look at social effects in their cost of sales. That thinking has to change. You know, if the whole fucking planet melts down, how good was your business plan?"

When the blog, blog, blogger comes blog, blog, bloggin' along: perhaps a clue will follow for Internet marketers.
posted by Anonymous at 12:56 PM

 
Virtual Slavery In L.A.

A smuggling ring that lured hundreds of Ukrainians to Los Angeles ---- many of them young women who were forced into prostitution ---- was a "full service" operation that netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal profits, federal prosecutors said Monday.

"They smuggled illegal aliens in boats, in the trunks of cars, and on foot," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Aveis. "And they did it over, and over, and over again."

(Another AO production)

posted by Anonymous at 12:49 PM

 
Head-Turning News As Hoisted Head Heads Back Home

Seven weeks after it was stolen from the Frontier Times Museum in this western-themed town northwest of San Antonio, the baseball sized head of a South American Indian woman has been found. A construction worker who was cutting weeds along a county road southwest of San Antonio found the head, still in it's glass display case, wrapped in a plastic bag and dumped along the side of the road.

(Thanks to AO)



posted by Anonymous at 12:14 PM

 
Glimmer of Hope?
Gary Farber's ever-keen eye spotted this small cause for hope that the Palestinians may snap out of their 40-year coma and oppose the Ancient Terrorist. He's not much buying it though.
posted by Anonymous at 11:57 AM

 
"Excuse Me Mr. Starr, There Is This Thing Called the Internet..."
Richard Starr has a nice little gloat piece in the Daily Standard about the coverage of the "massacre" in Jenin: how CNN, NPR, and just about the entire British press were duped by the Palestinian propaganda machine, but that a month later the truth has come out, even in the Guardian.

This is all well and good except for one thing: he gives zero credit to the blogosphere for its tireless efforts in debunking the charade from the very beginning. Charles Johnson, Glenn Reynolds, James Taranto, Bill Quick, and countless other bloggers (please check in with me and I'll be happy to give you credit) were on this from moment-one, hammering on the obvious propaganda efforts by the Palestinians and the gullibility of the Western press.

That Starr is unaware of the contributions of the blogosphere to expose this travesty isn't particularly surprising, but for no one to call him on it would be a crime, which I, for one, am unwilling commit.
posted by Anonymous at 11:22 AM

 
House of Oil-Smeared Panjandrums
Yesterday this brave man told his own Saudi government what was wrong with them and how to fix it. Al-Hattlan hopefully linked his prince's "leadership" in the Middle East "peace process" with possible changes at home. Excuse me, I have to go close my office door because the monkeys that just flew out of my butt might disturb the baby, who is still sick.

As long as our executive branch is willing to keep prostrating itself before these pampered autocrats, what possible incentive does the Saudi regime have to make changes? They seem to enjoy the tightrope of behind-the-back gestures of "friendliness" toward the U.S. while continuing to kiss the asses of their own Islamic extremists in a race down the pit of medieval cultural oppression. Anything - as long as they stay in power. Sound like anyone else we know? How about Arafat?

William Arkin discussed the Saudis in Monday's WaPo:

To say the least, Saudi Arabia has always been a strange friend of the United States and a prickly ally. U.S. tolerance is often explained as the price that is paid for access to oil. With oilmen in the White House, the notion that America is a supplicant to the Saudis has only grown stronger.

Yet so many years of accommodation have created a far more complicated actual relationship. As Desert Storm II looms, Saudi-American habits are not only influencing the Bush administration's military strategy for driving Saddam Hussein from power. They are also threatening the larger goals of the war on terrorism.

All I can say is that there better be a reason better than oil for our continued supplication to these nabobs: there better be some damn big behind-the-back friendliness going down that we don't know about yet, because if it's just oil, then this policy sucks worse than "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Arkin and the U.S. military brass are similarly concerned:

"Viscerally, we'd like to say [expletive] you guys, we'll do this on our own," a senior officer says, referring to the coming Iraq war. Of course, the military is not going to make the decision. Bush and Co. will undoubtedly implore the Saudis to once again give their approval. Although it is likely that the Saudis will restrict U.S. military action from their soil, the government of Saudi Arabia will have an important say in the outcome in Desert Storm II, just as they shaped the outcome of Desert Storm I.

If that means replacing Saddam Hussein with a Saudi-friendly regime in Baghdad, and not a true secular democracy that modern Iraq is uniquely capable of, then the United States will surely come out the loser in this battle in the war against global terrorism.

posted by Anonymous at 10:52 AM

 
No Wall - Take the Fight to the Terrorists
It would appear that Warren Bass has been reading Tres Producers - or at least Steven Postrel - as his analysis of the separation/Wall concept follows most of Postrel's points, as stated here back on April 25.

Bass doesn't go into detail regarding the crucial area of what to do now to suppress suicide bombing as Postrel did here:

In order to minimize the suicide bomber threat, the Israelis will need a much more intrusive occupation, one that provides physical security to Palestinians, protecting them from one another as well as from Israelis. A much more intensive use of informers will be needed, to the extent that no Palestinian feels that he can safely plot with another. Provocation in the schools and local media will have to be ended. And economic self-betterment of the Palestinians will have to be encouraged, protecting their property rights, removing the more obnoxious settlements and allowing the Palestinians to spread out, constructing needed infrastructure, etc.

but Bass agrees on the main points:

Instead of stopping Palestinian terrorism, a wall might just rechannel it against the settlements - putting Israel in the excruciating position of either pummeling the Palestinians to get them to stop attacking settlements Israel knows it can't keep or abandoning the settlements and reinforcing the lesson that terror can win territory.

And that, ultimately, is the biggest reason to worry about the enthusiasm for a fence: It reinforces unilateralism and helps defer indefinitely the only possible solution-negotiated partition-that has any reasonable chance of bringing peace. Unilateral disengagement by Israel would replace the land-for-peace premise of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 with land-for-violence; gut the long-standing Israeli insistence that negotiations are the lone legitimate way to resolve Arab-Israeli tensions; encourage Palestinian militance; reinforce Hezbollah's crowing insistence that force works and talks don't; and make Jerusalem and the rest of the new frontier into a new front line.

Unfortunately, Israel isn't facing a security problem that admits of a technical fix. Its security woes go hand-in-glove with its political predicament. Until the Palestinian leadership abandons its myopic, ugly reliance on terrorism and until Sharon starts offering the Palestinians some carrots as well as sticks, the country will remain under siege. In the long run, the smart move for Israel isn't building a fence. It's trying to build a border.

No carrots to Arafat however - Israel needs to make it clear that the carrots will come only with the Ancient Terrorist gone and the suicide bombing halted. In the meantime, ruthless rooting out of terror supply centers as in Jenin is the only way to keep the pressure on and to proactively suppress terror. Do you imagine it is coincidental that yesterday's attack was the first in almost a month? Israel must continue to do what the U.S. has been doing for the last seven months: take the fight to the terrorists, keep them on the defensive. No Wall - on to Gaza.

Addendum: Steven Den Beste sees Gaza as next as well.

Addendum ll: They're on their way:

The Cabinet did not say what type of response it authorized, but a strike against Gaza was widely expected. Hamas' senior leaders are in Gaza, and Israel has so far refrained from targeting them.

Tanks were seen moving toward Gaza on Thursday and forces around the strip were being beefed up.

"Target Gaza," read a banner headline in the Maariv daily. The military confirmed that it was calling up reservists, but would not say how many. The last reserve call-up came ahead of operation "Defensive Shield." Israeli media reports also said forces were amassing near the crowded strip, home to more than 1 million Palestinians.

posted by Anonymous at 10:09 AM

 
The Zen of the Blank Screen
I have been railing against TV for years - not bad TV, just TV. I am no absolutist. I can't imagine not having a TV and there are lot's of things I like to watch, which is of course the essence of the problem: there are many more interesting and fruitful things to do with one's time than plop down in front of the tube. Justin Sodano has some interesting thoughts and links on the subject. Check him out.
posted by Anonymous at 9:27 AM

 
Speak to No Evil
Tony Adragna - whom I have neglected inadvertently of late - has an excellent smackdown on Arafat and our weasels who want to keep talking to the unregenerate, shriveled, duplicitous, power-mongering, prevaricating terrorist:

For the record: I don't trust Sharon, either. But, I do trust Israeli democracy. I've previously intimated that the idea of Sharon being labeled a "man of peace" is laughable, but that whole line of argument is also irrelevant -- Israel doesn't need a man of peace right now: Israel is fighting a war, and Sharon is man for the job. When the fighting is done, and conditions are set for peace, Israelis will know what to do -- either Sharon will accept that which he's always opposed, or Israelis will bring down his government in favour of somebody amenable to peace.

Personal trust in a democratically elected leader -- Sharon -- of a nation of laws is irrelevant. But, Arafat is the PA -- if you can't trust Arafat, you can't trust the PA.

Arafat's Their Leader, Who Else We Gonna Talk To?

Yes, Arafat is the current leader of the PA -- Hitler was the leader of NAZI Germany, should we have talked to him?

Don't we all know how it was that Arafat got to be leader of the PA? It definitely wasn't through some democratic process. Arafat owes his position to a hand dealt from a stacked deck: the Arab assertion that the PLO is the only entity which may represent that Palestinian people, Arafat's quashing of opposition parties in the '96 election (he said, "we are proud of our democracy" -- what "democracy"?), and his continued use of the PA police state to maintain his own position (from the same interview, he used "security courts" to prosecute terrorists who were "planning to assassinate the Palestinian leadership" -- (a) he's still doing it, and (b) why couldn't he use the same courts to prosecute terrorists planning to kill Israeli civilians?).

Arafat doesn't want peace, just pieces. Israel has the proof of his continued support for terrorism. There is no reason to talk with him any longer.
posted by Anonymous at 9:09 AM

 
"Nothing Really Matters..."
In many ways I am inclined toward Anglophilia: I buy the whole "special relationship" thing, and think Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, and Tony Blair are cool guys. I am also inclined toward British rock and electronica, though not their pop, which is typically even cheesier than ours.

But, this abomination makes me wonder whether they really got a handle on the whole mad cow thing over there, because picking "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the greatest single of all time makes me want to pull the plug on the whole fucking island and watch it sink under the briny blue if I could be assured that all traces of this sub-parody of operetta clichés grafted onto cheese-metal would be destroyed along with it.

Please don't take me the wrong way because I refer in no way to sexual orientation, but that song is the queerest piece of studio abortion ever to limp-wrist it onto tape. I HATE every possible aspect of that song: from the nonsensical pretentious lyrics, to the nauseating waves of overdubbed choral vocals, to Freddie Mercury's lisping diva lead, to the wretchedly awkward lurching from (bowel) "movement" to (bowel) "movement." Even the rock-out part near the end that I could at least tolerate when it first came out now sounds utterly artificial, strained, grafted-on, and stupid.

Forget arguing about what songs should have been number 1. The fact that the British voted #1 the song I perhaps despise more than any other by an artist that I liked at one point in time - I loved, really LOVED the first Queen album - makes "Bohemian Rhapsody" the greatest DISAPPOINTMENT ever slapped on vinyl (or PVC, or whatever toxic crud they make CD's out of) of ALL TIME. There was no way to ever take Queen seriously again after that song - which was okay because the group pretty well sucked ass from that point on anyway - but I remember the sick feeling in my stomach when that melted poodle puke dribbled out of my friend's stereo. I had to go take a nap, and I had really bad dreams. Now I can never take a whole country seriously again. This is a black, black day.

Mike Says: Oh Eric, you are just so wrong on this one -- I don't even know where to start... "Day At The Races" was pretty good, but I'd say "Jazz" was really the beginning of the end, because after that was the dreadful "Live Killers" album, the uneven "The Game" and then the wheels just completely fell off (much like the Indians last week) during the best forgotten "Hot Space." *shudder*

But "Bohemian Rhapsody" is perhaps the quintessential Queen song. And in England, it is like our fascination/obsession/cultural touchstone with "Stairway To Heaven". (I'm sure they don't get that either) It's a cultural barrier that you can't cross, no matter how much you like Andrew Sullivan.

I remember hearing it the first time on a little transistor radio in 1975 and just thinking "What the hell is that?" as they played it again and again -- five times in two hours (see if ClearChannel would allow that today). I have had few musical experiences in my life like that one, where everything I had heard up until that point simply didn't matter anymore. Of course, then punk came along and changed it all over again, but hey, I was 13 at the time...

Personally, I like 'The Prophet's Song" better, off the same album, but that's another argument.
posted by Anonymous at 9:58 PM

 
Harvard Dreams
Displaying the astonishing good sense of MuslimPundit, Sulaiman Al-Hattlan, a Saudi journalist, political analyst, and post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, calls his native government out in a WaPo opinion piece:

As a citizen of Saudi Arabia, I dread the possibility that Osama bin Laden might instigate a repeat of a deadly 1979 Saudi government mistake. In that year, a group of religious fanatics occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca. They denounced the legitimacy of the Saudi government, claiming that it wasn't "Islamic" enough. The government managed to reclaim the mosque, and later the group's leader and most of his followers were executed.

But the end of the story had a twist: Though the government killed the extremists, it then essentially adopted their ideology. After the Mecca incident, Saudi authorities began imposing crushingly strict and pointless rules. Women were banned from appearing on television. Music was not allowed to be played in the Saudi media. Stores and malls closed during the five daily prayers. Members of the religious police were granted more power to intervene in people's personal lives. The Saudi government did all of this to please the Islamists, perhaps fearing further extremist threats. The fundamentalists interpreted these government actions as a nod to their power and an indication that they were now dictating the rules of the game.

Um, it would appear that appeasement doesn't work in this culture - lesson learned, I hope, at least by us. The Saudi regime, to protect its own pampered asses, has led the race to the cultural bottom: forward to the rear! Osama and his buddies, living and dead, stem from this craven decision. Holier than thou = 9/11. Appease not these buttplugs further. Al-Hattlan has a plan:

The Saudi government itself must fight against all kinds of monopoly of thought or debate. Right now, it faces a historical opportunity to develop its educational system, augment freedom of the press and expand women's rights, among other pressing issues. It can begin to give qualified, young, educated Saudis access to more political participation. This would involve ending regionalism, a process that gives greater privileges to some families from certain Saudi regions. As an added bonus, such a measure would safeguard against future tribal conflicts -- still very much a part of Saudi national politics -- that could result from the continuation of regional economic and political favoritism. It might also help end the civil cold war our society, silently, is going through.

Saudi Arabian society must also start a tough process of social and political reform. Our independent writers and intellectuals should be part of a public social dialogue that tolerates different ideas and thoughts. Our universities need to open doors for political and social activities to their students: At the very minimum, students ought to have the right to form students' organizations. This would teach them the concept of "social activism," and to organize civilized and peaceful activities within their universities. Such ideas can help the next generation create and participate in a productive and peaceful civil society, instead of dying in Afghanistan or elsewhere for causes that most of them do not even fully comprehend.

What we learned from the deadly 1979 Mecca experience should be put to use now. Ending political and religious fanaticism is crucial for the survival of the Saudi society and its leadership. Release from this chokehold can only come from within Saudi Arabia. Just as Prince Abdullah has become the most promising hope for peace in the Middle East, he is also our best hope for immediate social and political reforms in the kingdom.

I am unaware that any of these reforms are more than the wet dreams of an intellectual safely ensconced in the bosom of Harvard, but at least he has spoken them.
posted by Anonymous at 8:47 PM

 
Stepping
I have nothing but respect for the efforts of stepparents, most of whom bear all the responsibilities and work of parents, but receive none of the emotional guarantees that stem from the biological connection. USA Today took up the subject of stepmothers yesterday:

Many women dream of becoming moms. Few dream of becoming stepmoms. On their good days, stepmothers think of themselves as bonus moms or mentor moms. On their bad days — and that often includes Mother's Day — they believe they are thought of by stepkids and ex-wives as something just above pond scum. Or not thought about much at all. Those who monitor the family say stepmoms need to be thought about. New research shows they do not often fare well with their stepchildren.

More than half of all Americans today have been, are now or will eventually be in one or more step situations, says the Stepfamily Association of America. About 30% of all kids are likely to spend time in some sort of "stepping" arrangement. And those kids are increasingly likely to be spending more time with a stepmom as courts begin favoring joint custody that increases the children's time with dad.

Which brings me to our situation. I started seeing Dawn seriously after we met via my radio show about six years ago when my daughter was 12 and my son was 9. Almost miraculously, the three of them bonded right away. Even more miraculously, with predictable bumps along the way, their relationships have approximated the ideal ever since. They love each other deeply, and while we all take advantage of the woman of the house more than we should, that's more a problem created by my example than any fundamental relationship problem betwixt the three of them.

We've been married for almost four years now, and had the baby 2 1/2 years ago. She changed the dynamic for a time: suddenly there was a child, a baby, who was different from the other two, who were used to doting attention from both of us whenever they were around. That took some adjustment from us all, but especially those three. It was even weirder because their mother had had a baby right before we did (and then had another a few months ago), so while there had been just two of them for the previous 12 years, the ranks of my oldest two's siblings doubled within a few months.

Because their relationship was so fundamentally strong, however, after about a year of bruised feelings and heightened sensitivities, Dawn and the kids had recalibrated their relationships successfully; they are now stronger than ever.

I know how lucky I am to have both a wife and children who have been willing to allow themselves to be bound to mutual feelings that I would say approximates that of a very close, live-in even, aunt-niece-nephew dynamic. Because I know that our situation is about the best it could possibly be - and it still takes hard work and active good will from all parties to keep the social gears meshing smoothly - I can appreciate how difficult most step-relationships must be. The numbers confirm this:

For a variety of reasons, not all stepchildren hold their stepmoms dear to their hearts. A growing body of disturbing research documents that the myth of the "evil stepmother" dies hard. Her new husband's children may simply never truly accept her, a woman they see as an interloper. Among recent findings suggesting that stepmoms are often not cherished by stepchildren:

Only about 20% of adult stepkids feel close to their stepmoms, says the pioneering work of E. Mavis Hetherington involving 1,400 families of divorce, some studied almost 30 years. "The competition between non-custodial mothers and stepmothers was remarkably enduring," she writes in For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered.

Only about one-third of adult children think of stepmoms as parents, suggests Constance Ahrons' 20-year research project. Half regard their stepdads as parents. About 48% of those whose moms had remarried were happy with the new union. Only 29% of those whose dads had remarried liked the idea of a stepmom. Ahrons is a sociologist and senior researcher with the non-profit Council on Contemporary Families.

My daughter is now almost 18, almost an adult, there is no question she will feel close to her stepmom as an adult. I have zero doubt that my son will as well. Like I said, I am very lucky to be surrounded by such wonderful people; I haven't always felt lucky in life, but when it comes to my children and wife, I have it made. Though it pains me to do so, I must also admit that my ex-wife hasn't done anything I am aware of to interfere with our children's relationship with my wife. I guess I'm lucky in that regard as well (whew, that statement took a lot out of me).

I tell you all this mostly to demonstrate that it can work, and that it is worth the effort. There is also help available:

To make these often fragile blended family arrangements work, stepmoms are attending workshops and conferences, clogging Internet chat rooms and message boards with plaintive requests for help, joining real-life and virtual-support groups, starting associations, drawing on a growing cottage industry of books and reaching out to other women who understand.

They are very creative about how to find and give help. Stepmom Katherine McMillan, 30, of Oshawa, Ontario, will celebrate Mother's Day in cyberspace. She and about 30 friends from StepTogether, an Internet support group with 700 stepmoms, have partnered up two by two to exchange little gifts, running maybe $10.

"It's our own way of recognizing what we do," McMillan says. "We can celebrate each other."

Then in June she and a gaggle of stepmoms, including Tammy Matthews, will take a step past virtual friendship. They and others will host what they think is the first widespread series of small, weekend retreats for stepmoms who want to weave a stepfamily together. Confabs are scheduled on various dates in Oshawa, Ontario; Norfolk, Va.; Indianapolis; Mahwah, N.J; Detroit; and Houston.

Others take alternative routes to helping beleaguered stepmoms re-establish their sanity. Mead is starting a Northern Virginia chapter of the Stepfamily Association of America after spending some time on the Internet with StepTogether.org.

"Just entering a room with a lot of stepmothers, that feeling you are accepted and welcomed is something you can't find anywhere else," she says.

Good luck and best wishes - you have my respect and admiration.
posted by Anonymous at 7:16 PM

 
New Media In the Old Part 4: Parody, Recognition, and a Blogger's Manifesto
When last we spoke of the "New Media In the Old" in Part 3 of this series, we concluded with Tim Cavanaugh perpetrating a funny but catty parody of "warbloggers" - those bloggers who concentrate on politics and especially the armed conflicts of this conflicted world - which appeared in the Online Journalism Review in January. In the end, Cavanaugh concluded that the political bloggers were doing a lot of huffing and puffing but blowing down nothing as their bellows fell only upon themselves.

Typically, mainstream media outlets don't parody subjects in which the public has no interest or stake - what's the point? It was readily apparent to anyone who cared that the blogosphere had achieved a new level of prestige and recognition when it was parodied yet again in February, this time in the very mainstream Weekly Standard.

"Blog Ad Nauseum," in the form of a simulated blog page, is broader and less stinging than Cavanaugh, but it similarly zeroes in on the self-referential insularity of the blogosphere somewhat effectively. However, its beginning and end betray the faint but distinctive odor of bemused fear, as in, "We don't understand this stuff so it must be stupid, or if not stupid then certainly silly, or if not silly then pointless. Isn't it? Yeah, it must be."

The piece opens:

Instapundit had a good piece on the rise of blogging, the creation of web sites to link to interesting pieces on the web, drawing my attention to the point that George Santayana once made to the effect that those who don't have a life are forced to invent one.

The parody would have been a lot funnier and more emblematic if the links had worked, first of all; in fact it would have worked a lot better overall if the piece has actually been done using blogger instead of a blurry, cramped imitation. If I want a truly engaging blog parody, I'll go with actual blogs like Osama's bin Bloggin', or A. Beam of Light In Blogistan.

Second, the view that bloggers blog because they have no life is purely wishful thinking on a nonblogger's part. I now know a fair number of bloggers and all of them blog because they have something to say and the blog allows them to say it to an ever-growing, intelligent, and committed audience 24/7. They blog despite the fact that they teach law school, run newspapers, write books, raise families, are honor students, exercise, travel, are computer specialists, musicians, artists, and entrepreneurs. They make the time because they are preternaturally energetic, brimming with ideas, and feel compelled to give and take with their peers from around the globe with the touch of a key or the click of a mouse. So, not only do bloggers HAVE lives, but they feel life so intensely that they just can't keep it to themselves.

The piece ends with:

I have lost all touch with reality, and only live to comment on the comments that other bloggers have made in reference to my notes about their comments. Is anybody out there?

Again, while certainly some blogging becomes an echoing hall of mirrors, I haven't seen the ontological level dip below comments on comments on an original source, which bloggers seem to be able to keep sorted out rather easily. This would be the equivalent of critiquing a critic: a not pointless or overly recondite endeavor to my way of thinking.

I would conclude that the real significance of the Weekly Standard's rather weak blog parody wasn't in its execution - or lack thereof - but in the simple fact that one was attempted, that they bothered to make the effort at all. You know you've emerged from the great inchoate cultural underground when you have been parodied by outsiders twice within a month.

On the same day that it was being lampooned, Farhad Manjoo noted another cultural milestone for blogdom in a very fine Wired News article, "Blah, Blah, Blah and Blog":

There's perhaps no better proof that an idea has gained the attention of the mainstream than a mention on National Public Radio.

For blogging, that happened Wednesday -- and NPR's three-minute piece on how weblogging is transforming journalism was just one more sign that blogging has outgrown its underground trendiness.

Time magazine, The Times of London and several other newspapers have recently reported on blogging, with many of the outlets proclaiming blogs the thing of the future.

Manjoo agrees with my suspicions that by mid-February a cultural "tipping point" had been reached by blogs:

In January alone, at least 41,000 people created new blogs using Blogger, and that number is always increasing, [Evan] Williams said. Some have put the total number of weblogs at more than 500,000.

Alongside the boom, however, there have recently been a few faint signs of backlash. As increasing hordes take on the task of trying to keep new sites looking nice, sounding original and free from banalities, more hordes just seem to fail.

The surest sign that a phenomenon has reached "trend" status is when the word "backlash" starts popping up in articles about it, for there must be something there to lash back against:

But both [Dave] Linabury and [Matt] Haughey defended the genre of weblogging by invoking Sturgeon's Law, which comes from sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon who said, "Sure, 90 percent of science-fiction is crud. That's because 90 percent of everything is crud."

In other words, so what if most weblogs aren't interesting? The good thing, said Williams, is that everybody doesn't have to read them all. Asked if he'd like to live in a world where virtually everyone blogs, Williams chuckled and said, "Yeah, I think it would be a great thing. It's not that you want to read them. But people have the desire to express themselves, and I think it's tremendously powerful activity. If you write every day, your writing improves, your thinking improves."

(Williams doubtless also thinks it would be great if most of them used his blogger software and had their sites hosted by blogspot.) When Sturgeon's Law has been invoked in a descriptive article, the cultural currency of a phenomenon is assured.

Veteran blogger and Radio Userland maven Dave Winer contributes some interesting thoughts: he believes that dismissive blog critics are

"professional, ink-stained journalists who are scared by what we're doing here. We cover technology better than they ever could."

He rejects the idea that many blogs are boring or that they're no longer chic. "The Web doesn't go out of fashion," he said.

Winer added that the technology behind weblogging still needs to get significantly easier for the real talent to come online. "What I'm interested in is the doctors and professors and engineers and people who have a good education and a social area of expertise. We need to really reach those people, we have to go a couple of levels in terms of ease-of-use."

Winer is also interested in getting blogging into companies. He thinks that workgroups in firms would benefit from a log instead of e-mail, because it's searchable and collaborative, allowing people to "narrate (their) work."

....there is definitely some powerful stuff coming. The weblogging we do in public, that's just the beginning."

A week later, on February 24, blogdom's most visible citizen Andrew Sullivan posted the most important philosophical statement on blogs to date, "A Blogger Manifesto - the blogger's "95 Theses" - in The Sunday Times of London:

blogs could well be a milestone in the long history of journalism. By empowering individual writers, by reducing the costs of entry into publishing to close to zero, the blog revolution has only begun to transform the media world.

....In October of 2000, I started my fledgling site... Before long, around half the material on my site was suggested by readers. Sometimes, these readers knew far more about any subject than I could. I remember trying to fathom some of the complexities of the Florida election nightmare when I got an email from a Florida politics professor explaining every detail imaginable. If I'd been simply reporting the story in the traditional way, I'd have never found this font of information. As it was, I found myself scooping major news outlets on arcane electoral details about chads and voting machines. Peer-to-peer journalism, I realized, had a huge advantage over old-style journalism. It could marshall the knowledge and resources of thousands, rather than the certitudes of the few.

Sullivan acknowledges that the blog revolution has only just begun - we are about at Bunker Hill - and the goal of this revolution isn't to overthrow the mainstream media, but to create new paths through and around it, outflanking traditional media, supplementing it, commenting upon it, and keeping it honest. Blogs are already Socrates' gadflies upon the media - which some among the media applaud and some decry - but the potential is there for blogs to become full-fledged partners with the media. The wedding may be a shotgun affair, however.

Blogs have the huge advantage over the traditional media of being self-correcting on not one but two levels: As Sullivan mentions, readers chip in with their expertise and viewpoints, disabusing bloggers of any errant facts or notions in real time. Bloggers also impose this discipline on each other, bearing the collective knowledge and wisdom of the community down upon the utterances of one. This is a most unforgiving form of fact-checking and is nearly as common in the blogosphere as congratulatory blogrolling. Having been gang-corrected a few times myself, I laugh at the blog deriders who see only the mutual affirmation.

Sullivan then acknowledges the importance of September 11 to the development of blogs, as we discussed in Part 2 of this series:

And then the war broke out. Suddenly, it felt as if this event were not just happening to me - but to all of the little community the weblog had pioneered. I started writing about my feelings, and readers responded with an intensity I've never felt in any other journalistic form. For a few months, the site was entirely about the war, a place where every possible argument about the conflict could be grappled with. People sent in poems; stories; first-person accounts, until the site became a clearing house for September 11 reflection. The blog almost seemed designed for this moment. In an instant, during the crisis, the market for serious news commentary soared. But people were not just hungry for news, I realized. They were hungry for communication, for checking their gut against someone they had come to know, for emotional support and psychological bonding. In this world, the very personal nature of blogs had far more resonance than more impersonal corporate media products. Readers were more skeptical of anonymous news organizations anyway, and preferred to supplement them with individual writers they knew and liked. The audience doubled literally over night. By last November, the site was getting over half a million visits a month.

I wasn't the only one. Hundreds of "warblogs" started proliferating. A law professor named Glenn Reynolds set up one called "InstaPundit," and fast became a sensation. Established writers like the libertarian Virginia Postrel, the neo-liberal Mickey Kaus, and the left-liberal Josh Marshall, saw their own traffic jump and their influence grow. Previous unknowns like Ken Layne and Matt Welch added to the chorus. The Wall Street Journal's excellent online feature - OpinionJournal.com - added a blog summing up the "Best of the Web Today." "Overlawyered.com" started chronicling abuses in the legal industry. Tech bloggers gained followings that rivaled the now-flagging new economy magazines. Suddenly, traditional media was having to deal with a wave of new entries to the market, nipping at their electronic heels, and keeping them nervous.

Suddenly, old-style opinion columns also faced competition from round-the-clock rivals. More and more readers were reading the papers online, and using their favorite bloggers as guides to what was interesting or what they might otherwise miss. Bloggers became Internet sherpas - experienced guides to all the information and wackiness out there.

September 11 was a quantum leap for both blog supply and demand: readers and bloggers alike felt an intellectual and emotional need for constantly updated information, a place to share objective and subjective experiences, and the desire for a personal guide through, as Sullivan says, the "wackiness out there." Blogs outflanked traditional media both fore and aft, providing unfiltered raw information from original sources, AND providing openly opinionated guides through the haze while traditional media trod a less forthright middle path of intermingled fact and opinion, one often indistinguishable from the other.

Sullivan next addresses the great unspoken blogger issue of MONEY, daring to assert that this is a legitimate blog issue:

webloggers simply begged. They put little buttons on their sites that allowed readers to donate money to keep the blogs going. Slowly, cash dribbled in. In 2001, $27,000 came into my site via donations. Almost all of it went to pay for design and bandwidth costs, but before too long, a modest income source began to make blogging less like charity and more like minimum wage labor. Most major blog sites now have electronic begging bowls - although for most, the income is chump-change. Another option was what's called "affiliate advertising." The blog runs ads from, say, J.Crew.com or Home Depot or the Gap. The companies pay nothing for the ad, but if someone clicks through the ad to buy something from the Gap site, the blogger gets a small cut of the proceeds. In effect, the blogger becomes a sort of web shop-window. He gets readers to stop and look, and a few may go on to buy things. The commissions are small, but if the volume is sufficient, the income can grow.

The genius of the blogging model, after all, is the lack of overhead. Unlike loss-making online magazines, bloggers tend to have no offices to rent, and no staff to pay. After start-up costs for even snazzy sites, most income is profit. So even small amounts can make a difference.

Psychologically and in terms of cold, hard economics, there is a huge difference between "charity" and "minimum wage labor" and there seems to be a refreshing frankness now, at least among the more popular blogs, that the way this is going to work is along the lines of an NPR model, where the audience demonstrates its support via direct contributions. Putting up a full- service blog is the equivalent of working a full-time job. Who among us want to work for free? Who among us can afford it? Ultimately it all boils down to scale: only the very most popular among us drive the kind of traffic necessary to make the voluntary contributor model pay at this point; but as the scale grows and more zeroes are steadily added to the traffic totals, this model will begin to look more like real pay.

Blog traffic now is at the same stage of development that the Internet as a whole was at ten years ago, but I assure you it will not take the blogosphere ten years to proportionately catch up.

the leading bloggers are not far behind traditional media in their audiences and reach. Last month, my site racked up over 800,000 separate visits from 220,000 separate people. Instapundit boasts numbers in the same ball-park [see here for Glenn's latest numbers; incidentally, see Glenn here for another revenue-generating source a la the rock 'n' roll circuit: merchandising]. In terms of eye-balls, that easily rivals the subscription base of a magazine I once edited and still work for, The New Republic, and many other small opinion mags, which average from 50,000 to 200,000 subscribers. Sure, their subscribers are worth more because they pay a real price. But if the goal of opinion journalism is not ultimately money but influence and readers, the blogs are already breathing down the old media's neck.

I would say the ultimate goal of opinion journalism is to accumulate influence/readers AND money, but you get the point. The fact that the only real cost for a typical blog is time spent is extremely important as well: that means a blog can be pursued equally as a hobby or as a "job," again very much along the lines of public radio.

Sullivan wraps things up in fine style:

And the more you think about this development, the more potentially significant it is. What it basically means is that a writer no longer needs a wealthy proprietor to get his message across to readers. He no longer needs an editor, either. Psychologically, this is a big deal. It means a vast amount of drivel will no doubt find its way to the web. But it also means that a writer is finally free of the centuries' old need to suck up to various entities to get an audience. It means that the universe of permissible opinions will expand, unconstrained by the prejudices, tastes or interests of the old media elite. It's no accident that a good plurality of American bloggers, for example, are libertarian or right of center. With a couple of exceptions, the established newspaper market in America is dominated by left-liberal editors and reporters. What the web has done is allow younger or more talented writers to by-pass this coterie and write directly to an audience.

....what bloggers do is completely new - and cannot be replicated on any other medium. It's somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio... And it harnesses the web's real genius - its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It's a new medium finally finding a unique voice. Stay tuned as that voice gets louder and louder.

The blog as "killer ap," utilizing the immediacy, flexibility, low cost of entry, and global reach of the Internet in conjunction with CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLEMAN. It's a "content provider's" dream: to pursue one's own interests and express them in one's own style in conjunction with the ability to get the material directly to its audience without the editorial drag of a deterministic distribution system. Will it ever be that pure or simple? No, because humans are involved, but there is no doubt in my mind that blogs are something new, viable, and at the very beginning of their upward curve.

Following Sullivan's clarion call, the mainstream media really sat up and took notice as articles about the blog phenomenon increased from a drizzle to a downpour: Next in Part 5.
posted by Anonymous at 1:48 PM