By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
October 1, 2004, 6:02 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Bill
Maher: We Need an Exit Strategy, Not a Couscous Recipe: The HBO
host writes a commentary in the L.A. Times (reg.req.) that begins,
New Rule: Presidential candidates must have news conferences and cut out
the appearances on daytime TV. There's a reason they don't call it "Hardball
With Kelly Ripa." I need to know our exit strategy for Iraq, not Dick
Cheney's recipe for couscous.
This week, Dr. Phil aired an interview with President Bush and the first
robot, er, lady. I wanted to record it, but I was afraid my TiVo would think
I was
a wuss. Especially at the end, when Dr. Phil made Bush act out his feelings
toward North Korea with dolls. The president of the United States has no
more business being on "The Dr. Phil Show" than glue-sniffing teenagers
have being on "Face the Nation." If Winston Churchill had gone
on "Dr.
Phil" he would have been outed as an alcoholic with rage issues and
shuffled off to some center to break his cycle of co-dependency and get some
closure....
Link
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Reverse
DMCA: Copyright Holder Held Liable in Landmark Legal Ruling. In LinuxElectrons
(which I had never heard of till just now):
In a landmark case, a California district court has determined that Diebold,
Inc., a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, knowingly misrepresented
that online commentators, including IndyMedia and two Swarthmore college students,
had infringed the company's copyrights. This makes the company the first to
be held liable for violating section 512(f) of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA), which makes it unlawful to use DMCA takedown threats when the copyright
holder knows that infringement has not actually occured.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Internet and Society
Cyberlaw Clinic at Stanford Law School sued on behalf of nonprofit Internet
Service Provider (ISP) Online Policy Group (OPG) and the two students to prevent
Diebold's abusive copyright claims from silencing public debate about voting.
Diebold sent dozens of cease-and-desist letters to ISPs hosting leaked internal
documents revealing flaws in Diebold's e-voting machines. The company claimed
copyright violations and used the DMCA to demand that the documents be taken
down. One ISP, OPG, refused to remove them in the name of free speech, and
thus became the first ISP to test whether it would be held liable for the actions
of its users in such a situation.
Link
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Mount
Blogmore: That's what the Rapid
City (S.D.) Journal, in the shadow
of Mt. Rushmore, calls its campaign blog.
Link
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Mount
St. Helens VolcanoCam. Very busy, of course. F5 reloads
on a Windows system. Hit it a few times if you can't immediately bring
the image
up.
Link
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Sunday: Brady v. Bledsoe again: Patriots at Buffalo, 1 p.m. on CBS.
Debate
surprise
of the night: Fox News ran the pool camera, and C-Span showed the
split screen through the entire debate.
At Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp does the roundup: On
the Morning
After, Most Big-City Editorials Give Nod to Kerry
President Bush's expressions were priceless, if distracting. Most reports
note the scowls, grimaces and cheek-biting.
The
Democratic National Committee actually
put together a video (Real Audio: Dialup •
Broadband /
Windows
Media : Dialup • Broadband)
of the odder split-screen moments.
Much
has been made of Al Gore's sighing and grimaces while debating Bush in 2000,
so it came as a surprise to see the stream of reactions
from Bush while Kerry spoke. You would expect the President by now to be a
veteran of many situations for which
he
has had to
muster
and master
a
diplomatic
deadpan.
Strangest equal and opposite confusing conclusions:
• "Bush wins by not losing." -- Dallas
Morning News editorial
• "Bush doesn't win because Kerry doesn't (lose)," -- James
J. Unger, director of the National Forensics Institute at American University
(Judges
pronounce Kerry the winner)
Romenesko has more debate
reaction links.
And BBC has a roundup
of world reaction. Sample;
Kerry said one new thing after all. He said that we should sit down with the
Islamic world and discuss matters. It is very important, and it is precisely
this that we could not hear from Bush - the recognition that the USA or the
West is facing not a couple of mad terrorists but a proportion of the world.
From Hungarian TV
Later: You Forgot
Poland
Link
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A cartoon, a dictionary in limericks and a virtual bouquet: From
longtime reader Bill Marsland,
Sheila,
Again, as always, keep up the great work. Always something good to read or
review whether political, thought provoking, funny or outrageous. I love
the mix because sometimes I feel like a nut and sometimes I don't, so to
speak. The political content has been most helpful at this time. The teachers
presidential quiz was outstanding.
Daily, besides your blog, I also go to a semi-blog website for the cartoon
Arlo and Janis http://www.arloandjanis.com ....
Jimmy Johnson, the author, has a very interesting way with
showing older cartoons, explaining what he was thinking then and relating
it to now.
But, he also offers some very interesting links, kind of like you but on
a much smaller scale.
... this week he showed one that I thought
you might find interesting. It's concerning a group trying to make a dictionary
(to rewrite the entire Oxford English Dictionary!) completely out
of limericks. They are inviting anyone and everyone to join and be a contributor.
The FAQ
page estimated that they were hoping to
finish
the project in 25 years. They are only up to "Ar" so far.: http://www-b.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php
Here is an example.
Limerick #T13 about-face
By Virge
Submitted: 01 Oct 2004
Defines: about-face
Status: tentative
If you're lost and you need to retrace
All your steps, you should do it with grace.
Don't stumble unknowing.
Please watch where you're going.
It's easy: you must about-face.
This is an amazing project, and I can see it easily taking 25 years. (The
name of the group is OEDILF -- The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick
Form.) Thanks
for all of it, Bll.
Link
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Chamber concert Sunday to benefit MoveOnPac, Kerry: Bruce
Springsteen's doing it, and so are some classical musicians.
Here's the
last-minute press release:
An Afternoon of Chamber Music -- a fundraiser for MoveOnPAC.org and the
Kerry Campaign
This Sunday, October 3rd, 4:00 pm
At the home of Elly and David Lewis
165 Blackstone Blvd, East Side of Providence, corner Freeman Pkwy, river
side of Blackstone
The performers:
Michael Bahmann, piano, is renown in early music circles for his outstanding
work on harpsichord and forte piano. He has performed all over the world, and
it will be a rare treat to hear him, locally, on the concert grand.
Laura Gulley, violin, is a member of the Rhode
Island Philharmonic, is on
the faculty of the Music School, and also performs regularly on Baroque violin with
chamber ensembles in Boston and in Providence's own women's Baroque Orchestra,
Foundling.
Ellen
Santaniello, soprano, is a member of ZORGINA vocal
ensemble, whose performances and recordings of medieval polyphony have won
stellar reviews the world over. Ellen is on the voice faculty of Rhode Island
College and performs regularly in concerts of chamber music and oratorio.
Sarah Stalnaker, cello, a graduate of Oberlin and Rice Universities, is
a member of Community
Music Works and the Providence String Quartet.
This event is a fundraiser for MoveOnPAC.org and the Kerry Campaign. MoveOnPAC.org
is federal political action committee that provides financial support to
candidates who embrace moderate to progressive principles of national government.
More info: www.moveonpac.org
Donations of $50 or more are suggested
(checks payable to MoveOnPAC, or cash)
Please RSVP to ellen@zorgina.com
This concert is being sponsored by MAMAct -- " Mothers in action to create a just world for ourselves and our families."
mamaction@hotmail.com
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More later today...
September 30, 2004, 5:25 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Make up your own mind: Watch the presidential debate unfiltered tonight
on C-Span (Channel 31 on Cox in Providence) at 9 p.m.
Woody
Allen on the 2004 election: At U.S.
Abroad: "The German weekly news magazine
Der Spiegel discussed the
2004 election with Woody Allen on 27 September." Here's a bit:
Spiegel: Has the daily mood of New York changed so much since the attack on
the Twin Towers, that you now see everything as black?
Allen: No. Besides a sense of paranoia, which the parties' speeches are full
of, life goes on like before. People go to the theatre, to baseball games,
fil the restaurants. Most of the harsh security measures play no role in everyday
life.
Spiegel: Why have you, as a chronolist of Manhattan, not included September
11th in your films?
Allen: I don't find politics profound enough to deal with as an artist. The
story of human beings is composed of murder, only the cosmetics and the decorations
change: 2001 some fanatics killed Americans, and now the Americans kill Iraqis.
And when I was a kid, Nazis murdered Jews. Now, Jews and Palestinians are butchering
each other. Politics has been volatile for thousands of years, and meaningless,
because everything repeats itself. But, as a citizen I vote, or course. ...
Link
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Dead:
Dr.
John E. Mack, 74, Harvard professor of psychiatry who won a Pulitzer
Prize for his biography of T.E. Lawrence, A
Prince of Our Disorder, but found wealth and underground fame in
his research on the alien abduction phenomenon.
Dr. Mack died
Monday in London, where he was attending a Lawrence conference, after
being hit by a car allegedly driven by a drunk. An
obit in the
The Telegraph included Harvard's reaction to his most controversial
work:
Mack's conclusion that there was "no conventional explanation" for
case studies such as Ed, who remembered an alien woman taking a sperm sample
from him; Jerry, who had given birth to a human-alien hybrid; and Peter, who
had an alien wife in a parallel universe, led some colleagues to launch the "Knife
the Mack" movement.
Their concerns led to an inquiry at Harvard Medical School led by Arnold
Relman, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. After a year-long
investigation,
in which Mack won the support of, among others, Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard
law professor best-known for his involvement in celebrity trials, the school's
ruling body "urged him not, in any way, to violate the high standards
. . . of this faculty". But it also reaffirmed his academic freedom,
and allowed him to continue his work on aliens. This he did with gusto, producing
Passport to the
Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters in 1999.
NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with a friend and colleague of Dr. Mack, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton of the Harvard Medical School.
A poster at The Daily Grail eulogizes,
Dr John Mack did not believe that alien abductions were simply hoaxes, delusions
and hallucinations. Based on his work counselling abductees, Mack arrived
at the astounding conclusion that this was a phenomenon which was 'real',
but
which didn't so much have its basis in the physical universe as Henry Corbin's "imaginal
realms", accessible only through a widening of conscious perception.
This hypothesis is in stark opposition to the current scientific paradigm,
which
is based on the mechanistic assumption that consciousness is a by-product
of a physical brain.
The Telegraph obit includes this,
Asked what his message would be if he could broadcast to the world, he replied, "I
would be humbled", but offered the following prescription: "Wake
up, find your way, whether it is with prayer or psychedelics or abductions
or shamanic journeys or talking with gurus or seeing movies like The Matrix and The
Truman Show, whatever it is, find your way to break out of the program,
the commercial materialist program."
Also dead: Skeeter
Davis, Nashville singer, at 73.
Link
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Scientists
explain the meaning of life (and we don't matter much): Taipei Times.
Link
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WSJ reporter's candid email from Baghdad: Unvarnished war reporting. I'll
let Jim Romenesko, at Journalism crossroads Poynter.org, tell it:
The Wall Street Journal's Farnaz Fassihi is
said to be the author of a widely
distributed e-mail that begins: "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like
being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that
lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic,
meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell
stories that could make a difference."
> UPDATE -- FASSIHI E-MAILS ROMENESKO:
Hi, Yes, I am the author. The e-mail is authentic, my reaction is that
I'm stunned at how this has rapidly become a global chain mail. I wrote
it as a private e-mail to my friends as I often do about once a month,
writing them about my impressions of Iraq, my personal opinons and my
life here. and then it got forwarded around as you can see in a very
unexpected way.
> WSJ managing editor Paul Steiger says: "Ms.
Fassihi's private opinions have in no way distorted her coverage, which has been
a model of intelligent and courageous reporting, and
scrupulous accuracy and fairness." (New York Post)
Link
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September 29, 2004, 7:37 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Soldier
bloggers,
Iraqi bloggers discuss war-time experiences: Mark
Glaser at OJR assembles a virtual roundtable of bloggers in Iraq, both
Iraqis and soldiers.
One of the more interesting parts is the soldiers' reaction to the question "Do
you believe the U.S. should reinstate the draft? Why or why not?"
The soldiers say no. Although one says, " They did, it's called "stop
loss" [an order that prevented people from leaving the Army, National
Guard or reserves]."
Related: Draft
Fears
Fueled by Inaccurate E-mails: Factcheck.org attempts to debunk rumors of
a draft in June.
There
are
still no guarantees, of course, but an army of paupers is always a possibility,
too,
as
more good
civilian
jobs
vanish.
Link
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Beer for Soldiers:
Stars and Stripes has the backstory: 2nd
BCT soldier's plea to the world: 'Buy us beer'
Link
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The Crawford, Texas, Lone Star Iconoclast lives up to its name: President
Bush's hometown paper endorses John Kerry for president (Kerry
Will Restore American Dignity):
Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had
promised that, as President, he would:
• Empty the Social Security trust fund by $507 billion to help offset fiscal
irresponsibility and at the same time slash Social Security benefits.
• Cut Medicare by 17 percent and reduce veterans’ benefits and military
pay.
• Eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans and raise oil prices
by 50 percent.
• Give tax cuts to businesses that sent American jobs overseas, and, in
fact, by policy encourage their departure.
• Give away billions of tax dollars in government contracts without competitive
bids.
• Involve this country in a deadly and highly questionable war, and
• Take a budget surplus and turn it into the worst deficit in the history
of the United States, creating a debt in just four years that will take generations
to repay.
These were elements of a hidden agenda that surfaced only after he took office.
The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the
things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda.
Today, we are endorsing his opponent, John Kerry, based not only on the things
that Bush has delivered, but also on the vision of a return to normality
that Kerry says our country needs.
Four items trouble us the most about the Bush administration: his initiatives
to disable the Social Security system, the deteriorating state of the American
economy, a dangerous shift away from the basic freedoms established by our
founding fathers, and his continuous mistakes regarding terrorism and Iraq....
The L.A. Times interviews Iconoclast editor publisher W. Leon Smith (Local
Paper Snubs Favorite Son), a Democrat and mayor of nearby Clifton who
nevertheless endorsed Bush in 2000:
" They think the Taliban and I are in cahoots," Smith said of
locals complaining about the endorsement.
Related: Why
I will vote for John Kerry for President: President Eisenhower's
son, historian and author John Eisenhower, endorses Kerry in an op-ed in the
very conservative N.H. Union Leader. Excerpt:
...As son of a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically
expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election
of 2000, I was. With the current administration’s decision to invade
Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent,
and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the
Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.
The fact is that today’s “Republican” Party is one with
which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word “Republican” has
always been synonymous with the word “responsibility,” which has
meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human
and financial terms. Today’s whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion
does not meet that criterion.
Responsibility used to be observed in foreign affairs. That has meant respect
for others. America, though recognized as the leader of the community of nations,
has always acted as a part of it, not as a maverick separate from that community
and at times insulting towards it. Leadership involves setting a direction
and building consensus, not viewing other countries as practically devoid of
significance. Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party
leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance....
This seems quite extraordinary.
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Fast bike or blowing smoke? Liz
Donovan writes,
Skewed news?:
The
motorcycle aficionado in my house has been telling me about the buzz in
the biking Websites on whether the recently reported 205-mph ticket
given to a biker in Minnesota could be true. Not so, say most of them,
that bike would never go that fast. AP writes about the buzz, and has a link to the ticket on Smoking Gun. The discussion on Motorcycle.com's forum.
Link
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Outside the frame: From Burp, a couple of sites that stretch the brain cells:
Goodbye Romania: WARNING: By visiting this site you will destroy it. Each
visit
will remove one pixel from these photographs.
Andy Howell: I like the mouseover movement here a lot.
Link
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Big
3 networks balk at airing F-911 ads on news shows: Nikki Finke at L.A.
Weekly,
ON ANY GIVEN DAY, the major TV networks rarely demonstrate good judgment,
much less morality, when it comes to accepting a litany of nauseating advertisements.
Hemorrhoid creams. Vaginal ointments. Erectile dysfunction. Army recruiting
ads that portray war as a gee-whiz video game. KFC’s claim that fried
chicken is the new health food. And, lest we forget, Bud Light’s farting
horse during the Super Bowl.
But ads for the October 5 release of the new Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD?
Now that makes Big Media gag.
L.A. Weekly has learned that CBS, NBC and ABC all refused Fahrenheit 9/11
DVD advertising during any of the networks’ news programming. Executives
at Sony Pictures, the distributor of the movie for the home-entertainment
market, were stunned. And even more shocked when the three networks explained
why.
“They said explicitly they were reluctant because of the closeness of
the release to the election. All three networks said no,” one Sony insider
explains. “It was certainly a judgment that Sony disagrees with and is
in the process of protesting.”...
...Finally, this week, Sony’s protests started having an effect. “We’re
now getting movement,” a Sony suit told L.A. Weekly Monday night. Sony
corporate senior vice president Susan Tick claimed Tuesday that the initial
ban on the morning news shows was lifted, and time on an NBC Dateline had been
made available. But she also confirmed that the early-evening news shows are
still verboten, and ABC still remains adamant that the DVD can’t be advertised
on its PrimeTime Live. Meanwhile, the DVD ads’ status on the other network
news shows is murky at best. (Sony execs emphasize that Fox was not part of
this cabal — apparently because no Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD ads were planned
there.)
Finke expands from here on the corporate influence on big media.
If you clicked the link and read the story, you'll realize I wrote the headline
on the link.I read the three original headlines and had no idea what the
story was about:
Deadline Hollywood
When Might Turns Right
Golly GE, why Big Media is pro-Bush
Yes, it sounds like free association produced three ideas after reading
the story, and all three ended up on the page. But you have to tell people
who
haven't yet read the story yet what's coming!
Link
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September 28, 2004, 7:44 p.m.
Incredible String Band: Clive Palmer, Mike Heron, Lawson Dando.
Incredible String Band has all ages calling for more: It's been 30
years since the Incredible
String Band played this
continent, and their first show on the U.S.
tour, Thursday night at the Iron Horse Cafe in Northampton, Mass., was
rollicking fun.
Guitarist, singer and songwriter Mike Heron opened by joking modestly that
they'd waited in vain for a tribute band to come along, and finally decided
they'd have to be their own tribute band.
Before it was over, the band,
without founder Robin Williamson
but with the amazing Welshman Lawson Dando on keyboards, kazoo, Indian
harmonium, sticks and many more odd instruments, brought down the house
with music that has always been nearly indescribable. ("British
psychedelic folk" ?) Listen instead: Here's Paintbox (but
there's no female voice on this tour) and a bit of A
Cellular Song. (These links take you to Amazon pages where you may choose
your audio format.)
At
the height of their popularity, in the late '60s, the band swelled as the musician
girlfriends of the players joined the caravan. Imagine buskers spilling out
of a carnival wagon dressed like Robin Hood (that's
Heron, at right) and Maid Marian, playing all sorts of odd instruments found
on trips to Morocco and India, singing of hedgehogs, a minotaur and a witch's
hat, and opening a song with a small female voice whispering, "Amoebas
are very small..."
ISB could have become merely a jug band banging out ditties -- you can actually
hear this direction in 2000's Just
Like the Ivy, which brought together Palmer and Dando with Robin and Bina
Williamson instead of Mike Heron. Indeed, the only sour note Thursday night
for me was a banjo solo by Palmer, singing like Tiny Tim. I'm not a bluegrass
fan at all, though, and deadpan plucking has never appealed, no matter how
technically admirable.
Dando -- looking simultaneously like hippie Puck and a happy Alfred Hitchcock
in an elephant-print tunic -- is a wonderful addition, both visually and musically;
if you didn't know the old crew you'd think he'd been a founder rather than
the slight, wispy Palmer, whose Incredible Folk Club in Edinburgh spawned the
whole thing. Palmer left after one album for the hippie trek to India, and
wasn't part of the heyday. Smiling frontman Heron performs in jeans and a workshirt,
Palmer in a flannel shirt, so Dando's old hippie garb is the thread to the
old days.
But Heron is the showman here, making small talk and grinning through the
song transitions and setups, grinning again, perhaps wryly as he sings, as
a grown man, "Amoebas
are very small..."
Those wonderfully nonlinear lyrics never let them down. Mike Heron's voice
-- always better than Williamson's -- remains strong, and the group's harmonies
were splendid, especially on the wonderful, processional ending of A
Cellular Song, sung in rounds:
Amoebas are very small
Oh ah ee oo there's absolutely no strife
living the timeless life
I don't need a wife
living the timeless life
If I need a friend I just give a wriggle
Split right down the middle
And when I look there's two of me
Both as handsome as can be
Oh here we go slithering, here we go slithering and squelching on
Oh here we go slithering, here we go slithering and squelching on
Oh ah ee oo there's absolutely no strife
living the timeless life
Black hair brown hair feather and scale
Seed and stamen and all unnamed lives that live
Turn your quivering nerves in my direction
Turn your quivering nerves in my direction
Feel the energy projection of my cells
Wishes you well.
May the long time sun shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light within you
Guide you all the way on.
Some songs were absent because they were Williamson's, such as First
Girl I Loved, which Judy Collins recorded, changing the gender,
as well as Jackson Browne. But no matter.
When it all ended, the geezers rose, shouting "More," and got two
more songs. Then the younger crowd stepped in with insistent rhythmic clapping,
which drew Heron out one more time to say, "That's all we have, but thank
you, we'll be back."
The tour continues. They'll be in Texas this weekend. Catch 'em if you can.
Lyrics; many
clips at ARTISTdirect (but there are none from The
Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, perhaps their best album); more
clips at Amazon.com; guitar
chords for 25 ISB songs (MS Word).
Links:
Incredible
String Band
Amoebas
Are Very Small: The Incredible String Band Story
be
Glad, for the Song has No Ending
Incredible
String Band Mailing List Page
Guide
to British Music of the 1960s: Incredible String Band
Related: Creighton's
Collection of Classical Music from independent artists. You can hear
Lawson
Dando's classical piano work here.
Link
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Something
Bad Has Begun by Yusuf
Islam (Cat
Stevens -- both links are to photos) in the L.A.
Times (reg.req.):
Iwas flying to Nashville last week with my 21-year-old daughter to explore
some new musical ideas with a record label there. Ironically, I was trying
to remain low-profile because of the speculation that it might have raised
in the music world about a return of "the Cat." Media attention
was the last thing I wanted. But it seems God wanted otherwise....
Three FBI agents escorted me away from my daughter and asked me questions.
At first, it sounded like they might have me mixed up with somebody else,
as they repeated the spelling of my name.
"No. Y-u-s-u-f," I carefully spelled out. The agents looked a
bit puzzled.
As they continued asking questions, some of their queries were obviously
not related to me, so I thought this must be a matter of simple mistaken
identity. Whether it was a mix-up or not remained unclear because they weren't
under any obligation to give me a reason; the green visa waiver form I had
so neatly filled in earlier had effectively denied me any right to appeal
or answers. It was only when an immigration official read out to me a legal
reference number that he mentioned some implication with "terrorism" — no
further details necessary....
God almighty! Is this the same planet I'd taken off from? I was devastated.
The unbelievable thing is that only two months earlier, I had been having
meetings in Washington with top officials from the White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives to talk about my charity work. Even
further back, one month after the attack on the World Trade Center, I was
in New York meeting Peter Gabriel and Hillary Rodham Clinton at the World
Economic Forum!
Had I changed that much? No. Actually, it's the indiscriminate procedure
of profiling that's changed. ...
ABC also interviewed him. That is to be broadcast Friday night on 20/20.
Related: You
Say Yusuf, I Say Youssouf...: The Cat Stevens incident has its origins in
a spelling mistake
I heard Peace Train on the radio in western Massachusetts this weekend
(for the first time in decades). The dj cracked that the singer had just paid
a visit to Maine, but didn't stay long.
Link
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Balancing
Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories: Everybody but
me has blogged this by now. J.D. Lasica, writing in Online
Journalism Review, find that Google News's electronic editing serves up
largely anti-Kerry site when you search for "John Kerry":
In addition to mainstream news outlets from both sides of the political fence
(say, NPR and The Washington Post on the left and The Washington Times and
New York Post on the right), there were 34 anti-Kerry screeds from the second-tier
websites. There was only one pro-Kerry item, from CommonDreams.org.
Far from an isolated example, the pattern has repeated itself throughout the
past month. Small conservative Web sites such as Useless-Knowledge, Men's News
Daily, Michnews and ChronWatch turn up in disproportionate numbers when clicking
on news about John Kerry. Useless-Knowledge, for instance, made up 12 of the
first 100 results for John Kerry on Friday, and 11 of the first 100 results
Saturday.
By contrast, a search on George Bush or George W. Bush typically results in
a fairly neutral, evenly balanced set of results from both sides of the political
spectrum, with many of the same small conservative sites showing up to sing
the president's praises.
What's going on? Have Google's search results been hijacked by Fox News?
The story offers a few possible explanations, and there are more at J.D.'s
site, New Media Musings, here and here.
I asked him in email yesterday if Google, in the wake of his inquiry, indicated
that it's going to re-weight its algorithms.
His reply:
Google News' chief scientist told me after the story came out that he'll look
into it and appreciates all feedback, positive and negative, but he didn't
go so far as to say they're reevaluating their algorithms.
Link
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Congress
considering H-1B expansion: Deal could add 76,000 H-1B visas: Displaced
Techies blogger
Gina Minks sends along this from the The Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, Inc:
IEEE-USA has learned that key Members of Congress are readying legislation
to substantially increase the number of foreign professional(s) permitted
to work temporarily in the U.S. on H-1B visas. This time, rather than raising
the H-1B
cap – currently at 65,000 visas annually – they intend to establish
a new exemption for international students who earn a Masters or PhD from
an U.S. institution. Worse, the proposed exemption will have no cap and will
be
permanent.
There's more
at news.com.
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The
Unfeeling President: Righteous anger from E.L.
Doctorow, the author
of Ragtime, in an East Hampton, N.Y. paper:
I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer
the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve
of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young
soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable
war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was
almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it.
You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons
of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting
up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd,
smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied
during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and
speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their
country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion
which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity
for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young
men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives
and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric
of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life
. . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press
is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq....
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The Book of Bob: Newsweek's David Gates interviews Bob Dylan in a motel somewhere
in the midwest. Best quote:
You would have to be Bob Dylan—which is what all those stalkers must
ultimately have wanted from him—to grasp fully what he's trying to tell
you. But it must have to do with his having to accept the loss of his original
mode of creation, in which the songs seemed to come to him without his knowing
what he was doing. Does he still have that same access to—I don't know
how to put the question. He helps me out. "No, not in the same way," he
says. "Not in the same way at all. But I can get there, by following
certain forms and structures. It's not luck. Luck's in the early years. In
the early
years, I was trying to write and perform the sun and the moon.
Still playing word games: "The difference between me now and then is that
back then, I could see visions. The me now can dream dreams."
Does anybody else remember Acts 2:17? And it shall be in the last days, saith
God, I will pour out of My Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters
shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall
dream dreams
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Issues again: Following up on yesterday's tale of the teacher's election
issue quiz, blogger Scott at perturb.org has created his own issues
quiz, and
documents it well.. The statements are taken from actually words of Bush and
Kerry. Vote
on the
issues,
see who
you
will
deliver
for you.
Face it folks, you're unlikely to have a beer with either presidential candidate,
but you'll live under their policies and the consequences of their policies
for
a long
time. Don't be surprised later.
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September 27, 2004, 7:21 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Thursday's day off unexpectedly stretched into a long weekend. All my mouse-related
right-side pains went away. Tomorrow I'll write about the opening concert
of the Incredible String Band's first U.S. tour in 30 years, but I left my
links at home. (Lame, but true.)
In music, it's 1959 again: The real headline (A
small new future: ALEC HANLEY BEMIS on the casualties and survivors in the
war between the Cynics and the True Believers) doesn't say what the story's
about, so I rewrote it.
This is a well-researched, interesting, long piece at LA Weekly. You'll probably
be glad you read it.
...Napster was the catalyst with the power to set corporate America’s
overzealous hopes and indie rock’s half-baked dreams on the odd collision
course playing out today.
This is what happened: 1) By making “popular” synonymous with “piracy,” Napster
almost single-handedly eliminated the possibility of 10-million sellers.
(Basically, it’s far easier to find and steal tracks by Eminem online
than it is an obscure indie band.) 2) Napster opened a back-door distribution
channel to any band with good songs, a unique sound and access to a computer,
solving niche pop’s eternal problem of distribution and access. For
a band with buzz or good ideas but no access to typical gatekeepers — commercial
radio, distribution through Wal-Mart — there was now a radically streamlined
infrastructure for getting heard. 3) Napster allowed people to hear what
they are going to buy before they buy it. The result is that good indie records
are selling more copies, and bad major-label records are selling less.
This was only the beginning of a larger trend. Napster opened the floodgates
to the notion that we should be able to preview music before we buy it....Previewability
is probably the most important revolution in recent music. Despite what the
RIAA would have you believe, the shifts the industry has witnessed haven’t
been a matter of quantity so much as they’ve been a matter of quality.
People are making their purchasing decisions less on the basis of hype and
blind faith, and more on the basis of what they actually enjoy listening
to.
And that has really screwed up the trend-driven marketplace it took the
major labels more than 40 years
to perfect....
Bottom line: Edgar Bronfman Jr., by buying Warner Music Group from Time Warner
with private money, has created the biggest independently owned label on the
planet. Watch the next phase.
Bemis, the author, also interviewed
the originator of flash mobs, among other pieces for LA Weekly.
via MetaFilter, whose members toss
in their two cents here.
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Volunteer for Tech Watch:
Are you a technology professional interested in election integrity? A geek
who believes every vote should be recorded as intended? A techie who stands
for reliable and publicly verifiable election systems?
To volunteer, please go to the Election
Incident Reporting System and click
on "Volunteer Now!" to enter a volunteer profile about your volunteer
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TechWatch volunteers will receive training and participate in important non-partisan
election monitoring activities, observing and documenting:
• Logic & Accuracy testing of voting technology by election officials
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• Election Incidents on Election Day (on dispatch from an Election Incident
Reporting System to polling places within a given county)
More at the link.
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The marketing of the presidency: A fascinating
true story stands out in this wasteland of election distractions. Teresa Lhotka,
blogging at Anomalous Data,
recounts
a
tale from "curriculum
night" at
her 11-year-old's school:
...the teacher was talking about their current events unit, which as you
might expect is primarily taken up with the election process right now.
The teacher told of an exercise wherein he read from both the Bush and
Kerry websites. He read where each of the candidates stood on the main issues
of
the campaign. He didn’t say who was who…just “this is what
candidate one says, this is what candidate two says”.
The kids made tally marks about each thing they agreed with from each candidate.
Then the kids voted on the issues.
Four kids voted for Bush. 26 kids voted for Kerry.
You have to realize the significance of this. We live in Eden Prairie,
MN....
Eden Prairie has grown a crop of Bush/Cheney yard signs that rivals the
corn crops of neighboring rural towns. This is Bush country, make no mistake
about it…
…as illustrated by the fact that most of the kids who voted for John
Kerry were greatly upset by it. They booed the results of their vote. They
were upset that they had voted for the “wrong guy”.
Glancing around the classroom at the faces of the other parents, I could
see that many of them were disturbed as well. What could have gone wrong?
How had they failed their children? What did this mean?
The teacher went on to say that he assured the kids that the election was
not yet over, and that there still might be many issues where they would
agree with George W. Bush, and maybe when they tried again later, they would
end up voting for him.
The parents looked relieved as well.
The gears that had begun to grind uncomfortably in their heads smoothed
out and they relaxed.
We moved on to talk about other things, and everyone was happy.
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Sir
Tim Berners-Lee -- who really did invent the Internet -- is interviewed
at MIT technology review by Mark Frauenfelder. The blurb reads, "Tim
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger in
mind all along. He tells TR how his 15 years of work on the 'Semantic Web'
are finally paying off."
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Federal
court orders trial in Florida e-ballot lawsuit: AP reports,
ATLANTA (AP) — A federal appeals court on Monday overturned a judge
who had thrown out a lawsuit seeking a paper trail for that state's new
touchscreen voting machines.
Fifteen Florida counties use voting machines that don't create paper copies.
Three judges from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the federal
judge erred when he threw out the lawsuit filed by U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler,
a south Florida congressman.
"We vacate that decision and remand for a consideration of the merits," the
unsigned ruling reads.
A state appeals court ruled last month that a paper trail of ballots was
not required, ruling that voters are not guaranteed "a perfect voting
system."...
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No
Joke: Daily Show Viewers Follow Presidential Race: The
Business Journal reports,
PHILADELPHIA -- Viewers of late-night comedy programs, especially The Daily
Show with Jon Stewart on the cable channel Comedy Central, are more likely
to know the issue positions and backgrounds of presidential candidates
than people who do not watch late-night comedy, the University of Pennsylvania’s
National Annenberg Election Survey shows.
Polling conducted between July 15 and Sept. 19 among 19,013 adults showed
that on a six-item political knowledge test people who did not watch any
late-night comedy programs in the past week answered 2.62 items correctly,
while viewers
of Late Night with David Letterman on CBS answered 2.91, viewers of The Tonight
Show with Jay Leno answered 2.95, and viewers of The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart answered 3.59 items correctly. That meant there was a difference
of 16 percentage
points between Daily Show viewers and people who did not watch any late-night
programming....
Here's the Annenberg
report.(pdf)
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The Onion's2004 Election
Guide: Fed-Up Cheney Enters Presidential Race Himself and
Bush Vows To Pay Closer Attention To Needs Of Non-Presidents vs. Kerry
Unveils One-Point Plan For Better America and Kerry Names 1969 Version
Of Himself As Running Mate.
Related: Swift
Boat PCF-94: The video game.
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Hand
Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall, by Henry Bursill: Timeless
fun: How-to handshadows from 1859, thanks to Project Gutenberg.
PREFACE
I
need not explain how these Shadows were suggested, to any one who has seen
WILKIE'S picture, "The Rabbit on the Wall." But by what pains they
were invented can never be revealed; for it is known to my tortured digits
alone, and they, luckily for me, are dumb. I calculate that I put my ten
fingers through hundreds of various exercises before my "Bird" took
wing; my left little finger thrills at the memory of "Grandpapa";
and my thumbs gave in no less than twenty times before "Boy" was
accomplished. Yet now how easy it is to make the "Duck" to quack,
the "Donkey" to bray, "Toby" to wag his tail, and the "Rabbit" to
munch his unsubstantial meal.
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'Invade
their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity': James
Meek attends the world's first right-wing film festival: The Guardian goes
to the movies
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