Bayosphere

Media’s treatment of presidential elections is the subject of a recent Lawrence Lessig blog here: http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002175.shtml. I’ve also written about it here: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/MortazaviBlog/20040928#media_as_theater_or_theatre .

However, as I noted earlier, I think weblogging is not a panacea for social and political maladies. It has the potential of actually aggravating the problem: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/MortazaviBlog/20040915#weblogging_is_not_a_panacea .

Going to New York eh!?

Oh behave indeed! You hound, Dan. I hope you don’t catch anything.

Now what just happened?

The new media broke through and I don’t mean the bleating sheep of the lunar right bogosphere.
I mean we the media in the sense of ‘ we the new super-power ‘truly liberated digi-media.
The corpse media’s circulations been dropping harder than Oscar De La Hoya; they’ve been caught lying about that and countless other matters large and small. They’ve been pirated into the ground and humbled before the world yet thats really no great surprise,after all, they’re old, we’re young and that’s life.

We the new media should take a minute to celebrate along with that dog, Dan G.
( yoda man D!)
I would suggest a fine Australian shiraz or white Bergundy, maybe even a cleansing ale. SALUD, VIVA free media and see you later alligators.

People might enjoy my blog post investigating a parallel, right-wing PR firm track, pushing the Rather/CBS memos story. This was an early publicizing of the story which did NOT involve blogs, and later seems to have merged with the blog track.

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000702.html

I was chatting with a friend who is a climatologist at NCAR. While this can’t be correleated with global warming, global warming is likely to make this sort of thing more common in the future – energy into the water is what drives hurricanes.

He said it wouldn’t be surprising to see a half dozen category 3+ storms hit a place like Florida in four or five decades as the yearly norm. At some point it becomes too expensive to live in a place like that.

The real question is” “when will people in the US start to get serious about global warming?” Perhaps the silver lining of events like this is that it might begin to sensitize voters.

Did you ever think that maybe Florida is being punished for what it did to us in the 2000 election?
This is a warning for this election!

Very amusing. Want to explain what the 1100 people dead in Haiti did to piss the weather gods off so badly?

They approved of Bush’s policies.

Dan:

Come on down, it is really blowing. Storm is supposed to hit here at dawn. This could be the worst one yet!

Buzz

This has nothing to do with global warming for Pete’s sake, it’s just a historical, albeit nasty, cycle that these weather patterns create.

Now, that doesn’t make it any easier for all those people on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts.

A word to the wise, ocean front property will go cheap down there in the next couple of years, so if you buy in, don’t live there until ~2011+ when the current crazy weather patterns settle down. At that time you’ll be set for about 40 years.

AJ

What the people of Haiti did was to cut down most of the trees, thus creating an environmental disaster. The water isn’t soaked up by the roots, and it just runs off, washing out the soil, causing massive flooding and mudslides.

That’s what the people of Haiti did, they have destroyed their own land. Find an aerial or satellite photo of Hispaniola, you can see the dividing line between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Haiti has no trees left!

2000 election vs. hurricanes 2004

http://www.bartcop.com/message-from-God.gif

A message from god?

Personally I think some people have got too much time on their hands but what do I know

I have absolutely zero sympathy for Florida.

If you built your houses correctly, you would not have a problem.

How do I *KNOW*? I live on an island in the middle of typhoon alley. There’s no place to evacuate to. This season we’ve had just as many typhoons hit as hurricanes have hit Florida. Nobody’s roofs got blow off, nobody died, nobody homeless, minimal property damage (cars getting wacked by flying things, mostly).

Oh, BTW, building correctly means not putting your god-damned million dollar plus, shittly built house directly on the freaking beach… f-ing morons… you deserve exactly what you got, plus a little more for good measure.

What I find particularly delicious is that most of those folks could have defraid their building costs by a couple of hundred thousand dollars with a FEMA grant.

http://www.monolithicdome.com/plan_design/FEMA/

Meanwhile FEMA ships trailer homes to the Florida hurricane homeless (people who wouldn’t know a grant from a hole in the ground), resulting in them becomming homeless *TWICE* in a season despite the fact that disaster relief container homes

http://www.commetasa.com/ingles/products5.htm

provides safe, cheap, effective, quickly deployed emergency housing to folks who have lost their homes in a natural disasters.

Sometimes American government is increadly fscked in the head that it’s hard to imagine a more third world first world country.

A Message from God?

Interesting. THat map indicates that Orange County, Volusia County and others didn’t get hit by Frances or Charley. Sorry, those 2 counties got hit severely and voted for Gore.

Because of the hurricane, I had to cancel a trip to Orlando: http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/MortazaviBlog/20040926#should_i_go_or_should.

This would have been my first trip to Florida ever. My only hope is that my colleagues who did make it and those who live near the most devasted areas remain physically safe.

So, the next time the Merc runs an op-ed piece from Alexander Cockburn, it magically turns into “socialist fishwrap”?

The problem with Faux News isn’t that it has openly-partisan talk show hosts. It’s that management has blurred (some would say “erased”) the line between “news” and “commentary”.

Frankly, Faux isn’t even CNN’s real competition anymore: that role belongs to Google News, which provides the same up-to-the-minute information, with an even wider range of perspectives. anyplace you have access to a computer.

If it remains in its current form, CNN is probably doomed to becoming a sort of “Newzak” for use in airport waiting rooms and similar PC-less venues.

First, I do not watch O’Reilly because his views are too extreme, even for me. But he is like the WWF in that he is positioned as entertainment, rather than serious news. I don’t watch Hardball with Chris Matthews for the same reason. Or Larry King or Joe Scarbrough or any of the myriad other “news” journalists, with “fair & balanced reporting,” be they Fox, MSNBC, CNN, etc. These are one and all political commentary rather than news organizations. Don’t just talk about Fox; the others are tarred with the same brush, only their bias is toward the left, rather than the right.

But when a major news organization, such as CBS or the New York Times, or for that matter, the Merc goes from reporting factual news to news with a pronounced bias, then we have a credibility problem. A NEWS organization is by definition, a reporter of fact, not opinion. An editorial is an appropriate forum for opinion, not the front page or the lead story. Once that corner is turned, the news organization has as much credibility as the National Enquirer. ABC turned that corner several years ago and has now been joined by CBS.

I, for one, do not need a talking head to tell me how to think, or what the speaker said. I do require complete access to the news in order to reach my own conclusions.

Mr. Rich got it wrong (an even rarer occurance than Mr. O’Reilly’s getting it right). Crossfire is clearly a shouting match (would it were a debate, but, alas, not in our era) between partisan sides. The show is more valuable for having voices that are authentically connected with the Kerry campaign. Better to focus attention on the so-called neutral reporters who debase their journalistic calling by failing o challenge or investigate claims made by the spin-meisters of both parties.

Mr. Rich got it wrong (an even rarer occurance than Mr. O’Reilly’s getting it right). Crossfire is clearly a shouting match (would it were a debate, but, alas, not in our era) between partisan sides. The show is more valuable for having voices that are authentically connected with the Kerry campaign. Better to focus attention on the so-called neutral reporters who abandon their journalistic reponsibility by simply parotting and failing to challenge or investigate claims made by the spin-meisters of both parties.

Phil Wade: you seem to be oblivious of the distinction between news reporting and news analysis.

Just wanted to say that I read your book and absolutely loved it. I truly believe that the Internet and blogs are the future of journalism.

Thanks for writing something that all bloggers should read.

S.M. Mullis
http://fnn.blogspot.com
http://3aday.blogspot.com

As someone who has been blogging for five years, I just pray that grassroots journalism grows even more quickly than it already is. Between Fox, CBS, and the failures of even the New York Times to report the news accurately, it is critical for thoughtful people to have alternatives.

“O’Reilly because his views are too extreme”

Anyone who thinks O’Reilly is a knee-jerk far right winger is dead wrong. Sure, he can be testy with guests. But his positions are mostly well-reasoned and he is left of center on many of them.

“Faux isn’t even CNN’s real competition anymore”

No, because Faux is trouncing CNN!!

Also, can anyone explain why Frank Rich gets a weekly front-page article on NYT Sunday A&E section about politics.

I’ve always thought the distinctions among news personnel might be classified as:
//Reporting – gathering and sorting facts to present as objectively as possible a picture of events and effects
//Analysis – putting the facts into a context of history, causes, impacts and relationships, but objectively, without “spin”
//Opinions – making judgments based on ideology, experience or economic incentive

Certainly the first (at least for the broadcast component) is distorted by a combination of reportorial ineptitude, marketing pressure for time and visually enticing topics, and the inability of bite-size news management to deal with complex topics. But they suffer also in the analytical category because good analysis takes time and costs money. Thus, the preponderance of superficial analysis and recycling of predigested packages of interest information.

The rest of the pack…liberals and conservatives alike, are opinionists, more akin to talk show callers than to true journalists. But as long as the public is more concerned about Paris Hilton’s underwear than Bush’s foreign or economic policy (or Kerry’s alternatives) what more can we expect?

Give it a rest Dan.

Calling out Fox News every other week while you promote Michael Moore, and fail to even acknowledge what is coming from move0n.org just demonstrates your bias.

Oh, and is it a coincidence that three out of the four journalistic embarassments I mentioned above painted the Bush and Blair administration in a bad light?

Must have been a coincidence, or could it have been a toxic Foxification of the news? LMFAO!

Everyone download FireFox 1.0PR and take a look at the integrated RSS technology….Lets drop IE and Safari and have a true open cross platfrom independent browser. Way to go…

http://www.mozilla.org/

Shhhhhhh! Dan’s not here, let’s talk about him.

Seriously, there is a local (here in Silicon Valley) State Legislature candidate named Steve Poizner. He is a Republican who is spending millions on his campaign. Interestingly Richard Clarke, who has been slammed for his book about the Bush administration’s ignorance about terrorism before 9/11 is campaigning for him. Guess that rules out Clarke’s political motives when he wrote the book!

Ted, You’re right on both counts.

Also, Poizner has spent a considerable amount of his own money for his campaign, promising to start campaign finance reform. That’s easy enough when one is a multi-millionaire after having sold one’s company to Qualcomm (as Poizner did).

Poizner’s opponent, Ira Raskin (sp?), has been around for a while and proven himself as an advocate for reform that’s “people-based” and not unduly influenced by wealthy special interests.

Poizner’s campaign has run like clockwork; it’s very slick and professionally run. He has good people advising him; the best money can buy. )

Raskin campaigned on my doorstep some weks ago; one thing that really impressed me about him was that he had a young lad with him – a high-school student – who had volunteered to help in is campaign. I thought he was doing a great civil work by introducing that kid to the “underbelly” of working in a political campaign. Impressive.

Stock Options

If stock options are traded publically for short periods of time, why not trade them for longer periods of time like the ones given to employees. Then the companies could expense the value of the options on market prices.

Firefox

Firefox 1.0PR busted almost all my extensions. The built in pop up blocker notice is nice. The find tool bar and highlighter at the bottom is nice as well. But it should predictively realize that if I type a term in a websites search box that I’ll probably want it in the find bar as well. I am also missing the Bugmenot extension and gmail compose.

But the latest critical vulnerability is reason enough to upgrade. Dan could you read your logs and publish what % of people visiting your site are using Firefox?

RE Joe’s comment about us all using Firefox.

I’m a recent adopter and upgraded to the new version. I have to say I prefer it to IE. Problem will be when it gains sufficient market share to attract all the mayhem makers. Already this application has had “holes” patched in the new version and this is just the beginning.

I’ve tried firefox twice in the last 8 months. Both times I went back to mozilla for one key feature: turning off dynamic gifs. Browsing without all those flashing, blinking, epilepsy-inducing banner ads is just too important.

> Both times I went back to mozilla for one key feature: turning off dynamic gifs.

You can disable that in firefox too, no problem.

Un-scientific poll here. We’re all relatively intelligent here and I’d like to know what other people are thinking.

Please provide me with your brief prediction for the Presidential Election.

I predict that Nader stays on the FL ballot, Bush Wins FL and goes on to win the election by a small margin.

You?

Un-scientific poll here. We’re all relatively intelligent here and I’d like to know what other people are thinking.

Please provide me with your brief prediction for the Presidential Election.

I predict that Nader stays on the FL ballot, Bush Wins FL and goes on to win the election by a small margin.

You?

We seem to get so distracted by potential electronic voter fraud. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that there’s still a ton of problems with the current system. Read “How to Steal an Election”

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/09/16/how_to_steal_an_election/

The election is still a long way off, so a lot could happen between now and then. But if things stay on an even keel, I predict Bush by a fairly respectable margin. Florida won’t be close. If the overall race is tight, Ohio could be the place to watch this year.

And for the record, I was in the ABB camp 6-8 months ago. The Dems had this election handed to them on a plate. But I have never seen such gross incompetence and bumbling in a campaign effort. Its sad, really.

Did someone else just get outted?

The Washington Post reported that Donald W. Keyser, an ex-State Dept. official, had passed documents to Taiwanese intelligence agents and was charged with concealing a trip to Taiwan. See Powell Aide Gave Papers to Taiwan, FBI Says.

The article also mentions that Keyser’s wife is a CIA officer, but did not mention her name. However, some simple sleuthing shows that Donald Keyser is from Virginia. Running a search for him in Google reveals a phone number. A reverse search of the phone number shows Margaret Lyons.

Powell Aid Gave Papers to Taiwan, FBI Says:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24703-2004Sep15.html?nav%3Drss_politics

Phonebook results for donald keyser va:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=donald+keyser+va&btnG=Search

Phonebook results for (703) 690-7086:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=%28703%29+690-7086&btnG=Search

Margaret Lyon is a cia agent?

Is that what your telling us?

MARGARET LYONS is a CIA agent?

Some of these laws are just risible these days aren’t they. When I publish this all over Indymedia and Cryptome gets hold of it – if they haven’t already that will make a mockery of USSA law.

As it should too, thank f*ck for the free NET and free speech and death to the CIA.

Now as a follow up I suggest a mass civil disobedience campaign to make fools of the secret service. That is we all threaten to kill the pretzel a week from now. Get a few thousand involved and the SS are DoSed and stuffed – much like the Brits in India finally were.

Mass civil disobedience gets the goodie’s.
( seasoned with a little direct action to taste of course )

FYI: Check out the first International Weblog Awards, The BOBs at http://www.thebobs.com.

I am a freelancer for Deutsche Welle, the host of the award and blogger, an international broadcaster in 30 languages. The awards will be held in DW’s seven focus languages.

Nominations kick off today! So nominate your favorite blog in design, innovation, topic, journalism or best weblog. You can nominate your own of course.

I’ve colleced some good forgery memo evidence links at

http://sethf.com/cbs-memos/

Thanks for your insightful and informative articles.

I look forward to the article you plan … “build a hard-disk recording system that won’t be bound by those restrictions…”.

Please include details and costs of integrating it with the content provider (e.g., monthly fee to connect with their broadcast schedule), hardware selection, software required, other URLs/resources, etc.

Stephen Mehl

Ahhhh… the fun resumes