Two pictures.
Sure, everybody knows that the it-couple in the foreground is curator extraordinaire Lori Matsumoto and evil robotics genius John Wiseman. But who’s that dapper gent in seersucker strolling through the background of Patrick Farley’s latest comics infostrip for Wired?
And this, by the way, is what shoes look like at a Mountain Goats concert when you’re trying to figure out how to deal with the flash and you hit that button on the upper-left side while holding the camera in your lap. —The green Fluevogs would be Sara Ryan; and I would never wear those brown Nunn Bushes with seersucker.
A falling blossom
Returns to branch:
A butterfly
And that, boys and girls, is why we have DVDs.
Okay, some tiny good news—looks as though 20th is going to go through with Wonderfalls DVDs. The folks on the DVD marketing side love the 13 episodes and see great potential. We’re talking about extras and commentary and all that good stuff. December/Holiday release was mentioned. I’ll keep you updated. (BTW—a flood of “postcards” was mentioned. We were asked, “that’s not your families sending those, is it?” Um. In a way...)
Zero to sixty and climbing.
I was swaying a little, because Sara had bought me one more Manhattan, which means I owe her a drink. It was noisy, so I leaned in a little where he was squatting on the stage. “Seven days ago,” I said. “I hadn’t heard a goddamn thing. My friend over there,” she’s buying a T-shirt from Peter, and I can’t see her in the crowd, and he wouldn’t know her from Eve, but I gesture over that way anyway, “she says, you have to hear this stuff. So I downloaded a couple of songs, you know?” He’d told the guy ahead of me, who’d borrowed my pen so he could sign the CD, that it was twelve bucks, so I handed him two fives and two ones. “And here I am.” He didn’t even bother to count it. Just stuck the money in a pocket somewhere and handed me a CD. “Hey,” he said. “That really means a fuck of a lot to me.”
Which isn’t true. The first Mountain Goats song I scraped off of Limewire was a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy,” back in April. Which—and it’s a mighty fine song, don’t get me wrong, and Neutral Milk Hotel is one of those bands on my really-ought-to-look-into-them-soon list, and you can hear the quavering kick in his yelp and you can almost see him hunched over the guitar, yes, but—it’s not, perhaps, the most representative sample.
I was scraping Mountain Goats off of Limewire at the behest of Sara and Victoria and Johnzo, who’ve all done right by me so far. And if that first song didn’t move me much, well, the dark matter of P2P is shot through with Goats: there’s 450-some-odd titles in the repertoire, at this point, I think: all those songs stuffed directly onto cassette tapes through a boombox, all those prolific tiny-label releases. Plus all the bootlegged live versions, and all those rabid fans, spreading the gospel. So somewhere at the beginning of May I went back for more, and found “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Cubs in Five” and I never looked back. —And I know there’s no zealot like a recent convert and I know I’m foolish with having just fallen in love but can I tell you anyway? Listen. Just listen to the angry joy. Listen to the bitter glee. Listen to all these people who know they are about to see something so big that you can’t call it terrible and you can’t call it wonderful, and listen as they try to put it back together again afterwards. He is apocalyptic in the best possible sense of the word, and that’s why when you’re in the same room with him and he’s singing you lift your hands into the air. He immanentizes like a sonofabitch.
So it hadn’t been seven days. So I was lying. But it felt right at the time, and I’d do it again, in a heartbeat.
Definition: incompetence.
“It’s extremely difficult to govern when you control all three branches of government,” says Hastert spokesman John Feehery, a burden of which Democrats would happily relieve them.
Via Atrios, of course.
These pictures will not be the last ones of this sort that will see the light of day.
Tools.
This, this is rich:
Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran
BY KNUT ROYCE
WASHINGTON BUREAU
May 21, 2004, 7:29 PM EDT
WASHINGTON – The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
The Information Collection Program also “kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing” by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An administration official confirmed that “highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel.”
The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi’s program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.
An intelligence agency spokesman would not discuss questions about his agency’s internal conclusions about the alleged Iranian operation. But he said some of its information had been helpful to the U.S. “Some of the information was great, especially as it pertained to arresting high value targets and on force protection issues,” he said. “And some of the information wasn’t so great.”
At the center of the alleged Iranian intelligence operation, according to administration officials and intelligence sources, is Aras Karim Habib, a 47-year-old Shia Kurd who was named in an arrest warrant issued during a raid on Chalabi’s home and offices in Baghdad Thursday. He eluded arrest.
Karim, who sometimes goes by the last name of Habib, is in charge of the information collection program.
The intelligence source briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions said that Karim’s “fingerprints are all over it.”
“There was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the U.S. government, inadvertently,” he said.
Via Julia, though this one’s climbing the charts like mad. Why not? It isn’t every day you discover that your own government may have been so mind-boggling stupid. If this pans out, do the math: we took out Hussein’s government, doing all the dirty work and stirring up the shit until every tenth orphaned widower has taken up arms against us, while Iran waits quietly, patiently, to pick up the pieces when all’s said and mostly done.
We were their fucking flypaper.
But that’s not the funny bit; that’s not the funny bit, by half. No, the funny bit is this:
The tools are still going to figure out a way to blame it all on us.
This exercise in Dolchstasslegende brought to you by cartoonist Cerdipity, by way of Dean Esmay. Thanks to Orcinus.
Housekeeping: the Newsday article cited (rather in full) above has moved from here to here. What’s where it was now is an innoccuous AP piece about how Chalabi is “turning to politics for survival.”
DESTROY!!
ITEM!! Radio blowhard and professional bully Lars Larson heard that Cleveland High School’s Sexual Minorities and Allies group was planning an outdoor screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch! Seeing this as some sort of backhanded slight to his own manhood, Larson egged his reactionary audience into a telephonic bashing of such epic proportions that it shut down the school’s phone system! The school with no small amount of exasperated eye-rolling and long-suffering sighing canceled the dick-chick flick to assuage these small-minded bullies! Larson and his sycophantic ilk may strut and preen for now, satisfied in having smacked down a bunch queer ‘n’ questioning kids who never did nothin’ to nobody, but the last laugh’s on him: the Portland Mercury is sponsoring their own outdoor all-ages showing! Guess what, Larson: it’s a free fuckin’ country! So bite me! Monday, 7 June, 8 pm, at Pacific Switchboard!
ITEM!! The beleaguered Cheney-Bush campaign for the presidency planned a public stop at Kalamazoo College to be hosted by the campus College Republicans! Curious liberal students who wanted to see what all the hubub was about stood on line in the rain for two hours to get tickets! They dressed in mufti—khakis, sweaters, no bumper stickers or banner ads of any sort—and arrived at the public event promptly! But they were turned away at the door for failing a background check! It seems College Republicans had been trained to spot potential threats and fingered the subdued libs based on their reputations alone! When the libs attempted to assert their right to attend a public event, police were summoned! Arrests were threatened! They were informed this public campaign stop was actually a private event, closed to all but a vetted audience! We ask you, ladies and gentlemen, and all the scientists at sea: What does Cheney-Bush have to hide?
ITEM!! Scott McCloud’s seminal DESTROY!! was the first ’90s comic, say some; THE LOUDEST COMICBOOK EVER! bellow others! Its deceptively simple storyline makes wild mockery of the dialectic in which each side cries to the other, “You are stupid! And I will SMASH YOU!” Which makes it a stunningly prescient work of political satire! But don’t let “satire” fool you: it’s also great fun and a cathartic read! And the original artwork is a stunning addition to your home or office! (Management has for many years rejoiced in the classic “DESTROY! SHUT UP! DESTROY! SHUT UP! DESTROY! SHUT UP!” page.) This factoid is mentioned because only a few pages are left, but they are humdingers! Only $250 each! Management humbly commends the following page to your attention—
Courage! Bush is a noodle!
The triumph of William Jennings Bryan.
The chances are that history will put the peak of democracy in his time; it has been on the downward curve among us since the campaign of 1896. He will be remembered, perhaps, as its supreme impostor, the reduction ad adsurdum of its pretension. Bryan came very near being President of the United States. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected. He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for Harding, even for Coolidge. Dullness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President of the United States doesn’t believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something—by a narrow margin, but still safely.
—“To Expose a Fool,” H.L. Mencken’s celebrated obituary
of William Jennings Bryan
We escaped it then, but we forgot our history, and now we’re doomed to repeat it: a farce that never was very funny, a Punch and Judy show that just won’t stop beating the shit out of us. “Atsawaytodoit!” —But unlike a lot of us plying our boats about the Islets of Bloggerhans, I’m not reading this recent Village Voice article as an instance of Pastor Simpson gumming up the works in the Blue Room:
It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.
But now we know.
“Everything that you’re discussing is information you’re not supposed to have,” barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice.
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be “the Christian Voice in the Nation’s Capital,” the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David’s temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won’t come back to earth.
Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that “the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph’s tomb or Rachel’s tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace.”
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
As the incomparable Slacktivist points out, if read carefully, this logic is at best post hoc ergo propter hoc: what’s described isn’t a highrolling geopolitical summit with apocalyptic fanatics, but instead a slick bit of fanservice for the rubes, a huckster’s shill to puff them up, make them think they’re playas, and part them from their votes and money.
The group sent “45 ministers including wives” to the White House, where they sat in a room as a series of second- and third-tier staffers came through to assure them that the president appreciates their concerns and is counting on their support. At the end of the day, they were allowed outside to wave as the president departed in a helicopter. It was their only glimpse of him. (Robert G. Upton, the AC’s leader, described this as a “heart-moving send-off of the President in his Presidential helicopter.”)
The White House shores up support in a fragment of its base, and Upton gets to return to his office and crank out fund-raising letters assuring his deluded followers that he has insider access with “key leaders” in the Bush administration.
The author himself chimes in: a rather critical paragraph was, apparently, cut. This particular instance isn’t an example of consulting eschaton immanentizers on foreign policy decisions that affect us all. The Golden Text isn’t written on any White House walls, and if any one of those 45 ministers prayed for rain, no one in the administration took it seriously.
They are, after all, one fuck of a lot scarier.
In 1999, candidate Bush gave a speech to the little-known Council on National Policy.
His speech, contemporaneously described as a typical mid-campaign ministration to conservatives, was recorded on audio tape.
(Depending on whose account you believe, Bush promised to appoint only anti-abortion-rights judges to the Supreme Court, or he stuck to his campaign “strict constructionist” phrase. Or he took a tough stance against gays and lesbians, or maybe he didn’t).
The media and center-left activist groups urged the group and Bush’s presidential campaign to release the tape of his remarks. The CNP, citing its bylaws that restrict access to speeches, declined. So did the Bush campaign, citing the CNP.
Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership.
Now, this might be more post hoc ergo propter hoc. But there are very real questions as to how, exactly, Bush rose to the top of the Republican lists. And even if you don’t want to believe that an interlocking directorate of Christian political organizations and prominent Republican politicians could kingmake a failed businessman and one-term governor with a market-tested family name (“CNP will forever be nothing more than a ‘comfortable place’ for like-minded folks to brainstorm, one member said,” or so goes the ABC article that’s still the best one-stop shop on the CNP. “‘What they decided at one point was that people will simply feel more at ease,’ said another member, Balint Vazsonyi, who joined the group in 1997. ‘It’s certainly not for a political reason. The views discussed here are among those you see on the television or when you open a newspaper’”), what you have to ask yourself is why so many prominent Republicans see no political difficulties in associating themselves with individuals and organizations that explicitly call for overthrowing American democracy in favor of a Christian theocracy. And you can still write this off as fanservice if you want, glandhanding the rubes while picking their pockets, like the absurdly messianic coronation of Sun Myung Moon attended by hordes of money-hungry Republican movers, shakers, and congressfolk. But then you have to go back a year or so to Jeffrey Sharlet’s “Jesus Plus Nothing,” his “undercover” account of hanging with up-and-coming Christian(ist) power brokers:
“King David,” David Coe went on, “liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here’s this guy who slept with another man’s wife—Bathsheba, right?—and then basically murders her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.” David shook his head. “I mean, Jiminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What,” he said, “is that all about?”
The answer, we discovered, was that King David had been “chosen.” To illustrate this point David Coe turned to Beau. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”
Beau shrank into the cushions. “Probably that I’m pretty bad?”
“No, Beau. I wouldn’t. Because I’m not here to judge you. That’s not my job. I’m here for only one thing.”
“Jesus ?” Beau said. David smiled and winked.
He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered”—David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere—“nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”
David explained that when Genghis entered a defeated city he would call in the local headman and have him stuffed into a crate. Over the crate would be spread a tablecloth, and on the tablecloth would be spread a wonderful meal. “And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn’t even hear the man’s screams.” David still stood on the couch, a finger in the air. “Do you know what that means?” He was thinking of Christ’s parable of the wineskins. “You can’t pour new into old,” David said, returning to his chair. “We elect our leaders. Jesus elects his.”
He reached over and squeezed the arm of a brother. “Isn’t that great?” David said. “That’s the way everything in life happens. If you’re a person known to be around Jesus , you can go and do anything. And that’s who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to know the value of Jesus , you’re going to know the people who rule the world. It’s about vision. ‘Get your vision straight, then relate.’ Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world.” Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan’s vast, reclaimable empire.
Maybe it’s fanservice. Maybe it’s skinning the rubes. But it’s getting awfully damned hard to tell who the rubes are, anymore. These Christianist red-state jes’-plain-folks rubes own electronic voting machine companies, after all, and spent eight years hounding a president, almost running him out of office. And if those voting machines don’t assure their candidate’s victory come November, they’ll gear up for another bruising snipe hunt—no matter at all what we the people might want. (And even if we do win, and survive, we’re all still stuck half-in, half-out of that vast empire of theirs, whose capital has just been named: Camp Redemption, ladies and gentlemen. Dop, dop, dop.)
Is the Bush administration then the triumph of William Jennings Bryan? —Not to speak too well of the Great Commoner, but he at least had some convictions to lend him courage. For all its rank rabble-rousery, his populism was ultimately rooted in the idea of trying to do some good for the people, and some little good was done. Bryan used fervent religion and crackpot economics to build a powerful coalition of people who’d had little to no power before. He was trying an end-run around the vested interests to do what he thought had to be done.
Bush is speaking to the vested interests.
That’s what’s making all the difference.
Roz Kaveney knew Christopher Hitchens. And you, sir—
Oh, my. Here’s Andrew Sullivan quoting Christopher Hitchens, holding forth in Scarborough Country last night on the subject of Michael Moore:
But speaking here in my capacity as a polished, sophisticated European as well, it seems to me the laugh here is on the polished, sophisticated Europeans. They think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they’ve taken as their own, as their representative American, someone who actually embodies all of those qualities.
And here’s what Roz has to say about that:
This is, after all, a charming effete fop with an interest in alcohol who has become the house ex-lefty of a lot of American right-wingers who think that all European intellectuals are self-hating, effete wits.
Chin-chin.
Brownsark.
From the latest op-ed by Tony Blankley, editorial page editor for that “newspaper,” the Washington Times:
We have the strength—military, economic, cultural, diplomatic, (dare I include the strength of our religious faith, also?)—to persist around the world unto victory—for generations if necessary.
But all this potential capacity for victory can only be brought into full being by a sustained act of collective will. It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president’s political and media opposition want the president’s defeat more than America’s victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently—although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)
Why on earth would this be the case, Mr. Blankley? Will the next terrorist attack be a rewriting of the constitution?
(More here and here. Turn on the lights and scatter the cockroaches. —My God, you can almost hear the bated breath, you can almost smell the expectant sweat. One more terrorist attack will show you. The gloves will finally be off! We can at last do what must be done! Gloriosky, God in heaven, bring it on!)
Rules of order.
One thing I’ll never understand—the reason why some people think this sort of thing:
Midshipmen and cadets are expected to conduct themselves as gentlemen at all times—on or off the dance floor. Displays of affection on the dance floor are not tolerated, and Hop Committee members will ask those who violate courtesies to leave the hop. Members of the Hop Committee at the Coast Guard and Naval Academies are distinguished by their gold aiguillettes; at the Air Force Academy by silver aiguillettes; at West Point by red sashes. They have the authority to enforce regulations.
You will never leave your drag sitting alone, or embarrass her with boisterous conduct. Never leave her in mid-floor. If an occasion arises when you must leave, you should leave her with a group before excusing yourself. If you are not adept at certain steps, such as in the more intricate dances, you may suggest “waiting this one out.”
However, since it is the gentleman who invites the lady to dance, it is up to her to suggest that you stop. She might say, “Shall we rest a moment?” or “Please, let’s have some punch.” Otherwise, you should dance indefinitely (perhaps this is the origin of the term “dragging!”).
—or this:
At no time does any individual leave more than three cards. (For example, a husband and a wife may leave a total of six cards at one call.) You will remember that a man calls on adults, man or woman, but that a civilian woman only calls on another woman.
A military woman calls as an officer and therefore calls on the officials for whom a call is regularly required.
The following rules apply to the individual cards a husband and wife leave:
- When calling on a senior officer and his wife—2 officer cards and 1 “Mrs.” card.
- When calling on a senior officer and his wife, and his mother—3 officer cards and 2 “Mrs.” cards.
- When calling on a senior officer, his wife, his mother, and his father—3 officer cards and 2 “Mrs.” cards.
- When calling on a senior officer, his wife, his mother, his mother-in-law, and adult daughter—3 officer cards and 3 “Mrs.” cards.
When a husband and wife use “joint” calling cards (Lieutenant and Mrs. John Smith Jones), these rules apply:
- When calling on a senior officer and his wife, leave—1 officer card and 1 joint card.
- Cards in addition to joint cards are left in accordance with the general rules given for individual cards.
—or even this:
No one likes to apologize, but apologies are in order when:
- You are late at a luncheon or dinner party—or any social occasion such as a reception where the receiving line has already broken up. Then you go directly to the hostess and briefly apologize.
- The host and hostess have waited for your arrival at a luncheon or dinner party, but have not gone into the dining room. Then you apologize and tell them why you are late—and the reason must be excellent!
- You fail to keep an appointment. You should telephone or write a brief note, explaining your failure to keep the appointment—and again, the reason must be a good one.
- You cannot grant a request. In this case you must not only give your regrets, but if possible add some explanation, such as, “I’m sorry, but due to the great sentimental value attached to the object, I can’t lend it for the exhibition, etc., etc.”
- You break or damage something. You must attempt to replace the article exactly, but if you cannot, then send flowers with your calling card. You should, of course, state on the card that you are sorry concerning the mishap.
—is a necessary precondition for this:
- You have caused harm, or have hurt someone needlessly, or through carelessness. In this case you must do more than apologize—you must ask the other person’s forgiveness.
—or sufficient to ensure this:
You must always remember that the word—or signature—of a lady or gentleman is his or her bond. Therefore, think twice before you make promises. Signed to a check your signature means that you stand good for the amount indicated. Signed to the endorsement at the end of an examination it means that you subscribe to the work submitted and that it is your work. Signed to a letter it means that the ideas expressed are your own.
It is of the utmost importance that men and women in the services be honest and direct in all their dealings. Juniors can avoid a great deal of embarrassment by giving a complete but to-the-point answer in replies to questions put by their seniors.
If you are the junior and do not know or cannot give a complete or correct answer, then you should answer only as much of the question as you can without evasion or giving misinformation. An honest “I don’t know, Sir, but I will find out and let you know,” is a better answer than an indirect one that gives misinformation on which your senior may be basing an important decision. An evasive answer might seriously affect your service reputation.
Form and content; style and substance; breeding and manners; nature and nurture. —Etiquette courtesy Captain Brooks J. Harral, USN, and Oretha D. Swartz, Service Etiquette.
A few basic precautions.
Professor DeLong’s father is rattled by seeing his house on the cover of Reason magazine:
The latest issue of Reason magazine arrived in the mail, and the cover causes a jolt. It is an aerial photo of my neighborhood, with my house circled and the legend underneath: “James DeLong: They Know Where You Are!”
DeLong père ends up as sanguine about the database nation as Declan McCullagh, who wrote the article on the upside of data mining that the stunt cover publicizes. But DeLong fils isn’t so sure:
I don’t have settled (or especially informed) views on this, Dad. But I wonder if your first reaction might not have been more accurate. It takes 20 seconds to find and circle a house with a telephone book, a map, and a crayon—at $10 an hour total cost for low-wage labor, that’s six cents an address. Very few people will have an incentive to organize and analyze their data on you at that cost. Those whom you want to send you magazines every month will, but how many others. I think we do have to worry about how governments—future Stasis—will use computers. And there are additional (but far lesser) potential vulnerabilities: weaknesses of the will at the personal or household level that might be exploited. [...]
Sometimes what look like quantitative changes—the falling cost of information processing—make qualitative differences. This may or may not be one of them. But it may be time to start thinking about how one would live in a world in which every conversation (even informal ones with close family members) may be broadcast around the world.
All of which is really just an excuse to cut ’n’ past the lyrics to a delightful song by Momus, written in the headier, happier days of 1997, on this very topic. Ladies and gentlemen, from the exquisite Ping Pong: “The Age of Information.”
This is a public service announcement.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering
The age of information
It’s perfectly safe
If we all take a few basic precautions
May I make some observations?
Axiom 1 for the world we’ve begun:
Your reputation used to depend on
What you concealed
Now it depends on what you reveal
The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact
Is dead: we are all players now in the great game of fact instead
So since you can’t keep your cards to your chest
I’d suggest you think a few moves ahead
As one does when playing a game of chess
Axiom 2 to make the world new:
Paranoia’s simply a word for seeing things as they are
Act as you wish to be seen to act
Or leave for some other star
Somebody is prying through your files, probably
Somebody’s hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies
But relax:
If you’re an interesting person
Morally good in your acts
You have nothing to fear from facts
Axiom 3 for transparency:
In the age of information the only way to hide facts
Is with interpretations
There is no way to stop the free exchange
Of idle speculations
In the days before communication
Privacy meant staying at home
Sitting in the dark with the curtains shut
Unsure whether to answer the phone
But these are different times, now the bottom line
Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Most of your friends will still like you fine
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an email and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming World War III
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Axiom 4 for this world I adore:
Our loyalties should shift in view according to what we know
And who we are speaking to
Once I was loyal to you, and prepared to be against information
Now I am loyal to information, maybe I’m disloyal to you
My loyalty becomes more complex and cubist
With every new fact I learn
It depends who I’m speaking to
And who they speak to in turn
Axiom 5 for information workers who wish to stay alive:
Supply, never withhold, the information requested
With total disregard for interests personal and vested
Chinese whispers was an analogue game
Where the signal degraded from brain to brain
Digital whispers is the same in reverse
The word we spread gets better, not worse
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an email and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming World War III
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Crying in the Wind, by Harold Applebaum.
The soldiers pass, the leaders pass, and war
Becomes a string of dates and foreign names
To feed the young for twenty years. Once more
The tide recedes and man resumes his games
Of blindman’s bluff, the savage make-believe
Of progress, peaceful tongue in cheek. Once more
The rich will prosper and the poor conceive
As each contributes to the common war.
The wise will clamor, as they always do
With warning, reason, truth and sense, but vain
As crying in the wind. A precious few
Will reach the mountains by the time the rain
Begins, and launch their frantic arks to find
That floods are endless and the doves are blind.
Spinooti found it, tucked inside an old Bible.
Mollified, and yet.
Just because I feel some sort of obligation or something: one more Movable Type 3.0 post. —They’ve spoken, after all, and addressed a few of the concerns raised (rather vociferously) over the past couple of days:
- They’ve stripped the “one CPU” limit from the license.
- They count an author (the total number of which is now limited) as anyone who’s logged in within the past 90 days.
- They count a weblog (the total number of which is now limited) as a site visible at a single main URL; therefore, sideblogs set up as “separate” blogs with the software don’t count toward this total.
- They now offer Personal Edition add-ons, which will allow group blogs to purchase a somewhat cheaper personal license and add additional authors at $9.95 a pop.
This mollifies me not a little. I can still run it for free, since I now have “two” blogs, and not “five,” and it’s not inconceivable that I’d scrape together the 70 bucks necessary to upgrade to fully fledged. And the group blogs don’t have to buy the commercial license and trim their mastheads to upgrade the software they’ve been using; even sociology professors and natural philosophers should be able to pony up $12 or $13 a head to blog, right? (Though there’s a quirk in the special pricing: it’s cheaper to buy the middle license for 10 authors and 10 blogs and add on from there, than it is to buy the third license at 13 and 13. That quirk will no longer obtain in the regular pricing.)
But: the personal license at its regular price of 100 bucks is still 30 bucks more than 70, and I’m not necessarily going to upgrade right away. And you still have to be registered with TypeKey to download a free version. And—well, it’s weird. Jay Allen’s point is worth considering: this is called, after all, a “Developer’s Release”; it’s primarily intended for developers to get in early and start hacking together their third-party plug-ins, updating and upgrading to work with 3.0. A general release (it’s then theorized) of 3.0 is still to come. A fine point, but there’s some stuff left out of the equation: I, after all, am not a developer. I’ve already downloaded MT 2.661, so I can ride it out until this (as yet unacknowledged, mind) general release. But if I were just coming into this blogging game, and had heard MT was teh hella best, and went to get the program, I could download the Developer’s Release, or I could—
What?
TypePad, probably. —Not to climb to far out on a limb, but in the absence of clear communications, theory will fester: I think they’re trying to haul their income from one stream bed into another, roomier one with raw muscle power. Little blogs like mine ought to end up on TypePad; power users and “enterprise” folks can beef up the bottom line; de facto resellers like the fine folks over at White Rose can pay up or fall by the wayside. And this is SixApart’s prerogative. (Given the “oh you whining free-software hippies, it’s only 60 bucks for a cab ride, why don’t you just suck it up, you ungrateful internet freeloaders” rhetoric that’s spewing from some quarters, one feels it’s de rigueur to include a standard disclaimer with every post on the subject: “In our wondrous capitalist economy, a software company may charge whatever it bloody well feels like for its proprietary product,” or words to that effect. Also: Saddam is evil; the killing of Nick Berg was deplorable; and courage! Bush is a noodle.) But hauling rather than weaning an income stream from here to there is by its nature disruptive, and Jesus, I’m about to descend into punditry.
Fuck it. I don’t want TypePad; I like Movable Type; I’m not happy about paying $100 for it; there are alternatives out there; I’m going to start shopping around (WordPress and Textpattern, yes, and thanks for the recommendations). And that’s it; I’m spent.
MT 3.0.
Oh, hey, guess I’m sticking with MovableType 2.661 for a bit. —It’s not that I begrudge them their lucre and it’s not that I think software must (necessarily) be free or something like that; it’s just that I’m a cheap bastard. I mean, Jesus H. Christ in a jumped-up sidecar, the price breaks: $69.95 is steep enough, but that’s the introductory price. It jumps to $99.95 at some point after that. —It is still available for free, yes, but you’re limited to three blogs off one installation, and it only looks like I have two blogs running in MT: I actually have five, since three feed sideblogs to the other two.
I think maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and climb under the Textpattern hood to see what’s what.
And you know, the price breaks make even less sense when you consider the ever-growing popularity—and visibility—of group blogs.
Just to expand on the above point: two of the most popular and visible standard-bearers in the ever-growing trend toward group blogs are Crooked Timber and the Panda’s Thumb. Both of them run on MT. Both of them now face the following choice:
- stick with MT 2.661 until the cows come home,
- port their blogging and archives over to a different system, or
- pay $600 now, or $700 later, for software they’ve been using for free, or supporting with donations—
- and even then, the Panda’s Thumb would have to cut loose five authors to fit the top-end restriction. (Should they really be forced to get that Darwinian?)
Yes, SixApart is trying to account for the big companies that are using MT for things quite other than blogging, and that’s fine, go team! But the way they’ve gone about it—distinguishing personal from commercial uses primarily by the number of authors and blogs involved—leaves a big fat slice of their enthusiastic amateur base in the dust. Their prerogative; then, you can toss the baby with the bathwater whenever you want, so long as no literal baby is involved. There’s not a great alternative blogging tool (that I know of) which allows multiple blogs and multiple authors with such ease. Yet. —There will be, soon enough.
Oh, hey, more! Shelley over at Burningbird compiles a list of reasons why, even if I did only have three blogs, I couldn’t use the free MT 3.0: as it currently stands, you have to be registered with TypeKey to download it (which isn’t a prospect that thrills me), and you’re only allowed one installation on one CPU—and I have no idea how that fits with my hosting company. More phone calls and emails with technical support would be called for, with the possibility that I’d have to move everything elsewhere anyway (after further calls with their technical support, etc. etc.). Why hassle? My path is clear: 2.661 > some other solution. What fun!
One last update, and then I’m putting this topic to bed: Dean Peters has some very thoughtful things to say on why, exactly, there’s been such an uproar, and sketches an alternate pricing plan that would have made nary a ripple with me, at least (and not just because it’s cheaper, peanut gallery).
What part of “no” do they not understand?
NORTH: Alan—Alan, for 13 or 14 days now, all we have seen on the front pages of America’s newspapers is a group of obviously twisted young people with leashes and weird sex acts, the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays, being perpetrated by people in uniform.
