Some really good writing

Stunning (in both senses of the word, respectively) pair of essays, first Kim du Toit on The, uh, feminization, Of The Western Male (which I could swear I saw reported approvingly by right-wing blogging superstar Glenn Reynolds a day or so ago although now it doesn't look that way...could be my memory though), with rejoinder (via crooked timber) by Winston Smith, the Philosoraptor (all-time best blogname). Great writing - true, WS engages in a little more of the (more-typically-rightwing-blogger) shrillness than I'd like but hey i'm a wimp. And the substance is GREAT.

and via PressThink, an also stunning article in Columbia Journalism Review by Matthew Miller, on faults and potential of the press to play an active and constructive role in a democracy. Go read the whole thing, it is a treasure. i know i shouldn't quote this much, but it is sooo good! besides for all i know the CJR sticks stuff behind a firewall after a while, or moves everything to make linkrot, or otherwise allows me to rationalize this misbehavior....sorry. (Tell you what, go buy the book)

The media end up in cahoots with politicians in creating this illusion of meaningful action, both because 1) media norms don't allow reporters to say "this is a charade" even when they know it is (reporters are supposed to be "objective"), or 2) because it cuts too close to the bone for reporters to admit they are often tacit conspirators in such hoaxes.
...
"News" is largely defined as what public officials say and do. The poles of debate on major issues are thus set by the mainstream Republican position (today the Bush administration) and the mainstream Democratic position. The national press faithfully reflects these two poles, and the fifty-yard line in American politics is between them.
...[this] brings a clear downside: in times when neither party is serious about addressing major problems,...assures that public debate remains impoverished.
...
if candidates do put forward ambitious ideas, the top news outlets generally aren't equipped or inclined to assess them.
...
So it's Bush says "X," Gore says "Y." You decide. But people don't have any capacity to decide . . . . They [the media] either said "they're both full of it" or they say "we're not going to decide who's full of it," but they never come down hard one way or the other when one guy's numbers are based on sand and the other guy's may be fudged a little bit but make more sense.
...
...what's new isn't the same as what's important. We obviously need our top news outlets to give us the latest. But it would transform public life if they could also keep us focused on the big things that matter.
Wasn't there some way that the most important daily bulletin boards in our public life could institutionalize regular attention for things that are important - even though there isn't "news" on them? ...[and thus] perform a public service by mitigating the gap left when officials prefer not to address important issues?
...
Meanwhile, at The Sacramento Bee, editors are considering a Still True-like feature for the editorial page.
...
Despite its political ring, a feature like Still True does not represent a call for a return to the partisan newspaper wars of the early nineteenth century, when each political party had outlets that purely parroted its party line. Indeed, the idea is inspired by the fact that neither party is addressing these issues seriously, so the task of at least raising their dimensions has to fall to someone independent, with the power to bring them up.

Last but not least, Theresa Nielsen Hayden on today's NRA Woman..."If I were the editor responsible, I’d want to avoid walking along backlit ridgelines for a while...."

warmed-over haggis, or burning issues, or burned haggis, or something

it's late.

wapo via msnbc on sprawl vs nature, and fire:

"The weapons of mass destruction have been found," a San Diego resident wrote in the letters page of Thursday's Los Angeles Times. "They are poor land-use planning, budget cuts, arsonists and one foolish hunter."

via DeLong, Matthew Yglesias Can't See The Forest For The Timber Company Profits:

I should state at the outset of my discussion that I do not give a damn about America's national forests and that if George W. Bush wants to let the timber companies cut them all down, I wouldn't be particularly upset...

LA Times, Little of Tax Hike Goes to Fight Fires:

Ten years ago, voters statewide passed a half-cent sales tax increase to provide money for county and city public safety programs. Proponents credited the measure's success, in part, to wildfires that burned hundreds of homes in Southern California the week before election day.
...when Proposition 172 was passed, a lot of people who voted for it assumed that some of the money would be going to the Fire Department and that hasn't happened."
Ten of the 28 counties that responded to informal surveys by the California State Assn. of Counties in 2001 and 2003 reported using Proposition 172 money for fire protection...Most of those reported using just a small amount for fire, such as .8% in Placer County and 5.63% in Santa Cruz.

New York Times, In California's Inferno, an Oasis of Planning Stands Out:

"With more people being born than dying, we add 400,000 to 700,000 people a year, even if no one ever moves again into California," said Timothy P. Duane, an associate professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written about wildfires. "That is a Fresno to a San Francisco every year. That is a lot of people that need to go somewhere."

fyi, not that you are likely to care but i added some more links to religion, the economy, and the press below.

on blogging and the web

web helps californians during wildfires:

It gave the village a set of drums to get the message out," said Gary Stebbings, a construction manager who monitored the Web site regularly after evacuating his home in the alpine town of Lake Arrowhead.
The phenomenon was "the ultimate democratization of the media," said Howard Rheingold, a futurist and author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution." "The AP has only so many reporters and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access."

from Christopher Lydon,
Stirling Newberry (www.theclarksphere.com) -

"St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere... " In his own voice he continued: "That's the image you should have of what's happening on the Internet. Anyone on any given day can be the center if he has the best observation that resonates. There is no boundary of the circle... You get to sing a song and listen to the echo. You get to hear... how other people have taken what you've done and turned it into their center."

Doc Searls on The Media:

Yes, there's lots of stuff in all those media you'll like or use....But you have to wait for it if it's on a broadcast outlet or root for it in a publication. More importantly, you're not in charge. They are. And to Them, you're still just a consumer. A gullet for gobbling "content" and crapping cash. (Thank you for that perfect metaphor, Jerry Michalski.) Yes, Even if They are NPR and the New York Times. They are The Media. Information is a form of "content" that moves from Them to you, on an almost entirely one-way basis.

The Web is ours, not theirs.

Doc again - "blogging is one more way that the demand side is supplying itself"

Nate, from discussion on dan gillmor's site on govt attempts to erase history:

The key difference between "1984" and any attempts to emulate the rewriting of history today is the Web. Time after time politicians are caught by their saved words. The mainstream media may let them get away with pretending they "never said that," but the Web remembers...

More electronic skew-the-voting machine pieces

BTW, blackboxvoting.org is your one-stop shop for news and other info.

From Nov. 3 Newsweek, Black Box Voting Blues:

Electronic ballot technology makes things easy. But some computer-security experts warn of the possibility of stolen elections

From Wired Nov. 6, Suspect Code Used in State Votes:

An investigation by California's secretary of state has revealed that Diebold Election Systems placed uncertified software on electronic voting machines in a California county.
Voters in Alameda County...

Nov 3 Christian Science Monitor:

Electronic ballots, hailed as the antidote to hanging chads, will make a mark on Election Day. But critics warn of risks to democracy.

visit Tomorrowland - cast your vote at the Fraud-o-matic today...

from internetnews.com, EFF Case Vs Diebold Stalls, re Diebold's attempt to use copyright law to block the publication of information about flaws in their software:

The political element surrounding the case might have ramifications that will be felt in elections for years to come. If the San Francisco judge ruling on the restraining order today finds against the ISP Online Policy Group, the ISP and many others will be forced to stifle any mention of the machine's flaws.
With no incentive to fix the machines vulnerabilities, Diebold might not, giving every election day loser a way to contest the validity of the votes. It'll be a revisitation of the "hanging chad" fiasco during the Bush-Gore elections.

and, most powerfully, Britt Blaser with Secreted Ballots and a War Story - "Far more than you want to read about e-voting and maybe not quite enough about burning airplanes..." -

On 25 June 1968, about 3 miles from Cambodia, our C-130 was struck by .50 cal. machine gun fire that blossomed into a real headache...
...
To me though, [the e-voting story] feels like molten aluminum dripping off the left wing. There is no larger story.

Read it.

"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes."
-attributed to Josef Stalin

The will of God

Anne Lamott - "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do."

from yet another damn blog:

A couple of years ago, my parents decided it was time for them to leave their church. In the middle of it all, my dad said something that really struck me, "Last week, at Calvary, the minister was talking about morality, and doing the right thing, and everything he was saying was about what 'they' should do. It was all about other people. This week, at First Lutheran, it was the same topic, but it was all about what 'we' should do. I like that a lot better."

How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans

He doesn't seem to appreciate blasphemy.

Scott Rosenberg on Bush and God, church and state

...We worry when national leaders assume a mantle of divine destiny. The worry is based on history, not faith.
...I'll continue to put my moral antennae on alert any time a leader starts using his or her own religious faith as a touchstone of civic virtue. It's not always and inevitably a bad thing -- the obvious and legitimate counterargument is the Rev. Martin Luther King. But it's usually a sign to watch out.

Regarding our divinely appointed leader, Robert Brady weighs in:

It occurs to me that God must have a pretty damned high IQ, and a pretty broad spectrum of people to choose from, were she to have a hand in selecting the leader of America. The thought that she might select George W...

...you read it.

Apropos, via a BDL discussion,

a Bush admn. official said after the failed coup against Chavez in Venezuela, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters".

(ref. here?)

Where's the original content?

elsewhere, obviously. This is for your own good. There are some whose expository prose flows like a river, or swoops and soars like the swallows above. The prose of others can more accurately be likened to the fish out of water, flopping at irregular intervals on the sandbank. If it is an altruistic fish, it doesn't pollute the web (talk about mixed metaphors...) with redundant, "I can say it too only more awkwardly" verbiage.

economy, and lack thereof

BDL:

Red tape grows like kudzu, and needs to be aggressively pruned back every year.

Deesha:

Individually people all over the world have approximately the same natural endowments. What makes a difference is the nurture provided by the environment. And that environment is exogenous to an individual but endogenous to the entire collection of individuals which is called the society or the economy.
...India could have leap-frogged the manufacturing stage and gone straight from the agricultural stage to the information/service stage. The snag was that we neglected universal primary education and therefore hobbled ourselves....

via bonobo land, India economy watch:

The Chinese leadership seems to have its act together. The Chinese lucked out. It is India's karma that it got saddled with a bunch of self-serving narrow-minded weak-kneed myopic corrupt criminals as its leaders...

NY Times on call centers in India:

...coveted here. While the salaries are hardly lucrative by technology industry standards - anywhere from $1,600 to $2,100 a year - they beat those for most clerical positions.

"In the U.S., these jobs are taken by housewives or kids who haven't decided what they want to do with their lives," said K. Ghanesh, 39, the founder of Customer Asset. "Here, they are career jobs for college graduates."

...like government and sausages:

It is an iron law of international economics that the Exploitation Police will swoop down and denounce anyone who creates new jobs, particularly in relatively poor areas. The common complaint is that call-centre companies set up shop in places (New Brunswick is a good example) where they can find well-educated workers at relatively low wages. The Exploitation Police make this sound almost criminal. In fact, it's the way capitalism has always expanded and the way that poor regions have traditionally turned themselves into less poor regions.

On the growing U.S. trade deficit, The Mercantilist's Tale by Warren Buffett:

....take a wildly fanciful trip with me to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville...
...
[Eventually] the Squanders are forced to deal with an ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight hours a day in order to eat -- they have nothing left to trade -- but must also work additional hours to service their debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently sold. In effect, Squanderville has been colonized by purchase rather than conquest.

The Debt Tax, published in Boston Globe (if not there, try here (scroll down)):

In recent years, much has been made over the repeal of the estate tax -- or "death tax." Much less attention has been paid to a far more pernicious tax -- the "debt tax" -- which is bigger than the estate tax, capital gains tax, and so-called "marriage tax" combined.
...
As a result these factors -- rising interest rates, growing spending, and massive tax cuts -- the debt tax burden will continue to mushroom. The administration's own projections show the debt growing by half through 2008. This means that in five years, the average family could be paying between $4,500 and $6,000 or more each year in debt tax alone.

words of wisdom from Bonobo Land, here -

if the dollar falls substantially, and the internal US labour market practices the structural reforms it advises for the rest of the world, I don't doubt jobs can be produced in large quantities. The question is: where on the value chain will these jobs be situated?

And he links to this great British article on the karmic aspect of the jobs flight to India ("The jobs Britain stole from the Asian subcontinent 200 years ago are now being returned..."):

If you live in a rich nation in the English-speaking world, and most of your work involves a computer or a telephone, don't expect to have a job in five years' time. Almost every large company which relies upon remote transactions is starting to dump its workers and hire a cheaper labour force overseas. All those concerned about economic justice and the distribution of wealth at home should despair. All those concerned about global justice and the distribution of wealth around the world should rejoice. As we are, by and large, the same people, we have a problem.
...For centuries, we have permitted ourselves to ignore the extent to which our welfare is dependent on the denial of other people's. We begin to understand the implications of the system we have created only when it turns against ourselves.

Julian Sanchez:

At a time when nationalist "us versus them" thinking is back in vogue, the temptation is strong to find someone - ideally brown people with funny accents - to carry the blame for our economic woes.

Paul Krugman, Waiting For Our Wile E. Coyote Moment -

...The timing of such crises [currency crises like those that struck Southeast Asia in 1997 and Argentina in 2001] is hard to predict. But there are warning signs, like big trade and budget deficits and rising debt burdens.
And there's one thing I can't help noticing: A Third World country with the United States' recent numbers -- its huge budget and trade deficits, its growing reliance on short-term borrowing from the rest of the world -- would definitely be on the watch list...

and more Diebold potential electronic vote rigging news

Nov. 3, Calif. Halts E-Vote Certification:

The reason, Carrel said, was that his office had recently received "disconcerting information" that Diebold may have installed uncertified software on its touch-screen machines used in one county...

good article on the Diebold threat, from last month, giving examples - All the President's Votes? -

With academic studies showing the ... touchscreens to be poorly programmed, full of security holes and prone to tampering, and with thousands of similar machines from different companies being introduced at high speed across the country, computer voting may, in fact, be US democracy's own 21st-century nightmare...

more press links

From Dave Winer: "...funding from the MacArthur Foundation to study alternative compensation schemes for media on the Internet..." (oops. wrong kind of media. always follow link before posting.)

via pressthink, Blogging at the Spokesman-Review - a different way to put out the news

Atrios on blogging and journalism:

Journalists have a bias against "old news" - that is, if it was ever published somewhere, anywhere, it isn't "news." This makes the only "new" news either breaking news events, press releases, or new quotes from important people. That's a rather limited view of what journalism is.

Greg Palast:

In America, a 'conspiracy nut' is defined as a journalist who reports the news two years before the New York Times.

Julia, in Brad DeLong comments:

I heard Johnathon Alter [sp?] on WNYC the other night telling tales out of school about all the things the administration has done wrong since the war, and the inside battles that they're having - none of which was material I've seen in Newsweek.
I find it a little creepy when people with actual influence over the public discourse make a point of letting us know that they're really far too savvy and sophisticated to believe what they're telling us.

On the fawning Hitler Homes and Gardens article:

...any attempt by a magazine to "use copyright law to suppress embarrassing information is appalling." Leff said she is using the Homes & Gardens article to teach students that sometimes journalists can gather information that is "completely accurate, but because of the subject material -- in this case, portraying Hitler as a gardener and a gourmet in 1938 -- it's not really the appropriate tone to take."

press quotes

Links I've been collecting for some time - i.e. a few of them might be stale already in which case I apologize.

OLD. found at Poynter a couple years back, no permalink -

... no matter how many "neighbors" sections big city papers fill with feel-good news and school lunch menus, it is the enterprising little weeklies -- the ones that care enough about their small communities to get their hands dirty and report the hell out of stories -- that often make the difference.

From Doc Searls, touring the offices of his local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press:

Our tour guide, the photo editor of the paper, talked about how hard it is to get new subscribers when so many readers were getting their news elsewhere, or just seemed to give too small a shit. Yet he remained no less motivated, for the simple reason that daily papers remain highly civilizing forces for the regions they serve, and he felt privileged to be part of one.

from metafilter, the difference a small paper can make:

It was a huge scoop. Yet the newspaper that uncovered the atrocity was not the venerable New York Times or the Washington Post, still resting on its Watergate laurels. Nor was it the New Yorker, famed for its in-depth journalism. It was The Blade, a daily newspaper with a circulation of just 150,000 that serves the Ohio city of Toledo, by Lake Erie.

Excellent article by David Greenberg on Calling a Lie a Lie - The dicey dynamics of exposing untruths:

...it's worth asking why the press sometimes seizes on a lie while at other times passes it by...
...
In discussing which party's policies are preferable,...evenhandedness makes sense. But in reporting which party's claims are true, sometimes there's one right answer. Often, however, that truth isn't apparent to the lay person or the average reporter but only to experts - scientists, doctors, economists, or scholars. Reporters must themselves work through the numbers or diligently mine the experts' research to ferret out the truth - or, more likely, they fall back on presenting both sides' claims equally. Bound by professional strictures, news reporters can wind up giving a lie the same weight as the truth...
Loyalty has come to mean not just voting with your party leader but mouthing the line on TV, to reporters, or in press releases... Thus, when a president lies about policy, so does a chorus of members of Congress, columnists, and commentators - and try calling every Republican or Democrat in Washington a liar...
...it's dismaying that the conventions of news reporting have combined with the mechanisms of Washington media politics to erect such high barriers to freethinking journalism. The current rules end up encouraging media hysteria about personal lies of scant importance and deterring inquiry into topics that matter incalculably more.

Eric Umansky article:

As legendary WP editor Ben Bradlee once noted, "Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face." One sentence he says you'll never see on Page One, "'That is a lie.'"

Chris Mooney on "Mission Accomplished" and the media:

This apparent falsehood about the "Mission Accomplished" sign strikes me as being precisely the kind of thing that the major media will probably pick up on. That's because Bush's statement is a) obviously wrong and b) doesn't matter very much. But when it comes to debunking serious, consequential lies and deceptions -- about stem cell research or the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, for example -- our leading journalists tend to get cold feet.

via isthatlegal, Ed Cone asking Is objective news coverage a worthwhile objective? a while back:

There are greater threats to the quality of news than a rogue reporter or an out-of-touch editor at the New York Times. The increasing concentration of media power in corporate hands...is a big one. The assault on the ideal of objective journalism is another.

Jay Rosen on Fox News:

The Fox News slogan, Fair and Balanced, has always been ironic because it is meant to say: "Ha! We're the conservative alternative and yet more fair, more balanced than ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSBNC, Newsweek, the Washington Post and the holy New York Times, where-in a delusion that's had its day-they claim to have no ideology at all! So we'll claim to have no ideology at all, too. That will drive them nuts."

from followup discussion:

When I first started in Journalism, as a copy kid, I met the old hack who covered my high school football team. I told him, "you know, we always thought you were biased against us." And he said, "you know what, everybody from every other team tells me the same thing, which tells me that I'm doing my job right."

Because I was a kid, I assumed he must've been right. Later, after I got training in journalism and revisited the guy's work, I realized there was an another alternative: maybe he was just doing a bad job of covering all the other teams too.

The [newly] famous "neither fair nor balanced" Fox memo, which is all over the net.

via pressthink, words from Roger Ailes:

I've had a broad life experience that doesn't translate into going to the Columbia journalism school. That makes me a lot better journalist than some guys who had to listen to some pathetic professor who has been on the public dole all his life and really doesn't like this country much and hates the government and hates everybody and is angry because he's not making enough money.

interesting, the anger/hatred thing. Could there be some projection going on here...

Electrolite:

Just before the Iraq war, [well-known British TV news anchor and interviewer] David Dimbleby came to Washington to interview Donald Rumsfeld. They talked for half an hour. As you would expect, the questioning was persistent, forensic. Americans who heard the interview were shocked. The world's most powerful nation does not have the world's most powerful press. Specifically, it has no daily forum for the close questioning of politicians...

american media vs bbc:

Watch BBC World for a couple of hours, then switch on MSNBC. The sensory experience is not dissimilar to leaving a university lecture and then jumping on a roller coaster.

Readers: Why We Don't Alert Media To Mistakes, Reflections on credibility:

The Pew Research Center for The People and the Press reported last year that two-thirds of Americans believe news organizations are unwilling to acknowledge their errors, while just 23 percent say the organizations admit their mistakes. The research center also reported that the number of people who believe news organizations are politically biased stood at 59 percent.

Bill Moyers:

Journalists feel squeezed -- those who simply believe we are here to practice our craft as if society needs what we do and expects us to do it as honorably as possible. There's another study around here somewhere done by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and The Columbia Journalism Review. More than a quarter of journalists polled said they had avoided pursuing some important stories that might conflict with the financial interests of their news organizations or advertisers.

from Talking Points Memo:

...In fact, they have the ironic and in many ways dubious distinction of having seen the story advanced far more on their OpEd page than in their news pages...

more from same Eric Umansky article on responsibilities of the press:

Headline writers-typically copy editors-have an obligation to give readers the most accurate sense possible of an article's conclusions, regardless of how poorly those conclusions reflect on our nation's leaders. They're frequently failing.

Suggestion that journalists take advantage of teachable moments and put the hay out:

When a racial comment becomes news - say, Rush Limbaugh suggesting that the media gave favorable coverage to a black quarterback because of journalism's "social agenda" - the cows are hungry.
That's the time to ask a couple of questions:
· "What would people like to know right now?"
· "What could people learn right now?"
It wouldn't be the only story you'd do, but it would be the one story not likely to look like all the others, filled as they are with outrage and rebuttal, but precious little insight. It would be the sort of story former reporter Ruth Seymour says comes from the "inner sanctum," a story that takes you beyond the public face of a people and listens in while they talk to one another. Groups hold those stories tightly to the vest, says Seymour, now on the journalism faculty at Wayne State University. The journalist's job is to wedge in there and tell them.

Poynter online

It’s not an editor’s job to trust a reporter. It’s an editor’s job to challenge, to probe, to prosecute a story, to be the ally not of his or her colleague but of the reader who deserves a factual account.

electronic voting, political patterns, weblog discovery

A great collection of links and good thoughts from Dave Pollard on voting system integrity - today's news of course being security lapses with Sequoia Technology's voting software - Dan Gillmor:

It continues to astonish me that we're letting our most fundamental duty in a democracy -- voting -- turn into a system that's just begging to be rigged in a way that can't be audited. Why are we so blind?

Much good stuff on Dave Pollard's weblog including his next post, on the dynamics of continued support for deservedly beleaguered presidents:

I remember the way Republicans also supported...Richard Nixon. When Watergate hit, they rallied 'round the beleaguered president and stuck with him until it became clear that he was a liability to their own political careers rather than an asset, and then they deserted him in droves.
...There was hardly a peep from Republicans against Nixon until mid-1973, when popular support for Nixon plunged below 50%. By that time at least two dozen senior members of the Administration had been jailed or fired...

brevity

Busy busy busy does it best.

found via bbb, this written by Kurt Vonnegut:

Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our Constitution.

On Diebold -
If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, we are way behind on the rent and eviction is nigh. Sure wish the media thought this was worth covering. Dan Gillmor has more.

yes.

This is beyond cool - Abigail's dream of 1995 is realized in 2003

a bumper sticker I'd like to see

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when they offer some resistance to the prevailing winds.

It'd probably fit on a Yukon. Right next to "I'm changing the climate, ask me how".