The Death of David Kelly

10:50:22 PM    

Domain Registry Claims Blackmail Threat. Generally speaking, if you're caught red handed in a spam scam, it's best not to threaten those who cut you off with another spam attack. However, no one ever said that spam scammers were very intelligent. A guy who was running a scam to trick people into paying him to renew their .biz domains was taken offline by NeuLevel, the registrar he had used (and whose customers he was spamming). When the guy discovered this he called them up and threatened to continually spam all of NeuLevel's customers, telling them their domains were about to be deleted. Apparently thinking a spoken threat wasn't enough to get him in trouble, he emailed the same threat - telling them if they didn't put his website back online in 20 minutes, he would begin his spam campaign which he said would flood NeuLevel with angry phone calls. NeuLevel, of course, took the info and promptly alerted other registrars, their own customers, the US Federal Trade Commission and the UK police. [Techdirt]

There should be a Darwin Award for this. I got a good laugh.  10:46:19 PM    

Consent.

Throughout the Industrial Age, and especially during the Mass Media Era ? the end of which is threatened by the massively self-informing nature of the Net ? politics has been about money. We've had a government of the money, by the money and for the money, most of which has come from industrial interest groups.

This fact was brought home once again in the story of Hearthside Lobbying for Energy, by Virginia Ellis in the LA Times. Pointing to the piece, Dan Gillmor says,

Read this story, especially the boilerplate denials from legislators that their votes had anything to do with the money showered upon them by interested parties. Shame is an abstraction to such people.

Yet we still live in a democracy. Our legislatures and public bureaucracies govern at our consent.

We can reform our democracy by informing each other, and substantiate the informed consent by which our governments govern. That's the top challenge for connected citizens.

Lately I've heard more, for some reason, about the alleged hazards of networked democracy ? of the risks of mob rule, of candidates and legislatures governing by poll rather than principle. Maybe the risks are there, but I think the upside so far exceeds the downside that the latter serves mostly as a red herring.

Democracy isn't just about popularity. It's about consent. In our increasingly networked world, we have more opportunities, every day, to inform our consent, to deepen and substantiate it with facts and informed opinions by principled and involved people and organizations.

Governing is complicated. In the case of an issue like energy policy in a state like California, it's hugely complicated.

We can't uncomplicate it. But we can use the Net to inform our consent around approaches to it.

Seems to me there's a lot to talk about here, and it's not just about whose name is at the top of a ticket.

Bonus link #1: Mitch Ratcliffe's Political advertising ? from the IRS.

Bonus link #2: Britt Blaser's The Greatest Thing. Imaginable.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

We saw Legally Blonde 2 today. While it is not nearly as sweet as the first one and suffered from some lackluster writing, it had a message similar to Doc. The government works for us and when we allow them to do play with corruption, when we allow money to be the important aspect of how government works, then we are part of the problem. Politicians need to be reminded of who really holds the power. If we are unable to to pull them away from the lure of the big monied interests, than our republican formof government will be a simple hollow shell.  10:36:32 PM    

Hydra adds live HTML rendering to writing tool. Hydra 1.1.1 offers in-line HTML rendering thanks to integration of the Safari WebKit into the collaborative writing and editing program. The update to the free program also offers better stability. [Mac Net Journal]

Hydra is one of the coolest bits of software to use Rendesvous. This is really good news. I'll be downloading it shortly.  8:13:59 PM    

Sparkpod - a Mac-based weblog service. Sparkpod is a new weblog service catering to Mac users. It offers pre-designed templates, RSS generation (not sure which version of RSS) and a 60-day trial offer. The service costs $24.99 per year. [Mac Net Journal]

A new weblogging service is always nice but I don;t see how it caters to Mac users.  8:09:39 PM    

Salon: Congress to bikers - get a car. OK, the bone-headed political decisions coming out of the U.S. government are taking another giant leap backward. Salon offers a story today about Congress completely cutting funding for bike paths and all other pollution-free transportation programs [Mac Net Journal]

I guess if they used gasoline-powered bikes, they could keep the funding.  7:59:15 PM    

Mark Kleiman Sees Another Hopeful Sign:.

Mark Kleiman sees some very hopeful signs in the reaction to the White House's attempt to smear reporter Jeffrey Kofman:

Mark A. R. Kleiman: CULTURAL LAG A story is told, whether canonical or not I don't know, about Georges Clemenceau. Apparently a veteran Clemenceau met at a memorial service after the war was over shouted at him:

"C'etait les juifs!" ["It was the Jews!"]

Instead of arguing, Clemenceau replied,
"Oui. Les juifs, et les bicyclistes."

Puzzled, the man asked,"Pourquoi les bicyclistes?"

Clemenceau shrugged and said, "Et pourquoi les juifs?"

I was reminded of that by a detail of the Jeffrey Kofman affair, brought to my attention by Austin Cline of "About Atheism."

According to the Lloyd Grove story in the Washington Post, one of the commanders of the 3rd Infantry apparently said to the reporter, whom the White House tried to "out" as a gay Canadian, "Are you really ... Canadian?" And Matt Drudge did roughly the same thing, headlining his link "ABCNEWS Reporter Who Filed Troop Complaints Story is Canadian."

It seems to me -- though I may be overinterpreting -- that both the soldier and Drudge were making the same gentle joke: rejecting the White House's attempt to denigrate Kofman in terms of his sexual orientation by focusing their reaction on his nationality instead.

Whoever in the WH press office tried this stunt seems to have run into a little bit of cultural lag. He (or she) struck with a weapon that used to be sharp but has, rather suddenly, become dull.

Thirty years ago, and to some extent even ten years ago, homosexuality was what Erving Goffman called a stigma: a "spoiled identity," something that people were ashamed of and wanted to conceal. In some quarters, it still is.

But in elite circles, even right-wing or military elite circles, being homosexual mostly isn't considered shameful any more. Even though some heterosexuals are still uncomfortable with it and some homosexuals are still ashamed of it, that discomfort and shame are not respectable, and therefore are not to be spoken. (It's about where being Jewish was in, say, 1960.)

Really, that's such a profoundly cheerful thought I almost want to laugh out loud.

Of course, one could equally well draw negative conclusions from this: it tells us something that we all know but that is nevertheless very unpleasant about the kind of people who work in this White House.

[Semi-Daily Journal]

One of the ways we know how much the world has changed!  7:44:51 PM    

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Part CCCXXIV.

In "The Deficit Is Big, but Is It Bad?" Alex Berenson of the New York Times fails to make the distinction between big short-run deficits (good when the economy is depressed and unemployment is high) and big long-run deficits (simply bad, slowing capital formation, slowing economic growth, and raising the risk of economic crisis). As a result, his article turns into hopelessly-confused "he said, he said" mess.

It's not a hard distinction to grasp, or a hard distinction to remember.

Is it asking too much to expect the New York Times to find reporters to cover the economy who are capable of thinking analytically to the extent of making such distinctions?

[Semi-Daily Journal]

This often happens when you see any sort of punditry about something you really know a lot about. Pundits and columnists do not have to fact check. They just have to provoke. They are allowed to change sides. Consistancy is not something that is part of their job description. It always ticked my father off when they talked about the oil industry and were wrong. I hate it when they talk about science and are wrong. So I am not surprised that Bard hates it when that yalk about economics and are wrong.  7:41:17 PM    

Trade Winds.

The community that was fostered at AO2003 is now providing more pensive analysis.  This is a great time to reflect on how social software is changing the events business and the "trades" in general. ... [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Please read the very nice synopsis of the AO2003 meeting and the continuing effects of wireless technologies and social software on the evolution of meetings/conferences. Then read David Weinberger's article on the Death of Panels. The purposes of mass meetings and conferences is going to change and change quite fast. In five years you will not recognize them. The needs of the attendees, combined with new technologies, will alter them forever. I am looking forward to the first annual meeting that has wireless access with a chat room. That should be interesting.  12:07:59 AM