cheese it, the cops!

great blog debate (crispy)

well i'd repeat that mainstream news organizations are creating news in blog form. with remarkable speed it's changing the actual format of news on the web in mainstream outlets. in a way this is a key moment because the blog is a web-based and web-appropriate form, and rather than merely presenting print content on the web.

then also it has driven mainstream news organizations to cover certain stories in certain ways. that's a major effect, and i suspect will be much more pronounced as time goes on. one model might be open-source software. if you've got thousands of people working on something, you can get better results. wikipedia  is also a good model: it has already far surpassed britannica in content because it has thousands of voluntary contributors.

of course it doesn't work quite that well with blogs maybe, cause you're going to have to wade through worlds of potential crap. but also the blogosphere has directionality, etc, movement toward or away from particular treatments of particular topics.

The great weblog debate part II

as crispin mentioned earlier, i'm on a panel dedicated to blogs' impact on news. i write for the austin american-statesman, and in my admittedly biased position I see virtually no impact on news from blogs.

more than anything, it seems blogs have become watchdogs for the media (and corporate america, for that matter). ask dan rather whether he thinks someone was watching over his shoulder. that doesn't change how i do my job, and it really shouldn't change how any other journalist does, either. hell, after jayson blair i'd like to hope reporters are taking their responsibilities a bit more seriously (though i know the writers that don't remain).

to a lesser degree, i see blogs shaping news by shaping consumer demand. the impact of this has been slight at best. people still go to established brands (e.g. NYTimes) and portals that carry established brands (e.g. Yahoo!) for their dose of news.

other than those two purposes, i see blogs having virtually no impact on mainstream news. i read blogs and consider them as any other source: personal; one-sided; and in need of confirmation and context. but that's the beauty of blogs: that they are personal and instantaneous, and confirmation, context and the other side grow organically in blog-world. that growth is far too early on the evolutionary chain to be taken seriously as news.

i'm certain others disagree. tell me why i'm wrong.

also, check out crispin's intial great weblog debate post and the subsequent comments.

z

i want to thank my lawyers . they are the only people who really, deeply care about me. but most of all, i want to thank my grandmother, who whipped my white ass every day. when i was really bad she used to manacle me to the wall in the basement and leave me for days. once when i didn't say "please" she poured gasoline on me and set me on fire. she would light me up and then talk to me about why she was lighting me up, though it was hard to hear her over the roar of the flames. she shoulda gotten an oscar for the way she lit me on fire.

thank adam for this . maybe they should start a tour company.

thank god

that someone is watching out for all of us. using the incredible intelligence skills for which she is so noted michelle malkin has found out that there are anarchists in boston . let the arrests begin. there's this quotation: "Anarchist Black Cross Federation, an organization that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller calls an ``emerging revolutionary group,'' has active members in Boston who have distributed fliers against the war in Iraq, including one that reads: ``Synchronized bombing is a lie. But we can be more precise.''" as a terrorist threat that seems a trifle...obscure and out of context. but it's obvious that if the group is distributing leaflets vs. the war in iraq, they must be repressed, or at least interned and sexually humiliated.

sometimes shit is surreal. or maybe i'm just hung over after the oscar party. (my acceptance speech: this is for every white man who ever thought he was as cool as denzel. this is for every faceless, voiceless white suprematist who ever worked as an extra in a movie that sucked.) anyway

Lemn Sissay, named as one of the 50 key black British writers, fetes small talk: 'Talking about traffic and patio doors is the Western Buddhist mantra,' he said. It's a way we can find inner peace in today's society. Small talk can give away so much more about people, and be much more fascinating than big talk. I truly respect those who can sit around and discuss patio doors for half an hour and get something out of it.'

The survey also found that more than two -thirds of people believe the telephone is the best way to have intelligent conversations, although Ned Sherrin, presenter of Loose Ends , the Radio 4 comedy show, a lexicographer and author of 20 books, admits hating the telephone. 'I would rather see the contours of their face, the clouds and the flicker of their tears. I find the telephone irritating and unsatisfactory, and like to get them over with as quickly as possible,' he said.

lemn? dude. i'd rather see the clouds too. fetes small talk?

 

what i said yesterday to the young democrats

columns

last week's,on what the idiot war in iraq has done to us strategically
and this's, on freedom of and from religion

geez, man,  actually i think these wind farms look amazing. i was driving back here to york co. from pittburgh and was marveling at things i never saw before. you know what? get the fuck over it cause there's no way to generate energy without intervening in the world. but our interventions *are* the world: we too are mammals and we too build our little lodges or whatever. if environmentalists are unhappy with wind power i guess they can go back to nuclear.

food stamps of death

don't tell anyone this, ok? i just had lunch with the person who runs america's food stamp program. she or perhaps he is thrilled at the way things are going. she or perhaps he is being allowed to do her or perhaps his work, and her budget just got increased in a satisfactory way. could it be that there's a human side to the, er, death machine? that quietly, secretly they do right things too? amazingly she or perhaps he did not pay for those incredible crabcakes at lexington market with foodstamps.

i only wish

that charles was marrying his boyfriend.

bto

i can forgive someone for binding, torturing, killing. we all have our eccentricities. but i can't forgive this :

Most residents who lived near Rader described him as a bureaucratic bully, an ordinance enforcement officer for this Wichita suburb who often went out of his way to find reasons to issue citations.

One neighbor said Rader was once seen measuring grass in a front yard with a tape measure to see if it was too long. Another recalled catching Rader filming his house, documenting possible violations.

execute him i say. then revive him and execute him again.

 

dude. cool. we used to do this with richard nixon. for the same reasons.

the great weblog debate

i'm going to start a conversation on blogs in relation to mainstream media on this page with dan zehr. dan's an old student of mine from  penn state harrisburg and a reporter at the austin american-statesman. he's participating in a panel on blogging on mar 4 and thought maybe an actual blog would be a good place to think about this.

here's a question that's been nibbling at me. virtually every newspaper and magazine site has blogs. in fact, they're obviously trying to shift some of their operations into the blogosphere as they feel for where the money and the readership may eventually be. this seems only responsible, and some of these (the national review corner  springs to mind) are very widely read and pretty damn good. but i personally don't think it's a worthwhile or honest practice, overall. what i like about blogs is precisely the fact that it's someone talking, unedited, in her own voice on her own behalf. to me a blog edited by the washpost editorial staff isn't a blog at all but a simulation. and i think that in the long run what people like about blogs will draw them away from these sites. the national review is one thing. but the "blogs" of the washpost or time magazine or whatver in the long run will be exactly as safe as the publications themselves. they *are* the publications themselves, i.e. not blogs.

speech!

so i'll be speaking tomorrow at dickinson college, at a conference organized by the campus democrats, called so what's next? the theme of the conference is how dems can save their asses. it's a bit ironic cause i'm not one. but anyway, peter beinart of the new republic and stuart rothenberg will also be speaking. Me 9:30 am stern great room. here's the thrust of my remarks: is there anything y'all care about more than winning elections? if not, just disband. if so: show and prove.

a friend of mine (an eminent poet) writes as follows:

So, if YOU were interviewing Bill Moyers on a big stage in California, what would YOU ask him?

my reply:

well. i don't know. and it would seem uncharitable and old. but i was reading barry goldwater's autobiography. and he regarded moyers' work on lbj's '64 campaign as the acme of dirty politics: all innuendo and (according to barry) false implication, no facts whatever. they were making barry out to be an insane warmonger. meanwhile they were rolling up the gulf of tonkin incident as mcnamara issued endless lies. so: i'd ask him: does he regret anything he did in that campaign? does he think what he did (most famously, the "daisy" ad) was a turning point in american political discourse etc.?

scribble jam

just got hold of the dvd of scribble jam #7 ('03). scribble jam is an annual underground hip hop event in cinci featuring mc, b-boy, and dj contests (there's a brief human beatbox thing here too). it was great, and much much better in sound and picture quality than the tape of the 2000 thing i have. but what blew me away was the concert on the b side. in particular, atmosphere (slug and mr. dibbs) with murs. incredibly intense rendition of incredibly intense music. truly one of the greatest concerts i've seen in any medium.

co-ruption

so. you guys ill yet ? what about now ? we bring you the blessings of freedom, and ourselves the blessings of infinite wealth. everyone wins, especially the dead.

brace yourself for baffling smoke signals from the vatican city . or perhaps the catholic churchc will take this excellent oportunity to disband or merge with paganism.

fdr/gwb

in the same way as fdr's admin represented an american socialism, gwb represents an american fascism .

hope

for america's youth. remember the deep repudiation of first amendment rights by america's youth as represented earlier this year by a knight foundation study? well it seems some kids are still able at least to exercise freedom of speech in school assignments: check out this outstanding treatment of the topic by american cop .

i've re-organized the hip hop material on my main site (among other things for the students in my hip hop class: hip hop home .

and let me give up some credit. who picked naked monk ? who designed my website ? my daughter emma . naked monk. colors etc. cause she may have been 12 at the time. but straight up: i trusted her more than anyone on stuff like that, esp. my wife, the brilliant yet blindish marion winik . that's just the way i ride .

yo let me pay tribute to naked monk, the font of my website, my, er, logo etc. now that i've switched to mac: yo anybody find me that thing for my computer??

gotta admit , the innocence of michelle malkin is sweet. she refers to self-mutilation - specifically girls cutting themselves - as a "strange new trend." i've heard that kids are smoking this weird new stuff they call "weed," too.

yes, yes y'all

well now, a few anti-fundamentalist blogs have been having fun with this story  out of waynesboro, va (i used to live down near there). it's about a christian group which is attacking thomas jefferson as a blasphemer and connecting him to such junior antichrists as voltaire and paine.

It was the day a call to arms went out, to Christians everywhere, to band together and fight religious persecution they encounter even today.

 

It was the day to recognize the perpetrator, that “enemy of the Gospel” - Jefferson, according to Christian Heritage officials.

 

The new religious group, which recently built a complex on a hilltop overlooking Interstate 64 at Tinkling Spring Road, pronounced Jefferson “the anti-Christian” and George Washington’s opposite.

 

Jefferson, they said, “feigned belief in God to achieve his own political ends and came to sever Jesus Christ from his divinity.”

what christian heritage had in mind was stuff like this:

In a letter to Benjamin Rush dated April 21, 1803 Jefferson wrote, "To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other."

this does have the vague flavor of a hoax (tinkling springs road?), but i hope it's serious. i congratulate christian heritage. it takes guts for american christians to admit this: there was a range of religious beliefs among the founders. notoriously there were many sceptics and deists. usually the line is that "this nation was founded on god," etc., a claim that does not withstand a moment's research. i've never seen a christian group actually hop on jefferson, but they all should be. indeed, if thomas jefferson has an american opposite, it's john ashcroft, and as the admin "exports democracy" they might want to think about whether it's jefferson's or the opposite of jefferson's (whatever that is: fascism, in short). while christian heritage is at it, they might want to get a gander at john adams .

die, asshole

look. you can't stake everything on the idea of freedom and then oppose the right to die. or for that matter oppose the right to die . there is no freedom more fundamental: it rests on the claim that my life and my body are my own, my clearest, possessions. your interruption of that claim is an assertion of your ownership of my personhood: a deep, clear, straightforward tyranny. (meanwhile, simultaneously, you assert your own right to torture and execute.)

lawrence summers drove by my house last night in his '64 olds. he was waving a 40 and bouncing on a bitch is a bitch by nwa. that's how he rolls.

ass

so a high school valedictorian from virginia has been charged with conspiring to kill george bush . he has already undergone rendition, torture, etc. one thing should be clear from the way we are conducting our legal system: no one will ever be in a good position reasonably to evaluate his guilt. the trail is so polluted with the possibility of false confessions, false accusations, unavailable witnesses etc, that the justice department has made truth impossible for itself and for the rest of us. 

in case you were wondering

whether gwb thinks the united states is a free nation: in brussels: "a free country is a peaceful country."