We've grown accustomed to the insane

Gifthub points to a tale of infelicitous economics - French, of course - told by the Times:

“The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,” Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder.

One might wonder (the Times, vastly culpable on this score, does not), how did this come about?


One thing to understand is that in the US, wealth long ago learned to be self-concealing. Instead of flaunting in the mode of nouveaux riches, the old money followed the Cosimo de Medici/Superman model: Appear normal and be the power.


This can easily be parsed via real estate patterns. The wealthy find islands, like Longboat Key, Casey Key, or Boca Grande in Florida, which are a bit off the beaten path. They are zoned to be almost entirely private - the one "public" beach on Longboat is a strip of lovely sand with three parking spaces. They offer no Wal-Marts, no reason, really, for the hoi to show up. If you kayak around in Florida, the money - hidden behind walls or hedge from the street -- stares at you on the water from palatial terraces, balconies, lawns, tennis courts, and often, a princely yacht.

In near "completely crazy" conditions, philanthropy is tasked with a not entirely consonant set of objectives: it has to pre-emptively fend off the usual ressentiment of the less fortunate; in a sense, it's a form of protection policy, buying the goodwill of the many via the machinations of experts; it might apply a bit of salve to the soul of the Giver, who is disproportionately a Taker. In the case of a Madoff, it's a fungible triple bottom line accounting scheme with heavenly overtones, inaudible to human ears. In the case of the Koch Bros., it's an entree to social cachet, to establishing a strategic position amid a network of potentially like-minded Takers. Philanthropy so guided can do small good, but is powerless to alter the power structure that makes itself possible. Its use value, in fact, lies in reinforcing that system.

How much longer will USians indulge the polite fiction that the wealthy -- who seize the best assets of nature, of art, of time -- make it all good by sending accountants, lawyers and pony boys to tend the altars of philanthropy. A nettled Business Week will piss about salient moments of poor monarchic judgment. Face the music, USians, and it's not Lawrence Welk, or The Band, or Ol' Blue Eyes: Like the Franco-appointed King of Spain, the rich are always gleefully trumping Big Game somewhere -- rarely they're caught in the act.

Trump boys

Snap judgment

"Something snapped in him," is the mantra that USian media are using as the all-purpose explanation for Robert Bales' act of extinguishing 16 Afghan civilians.

This sort of empty linguistic nonsense passes for interpretive thinking at The New York Times, at the Diane Rehm Show, at NPR.

It assumes there is a place in a human's head where something can happen. It has nothing to do with military operations or ideology, it's a psyche thing.

What if human psychology were merely a negotiated protocol? A way to not understand anything?

What if there is no inside in Mr. Bales's head or in anyone else's? Where then might "something" snap?

What is a snap? What is "something?" We really do not want to understand, we just want to make verbal noises? The Times utters a meaningless noise and our cognitive intelligences all sit, like dogs?

What if the something that snapped was not in him? What if it had something rather than nothing to do with ideology, with a history of violence, with a hatred that began 4 million years ago. The heart of war lies in ideology, in stiffness, in the cohesion of wills crushed into refined cocaine, fusing blood and lies, and explanations a la The New York Times.

Creditor-Media Matrix Manifesto

There will be no radical changes in the personnel of the present efficient staff. Mr. Charles R. Miller, who has so ably for many years presided over the editorial pages, will continue to be the editor; nor will there be a departure from the general tone and character and policies pursued with relation to public questions that have distinguished The New-York Times as a non-partisan newspaper — unless it be, if possible, to intensify its devotion to the cause of sound money and tariff reform, opposition to wastefulness and peculation in administering public affairs, and in its advocacy of the lowest tax consistent with good government, and no more government than is absolutely necessary to protect society, maintain individual and vested rights, and assure the free exercise of a sound conscience.

Adolph Ochs, upon purchasing the New York Times in 1896 - via A Tiny Revolution.

WikiLeaks or WikiLedes?

[NYT correspondent Mark] MAZZETTI: Well, as a reporter, you're very rarely confronted with this amount of information, and so it's almost - it's the reverse of the situation you're normally in, which is too little information. Here, we are confronted with such a volume of information that it's hard to make sense of it and it's hard to know how to - which parts to emphasize and which parts not to.  NPR transcript

If nothing else, the WikiLeaks exposure should test the claims of journalists and bloggers with regard to the quality of their attention to data. 


Journalists still pretend they own the space of creating/reporting news. Bloggers will continue to contend that without intelligent and ethically responsible interpretation of what is reported, the journalistic niche doesn't amount to very much.


An actual journalist would rename WikiLeaks to WikiLedes - because the 92,000 or so documents are so many leads (or ledes) into the complex world of the Afghan war, and this is a relatively small set of documents (the NYT calls it "exhaustive," but probably just means "exhausting").


 What Mr. Mazzetti points to as exceptional is in fact the normal case: the actual data out there for any story are potentially infinite. Newsmen deal with digested digests, rarely with the raw. But they forget they are dealing with pre-digested regurgiatives, and think they possess mastery over a certain genuine terrain. They do not.


Wikileaks exposes the abbreviative power of news media. Faced with something like the complexity of the real, Mr. Mazzetti thought he was dealing with something unusual. He was not. The gap between the NYT accounts of Afghanistan before WikiLeaks, and the density of the documents now available is vast. What Mr. Mazzetti and the NYT are looking at is the abyss that is always there in any bit of actuality, but which their customary defenses have always dealt with deftly and obliviously. They'll need a new set of defenses if the leaks keep coming.


The Times had three weeks or more to examine the documents. Others now have more leisure, and might find more there than the Times did. And pursue different inquiries. On Democracy Now, Julian Assange raises a question about the Pentagon's decision to fire up a criminal investigation into the source(s) of the Wikileaks material:

Why is it that an investigation is announced to go into the source, before an investigation is announced to deal with the potentially criminal conduct that is revealed by this material? DN

Wikileaks is lifting two veils: one on the war, the other -- perhaps more significant -- on the unreality of everyday journalism, the fictional, smooth, clear narrative arcs of the Times, NPR, MSNBC, etc.


After cataract surgery, the eyes can be sensitive to light.

NYT's lobotomy needs a lobotomy

Turns out it was Time.com and Politico, both well-financed, reputable news media organizations, that blithely stepped over the line and took what was not theirs. (**(&*(

The Intellectual Property thing has apparently gotten even dumber in the world of print journaljism. The above is from David Carr, in the New York Times, accusing news organizations of "stealing" the news.

The simple fact is, the Rolling Stone story was no longer a story about a general. The effects it triggered themselves became front page news - understanding Obama's actions with regard to General MethChrystal required awareness of the story that caused them. The story at that point was itself news.

Only the New York Times would fail to see this. Fail to see that news is inherently public property. Rolling Stone blew it by failing to be first to post its own story (then posted a really lame mark-up), but the Times blows tout court when it confuses actual news events with proprietary reportage about them, because it fails to see that these linguistic entities can indeed bleed "across the line."

It is risen, and it eats your brain on stale crackers

Abraham Joshua Heschel often used the word "embarrassment." "The cure of the soul," he wrote, for example, "begins with a sense of embarrassment, embarrassment at our pettiness, prejudices, envy, and conceit; embarrassment at the profanation of life. A world that is full of grandeur has been converted into a carnival." Speaking of Faith.

Heschel, beautiful soul, contemplate Comcast. Here's a tube-and-truck shop that just found 13.75 billion simoleons to buy NBC. Where the fuck does a publicly-held company stash that sort of cash? Don't poverty-stricken shareholders get some of the vig?

Comcast Corp. is said to be serviced by the smartest money men that money can buy. (I recall being reamed (by phone, long distance, from Corporate) by one of their top accountants for failing to follow expense account procedures. I'd been there less than a week, the money in question was no more than $40.)

Perhaps that is why, despite the need to come up with some hard cash, Comcast has also found it in its heart to succour its long-suffering faithful:

Comcast Corp. Increases Dividend 40%; Intends to Complete Current $3.6 Billion Stock Repurchase Plan Within 36 Months

Thursday, 3 Dec 2009 06:18am EST

Comcast Corp. announced that the Company's planned annual dividend has increased 40% to $0.378 per share. In accordance with the increase, the Board of Directors has increased the quarterly dividend payable on January 27, 2010, to shareholders of record as of the close of business on January 6, 2010, from $0.0675 a share on the Company's common stock to $0.0945 a share. Additionally, Comcast announced its intent to complete its $3.6 billion share repurchase authorization over the next 36 months.

I remember the epiphanic, or apophenic, moment when, at 7:30 a.m., employees were summoned to a general meeting at a large auditorium distant from our workplace. Why, Truepenny? To be privileged to be among the first worldwide to behold the new Comcast Corporate Logo. It arrived amid sound, fury, smoke and mirrors + video of the long struggle to find that glyph, that Mark, that amulet which would and could only say, speak, represent, embody, BE, Comcast:

as the Eleatic Stranger would completely understand. Balm in Gilead. Hosannah. He is born/risen/compounded quarterly at 7.5% tax free.

So all "kidding" aside, I have to ask - if Tube ownership is so lucrative that Comcast can afford to own one of the major Big USian Content providers, then what's the problem with my argument that those who own the tubes, Big Pipe et al, ought to be sharing the wealth with the po' folk that every day strive to provide meaningful content on the web, at no cost, with piddly ad contracts, outdated marketing schemes, and human salt?

Why should the tube be worth, basically, infinitely more than what it is there to carry?

Friends who remain at the gnuspaper I used to work at tell me that, after having scraped every possible bit of dollarage from them, Management (still owned by the New York Times) has notified them that they not only won't receive bonuses for doing more work with fewer people than ever before, but they'll also be forfeiting the 5 vacation days they received last year in lieu of a salary increase, because it was tough to find enough living bodies when people actually took their daze off.

Abraham, Abraham, I say to you: Until the Contentasters rise up and demand a sou or two from the Tubers, there will be no joy in Mudville; the model cannot hold. The forces that want Murdoch and Comcast to control Content believe we know no better than to want to be held in contempt, controlled by corporate Virii that will do our thinking for us, and be well compensated for their pains. After all, they've got the business model now haven't they? How embarrassing.

All the other people's writing that's fit to print

This guy* might have a point --

"Is it appropriate for a national newspaper to reprint my personal tribute to Edward Woodward as if it were an article written for them?" tweeted Wright today. "They just lifted it from my blog without asking. And cut off the entire end section about my last meeting with him … I'm not talking about quotes. Am talking about the entire article. But with edits they made that make me look ill informed and unfeeling … Perhaps they would like to send the fee they would pay the commissioned writer of such an article to Edward's memorial... ." Media Monkey

Grosso modo: To what extent are news organizations like the Times trapped in a print publisher's economic model (and, btw, of news) that is already on its way towards being outmoded? And if that's the case, how can they be relied upon to provide us with news?

*via a Jarvis tweet

Tom {T'i qifsha trut?} Friedman, "Fuck You"

Thomas Friedman (see preceding post for new editorial policy regarding certain proper names) regarding how it came to pass that he chose to say "Fuck you" to a roomful of people (at the Freedom to Connect Conference) trying to understand journalism:

"I believe passionately in the New York Times, a place I have worked at my whole adult life. Lord knows, it has made its mistakes. Which newspaper or blogger hasn't? But I believe that when it is at its best it plays a vitally important role in our democracy, and flippant, denigrating remarks about it, at a time when it is in economic peril and our country desperately needs serious journalism to sort through this crisis, struck me as deeply unserious. That said, when I'm trying to make a point, especially a heartfelt one, and my choice of words ends up getting in the way of that point — even if for just one person — then I chose the wrong words."

(From David Weinbergers's most recent edition of JOHO, which has much more of interest about new notions of news).

This is Dan {viech d'ase} Ratherism, only rather worse. Mr. {Bousse to la gueule}Friedman has chosen high seriousness and the priestly essence of Journalism to believe in, at a time when what one might wish to do is to look very honestly and dispassionately at the New York {Moor Kwas} Times, the falling industry it clings to, the social crises making it a reasonable question whether, given the current state of social rationality, journalism continues to be what it originally was, or whether it has degenerated, genealogically, into the opposite of its original idea,

social rationality appears to produce normative ideals, however these normative ideals are subject to historical change. Their existence in the present may have little relation to their genesis. That is, what was once normative may have over time come to be instruments of domination. (We can think of a totally administered society or the irrational consequences of rationalization.) Thus, previously normative ideals could lose "the normative kernel" over time. link

and, if so, why.

A demystified idea of market proportion - oh, and ILEC fraud

And you may ask yourself

How do I work this?

And you may ask yourself

Where is that large automobile?

Interesting, from Pogue (whom I rarely read any more):

text messages are pure profit for the cell carriers. Text messaging itself was invented when a researcher found "free capacity on the system" in an underused secondary cellphone channel: http://bit.ly/QxtBt. They may cost you and the recipient 20 cents each, but they cost the carriers pretty much zip. @#$#@$@

Useful to see how the carriers think. They discover free capacity, then invent magical ways of billing us for using it:

Looking for a data pipeline that would fit these micro messages, Hillebrand came up with the idea to harness a secondary radio channel that already existed on mobile networks.

This smaller data lane had been used only to alert a cellphone about reception strength and to supply it with bits of information regarding incoming calls. Voice communication itself had taken place via a separate signal.

"We were looking to a cheap implementation," Hillebrand said on the phone from Bonn."Most of the time, nothing happens on this control link. So, it was free capacity on the system." ^&*^(

To charge for it sounds a little like sub-prime mortgage chicanery. Magical Fuck-the-Customer Money. (It took a move by Google to get someone in the press interested enough to mention it?) *

I grow tedious in the retelling: If the ILECs, the carriers, will go to great lengths to bill us for something that's no cost to them (inventing elaborate "choose your style" billing formats for the sake of verisimilitude, no doubt) how much profit are they making from their Pipes? And if they exuberantly produce surplus profits ex nihilo, then what will be their response when Content Big and small start charging us to access their news, information, "entertainment," etc.?

When every purveyor of "meaning" will be trying to make a buck, who of us will be able to afford the bogus carrier charges, the fraudulent texting fees, and the absurdly exaggerated content fees? When will these Incorporated Content Inc. folks begin to understand that this is not broadcast, this is not Big Content, this is micro / nano / distracted / serendipitous activity? One does not look at everything on the NY Times site the way some New Yawkers probably still read every page of the print edition as if it were just unearthed at Qumran. One often does not even see its front page. One comes to it via google news, or as in this case, via Humorzo, who receives nothing from Mr. Pogue or the Times for linking to them.

What if the Times, content provideur nonpareil that it is, were to discover that people are coming to it only because they're getting tipped to something by a blogger, or a youtuber, or, gulp, Homo Twitteriensis? That its sense of the market, of how it works and what to expect from it, is off by several orders of magnitude? Perhaps by as many orders of magnitude as the gratuitous profits being made by the carriers for their phantom texting costs?

What if Big Content has as exaggeratedly an incorrect sense of its value as we have of the ILECs' price-to-cost ratio for texting? Could it accept the truth of that? Really eat it, digest it, and then pay the fuckers on Twitter who send people to its huge brand?

*It seens it was reported on last December by Randall Stross, but apparently no one cared (and why doesn't Pogue link to Stross's scoop?).

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful house!

And you may tell yourself

This is not my beautiful wife!

To David Simon

Dear David Simon,

You have gone from the penetrating world of The Wire to the impermeably inelastic world of Build the Wall.

Instead of talking supplicatingly to two publishers as you do in your piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, consider what you, we, and they are dealing with.

The money is in the pipes. The pipes are sucking it all into their nether regions. The money for content is there, but it's been abducted.

The quandary of viable content on the Net is not unlike the quandary of viable healthcare in a world of corporate greed. Consider the parallels; they are legion.

There's much more to be said on this. For now, what I'm saying to you - whose work I have deeply admired - is this: where's your imagination? Where are your investigative instincts? Where is your ability to follow the almighty $ from the streets to the vultures to their insect lords?

Dude. No fucking walls.

More to come.

==

Some of the More: {still in progress}

The hegemonic control over the finite, "hard assets" of the Internet has displaced the power of an infinity of content providers from making anything like real money from end users, who have already paid their fair share to access the Internet - where "Internet" takes the pipes and all the content as one unified entity. Even though it's not literally (as in, legally incorporated as a single entity) unified, it obeys the logic of a single system for the end user. We pay for the Internet and we get the dialtone and we get the content. Only, the dialtone providers keep all the money - not for any logical or legitimate reason, solely because they occupy a certain gatekeeping position on the "superhighway."

Just as corporate control of news organizations has eviscerated the very idea of what news is, as Greenwald so eloquently notes here, so the health insurance industry has so polluted our notion of sociality that it does not seem self-evident to many US citizens, including Max Baucis and roughly 40 Republican Senators, that healthcare is a right that must be available to all.

So too Adam Arvidsson in The Ethical Economy is making the case that branding has changed the nature of the economy, from one of production to one of finance. The moment you move from the product to the financing of the product, you have the desire for HUGE BRAND. Only, hugebrandness, like Lehman Brothers' credibility, is mere rumor of value, distinct from all use. If you have Huge Brand as a journalist, say Greenwald and Lewis Lapham, you are probably as corrupt as the day is long.

The point is, it is our health, and our Internet, that should be at the center - not the financing of healthcare, or the financing of content. The corporate infrastructure makes miching mallecho of the argument's inherent logic before it can begin, because the corporate structure of media and the corporate structure of healthcare are entirely alike (indistinguishable plasmids?). Both are wealth creation centers that, like Ron Suskind's famously anonymous worldbeater, create their own reality -- which the reality-based rest of us are permitted to report on, consume, and bewail.

Study for Raft of the Medusa*

*h/t for image to Juke aka Informant38 aka dirty beloved.

Fuck the piper (an immodest proposal)

Google Inc. (GOOG 429.53, -13.07, -2.95%) on Thursday said its second-quarter net income rose to $1.48 billion, or $4.66 a share, from $1.25 billion, or $3.92 a share in the same period a year earlier. Net revenue in the period ended in June rose to $4.07 billion from $3.9 billion, Google said. Excluding special items, earnings were $5.36 a share. Wall Street analysts had expected Google to post earnings excluding special items of $5.09 a share, and $4.06 billion in net revenue, according to data from Thomson Reuters. #

I'm not understanding why everyone thinks Google is brilliant but no one seems to grok the model.

It would be edifying to know how many stories at the NY Times site have been clicked on by users (or by bots) over the past decade, if that's how long they've been available. Must be in the hundreds of millions. Let's say 300 million [add: that's way low - see here]. Had they charged $.007 per story accession (i.e., click), the Times would have made $2.1 million. That's $2.1 million more than the ZERO their content has earned for them thus far (offset by whatever grand total their short-lived scheme of charging for Rich, Dowd, etc. brought in).

But who would agree to pay them even $.007 per access? you fairly ask. And my model says - it doesn't matter. Because the money would not come directly from the end user's pocket, but rather from those funds spent by all of us to all the large corpses who bring bits into the home, by whatever means - Comcast, Verizon, etc. Because these companies right now are thieves. They are making money hand over fist from users. But users do not pay them in order to see dark screens (that bliss is for television). We pay the Comcasts and Verizons in order to access content. Their mega-earnings are contingent upon their parasitism of Content.

Does it not seem appropriate that the pipers pay for that which enables them to exist? I have put forth this model before, (also a bit here) and of course it's patently absurd. However, I assure you, it's the only fair way to make sure that there is quality content on the Net. As of now, that assurance is lacking. The black holes of internet service providers are threatening to suck down all the light. They are making vast profit while thinking only about metal and fiber and trucks. All of those who are trying at least to think, to tweet, to make something or do something or read something, sit atop an enormous pile of bupkis. This is wrong.

The only fair way is to let every click on the net - to anything, except closed sub sites (like JSTOR), and sites featuring socially challenged content (bestiality, child porn, Republican Senators) - move a bit of micromoney from piper (a general fund fed from all pipers) to contenter. And, the same amount. Equal bits. Let's not quibble over how much more quality one finds in the NY Times. You provide content, you get clicked on, you get the everybody micro$, period.

This in no way obviates Big or Small Content from selling ads or running contests or selling t-shirts. It is simply the addition of a revenue stream that wasn't there before, taken from the profits of Big Pipes. You know the gold is there.

My argument would be improved by containing actual numbers of clicks for some content providers. But I don't think it would change the underlying logic. Please now tell me why I'm wrong so I can remove this chimera from my skull.



[Update] from the Man who Knows Everything:

Free is for the masses; the elite will pay for high quality content in news, information, education and entertainment. Digital feudalism...8 minutes ago from TweetDeck

ajkeen

Andrew Keen

pools of common patronage and micropayments by use

via Stowe Boyd:

Posner Wants To Ban Links To Save Newspapers

juicy bit:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary...more

Very rough analogy: Before there was central water, people dug wells and paid for delivery equipment to provde them with clean water; each habitation its own system. Centralized water eliminated the need, and well diggers and equipment providers largely disappeared. People still pay to access water, just via other means.

News organizations need to divorce what we want from the physical encasements that no longer are quite so essential (tho' the net-deprived might disagree). They and we seem to believe that the end of the need for paper is the end of the need for news. It isn't.

Similarly, we think of the necessary costs of Internet provision to consist of the cost of the pipes, the delivery mechanism. An analysis of the actual pipe costs would help us understand why it is that pipemakers are so happy to be in this business. Perhaps some of that profit could be applied to subsidize use.

Not as in giving the New York Times a basic content emolument for existing, but maybe more as in a micropayment method by which, when users choose to look at a story in the Times, a tiny sliver of funds goes to the Times. Not directly out of the pocket of the individual user, but out of a common fund, generated from the pipemakers' profits.

That is, end users fund the pipes and contribute to content costs, but content providers earn their keep by justifying their existence. Links are free and the more you are linked to, the greater the chance of getting those micropayments -- $.0000000000007 or so, nothing huge - but it will add up.

Such a means of common, shared costs of patronage might seem silly, or full of difficulties and obvious problems, but it is surely less so than invoking antiquated and misguided law to "bar linking."

Triangulating house negroes and unempirical spokesmen of empire

"And be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them." Al Quaeda to Obama.

''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." Unidentified Bush advisor, 2002.

I can't help but think that until the alleged paper of record comes clean on the source of that paradigmatic quote in Ron Suskind's piece, it will be impossible to gauge the rhetoricity of language like that above, attributed to Al-Zawahiri.

I mean, the quote defines what has become a key node for our understanding of the guiding mind behind the last eight years - at least - of the architectonics of Washington's command of what reality is.

Yet we don't know who defined it for us so neatly, so precisely, because the newspaper of record has never divulged the source.

The newspaper of record is a record of not-for-attribution and off-the-record information that gives us a mottled panorama of journalistic narrative. We are told - sort of - the stories, but the storytellers remain behind the concertina wire of privilege.

Fuck you, New York Times. Fuck you.

Times misses coffee spewing story opportunities

The New York Times gives us breathless drama, quotes Paulson:

“I’ve always said to everyone that ever worked for me, if you get too dug in on a position, the facts change, and you don’t change to adapt to the facts, you will never be successful,” he said in the interview.

The paper did not seem to think it worthwhile to ask at what point in the change authorization from Congress might be, uh, something to do. Or how much it adds up to ($2 trillion). Or whether the bankers are required to think humanely, ethically, responsibly about lending. You know, shite like that.

Times remains perfect

The New York Times remains perfect in its ignorance of Amy Goodman, even though the journalist was arrested in St. Paul and her credentials were stolen by SS. Only mention of Goodman in a story is in comments to a useless bit of reportage.

They're here

Weekend Edition Saturday, July 19, 2008 · In northern California, organized crews of poachers are raiding residential recycling bins and are sometimes threatening homeowners who get in the way. Authorities in the Bay Area say it's a sign of the sour economic times, but it's costing cities plenty. San Francisco alone estimates it's losing $500-thousand a year to recycling bandits. NPR's Richard Gonzales reports. (4:10) NPR

If it's a sign, well, how about reading the sign. Why "poachers"?

No poets, no entrepreneurs, no ragpickers, no priests, no judges, no lawgivers, no soliders, no mothers.

Marching lockstep with the general degradation of value, (yesterday's NYT had a front page video ad for iphone starring david pogue) NPR is more consumer spectacle, more Night of the living dead, than journalism. Especially All Things Considered and Scott Simon.

Random streamitis

Not to entirely be confused with stromateis:

Can you tell that this:



is this:



If you are in Tallahassee, FL, or select other locales, Wal-Mart can look like this. Still the same inside, as far as I know (didn't enter the one pictured above). Wal-Mart will adapt.


It is good to find the all too, too scrotechafed WonderChicken returning. Who, by the way, is so right about geekcons as to be almost Scriptural. Geeks need to find humans other than viral clones of their geekly pale selves to appreciate.


New oldmedia news: (for the NYT and all media, but especially the NYT, since you there are so high on interactivity) - put a little polling device next to every story you run, inviting your readers to respond to the question, "Is this news?"


Corporations: don't survey or poll anyone over 50 about anything, ever. Life is too short for your shite.

[Add]: Gathering of silence

Preboarding the post-funct express

Aw c'mon, George's humor was never ill. - Sheila Lennon.

Consider the sluice

Found this headline:

New Fears on Long-Term Global Oil Supplies

I thought was at the top of a heap of stories aggregated by Google News. It occasioned a mild spasm of anxiety. Until I realized I was not reading a news aggregator, but only the New York Times front page:



I'm still of the wizdumb-of-crowds opinion that the aggregate could carry some weight.

These telenovelas?

In theSessum's memorable phrase, journaljism.

Some Thing is rotting in Fishistan

Kia on Fish on French Theory:

This is a deconstructive analysis of straw. #