Monthly Archives: August 2005

The logic of last resorts

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Siva had a great short post on sivacracy.net this morning about last resorts. Very well thought out.

You know how your keys are always in the LAST place you look?

That’s because you stop looking when you find them. Duh. They could also be in the FIRST place you look. But the first place would also be the last place.

Keep that in mind when W says he would attack a country without provocation even if it has broken no international laws or treaties only as a last resort.

See, he only attacked Iraq as a last resort. It was also a first resort. But whatever.

Morals and Religion 1

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I was listening to a podcast of Radio Open Source (Christopher Lydon’s new public radio show) today where they were talking about intelligent design and evolution. While listening to this I remembered something that I have thought about on numerous occasions before. One of the arguments I keep hearing from religious “conservatives” about morals is that you can’t have morals without some higher being to tell you how you should live and behave. One of the guests on the show was Kenneth Miller and he discussed how the creationists (let’s forget the euphamisms and call them what they are) believe that something must have created us or why would we even exist.

My belief is that in order for societies to survive and prosper, some basic rules of behavior must be established. Whenever you put a group of people together they eventually have to define some rules or the group breaks down. This does not just apply to humans, every animal species that lives in groups has standards of behavior. There are typically leaders in any group, whether they are dogs, gorillas, bees or any other social animals. All the other members of the group follow certain behavioral standards. This is done for greater benefit of the group and the species. The same thing applies to human societies. They establish rules, based on common sense and experience to preserve the group. Rules like the ten commandments (whichever 10 you happpen to follow, which vary depending on which christian, muslim or jewish sect you follow) can ultimately be filtered down to 2 main ones. Don’t kill and don’t take what doesn’t belong to you. These are pretty easy to figure out for any group that wants to thrive.

Considering how many “god-fearing” people that claim to follow these rules don’t seem to have a problem with capital punishment or killing infidels or heritecs, I don’t put much stock in anyone saying you must have a god to have morals. I believe morals are something that comes from common sense and the need to survive. I am a good moral human and I don’t believe in god.

I will probably follow up on this idea later, but it is late right now and I need to get ready for bed.

Dave Winer on Jon Udell

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Dave has a good description of the difference between blogging and podcasting. There is a huge difference between the written word and spoken word. Neither is neccessarilly better or worse, just different. The same words can be given a very different meaning by the way they are spoken.

Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses. The great thing about podcasting is that you can take it with you, driving, running, walking, where ever, and just let your mind absorb ideas through your ears, which is a very nice way to get to know someone, very different from reading what they write. Where the written word only has the intonation the reader can infer (adding a lot of errors in doing so) and can be skimmed (lowers comprehension by orders of magnitude) the spoken word has great subtlety and subtext, and can seduce, cajole, wink, leer, lurk, and be lewd. Both forms of expression have their place

Permanent Vacation

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Shrub VacationThe world would be a better place if this guy just stayed on vacation permanently.

The August getaway is Bush’s 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and Tuesday was the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford — roughly 20 percent of his presidency to date.

Doug Kaye on public radio

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I was a long time listener to public radio. But in recent years I have largley given up on it and have stopped contributing money. The major programs like Morning Edition, All things considered, and talk of the nation have become more and more like commercial radio, parroting the statements of the Shrub administration and being less questioning of government policies, especially during the lead up to the Iraq war. I still listen to selected programs like On the Media and Le Show but I listen to them in podcast form. I almost never turn on the radio. Because of th enormous amount of money required to do tradional radio, NPR (and PBS and Corp for Public Broadcasting, especially CPB under republican hack Ken Tomlinson) have become water carriers for the government because they are terrified of getting completely de-funded. There is also the issue ofwanting to here the programs when I want to listen to them, not necessarilly when stations decide to broadcast them, if the local stations carry them at all.

Doug Kaye, who runs the amazing IT Conversations site and podcasts has a very good post on the future of public radio. In essence it like other mainstream media are doomed.

This started for me when I blogged about Doc’s suggestion that we all call our local public radio stations and request they carry the new show. It took me no time at all to realize how little sense that made. There’s no doubt that if KQED-FM were to broadcast the show at all, it would be at some obscure time of day when I wasn’t likely to listen. No, that’s not even correct. There’s no time of day that would be good for me. I don’t plan my days around a radio or TV schedule because, quite frankly, I don’t need to. I have an iPod and I can listen to what I want, where I want and when I want. And given that there’s already more good programming than I have time for, anyone who doesn’t make it easy for me by providing an RSS feed with enclosures simply won’t make the cut. Even in my car, unless it’s just a trip to the grocery store, I no longer tune in a broadcast station

With the technology that is available now and coming in the future, for both creating content, and distributing it, large television and radio networks will soon have no reason whatsoever to exist. This is a good thing because it will allow more specialised programming to flourish. The old technology required content to be generalized in order to make it economically viable. Because the audience for specialised programs might consist of many groups of relatively few people distributed over large geographic areas, it was not feasible to broadcast such programs because of the very limited bandwith of over the air communications. The internet and the technologies that enable podcasting allow these types of programs to reach an audience at relatively low cost now. A major change is underway in the media and it is irreversible no matter what main stream media tries to do about it.

The coming crash 6

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Jim Kunstler has an excellent post about the coming crash that US is facing. He talks about the complete lack of any kind of discipline that the hipocritical replubican hacks running this country are demonstrating. If you are sitting a variable rate interest only mortgage right now and you have the potential to grab any profit compared to the purchase price of your house, SELL NOW and take your profit. Put the money away and start renting. DON’T WAIT!. Before long interest rates are going to be going through the roof, and the price of houses is going to collapse. At that point you won’t be able to recover your purchase price even if you can sell. Then you will be in the hole to the bank and with recently enacted “bankruptcy reform” bill, you won’t be able to escape your debts by declaring bankruptcy.

For another prime example of the fiscal irresponsibility of the republican congress and whitehouse check out this item from Salon.com

A mess of thorny devil’s club and salmonberries, along with an old chicken coop, surrounds the 40-year-old cabin where Mike Sallee grew up and still lives part time on southeast Alaska’s Gravina Island. Sallee’s cabin is the very definition of remote. Deer routinely visit his front porch, and black bears and wolves live in the woods out back. The 20-mile-long island, home to fewer than 50 people, has no stores, no restaurants and no paved roads. An airport on the island hosts fewer than 10 commercial flights a day.

“I can take off from the homestead and walk the beach for several miles before I get to any other habitation,” says Sallee, a fisherman who also operates a small lumber mill. “There’s two main mountain ranges on the island and a big valley of forest and muskeg.”

Yet due to funds in a new transportation bill, which President Bush is scheduled to sign Wednesday, Sallee and his neighbors may soon receive a bridge nearly as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. With a $223 million check from the federal government, the bridge will connect Gravina to the bustling Alaskan metropolis of Ketchikan, pop. 8,000.

All this is happening while we have squandered $300 billion in Iraq, with no end in sight.

Nostalgic for Michael Powell 2

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I never thought I would nostalgic for the days of Michael Powell as head of the FCC but the new chairman Kevin Martin really scares me. I was very much opposed to Powell’s deregulation at all costs, that helped accelerate the consolidation of major media. However recent developments like podcasting, blogging and other means of network distribution of media are making traditional mainstream media increasingly irrelevant. However, now under Kevin Martin, the FCC has restated The Four Internet Freedoms originally put out under Powell’s reign. The FCC was created to regulate communications to ensure that limited public assets like the airwaves for tv and radio were used wisely for the public good. Now however, they seem to be focused on restricting what should be a limitless network for human communications in order to protect the entrenched but increasingly under pressure media oligarchy, from the new realities and the public be damned. Look at what they have now said:

How Martin’s FCC is different from Powell’s
The difference between the Powell FCC and the Martin FCC (.doc, .pdf) is clear in the re-statement of The Four Internet Freedoms issued Friday! Also see Martin’s statement (.doc, .pdf) and, for example, this article on Powell’s Four Internet Freedoms.

Powell: Freedom to access content.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.

Powell: Freedom to run applications.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;

Powell: Freedom to attach devices.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

Powell: Freedom to obtain service plan information.
Martin: Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

And the Martin FCC adds an important footnote:

All of these principles are subject to reasonable network management.

Follow the link above the quote to see more. I found this through Om Malik’s Blog