June 8, 2008

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Meet the new boss, nothing like the old boss

June 8, 2008 in Ideas, News | 19 comments

Nobody gets the idea of Obama, and perhaps Obama himself, better than Dave Winer. I love Dave’s latest post, Blowing Up the Beltway. Step back a year, to when the Clinton Restoration was proceeding on schedule, and Obama was still this skinny dude from Chicago who gave a great speech at the ’04 convention.

Washington, we all knew, was an insider’s game. It was the Politorium, a backslappy blabblosphere inhabited by a few elected officials, vast allied bureacracies, lobbyists, consultants, and center-feeders of the sort that Hunter S. Thompson explained best. There were good people in there too, but they were trapped.

(An aside: would HST have offed himself if he know Obama was coming? How would he have covered this election? Man, we miss that guy.)

I know people who know Hillary, and to a person they all love her. But she played a new game the old way, and lost while leading in popular votes and Heartland America. It was a defeat more decisive and bizarre than Al Gore took when the Supremes railroaded him and the whole freaking Constitution, at the turn of the Millenium.

But we’re done with that. I think even the talk radio addicts who hate all Democrats by reflex know the old gig is up. The reason has nothing to do with partisan politics and everything to do with Democracy 2.0. That’s the one where the threshold of participation narrows toward zero. We’re not there yet, but we’re headed that way. Obama is leading the way, but it’s not just about him, or his candidacy, or his policies.

Sez Dave,

  As much as I believe in the idea of Obama, if he doesn’t live up to it, I’ll still believe in the idea, because I always have. I don’t want to be an insider, I don’t want the insiders to rule, I don’t want there to be insiders at all. I want to distribute opportunity and acknowledge intelligence and goodness where ever it appears. I fought against the centralized Inside The Beltway way of doing things in Silicon Valley, and we won. Of course a new aristocracy pops up but their power is as thin as the people whose power got popped in every bubble that came before.

Then, this kicker:

  The Internet destabilizes every hierarchy it contacts. It erases every barrier to entry. The only way to win is to point off-site, in every way you can think of. Win by offering better value, not by locking users in. People will become instant refugees to escape your clutches. Think you’re immune? Think again.

It’s about the Net. And the Net is us. It’s all outside, not inside.

And it’s not just about elections. It’s about governance. How we do it matters more than what we do with it. And we’ve hardly begun to visit that one.

White and Blue Land

June 8, 2008 in Art, Fun, Geology, Photography, Places, problems, Science, Travel | 6 comments

You fly enough and they bump you up to Business Class whether you want it or not. That’s how United Airlines works, and for most passengers that’s not a bad thing. In my case I often don’t want it because it means giving up a window seat I’ve carefully chosen back in what we used to call Coach.

But that’s what happened last Wednesday, when I flew from Amsterdam to Chicago. I got bumped to an aisle seat in the Business Section. Worse, nearly everybody with a window seat closed their shades. For viewing we might as well have been in the cargo hold.

The “air show” system that displays flight progress on a map was also down, although a couple times I was able to tell where I was with my GPS, which (amazingly) was able to pick up the 4+ satellites required to to quadrangulate our location 38,000 feet over the Earth.

So I knew when we got to Greenland — my favorite place to shoot from on high . I asked my seatmate, who had the window, if she’d mind if I took some pictures of the land below. She said okay, we opened her shade, and that’s how I got these shots here.

The conditions were less than ideal. It’s never good to shoot out the sunny side of a plane in any case, because the direct light illuminates all the scratches, debris depositions and other imperfections in the windows, which are optically awful to begin with. This window was average or worse in those respects, and on this day Greenland was also hazy, with lots of clouds amidst the mountains. Still, I got some decent shots — enough, at least, to slake my thirst for geographic and geological spectacle and knowledge-building.

I took more shots a bit later, after we crossed the white expanse of Greenland’s middle (at just above the 63rd parallel, which is just 3 degrees south of the Arctic Circle), but need to work instead. Meanwhile, if any Flickr freaks want to help me name some of the mountains, glaciers and other features I shot in that series (or any of the others), please do. I found a few details on Google Earth and filled them in.

The caption for the above reads,

The water body is a glacial bay called Norrivig. Behind it is an island in the midst of which is “Azimuthbjerg” lat=63.4333333, lon=-41.6666667. Here is NotSoGreen on the same area, which also points to this Jason Sloan photo on Flickr. This is all in the Tunu or East Greenland, one of four large Greenland counties, or administrative districts. East Greenland is known natively as Ostgrönland. The glacier or gletcher emptying into Norrivig Bay is Thrym. The mouintain beyond is Hvidbjørn Bjerg, at
N 63° 31′ 0” W 41° 49′ 0”, or 63.51667 / -41.81667, with GeoNameId : 3423410.

Hope that helps the curious find out more.

If you’re interested in Greenland — and I would highly recommend it, because it’s not only beautiful but melting — check out NotSoGreen. Wonderful service.

The thrill of Jim McKay

June 8, 2008 in News | 1 comment

The best thing about the Olympics on TV was, and will always remain, Jim McKay. Loved watching that guy. Sad to learn he’s gone.

The Iraq War Railroad

June 8, 2008 in Business, Events, Future, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Politics, VRM | 2 comments

Frank Paynter writes,

  Putting the ME in. That’s what this thing is about. So I have my personal secret plan… (not evil, like gapingvoid’s is), but the sustainability piece is missing…. monetizing…. business model… cash… shekels… ducats… does it have to be an advertising magnet? They’re not really talking about that here.
  More seriously they’re talking about the media role in the Iraq war. Amy Goodman, Phil Donahue, Norman Solomon (moderating), Lennox Yearwood (“Make Hiphop, not war”), Naomi Klein, Sonali Kolhatcar… a lot of this is preaching to the choir. The people here already get it. Many of us knew it in 2002. The administration manipulation of media from 2002 forward was a certainty. What we need is for the libertarians like Doc Searls and his ilk to get exposed to this information and find a certainty they’re willing to declaim.

Well, politically I’m a registered independent, though I do have some libertarian sympthies, to the degree that I like business and think we make too many laws and have too many regulations. But I’ve also called myself a “defective pacifist” and have come out squarely for Barack Obama. Also, I’m not aware of having an “ilk”, and I don’t like being accused of having one. But, whatever.

I don’t think I have any areas of disagreement with Frank here. What’s more, I haven’t been silent about it. Look up searls media iraq war and you’ll find plenty.

Among those items is some recent pointage to a talk Forrest Sawyer gave at UCSB last year. I think I reported on it at the time, but I can’t find it. Still, I do appreciate being prodded, because Forrest’s talk is one of the best indictments I’ve yet heard of mainstream media capitulation to the Bush administration’s railroading of the nation, and the world, into a war that was flat-out wrong and dumb to begin with. Forrest also does a great job of stressing the importance of other streams besides the main one. So go watch it. One quote…

  Over the past six years we have seen a failure of the tradiional media to live up to its obligations of oversight and challenging the government, greater than any we have seen in the nation’s history… Those who have not yet come to feel ashamed will feel ashamed of their performance and their letting down of the American people.

(I might be off by a word or two there. Transcibing from YouTube is no bargain.)

Also, for what it’s worth, at we also have some ideas for Frank’s “sustainability piece”. I can’t imagine anything more reforming of media than giving it an easy non-advertising-based business model driven by listeners, viewers and readers — in alliance with journalists and artists on the supply side — rather than ever-more-targeted advertising.

I also recommend hanging at while it’s still going on. Great conference. Wish I were there.

Thermal rediscovery

June 8, 2008 in Places | 1 comment

According to the thermometer on the dashboard of my car, it passed 100° in Boston today. In any case, it was pretty damn hot. Made working nearly impossible in an apartment with no air conditioning and little ventilation. But we had a great time hanging out with friends and driving around picking up stuff in the car. One item was a fan for the attic office/guest quarters where I’m sitting now, sweating like a boxer. The new fan is actually two in one frame. You jam it in a window and with a little remote control you can make both fans blow in or out, or one blow in while the other blows out. It has two digits in a red LCD read-out that tells you the temperature. It’s it’s over 100, it just says “HI”. I thought it was broken until I figured out that’s what the deal was.

It just dropped to 97.

I should complain. Most of my life I’ve lived in places with no AC. There was none in our house, and none in any of the schools I went to, except maybe in the offices. Also none in any of our cars. The grace of AC was not afforded to me until I bought cars with it. Most of those were junkers and in most cases the AC was one of the things that didn’t work. The whole time I lived in New Jersey and North Carolina I had two places with AC. One was a garden apartment in Hackensack, with a rattling window unit that served just the dining room. The other was a double-wide in the North Caroina backwoods. I think the AC was the only thing good about that place, other than a location that offered near-absolute solitude, except for the pig farm about a quarter mile away through the woods. Hadn’t thought about that pig farm for a long time. We had it in few of our many California houses, and not at all in the one we have now in Santa Barbara, which is about as close as you’ll find to an air conditioned climate in any case.

So, just as I had to get re-acquainted with the cold this last Boston winter, now I’ll do the same with the heat this summer, which began in earnest today, when it is still, technically, spring.

Anyway, I’m going to bed downstairs where it’s in the low 90s now.