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Priceless…

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In case you missed it, this gem appeared in the Friday Wall Street Journal in an article about the steady shift of the American economy’s transactions from cash or check to plastic:

  Some Christians see the pervasive use of plastic as part of a dark biblical prophecy. Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, has said that plastic may signal the cashless society of the end times foreshadowed in the Bible. Mr. Robertson’s network accepts contributions from supporters on both Visa and MasterCard.

The end times, it seems, will be financed at a low introductory APR — but when the full rate kicks in, sinners beware!

At the convention

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Blogging and bloggers are getting tons of attention as the Democratic Convention gears up. Dave Winer has set up a really useful blog aggregation of tons of the con-blogging.

Salon, meanwhile, has a half-dozen staffers in Boston. The coverage will be all over our home page, but a lot of it is already pumping through War Room, our political blog. Check out Tim Grieve’s report on Al Sharpton’s stemwinder:

“Sharpton contrasted his run for the presidency with Bush’s experience of ‘being born on third base and thinking he hit a triple.’ ‘I wasn’t even born in the stadium,’ Sharpton shouted. ‘I had to fight through the parking lot, get through the front gate, go around through the crowd, and thenhit a triple.’ “

Another convention on another coast

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While the eyes of the nation are on a certain convention in Boston this week, I will be counter-programming: Tomorrow I’m heading up to Portland for the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Although Salon started covering free/open source software back in 1997, when I was editing Andrew Leonard’s great pieces on Apache etc., I have never been to one of these fabled events, so I’m looking forward to it, and hope to do at least some posting from there.

The robot heart of software

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Isaac Asimov was one of the science fiction authors whose works I avidly consumed when I was in my early adolescence, and though even then I could tell that his writing lacked a certain level of nuance and style, I loved it for its cleverness and its imagination. Standing at the podium at science fiction conventions, expounding on any subject under the sun, he was like a polymath Woody Allen with the neurosis circuits disabled, and his optimistic rationalism — even in the 1970s, an era during which optimism was hard to make credible — was infectious. (Read Cory Doctorow’s appreciation of Asimov in Wired for more.)

So I don’t think I’ll be able to bear going to see the new movie “inspired by” his “I, Robot” stories — those inventive chestnuts about what happens when robots programmed with “the three laws of robotics” tangle with the chaos of human affairs. (Chris Suellentrop in Slate offers an overview of how the movie betrays Asimov that makes me feel my decision is completely logical.) But I was glad to read this editorial in the Sunday New York Times, which thoughtfully nailed exactly what made these stories such fun:

  Each of the stories in “I, Robot” works out a problem in the application of these laws, usually caused by an unforeseen implication or contradiction. Asimov’s robots are perfectly logical, and therefore all the real problems are caused by humans, who are shockingly unaware of the way their intentions and emotions run counter to logic. What look like manufacturing flaws in the robots nearly always turn out to be faults in the way a command was articulated. Humans, it turns out, are mainly good at bossing other humans around. Our computers remind us of this every day.

The “I, Robot” stories, in other words, are exercises in logical debugging that happen to take the form of miniature mysteries.

Saying “the real problems are caused by humans” is, of course, awfully close to saying, “It’s the user’s fault!” — an excuse that conscientious software developers and designers shun. Yet, as I dig deeper into work on my book about software, I’m learning a lot more about exactly how hard it is to make the absolute logic of computing serve the messy ambiguities of human desire, when all the pressure of the undertaking is to make things work the other way — to force us human beings to conform to the rigorous precision of machines. Asimov’s wonderful stories pre-imagined this dilemma for us. Maybe someday he’ll find a filmmaker who can do his particular imagination justice.

Even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked

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Two decades ago I had the odd and daunting experience of defending my undergraduate thesis, on several of Shakespeare’s plays, before a panel of scholars. While hardly as rigorous as the real orals a PhD thesis is supposed to be subjected to, this encounter was part of what my department at Harvard required for graduation, and I faced it with some trepidation.

When I walked in, I was introduced to William Alfred, the playwright, poet and English professor. I hadn’t studied with Alfred, and had no idea what to expect from the rumpled man. He broke the ice with a simple question: At the start of “King Lear,” Cordelia refuses her royal father’s demand for a profession of love. There’s a foreign phrase that describes her act in legal terms — what is it?

I’m not sure how many layers of my brain I had to dig through to find it, but somehow I retrieved the desired answer, the medieval label for an injury to the royal office: “Lese majeste!” Alfred’s eyes twinkled; my response seemed to satisfy my interrogators’ basic requirement of literacy, and from there, all went swimmingly. (Alfred, a brilliant and generous soul with whom, alas, I only had a handful of further conversations, died in 1999.)

Of all things, this distant recollection popped into my head after I finally caught up with Michael Moore’s much-debated “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Many words have already been flung across the political spectrum about the movie. I will limit my contributions to this one phrase: What Moore has, I think, accomplished, particularly in the movie’s more coherent and better-assembled first half, is an outrageous and highly effective act of lese majeste.

George Bush campaigned as an informal man of the people, and he did not carry a very dignified bearing into the Oval Office. (Remember that strange boil on his face during the Florida recount?) But from 9/11 on, his team of handlers began to weave a cocoon of larger-than-life pomp around him. Partly, it was what the nation wanted; it was also smart political opportunism. It has, to be sure, frayed some since the Iraq war and its attendant scandals. The “Henry V”-style bullhorn at ground zero struck a chord with many Americans; the “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier stunt backfired.

But “Fahrenheit 9/11” methodically dismantles this president’s carefully manicured dignity: It says to the viewer, “Pay attention to the man behind the curtain — he’s smaller than life.” The movie’s most indelible sequences are those that show our president as he really was in the face of the great crisis of 9/11: Not, as we were told by Showtime’s “DC 9/11,” a stirring take-charge commander, but a passive photo-op participant who sat paralyzed for achingly long minutes of “My Pet Goat” rather than take the initiative to say “excuse me” to the class and leave the room.

My colleague Andrew O’Hehir drew a connection between Moore and Dario Fo, the Italian playwright/performer most famous for his assaults on the dignity of the papacy. To be sure, Moore has none of Fo’s skills as a physical clown and only a fraction of his instincts as an entertainer; Fo is an artist, while Moore is chiefly a propagandist. Still, it’s a good comparison: The two men share a willingness — more than that, a ferocious determination — to strip away the niceties of ceremony from powerful men so that we can see their misdeeds.

That refusal of deference is, after you get past all the various problems with “Fahrenheit 9/11” as documentary and as history, what counts. The TV networks (though they thought nothing of rummaging through the details of Bill Clinton’s tawdry sexual escapades) have decided to protect Bush from unflattering images. It falls to Moore to dig up the footage of protesters pelting his inaugural limousine with eggs, and play it for us again.

By the end of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore has flung his own messy indictment at the presidential portrait, and it won’t be easily cleaned up. The filmmaker is deliberately, methodically, overflowingly disrespectful at a moment in our history when there’s far too much respect in the land. When the throne holds an ignorant, incompetent, profligate pretender, lese majeste becomes a patriotic duty.

The real war

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Funny how it goes: John Kerry seizes the spotlight by announcing his running mate, and the Bush administration trots out Tom Ridge to warn us of more terror attacks. This time, the warning comes with more detail: Osama bin Laden himself, it seems, is plotting another attack on the U.S. But President Bush may find that this timely reminder of the original, genuine global terrorist threat backfires. Because every time we hear the name Osama, we should remember whose policies have left the al-Qaida leader at large.

Over the past year, I’ve made a point of repeatedly referring to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a strategic mistake. Put aside issues of morality, of justification for the war, of possible deception by U.S. leaders; just consider the issue on the global chessboard for a moment. The next time you hear someone ask whether the U.S. is safer or not as a result of the Bush administration’s war on Saddam Hussein, you can definitively answer “no.” The evidence can be found in today’s report in the New York Times that bin Laden and company intend to attack the U.S. this year in a plot directed from their hideouts on the Afghan/Pakistani border.

This should hardly come as a surprise. These, after all, are the people who attacked the U.S. on 9/11. In the wake of that attack, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban regime that harbored our enemies. But we never finished the job; we left bin Laden free, we left Mullah Omar free, we let Afghanistan drift back into a state of opium-growing, warlord-dominated semi-anarchy. We chose to invade Iraq instead.

We now know a lot more about all the blindered, blinkered reasons that led the Bush administration to this disastrous mistake. What I’ve never understood, and still don’t understand, is why the rest of the U.S. government, and to some extent the U.S. media, have not furiously and persistently asked the obvious, and still hanging, question: Why didn’t we go full-tilt after bin Laden in spring of 2002?

Would it have caused too many casualties? That didn’t seem to be a deterrent factor when it came to invading Iraq. Hundreds of American soldiers have died, and are still dying, in Iraq; such a tragedy might be more justifiable if we felt, as we cannot now, that the sacrifices had a direct connection to the 9/11 attacks — and to preventing their sequel.

Was it out of deference to our shaky alliance with Pakistan? But what good is that alliance if it does not help us capture our most lethal enemies?

I understand that the mountainous border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan is treacherous terrain. It’s historically isolated. Its tribal inhabitants are suspicious of foreigners. But we didn’t get to choose our opponents; 9/11 chose them for us. What if we had invested some portion of the blood and treasure squandered on the Iraqi adventure on a full-bore campaign to “smoke out” bin Laden and rebuild Afghanistan? How would the “War on Terror” look different today? And would we still be facing these ominous warnings of al-Qaida attacks?

I am not one for conspiracy theories. But when we can’t answer these questions, we’re left to less savory speculations. What is actually happening between the Bush administration and the Pakistani government? (We’ve all now seen the reports that the Bush administration is asking Pakistan to round up “high value targets” during the week of the Democratic convention.) Why has finding bin Laden been so impossible? What could possibly be higher-priority for the U.S. than apprehending those responsible for 9/11?

The supposed “grownups” in the Bush Administration have neither answered these questions nor taken responsibility for their mistakes. Our one chance of ever getting the full story is to vote them out and give their replacements a chance to investigate.

Stop, hey, what’s that sound?

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People are just beginning, it seems, to wake up to the fact that most digital music today doesn’t sound as good as it could. That’s because the most popular compression formats — including both the lingua franca MP3 standard and the standard Apple uses for its ITunes store — are “lossy”: To make the file size smaller, they trade off some loss of information (and therefore sound quality).

This latest round in the discussion seems to have kicked off with a Randall Stross column in the Sunday New York Times, but it dates back at least as far as Andrew Leonard’s early, groundbreaking coverage of the MP3 phenomenon in Salon. Stross points out that Apple’s choice of a good but still “lossy” compression standard for its music store means that — surprise! — you’re really not getting CD quality audio when you pay for your $9.99 album.

Continuing the thread, Tim Bray writes: “I used to think that if you were listening to music on headphones on a bus or train or plane or in a crowd, the MP3 lossage really didn’t matter much. But recently I’ve been listening to the Shure 3C phones, and it’s obvious that we really shouldn’t be ignoring these compression issues; in particular since lossless compression is available right here, right now.”

Well, yes. We have the technology! The problem here is not technical, it’s political, legal, financial.

The odd thing to me is that Stross’s column — which appeared in the Business section, after all — failed to mention the obvious: that the record labels are selling lossy versions of songs online because they still distrust the new medium, even when it is being used legally and when people are paying for their product. They’re more interested in propping up their sagging CD business than in quickly exploiting a new marketplace. So after years of dithering they figure, OK, we’ll sell our wares on the Net — but let’s only provide crippled versions. The crippling applies not only to Apple’s DRM schemes (lord knows whether you’ll still have access to that music, 10 years and three computers from now) but to the 128 kbps bit rate of the songs you buy. It was one thing to accept that tradeoff in 1998 when MP3s were underground, hard disks were smaller and most of the world was on dialup connections. Today, it makes no sense.

I don’t doubt that the DRM and bit-rate compromises were part of the horsetrading Steve Jobs had to engage in to get the record labels in the door in the first place. But it doesn’t make me want to sink my cash into purchases on iTunes. (At EMusic, by contrast — which I still subscribe to despite my hissy fit when they stopped offering unlimited downloads — I pay for music and receive it uncrippled by DRM and in a higher quality, though still not perfect, format.)

The prevalence of cruddy 128 kbps music in the online marketplace demonstrates that the music industry still doesn’t believe in online distribution: It still doesn’t trust us, even when we’re paying for the music.

The real issue for the recording industry has never been loss of profits due to piracy, because no one has ever proven that there is a direct connection between piracy and declining CD sales (in fact, quite the contrary). What the industry fears is loss of control. Individual consumers — like Andrew, who wrote a column about this last week — want to buy their music and then do whatever they want with it: Put it on an iPod, put it in the car, burn new CD mixes, share with friends. It’s what we’ve always done with our music, after all; we just have better tools today.

There are audiophiles out there, of course, who turn up their noses at “CD quality” — which is itself “lossy” compared with higher-quality audio formats. But meanwhile, the vast majority of music lovers who are reasonably content with their CDs aren’t getting their money’s worth when they buy online.

So remember: when you rip your own CDs to MP3, use at least a 160 kbps rate, or higher if you’ve got a big disk, or a “Variable Bit Rate” if your ripper supports that. The added file size is negligible given how cheap storage is today, but your ears will thank you. And the next time you think of buying music from an online store, tell them you won’t settle for anything less.

Main squeeze

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Several weeks ago I wrote about the fun I was having with the open-source Slimserver software for streaming your music collection to any other networked computer. An alert person at SlimDevices, the company that develops the software and also produces the Squeezebox computer-to-stereo bridge, e-mailed me to ask if I wanted to review the product. It took me about 30 seconds to say yes.

The Squeezebox — a small black box about the size of a book, with a bright, readable display — sits at your stereo and pulls in, over your existing Wifi network, any music file or playlist sitting on your computer’s hard drive. The Slimserver software sits on the computer and talks to the device. Mine set up very easily, with only one glitch (the box immediately wanted to upgrade its software, but had trouble getting the upgrade downloaded automatically). If you had the modest skill required to set up a wireless network, you won’t have any trouble getting the Squeezebox running. It may not be for total neophytes, but, in my home at least, it didn’t require full system-administrator chops, either.

Once set up, the Squeezebox instantly transformed my music-listening life: suddenly, all the music I’d been listening to on mediocre computer speakers, or on my Ipod, was available at the click of a remote on the much more pleasing living-room stereo that had fallen into digital-music-age disuse. (It probably helps that my kids are finally past the maximum-childproofing-level stage and so I’ve recently removed the extra door from the stereo system cabinet!) I loved it so much, I bought my review copy.

This week Walt Mossberg reviewed another product from a company named Roku that seems to do pretty much what the Squeezebox does. I haven’t used it, and it may be really good (Walt didn’t like how it handled the security on his wireless network), but as far as I can tell, it’s more expensive, it doesn’t have wireless built in and it’s not even quite available yet (ships mid-July, according to the Roku site).

I’m happy with my investment in Squeezebox, not only because it’s changed my music-listening life, but because I know that, if the tumultuous tech business crushes the small company that makes it and orphans the device (it’s been known to happen in the Valley!), there will most likely be a core of enthusiasts who will keep working on upgrades for the software. For consumers buying on the bleeding edge, that’s becoming an important “feature” in its own right.

Of, by and for

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Mitch Kapor, Bart Decrem and Joe Costello have launched an interesting new group blog called ob4 — “Of, By and For” — for musings, discussion and debate about democracy in the aftermath of the Dean campaign. (It also seems to be a sort of prototype testbed for a new edition of the open-source content management system Drupal being developed by CivicSpace Labs — evolving out of the experience behind the DeanSpace software.)

Iraqi sovereignty, meet Vietnamization

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Today’s news accounts of the surprise and clandestine handover of sovereignty in Iraq yesterday — in particular, David Sanger’s excellent New York Times analysis, which dispassionately laid out how tenuous the whole affair was — left me with a depressing sense of deja vu. Sanger quoted Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s comparison of the Iraqi insurgents’ attacks with the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Rumsfeld was arguing that the Iraqis, like the North Vietnamese, are aiming their attacks as much or more at American resolve as at targets in their homeland.

But the Vietnam comparison that is more apt today is the sorry saga of “Vietnamization.” Cast your mind back to the Nixon administration’s desperate efforts, even as its timbers were beginning to splinter on the Watergate iceberg, to extricate American troops from their no-win deployment in Southeast Asia. The “peace with honor” policy involved handing power over to a hand-picked government friendly to U.S. interests but unloved by its own people, and replacing American military forces with native troops, regardless of their combat-readiness or willingness to fight.

Does this movie sound familiar? The echoes of “Vietnamization” in the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy are eerie — and terrifying, because Vietnamization was an utter and total failure, one that everyone involved pretty much knew was inevitable, but that proceeded because it was the only fig leaf handy to cover an embarrassing strategic defeat for the United States. As in Vietnam, so in Iraq: The U.S. military can “win the battle” (as we “won” the Tet offensive), but if the leaders in Washington haven’t identified clear, realistic goals, there is no way to win the war. (Hint: just as “terror” is not an enemy you can target, “freedom” is not a government you can support.)

The Vietnam adventure was cursed because the South Vietnamese government it sought to preserve was corrupt and unpopular. It didn’t matter that the North Vietnamese were Communist despots if enough people in Vietnam perceived them to be nationalists taking on the imperialist U.S. Similarly, in Iraq, it won’t matter that the insurgents are actually murderous Baathist thugs or suicidal Islamic fanatics if enough Iraqis think that they’re nationalists taking on the imperialist U.S.

Handing power over to a weak and compromised interim government seems less a promising strategy than an election-year desperation move. With Americans still dying every day in Iraq, we have no choice — Bush supporters and opponents alike — but to hope and pray that it works. Unfortunately, it seems much more likely that Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney (the latter two of whom had ringside Beltway seats for Vietnamization the first time around) have marched themselves straight into Santayana hell, where they are doomed to repeat the United States’ worst mistakes.