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iPod’s end suggests “end-to-end” model’s limits

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Walt Mossberg recently sang the praises of Apple’s “end-to-end” model that “tightly links hardware, software and Web services.” Apple has certainly found a Midas touch with the iPod; the devices are everywhere.

To me, though, Apple’s weak link has always been hardware. Of course it designs things beautifully; but the quality control has long been…problematic. I’m not merely talking of the spectacular incidents of battery combustion and such; the problem is that lots of basic components — things like keyboards and sockets — often fail. And people who love Apple’s software and hardware designs don’t have the option of buying, say, the Extra-Rugged Edition of the MacBook or the iPod. There’s only one supplier; your choices are limited.

These thoughts are occasioned by the final death of my old first-generation iPod, purchased in 2002. I’ve only given it light usage over the years. But I’d already had to replace the battery twice (Apple’s design assumed such an occasion would never arise). Now, though, the Firewire socket has come slightly loose and the iPod won’t make a connection with the computer at all (it won’t recharge, either, unless you jiggle the cable just so).

Four years is all we can expect from a portable music player, I suppose. I hied me to Apple and invested in a slim new player. But shouldn’t these toys have a label on them that reads “Warning: planned obsolescence”?

Back up a minute

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I live in earthquake country. In 1989 I’d just moved into the first apartment I ever owned instead of rented when Loma Prieta struck, knocking down great chunks of plaster from our walls and instilling in me a healthy respect for the power of faults.

This has also made me religious about data backup, and I have recently been hunting for the best deal in offsite backup. GMail is okay for the occasional file but not spacious enough to be a full solution. There are all sorts of commercial services around, but the pricing tends to get awfully steep once you factor in the size of many years’ archives and lots of music files.

Jungle Disk, an open source front end to Amazon’s S3 service, looks like a pretty good deal, though. (Thanks, Metafilter!) Is anyone using it? I’m going to test-drive it soon and will report on my experience.

Send the Marines

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Tonight President Bush will announce his plans to deploy National Guard troops on the Mexican border to rein in illegal immigration. In times of political difficulty and sinking polls, Bush has always found troop deployments a tonic.

But I’m thinking he’s not going nearly far enough. Consider all the creative ways the Bush administration could pursue its goals with a little help from the uniformed services:

  • For seniors who have been tardy about signing up for a Medicare drug plan, what could be more effective than a GI at the door? It may be that, as Bush has put it, “Deadlines help people understand there’s finality” — but gun barrels are even more persuasive.
  • Schoolkids across the U.S. know that their future depends on how they perform on a growing array of tests that are the Bush-era education system’s hallmark. But if you really want kids to understand a test’s gravity, there’s nothing like the impassive stare of a sergeant at the front of the room.
  • Under the Bush administration the I.R.S.’s army of auditors has focused its efforts on making sure that low-income filers claiming the earned income tax credit aren’t cheating. Surely this enforcement effort would prove even more effective with a little military muscle behind it. Suspect taxpayers could have their returns reviewed in the belly of an Abrams tank. If that’s not sufficient, Vice President Cheney could approve a Geneva Conventions waiver.
  • The Bush team has faced what it views as outrageous delays in obtaining Senate approval for its most conservative judicial nominees. Well, why wait for senators to achieve consensus or compromise? Why not just deploy a Marine battalion to Capitol Hill?
  • Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may or may not be on the verge of indicting Karl Rove. But isn’t this endless Plamegate investigation distracting the government from its important national security mission? To end this threat, all it would take is a 3 a.m. visit from a Special Forces team.

Really, once you get going down the road of martial law, the possibilities are endless.

BONUS LINK: Tom Lehrer’s Send the Marines

Reluctance to give credit

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In the early days of the Web, when we were just getting Salon off the ground, we noted with amused snorts how big media outlets were unwilling to credit anyone doing original work online — they’d prefer, when they bothered to acknowledge a source at all, to use vague attributions like “a Web site” or “on the Web.”

These days Salon gets somewhat more respect. Hey, it’s only been ten years we’ve been doing our independent journalism thing — not long enough to belong to any clubs, assuming we’d even want that, but enough to warrant a named-attribution tip of the hat, some of the time.

The rise of blogs has occasioned another turn of this same wheel. Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo (and new TPMMuckraker spinoff) regularly breaks news on those stories it focused on, notes with amusement today that the New York Times won’t actually credit his site for a scoop about documents relating to bribery in the Dusty Foggo/CIA/Cunningham/Wilkes imbroglio.

The documents simply “appeared on the Internet Tuesday,” the Times story says. Apparently they simply materialized.

This is like writing about the Times’ scoop on NSA spying by writing, “News of the program appeared on paper last month.”

Pentagon-run intelligence will be unaccountable

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The last time the world of U.S. intelligence was in this much disarray, it was the mid-1970s, and the American public was aghast at the sheer volume of revelations of dirty tricks, domestic surveillance and abuse of power that culminated in the nightmare crimes of the Nixon administration. In the wake of those scandals, Congress roused itself from its torpor and created a structure for oversight of intelligence. Never again would an arrogant, secretive administration be able to smuggle political reprisals and personal vendettas under a catchall “national security” umbrella.

Whoops. So 30 years later we have a parallel crisis — only this time around, the need for an effectively functioning national intelligence operation is only greater, given 9/11 and the continued possibility of attacks on U.S. citizens, yet the executive and legislative will to resolve the problem is even weaker.

We know that the CIA gave the Bush administration reasonably good intelligence pre-9/11 that it ignored. We know that in the run-up to the Iraq war the administration cherry-picked reports that supported its war plans and ignored those that didn’t. We know that in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq disaster the administration found it convenient to scapegoat the CIA. And we know that, in the absence of effective congressional oversight — as Republican committee chairmen have hobbled any serious investigations into the political and policy-making roots of these intelligence failures — the Bush administration has so far gotten away with this approach.

The fact that — after the launching of a “global war on terror” — the central pillar of American intelligence has been gutted through a bureaucratic civil war, a personnel implosion and now a bribery scandal hasn’t seemed to worry the Bush team. They never liked a CIA that failed to tell them what they wanted to hear, and they’re happy to let it rot so they can erect a different intelligence structure more compliant to their political agenda.

That seems to be the primary motivation behind the decision by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to place the U.S. military in the CIA’s former role of managing human intelligence and covert operations. Most coverage of this controversy, and the question of the appropriateness of appointing a military officer to run the CIA, has painted the story as a power struggle, in which Rumsfeld is seeking to expand his authority at the expense of the civilian CIA. That may well be the case.

But it seems to me there’s a separate aspect that most of what I’m reading has ignored. Military intelligence isn’t subject to the CIA oversights Congress mandated in the 1970s. Sure, that oversight has been ineffectual in a one-party government. But now the possibility looms of Democrats winning control of one or both houses in November. So the transfer of intelligence operations to the Pentagon looks like a tactical hatch-battening for a Bush administration that’s going to be increasingly desperate about hiding the extent of its extra-constitutional behavior.

MORE from Sidney Blumenthal. Thomas Powers’ perspective here in a New York Times op-ed, as always, is invaluable:

  What finally humbled and gutted the C.I.A. after decades of Washington bureaucratic infighting was a loss of support where it counted most: the refusal of the Bush White House to accept responsibility for the two great “intelligence failures” that prompted Congress to reorganize our services…. President Bush might have accepted responsibility for these two failures. He might have followed the example of President John F. Kennedy, who took the blame for the disastrous C.I.A. attempt to put a rebel army ashore in Cuba in 1961. Instead, the administration hid the existence of the pre-9/11 warnings for as long as possible and continued to insist for many months after the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein’s illegal weapons might still turn up, and it has blocked any official investigation of its role in exaggerating the slender intelligence that existed.

In case you missed it: Poniewozik on Colbert

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Amid the swarm of post-Colbert commentary, James Poniewozik’s acute observation on his blog at Time stands out:

  Colbert wasn’t playing to the room, I suspect, but to the wide audience of people who would later watch on the Internet. If anything, he was playing against the room — part of the frisson of his performance was the discomfort he generated in the audience…
What anyone fails to get who said Colbert bombed because he didn’t win over the room is: the room no longer matters. Not the way it used to. The room, which once would have received and filtered the ritual performance for the rest of us, is now just another subject to be dissected online.

This relationship is so over

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Ever wonder why you still get marketing calls even after you’ve signed up for the do-not-call list? There’s a loophole in the privacy law that allows companies that you have a business relationship with to contact you. Makes sense, in theory; customer service sometimes requires that a company be in touch with you.

Leave it to corporate America to drive a battering ram through that reasonable loophole.

Recently I received mail from Prudential Insurance, which used to insure my home until, I don’t know, Prudential ran the numbers and decided they didn’t want to be in the “property and casualty” business any more, so they sold that whole business, including my policy, to somebody else, who sold it to somebody else, who now insures my home. Prudential and I were finished as of November, 2003, and it’s hard to imagine any circumstance under which they might need to contact me. But if something came up that was actually about that policy, I guess they could.

Ahh, though, there’s more happening here: Prudential’s insurers don’t want to insure me any more, but their colleagues in the marketing division, which presumably rakes in millions selling a big list of names — including mine — to other companies, still wish to continue our relationship. In fact, this recent letter assured me, “the relationship you have with Prudential, which was established when the policy was originally written, continues.” And because Prudential and I still have this relationship, Prudential is obligated to send me a privacy notice, so I can, if I choose, opt out of their marketing calls and those of anyone else Prudential feels like sharing my name with.

So, basically, two and a half years ago, Prudential ended our relationship, and told me it didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. Now, after I’ve put the whole thing behind me and moved on, the company says, actually, we’re still having a relationship, and it’s up to me to break it off.

Maybe this amounts to good business, but I think the company really needs to see a therapist. As for me, if I ever hear from them again I think I’ll need to see about getting a protective order.

How OPML got shared

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Dave Winer has launched Share Your OPML, a service that lets you upload a blog subscription list into a pool of shared information, where you can use it in various ways — see what other subscriptions are “like” yours, see who has subscribed to a specific blog, and so on. Bloglines lets you do a little of this from within its sub-universe of blog consumers, but Share Your OPML is more open-ended and agnostic; it also takes a wee bit more savvy to get your subscription file into its system. (OPML is the Web-based outlining format Winer has championed; it’s widely used for structuring the information in blog reading lists or “blogrolls.”)

Colbert’s critics should put away their laugh meters

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Today the agenda for discussing Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is, “Was he, or wasn’t he, funny?”

As any performer knows, humor is intensely subjective; it is brittle, circumstantial; it depends on the moment, what came before, who’s in the room, how much they drank. I wasn’t there in that banquet room. It seems that Antonin Scalia found Colbert’s jokes hilarious; President Bush, along with much of the crowd, apparently did not. Viewing the video after the fact, I happened to find much of it funny. So have millions of downloaders and Bittorrent-ers and Youtube-sters.

But none of that really matters. Evaluating this event on laugh-meter scores is absurd — it’s just one more way of marginalizing and dismissing what actually happened that night. Just for a moment, Colbert brought a heavily sheltered President Bush face to face with the outrage and revulsion that large swathes of the American public feel for him and what he has done to our country. He did so at an event in which a certain level of jovial kidding is sanctioned, but he stepped far beyond. His caricature of a right-wing media toady relied on irony, and irony rarely elicits belly laughs, but at its best, it provokes doubt and incites questions. The ultimate goal of Colbert’s routine was not to make you laugh but to make you think; it aimed not to tickle but to puncture.

In that sense, those observers who have criticized Colbert for being rude to the president are absolutely right. As I wrote yesterday, the performance was a deliberate act of lese majeste. That means it was meant to pop the balloon of protective ritual around Bush and let reality in, so we can see him — along with those in the press who have been complicit with him — for what he is.

Inside the Beltway, humor is supposed to be disarming, “humanizing.” Ever since Richard Nixon appeared on “Laugh-in” and said “Sock it to me!,” suggesting that he was not quite the conservative gorgon that he seemed to be, politicians have wanted to use comedy as a prop in their own campaigns of self-promotion. But that’s a late-20th-century degradation of comedy. There’s an older tradition — stretching back to the commedia dell’arte and beyond, into the medieval court and its “all-licensed” fools — in which the comic seeks the discomfiture of the powerful.

Colbert’s act had less in common with cable-channel comedy shows than with the work of Dario Fo, the Italian iconoclast who specializes in lese majeste (he likes to poke fun at the Pope). In this it resembled Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but it was smarter than that propagandistic montage, and braver — delivered live, as it was, in the belly of the press-corps beast it was skewering.

So now we have the sad spectacle of the media desperately puffing air back into the popped balloon of the president’s dignity, pretending that nothing happened. The Bush impersonator was funnier! cry the pundits. Colbert bombed! Well, they can sneer all they want about whether or not he slayed ’em in D.C. Out here in the reality-based community that increasingly encompasses the American electorate, Colbert hit his targets. And they will never look quite the same.

Stephen Colbert and the Beltway disconnect

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Sunday and Monday the Net was abuzz with word of Stephen Colbert’s bracing, revelatory acts of lese majeste at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Videos were posted. Emails were exchanged. Word spread. This was, or at least felt like, a watershed event, an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of moment.

That, apparently, is not how it seemed from inside the Beltway bubble. Colbert’s highwire irony apparently left the D.C. press corps cold. It didn’t even merit a mention in the New York Times coverage of the event. Colbert “fell flat because he ignored the cardinal rule of Washington humor: Make fun of yourself, not the other guy,” the Washington Post told us. It seemed that a silly routine that President Bush concocted with a Bush impersonator went over better with this crowd.

At Salon we’re well accustomed to this disconnection between the D.C. consensus and the view from beyond the Beltway. We felt it keenly during the mad Monica days, when capital insiders and mainstream media boffins puffed themselves up with outrage at an inconsequential presidential transgression while a significant portion of the rest of the nation sat there thinking, “Get over it — move on, and get back to work on the real problems we face.” Today, this dynamic is inverted: the outrage lies beyond the Beltway, where it’s almost impossible to believe how badly the nation has been run into the ground by the current administration and its allies.

In Washington, it seems, the emperor’s nudity remains a verboten topic, and our leader is to be feted with business-as-usual niceties. Meanwhile, beyond the corridors of power, the clothes vanished a long time ago, the folly is transparent, and we can’t believe the ugliness of the resulting spectacle. Our young people are dying in a war based on a lie, our national leadership reeks of corruption, our economic well-being has been sold out for a mess of tax-break pottage, the global environment is being wrecked for our children, the absence of a smart energy policy has left us powerless in the face of an oil shortage — and we are supposed to be nice?

Maybe the editors and reporters in that banquet room didn’t find Colbert funny. Watching his performance at home, I couldn’t stop laughing.

[Watch Colbert here (Videodog, Youtube 1, 2, 3); read Michael Scherer’s Salon piece; there’s a full transcript over at Kos.]

LATE ADD: Dave Johnson calls the absence of mainstream Colbert coverage an “intentional blackout.” Me, I don’t think it’s coordinated in quite that way; newsrooms independently reach the same (wrong) conclusion about what’s newsworthy — then see their choices reinforced by those of their colleagues at other outlets. Mostly I think they resented Colbert’s jabs at them — and cheered themselves up by telling themselves that he wasn’t really funny.