My review of the new Paul Krugman collection is up today.
Upcoming events
I’ll be out and about over the next few weeks:
On Thursday, Sept. 11 (!), I’m talking on a panel at Seybold on the effects of blogging on the publishing industry. It’s at 4:30 p.m. at the Moscone Center.
On Sunday, Sept. 14, I am again getting on stage with my friend Josh Kornbluth, whose wonderfully funny and moving show, “Love and Taxes,” is now playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Every Sunday during the run of his show Josh has hosted these free conversations about tax policy. (At Berkeley Rep I believe the events are free to anyone who has a ticket stub from any performance of the show.) The last one I did, back in July at the Magic Theatre, with Leo Martinez of the Hastings College of Law, was extremely interesting. Josh’s new brainstorm is to start a movement — relating to his show’s insight that the taxes we pay actually support things that we need — under the banner “I. R. Us!” He’s even selling buttons.
On Saturday, Oct. 4, I’ll be part of a panel at BloggerCon, at Harvard Law School, along with Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds and Ed Cone, talking about blogging and journalism.
The morning after the eve of destruction
This end-of-summer pause, as the headlines fly about the latest bombing attack in Iraq, is an appropriate occasion to revisit my “Eve of Destruction” post, which occasioned so much comment back in March. In particular, I look back at my summary of Thomas Powers’ prescient prediction of the likely course of events following from a U.S. invasion of Iraq: “…a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes.”
So here we are. The daily death of American soldiers has now become so commonplace it does not merit much coverage. The postwar period has now cost more lives than the active war. I trust that the reader who mocked my use of the phrase “sitting ducks” is now reconsidering his tone; what other phrase makes sense? Iraqi democracy does not seem in the offing in the short or medium term. We are incapable of protecting moderate Iraqis from extremists; we are incapable of protecting our own troops from random assault. Major bombings, like that of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad or today’s atrocity at the Najaf mosque, are on the rise.
Is it more money that we need? Since the Bush administration has made cutting taxes its top priority, it refuses even to admit that any Iraq-related expenses should be included in its budget forecasts. Is it more troops that we need?
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld insist that that’s not the problem. We should just sit tight and let them handle it. They Have A Plan. I guess they’re just not sharing it with us. Or with our allies. Or with the Iraqis.
There’s a limited set of possibilities here: Either the government has no strategy at all; or it has one that is not working; or it has one that is so devious or immoral or inexplicable that it cannot reveal it to its own citizens.
There is a monstrous credibility gap here — yes, the phrase is from the Vietnam era, the last time the U.S. government undertook to justify a chronically deteriorating military situation by making increasingly incredible statements. It took years for the press and the public to cotton to the credibility gap then; this time around, we ought to be a little more savvy.
Getting creative with RCS
“Filchyboy” has just concluded a kind of performance art on the rcs.salon.com server, sending its “updates” page a series of URLs and linkwords that form a poem. Each line links to a page on his server.
If you find this interesting, check it out now — this is like Zen sand art, it’ll disappear as other people update their blogs and send the poem down the page… The poem doesn’t do that much for me, but it’s a neat little trick, and I have always admired the Brian Eno approach of using technology in ways that were not intended or imagined by its inventors.
Unclear on the concept
One of the motivating notions of the blogging movement is the idea that blogs put individuals — including business executives — directly in touch with one another, bypassing layers of middle-people. That’s the idea, anyway. Or you can hire a PR person to send email to bloggers saying that you “read their blogs regularly” and “wonder if they’d be open” to you “posting an opinion.”
Both Mitch Kapor of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe — along with who knows how many other bloggers (not me, though!) — were recently on the receiving end of such an email. Clueless PR efforts are an ineradicable fact of life, and pointing out that said executive would have served himself far more effectively by popping these bloggers a quick email of his own — or posting comments on their sites himself — isn’t going to change the entrenched business practice of “have my secretary/PR person/other flunky do it for me.”
What’s most amusing about this incident is that Kapor, in a gentlemanly way, hid the identity of both the executive and the PR firm in question — but others in the comments to his post took key phrases from the PR letter and used Google to nail down exactly who exec in question seems to be.
Big Red
Every now and then, very rarely, we encounter a story that is simply all good news. Such was this bit from yesterday’s New York Times, reporting on a paper that is supposed to be online in Nature (but I couldn’t find it just now). The online headline — “Study Spurs Hope of Finding Way to Increase Human Life” — lacks the critical piece of information that readers of the paper newspaper were treated to in the sub-headline: “Chemical Found in Wine May Hold the Key.”
Not just wine — red wine. The chemical, resveratrol, is found in higher quantities in pinot noir than in cabernet sauvignon (Burgundy devotees can rejoice), and grapes grown in more “difficult” circumstances — colder, more trying climates — seem to have more of it than grapes that had an easier time of it.
This news, of course, fits in with other research on the so-called “French Paradox” (low rates of coronary heart disease in European and Mediterranean cultures whose cuisine isn’t necessarily low fat or low cholesterol). It is also simply cause for celebration for those of us who like our glass or two of wine with dinner. In vino, veritas — and extra years, too.
Spam deconstruction contest
This is cool: Mark Hoback of Fried Green Al-Qaedas is sponsoring a “Spam Deconstruction Contest” — and the judge is none other than Bill Griffith, the amazing creator of Zippy the Pinhead. (If there is a character anywhere well-suited to the appreciation of the finer points of spam, it would be Zippy.) Entries are due Aug. 26. Full info here. Prizes, too.
When I went to work for the old San Francisco Examiner back in 1986, I worried a bit about the prospect of connecting my career with a Hearst paper. What helped sell me on the Examiner was that it ran Zippy every day — at that time (and perhaps still?) a rarity among U.S. dailies.
Outlook is bleak
Where do you want to go today? Anywhere but Outlook!
I got back last night from a two-day vacation to over 2000 emails in my inbox. Over 1300 were spams correctly tagged as such by our server’s Spam Assassin. Of the remaining mail, several hundred were” real” messages, and another several hundred were debris resulting from the latest round of Outlook viruses.
The good news is that that debris is coming to me as the result of *other* people’s being infected by the virus and trying to send mail forged under one of my (or Salon’s) addresses. I get the bouncebacks because of that forgery. But I don’t worry about being infected myself because (a) of course I never click on spam attachments — most spam never gets opened or even seen; and (b) I don’t ever go near Microsoft e-mail software.
Outlook is a joke. No sane computer user today should use it. If your company makes you use it, go to your CEO and explain how much time and money his company is losing by using it. I use Eudora; there are several other good non-Microsoft products depending on what platform you’re on. Both Mozilla and the Open Source Applications Foundation are developing or already offer free e-mail clients as well.
Kevin Werbach writes, “Either email is broken, Microsoft’s email software is broken, or those two statements are the same.” I don’t believe they’re the same at all. Microsoft email is broken, and it’s time for people to wake up and move on.
Blaster on stun
Done patching your Windows system against the Blaster worm? Then you’ll have the time to read this piece from CSO Online: “Patch and Pray.” It uses the saga of the Microsoft SQL Server “Slammer” worm from last winter to explore why and how the whole patching process has gone astray.
| As the volume and complexity of software increases, so does the volume and complexity of patches. The problem with this, says SEI’s Hernan, is that there’s nothing standard about the patch infrastructure or managing the onslaught of patches…
There are two emerging and opposite patch philosophies: Either patch more, or patch less. Vendors in the Patch More school have, almost overnight, created an entirely new class of software called patch management software. The term means different things to different people (already one vendor has concocted a spinoff, “virtual patch management”), but in general, PM automates the process of finding, downloading and applying patches. Patch More adherents believe patching isn’t the problem, but that manual patching is…. The Patch Less constituency is best represented by Peter Tippett, vice chairman and CTO of TruSecure. Tippett is fanatical about patching’s failure. Based on 12 years of actuarial data, he says that only about 2 percent of vulnerabilities result in attacks. Therefore, most patches aren’t worth applying. In risk management terms, they’re at best superfluous and, at worst, a significant additional risk. |
Oh yes, this is the year after Bill Gates declared the crash “Trustworthy Computing” initative.
Deficit Attention Disorder
We’re still waiting for that Great Golden Recovery in the Sky that the Republicans have promised ever since they passed their first tax cut in 2001. Taxes were cut but the economy kept tanking, so they decided to cut taxes again: They’re thinking, “Hey, if it didn’t work once, maybe it will work the second time around. And if it doesn’t, well, in the meantime at least our campaign contributors have a lot more money in their pockets to give us!”
So the tea leaves keep circling in the bottom of the glass, and the prognosticators keep seeing those signs of a turnaround, and in the meantime, George Bush has earned the distinction of having the worst record on jobs of any president since Herbert Hoover. That should give the Democrats some sort of ammunition, if they can un-dampen their powder.
For a look at how the Republicans plan to position the president’s defense, consider this paragraph from today’s Wall Street Journal (the piece is by Greg Hitt):
| Even if the administration’s expectations don’t hold, the prresident’s political allies suggest that voters — mindful of the challenges he has faced while in office — will give him credit for trying to fix the economy. “He might have an uncertain economy, but nobody’s going to be able to legitimately lower the boom on him for lack of attention on the issue,” said Rich Bond, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. |
The context here seems to be political analysts’ view that Bush the elder lost the 1992 election because voters felt that he’d “lost touch” with their economic troubles and hadn’t “paid attention” to their hardships. That may be. But this “pay attention” theory really underestimates the average voter’s expectations.
“Paying attention” to a recession and unemployment doesn’t get you many points if you’re president of the United States. It sort of comes with the job, like the Oval Office. It’s a prerequisite, not extra credit. The credit comes not with giving “attention” to the economy but with making good choices that help the economy recover and people find jobs. Bush supporters like to say that he inherited a downturn — during the 2000 election cycle they took great pains to say that the recession had already begun during Clinton’s term — and they’re right. But if we consider this downturn to have begun in 2000 that means the Bush folks have had nearly three years to turn things around, and they haven’t.
If things do improve between now and Election Day, Bush may be able to rest easier, but if they don’t, or don’t much, I don’t think the public will give him a B for trying. I think they will be mad, and rightly so. “Paying attention” doesn’t help if the things you do after you’ve paid attention make matters worse, not better.