Xark!

The flu will test who we are

"Flu is a highly political issue, to put it mildly," Terry Jones wrote this morning, and that's what I'm going to talk about -- not the science of it. Because science is only part of what we'll be facing in the coming days.

Whether or not history records April 2009 as the genesis of a global pandemic, there are some things we can expect with near certainty: Rumors, reports, controversy, credibility gaps and fear. So please bear these things in mind and, if you agree with these ideas, help spread them. Because fear is a deadly virus, too, and just as networked media can help spread it, network media can also serve as an immune system response to fear IF WE KEEP OUR HEADS AND WORK TOGETHER.

FOX News: Mission Accomplished

Dan's Friday links, etc. (2.10)

NEWSFLASH! ONE WEEK OF ROCKETBOOM ADS SELLS FOR $40K ON eBAY: And the winning advertiser is someone named Starfinder5, whose bid bested a $31,200 offer by an unknown eBay nube called 6520brad. There were 105 bids.

We'll expect detail in today's episode, but for those of us wondering how these new media forms are going to shake out, this bears watching.

RANDOM FIND: I have found the Greatest Book Critic Writing in The English Language Today, and his name is Noel Hurley.

WHICH VIBRATOR IS RIGHT FOR YOU? Via Alternet: "Kat's on-the-job training had taught her a trick to determine which vibrator might be right for you: Touch it to the tip of your nose. It's also right there on Sue Johanson's website, episode #036: Try the nose test -- if it makes you jerk your head back, these vibration are too strong for your genitals." (Freelance writer Liz Langley)

AFRICA TOO WEAK TO FIGHT H5N1 (BBC): A reminder that bird flu doesn't have to turn into a human pandemic to have profound effects:

Officials at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) say Africa's monitoring systems simply are not adequate to cope effectively with outbreaks... "The reason we've been so concerned is that veterinary systems throughout Africa are weak," said Samuel Jutzi, director of the FAO's Animal Production and Health Division.

WE'RE NOT THE ONLY ONES TALKING ABOUT CARTOONS: Via Steve Outing's E-Media Tidbits (Poynter Online), the CEO of Topix.net blogs about what happens when they put a geo-locator on the IP addresses of commenters on the Danish cartoons controversy. Answer: They're coming from around the world.

And here's George Friedman writing in Tuesday's Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report:

The explosion in the Muslim world over the publication of 12 cartoons by a minor Danish newspaper -- cartoons that first appeared back in September -- has, remarkably, redefined the geopolitical matrix of the U.S.-jihadist war. Or, to be more precise, it has set in motion something that appears to be redefining that matrix. We do not mean here simply a clash of civilizations, although that is undoubtedly part of it. Rather, we mean that alignments within the Islamic world and within the West appear to be in flux in some very important ways.

SPEAKING OF CARTOONS: These days its not uncommon for more than half of our daily traffic to be people who come to Xark via image search engines. The most popular image? World's Ugliest Dog. Second most popular? "Growing Up Hippie No. 4." Probably a dozen people a day download this image.

For the record, there are actually only three published cartoons in the "Growing Up Hippie in the 1970s" series (No. 5 here). And the first one was No. 3. I never drew a No. 1 or a No. 2. Why? Because I'm just not hung up on that whole consecutive order thing. I grew up hippie, remember? Anyway, traffic counts seem to suggest I should write less and draw more, particularly if I'm drawing cartoons that have popular image search terms in the filename.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: WaPo reports that what Gonzales told the Senate about the secret eavesdropping program ain't what the White House told the FISA judges. Can't say I'm surprised at this point. By the way, was anyone else unimpressed by Bush's non-informative claim (well, actually, it's not even that -- more of a nudge-wink inference) that his illegal spying program somehow thwarted shoe-bombers from stealing a plane and flying it into some building out in Los Angeles? Excuse me, but how do you hijack a plane, post-9/11, with a shoe bomb? "OK, let me into the cockpit, so I can crash the plane and kill all of you, or I will make my shoe explode, and maybe put somebody's eye out. Allah akbah!" It's just not very convincing.

WELL, DUH: Newsflash (National Journal): "Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been 'authorized' by Cheney and other White House 'superiors' in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records."

CHUCK NORRIS: The whole Chuck Norris meme is now officially dead, according to our oldest son, a junior in high school. Apparently it's just soooo December 2005. So throw out your Bustedtees "Hero" shirts and try to keep up. (Actually, I don't care -- I'm far too old to be hip, and I still think the "Young Chuck Norris" music video is pretty funny).

Dan's Wednesday links, etc. (2.1)

STATE OF THE ONION: Did you watch Bush last night? We didn't -- went out and supported the US economy by purchasing a sofa instead. For coverage of the event, I turned, as always, to America's No. 1 weekly news source: My ass.

Just kidding. I pulled up The Onion and read its lead story:  "President Creates Cabinet Level Position to Coordinate Scandals."

"Tonight, by executive order, I am creating a permanent department with a vital mission: to ensure that the political scandals, underhanded dealings, and outright criminal activities of this administration are handled in a professional and orderly fashion," Bush said.

The centerpiece of Bush's plan is the Department Of Corruption, Bribery, And Incompetence, which will centralize duties now dispersed throughout the entire D.C.-area political establishment.

THE STATE OF THE UNION IS AWFUL: I almost wrote about this over the weekend, but restrained myself. You can see how long that lasted. Here it is, short version: I can't remember a moment in my adult life in which the fundamental foundations of our Republic and the world at large were this compromised and unstable. Will 2006 be worse than 2005, which wasn't exactly a stroll in the park? Damned if I know. What do I look like, a psychic?  All I'm saying is that multiple conditions favor outcomes that could be really crappy.

YOU GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY: The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great group that's soon to become as maligned as the ACLU, has sued AT&T for assisting the NSA with its warrantless domestic spying program (via Slashdot).

H5N1 REACHES IRAQ: And not just bird deaths, either. The WHO confirmed Monday that a teenage Iraqi girl died of the disease on Jan. 17. Remember that thing I just said about how conditions right now favor some really crappy outcomes in 2006? Uh ... this would be one of them. BTW: The big media hasn't really sorted out the importance of this: It's not even mentioned on homepages of the WaPo or NYT sites at this hour (although the NYT is promoting a story about China's spotty response to the disease).

BLOGS ON BUSH: Liberal David Corn: a "comic-book defense of the war in Iraq." Words of the night? "Retreat" and "isolationism." Corn: "Did a new memo come in from the pollsters?" Smug A-List conservative Glenn Reynolds: "The delivery was, for Bush, good, and the substance was mostly good, too, though the cloning-ban stuff didn't thrill me. The Presidential Commission on entitlement reform was also very lame, though realistically it's probably all he can do." Military-themed conservative Austin Bay: "The 'terrorist surveillance program' is the correct way to phrase it." (Editor's note: Yes, it's the correct phrase if you're intent on helping people miss the point). Liberal kos (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga): "Nowhere near as good or powerful as last year's (which I thought was his best speech ever). This was, frankly, more of the same ol'." And Wonkette: "Seriously, shouldn’t the Democratic Response have been Governor Kaine just saying, 'WTF, Mr. President?'”

A great idea from pioneer Chris Lydon: Blogs of the Union.

LUNCH-HOUR UPDATE: From this afternoon's Blogometer, which focused on the SOTU: "We'll get into issue-by-issue critiques of the speech below, but it's worth mentioning here that conservatives were anything but enthusiastic about the speech." Democrat Senator Nancy Pelosi's headline at The Stakeholder: "It Was a Nice Break from Reality TV." And there's this from War Liberal: "Did he really call for a ban on 'human-animal hybrids'? Is this a real concern? Are we at war with the Lobster People again?"

Dan's Wednesday links, etc.

Dan here, reporting back after my first excursion into the land of Snake Oil Suitmen (by this I mean that I just gave my first PowerPoint presentations in front of groups yesterday). I did wear a black jacket, black slacks, pointy shoes and a white collared shirt, but you'll be happy to know that I eschewed the tie. I wear a lanyard with an I.D. on it, and  I figure that if you want me to wear that at the office, it should take the place of a tie. Deal with it.

My presentation: Trends on the web and what we intend to do about them. My favorite question from yesterday's sessions: "Where did you learn to use PowerPoint?"

Anyway, I've been so deep into work-think lately that it has rendered me dull, for which I apologize. As a peace offering, here's something obscure yet really cool (via Slashdot): Researchers at the University of Rochester have created a model of phase change in liquids (U of Rochester photo, researchers Eldred Chimowitz and Yonathan Shapir).

Dull, you say? Not hardly.

Phase change is one of the most underappreciated processes in the physical world. It's what happens when water turns to ice or vapor, and vice-versa. In other words, phase change is what happens when a changing variable stops making a thing more that way (hotter, colder, faster, slower, etc.) and causes it to assume a radically different state.

That sudden change of state -- the "light switch effect" -- is an issue in research into everything from fuel cell technology to global climate change. But because the complexity of the change is so enormous, computers have been unable to model what goes on within a system (or, in this case, a liquid) during the transition. In other words, the thing that is the most value to researchers has been the one part of the event that has remained invisible. Until now.

What does this mean for ordinary schlubs like us? That everything just speeded up, again. Duh.

PAT ROBERTSON, CRAZY PERSON: Perhaps the most amazing trait in American culture is our tendency to reward certifiable looniness with celebrity and status, so long as it's backed by inherited money, good looks or claims to Biblical authority.

Which brings us back to our old friend Pat Robertson, last seen here warning Dover, Pa., that God was going to make residents pay for turning out its loony, dishonest, "Intelligent Design" school board. Now Israel is punishing him for calling Ariel Sharon's stroke an act of divine retribution. Pat, who didn't like that Sharon was willing to deal land with the Palestinians, declared last week that "You read the Bible: This is my land, and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he's going to carve it up and give it away, God says no, this is mine."

His punishment: The Israeli government pulled out of a $50 million deal with Robertson that would have allowed the Virginia Beach televangelist to build a  Christian theme park near the Mount of Beatitudes, the site where Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount, fed the multitudes, etc. Robertson and his partners had planned to call the facility The Galilee World Heritage Park.

Israeli officials went on to say they still like the idea of a Christian theme park as a tourist draw: "The contract is still open," said Tourism Ministry spokesman Ido Hurtuv, "but not to Mr. Robertson."

Better watch out, Mr. Hurtuv, or Pat's gonna slap a fatwah on yer ass!

Anyway, regarding the Galilee World Heritage Park: What Would Jesus Build?

MORE NEWSPAPER LAYOFFS AHEAD -- AND GANNETT TO BUY OUT KNIGHT-RIDDER? Maybe so, points out smart guy Tim Porter. That's pretty awful, but not nearly as alarming as speculation that FOX News owner Rupert Murdoch is scheming to buy up The Wall Street Journal (read this in the past week, but can't find the link... file it under scary thoughts, not solid info).

Meanwhile, Slashdot noted this bit about how Murdoch's minion's were thwarted in their attempts to block out every mention of their rivals by users of MySpace, which Murdoch purchased this past summer. In a refreshing bit of news, the MySpace users revolted -- and won (for now).

IRONY ALERT -- BIRD FLU STRIKES TURKEY: This isn't time to panic (let's face it, it's never time to panic), but it's time to start paying attention again. The number of human cases of H5N1 in Turkey are surprising and worth monitoring, and that's about all I'm willing to say right now beyond this: I've moved Effect Measure back up to a daily read again. The Reveres have had some interesting things to say in the past week.

Warning: Contains ranting, raving and possible spittle

I'm trying to read the news this morning, admittedly after a rough night where I slept little and worried alot about the usuals: money, work, money.  It's making me so cranky, I have to share.

MSM sucks. The newspapers. The online news aggregators. They are reactive,  superficial, meme-distributing, lazy, pompous, water-carriers for the normative.  Here's a clue, reporter/editor/smartass columnist: YOU ARE NOT MY DADDY. I don't need you to make me feel better or pat me on the head or interpret the news for me.  How about some facts? A little research? How about some quotes from something besides the same press releases that every media outlet in the country got? How about not letting sources feed you the same bullshit that you then spew all over my news like it came down from the heavens? Look, dude, I can access documents, definitions, medical abstracts, subject histories, alternative viewpoints and anything else myself, all while not wearing pants ... What are you offering me?

There are some journalists who are actually looking a little deeper, being a little thoughtful in their presentation of the facts and I want to commend them for holding firm against the tide of "don't research, repeat!" hacks.

Two  cases in point and then I will foam elsewhere...

H5N1: Move along, nothing to see here

The problem reporters and editors have with H5N1 is that they simply don't have a functional template for reporting on a true global pandemic.

SARS and West Nile had novelty going for them. Smallpox? Our own government happily hyped that scare, pushing coverage that left voices of moderation well outside the mainstream.

But H5N1 is just "bird flu." Influenza. Hell, we've all had the flu. What's the big deal?

The result is tepid coverage that, in the past week, has focused primarily on downplaying the risk ... and casting the mainstream press in the paternal role of sober, unflappable truth-teller. Today's example: A web-exclusive Newsweek article by Rob Nordland ("The Sky's Not Falling... Yet").

Why a pandemic will kill newspapers

I've written a front-page story on bird flu, plus a splashy Health/Science section on how to prepare your business and family for the coming crisis, but every couple of weeks someone will say to me: "You write about science -- you should do a story on this bird flu thing. Have you heard of it?"

Well, yeah...

It's not much better around the newsroom. I've had at least three people speak  to me about Avian Flu as if: 1. I've never covered H5N1; 2. We've never published anything about it; and 3. They think they're giving me a hot tip. And this is from people in the information business, people who are supposed to read the paper as part of their job.

Which brings me to a couple of conclusions:

Dan's Tuesday links, etc.

I've been out of my usual morning routine of bookmarks and aggregator runs thanks to a number of variables: A bunch of deadline work, the start of football season, a cold (which I'm still not over), etc. But it's time to get back in the saddle.

The funny thing is, so little has changed:

In Washington, the big story seems to be much nattering and grommishing regarding the appointment of Karl Rove to oversee the Katrina response. On the Left: This is an outrage! On the Right: The people on the left are all fags! And at TPM Cafe, a wise observation: This is all a distraction.

From what? Well, we have a president who calls for $200 billion in federal spending for Katrina recovery, and then he says -- in front of God and everybody -- that we'll pay for this by cutting the budget. This is something akin to driving home in a small-penis-compensating $120,000 Hummer  H-2 and announcing to the family that you're going to make the payments by switching to generic-brand breakfast cereal and cutting out grandma's medicine.

As the blog Bad Attitudes puts it: "We take on an optional war in Iraq, and it is fine to put that on a credit card for the past three years and for years to come; but the minute we need to launch a two-year rebuild of a major region of the United States, we have to find budget offsets such as delaying/gutting the new Medicare drug benefit?"

Meanwhile, The Heritage Foundation moves ahead with its gameplan for the post-Katrina recovery: Waive environmental environmental regulations, eliminate the capital gains tax, let private investors buy up public school buildings in the disaster area and exempt heirs with a net worth of $1.5 million from having to pay estate tax.

And as for that $200 billion (which, despite conservative claims of getting it out of "waste, fraud and abuse,"  is going to  be borrowed from our children), it's a pretty safe bet who is going to wind up with the lion's share: The same people who got the bulk of the money we've wasted on Iraq.

Look folks, politicians remember their friends. It's just what politicians do, for crying out loud, and this bunch happens to be a bit more eggregious than most. As Molly Ivins wrote: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention."

Speaking of Texas, Janet and I went to bed last night with about six minutes to go in the Washington Redskins at Dallas Cowboys game. Dallas was up 13-0, and even though Washington QB Mark Brunnell had just turned 2nd-and-forever into a 3rd and 3 with a nice scramble, I'd had about enough. The Redskins were losing, and I was pleased.

Never do this.

I wake up this morning and find out the Redskins scored twice in the final four minutes and took the game 14-13. To salt the wound, both touchdowns went to WR Santana Moss, a player I'd been disrespecting out loud to Janet all night.

WHY I HATE THE REDSKINS: There are many reasons, not the the least of which being that if you grew up in North Carolina, like I did, everybody was a damned Redskins fan. But here's a reason that's worth talking about: THEIR NAME.

Every disgruntled white man in America got a chance to get-his-grouch-on earlier this year when the NCAA nixed Native American mascot names. It was as if every single white American male felt he had just discovered, independently, that there were some Native American team names that honored their inspirations: Seminoles, Illini, Utes, etc. And each one felt the urge to share this insight, simultaneously, on talk radio.

They were right, of course. The NCAA, collectively, has the brains of a blow fish. However, the talk radio outrage generally overlooked a clause in the NCAA ruling that will ultimately allow teams like Florida State to keep their mascots because, upon further review, there isn't anything overtly racist about them.

But is there anyone, ANYONE, in America who wants to argue that the name "Redskins" isn't overtly racist? If so, here's my message to them: SHUT UP.

A modest proposal: The Washington football franchise should announce, today, that it has changed its name to the Washington Warriors and chosen to revert to their "throwback" team logo: a spear with feathers on it.

Grouchy white men will bitch, but that's what grouchy white men do.

What have we learned? Last week I asked a public health official what, if anything, we have learned from the disaster in the Gulf. His reply: The people now understand that the government doesn't listen to the experts and just goes around doing whatever it wanted to do in the first place. He's hopeful that this will make people skeptical when the government says that it has a working plan in place for an H5N1 pandemic.

I remain skeptical. Never underestimate the ability of the American people to underestimate.

And what does it all mean? Like I would know. But here's what it means if you're in the White House: Your poll numbers are in the toilet, Mr. President.

"Bush stands at a precipice," says Carroll Doherty of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. "He's lost ground among independents. He seems to be starting to lose ground among his own party. And he lost the Democrats a long time ago."

Dan's Monday links, etc.

Tamiflu: Why is it that the best coverage of the H5N1 story seems to come out of Canada? Anyway, here's a headline we've been waiting for: "Sales of flu drug soar amid pandemic worries."

TORONTO  — North American sales of the drug oseltamivir have more than tripled in recent months, a trend public health experts see as evidence individuals are stockpiling the once little-used antiviral as a hedge against a possible flu pandemic. With similar reports emerging in other countries as well, a leading advocate for pandemic preparedness is concerned public demand could soon outstrip the limited global supply.

"We are on a collision course to panic," warns Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "I think that what's going to happen is . . . that this drug - which has yet to really be demonstrated to have any clinical impact on H5N1 infection - is now going to become the 'I can't get product, therefore I must have it right away product.' The reality is going to come through that there is only so much available."

(Obviously, we've been looking at this all wrong. H5N1 isn't a crisis -- it's a global investment opportunity!)

PressThink TrainWreck? Jay Rosen's interesting attempt at a joint-blog exchange with Austin Bay turned into an enormous, four-day, 168-comment Culture War ruckus. The original exchange between Bay and Rosen was moderately interesting, but the real story was what happened in PressThink's comments. A bunch of Bay's conservative readers just -- for lack of a better word -- invaded Rosen's blog, launching a stunning display of aggressive "shock and awe" partisan absurdity.

This afternoon, Jay pulled the plug:

"I'm embarrassed that this thread appeared at my weblog. I'm embarrassed that something I wrote and edited was the occasion for it. I embarrassed that the letters "edu" appear in the Web address at the top of this page, since most of this is the opposite of education. I'm embarrassed for having entertained, even for a second, the notion that Austin Bay, a Bush supporter and war veteran, might get a hearing for some of his warnings from those who agree with him on most things.

"And I've had enough of anonymous tough guys with their victim's mentality raging at their own abstractions..."

(Jay doesn't need to be embarrassed for trying something new, but the tone of the exchange is a good example of the unreasoning hatred of the press and "the liberals" -- typically expressed by anonymous men with macho-sounding handles like "Captain Wrath" -- that thrives in corners of the web. BTW, Weldon Berger pretty much put the coda on the whole argument, not that anyone seemed to notice or understand. Still, I believe in my bones that bad behavior like this has a karmic cost, and that the Right is running up a serious bill these days.)

Speaking of war: Make sure to check out Operation Yellow Elephant. ("It's their war. Why aren't they fighting it?")

Intelligent Design and Pastafarianism: From Radosh...

"While I won't deny that the intelligent design proponents are clever, I realize there's one really basic question I've never even seen them try to answer. Since ID is basically just a spiffed-up version of the argument from design, why isn't it vulnerable to the same counter-arguments? ID says that if something is irreducibly complex, the only rational explanation is that it was designed. So the question is, can a thing be designed by something less complex than itself? ID is careful to say that we can't know anything about the designer, but as a matter of simple logic we can know the following: either the designer is or is not irreducibly complex. If it is (the obvious choice), then by ID's own premise it must have been intentionally designed. And that designer too must have been designed. It's turtles all the way down."

Red Rover: Rose Aguilar is in Liberal, Kansas. I can't begin to describe how much I like the spirit of what this woman is doing.

Meanwhile: Today is a big day in my journalism career. I'm writing my first-ever fashion story... on women's "Daywear." I didn't even know there was such a thing this morning, but now I know that word for this fall is "separates, separates, separates!"