The first episode of the classic first person shooter game can be played via browser. The old game software won’t run on the operating systems we use today.

link
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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

It’s sad that we had to lose this year, but conservatives and Republicans can console themselves with Barack Obama’s unhappy prospects based upon the irreconcilable dilemma facing his presidency.

If he takes a thoroughly “progressive” course, agreeable to the democrat party’s leftwing base, he will assuredly produce economic calamity domestically and US humiliation in foreign affairs à la Carter, and he will then have a snowball’s chance in Hell of being re-elected.

On the other hand, if he tacks to the center, he will bitterly disappoint that extremist and highly volatile leftist base, which will turn upon him like the Furies, ultimately over time bringing into active and hostile opposition both the media and the community of fashion. In that case, like Lyndon Johnson, he will become a discredited, failed, and reviled president, unable to defeat primary challenges from the left, and not even able to run for a second term.

Will it be Door 1 or Door 2, President Obama?

As the Telegraph reports, his appointments of supporters of the war in Iraq signal a centrist direction, and the natives at Daily Kos are already becoming restless.

Mr Obama has moved quickly in the last 48 hours to get his cabinet team in place, unveiling a raft of heavyweight appointments, in addition to Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.

But his preference for General James Jones, a former Nato commander who backed John McCain, as his National Security Adviser and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a supporter of the war, to run the Homeland Security department has dismayed many of his earliest supporters.

The likelihood that Mr Obama will retain George W Bush’s Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has reinforced the notion that he will not aggressively pursue the radical withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq over the next 16 months and engagement with rogue states that he has pledged.

Chris Bowers of the influential OpenLeft.com blog complained: “That is, over all, a centre-right foreign policy team. I feel incredibly frustrated. Progressives are being entirely left out of Obama’s major appointments so far.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos site, the in-house talking shop for the anti-war Left, warned that Democrats risk sounding “tone deaf” to the views of “the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush policies.”

A spokesman for the President-elect was forced to confirm that Mr Obama holds to his previous views. “His position on Iraq has not changed and will not change.”

But the growing disillusionment underlines the fine line Mr Obama must walk between appearing to reach out to former opponents and keeping his grassroot supporters happy.

Obama’s new Attorney General Eric Holder has always supported “reasonable regulation” of firearms. Guess what? As Deputy Attorney General, he also favored “reasonable restrictions… reasonable regulations on how people interact on the Internet.”

0:39 video

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Fox News:

The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD’s, FOX News has learned.

The attack came in the form of a global virus or worm that is spreading rapidly throughout a number of military networks.

“We have detected a global virus for which there has been alerts, and we have seen some of this on our networks,” a Pentagon official told FOX News. “We are now taking steps to mitigate the virus.”

The official could not reveal the source of the attack because that information remains classified.

News.com.au:

The US military has banned the use of flash drives and DVDs on its computers as it tries to combat a virus spreading rapidly through its networks.

The Pentagon ordered an unprecedented ban on all external hardware but refused to comment on the source of the attack, saying such information was classified.

“We have detected a global virus for which there has been alerts, and we have seen some of this on our networks,” a Pentagon official told Fox News.

“We are now taking steps to mitigate the virus.” ...

An email sent to military personnel identified the problem as being caused by a virus called Agent.btz, Wired.com reports.

The virus is a variation of the “SillyFDC” worm, which has been around since about 2005 and spreads by copying itself to flash drives and then replicates onto any computer that device is plugged into.

Agent.btz originated in China, according to ThreatExpert. Spyware Doctor is reported to be capable of eliminating it.

Argues Paul Boutin in Wired:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

If you quit now, you’re in good company. Notorious chatterbox Jason Calacanis made millions from his Weblogs network. But he flat-out retired his own blog in July. “Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it,” he wrote in his final post.

Impersonal is correct: Scroll down Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs and you’ll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can’t keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google’s search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for “Mark” ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama’s latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.

Read the whole thing.
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He seems a bit overly pessimistic to me.

I think election year fatigue can be observed right now, and a lot of Right bloggers are understandably depressed. I’ve found it impossible to get a link from any of the big time blogs for a long time now, and have nearly completely stopped emailing any of them. Still, traffic tends to creep upward slowly. And NYM postings do come up high on Google fairly regularly.

I disagree with Boutin. Innovative and amusing blogging concepts, like Stuff White People Like, can still very rapidly gain a major audience, and even we boutique bloggers, aiming at a more sophisticated and inevitably limited readership, are able to attract a few thousand readers per diem. Professional group blogs don’t bother me a bit.

Apple mocks Microsoft’s approach to defending Vista through advertising.

0:30 video

Tom Elia describes how the leftist media and the blogosphere punished the disloyal peasant for presuming to question the tax policies of the Chosen One.

Like many of us, Mr. Wurzelbacher has questions about Barack Obama’s tax policy, among other things.

So what happens to Mr. Wurzelbacher for expressing his views?

Reports in the mainstream media appear claiming that he is unlicensed (even though he doesn’t need one as an employee of a business or as a contractor working on a residence), and that he apparently has a tax lien filed against him.

Not to be outdone, the Daily Kos published his home address for all the world to see.

The Democratic Underground just threw whatever they could at the guy.

Better think a little longer next time if you wish to criticize a Chicago Democrat running for president (or anything else, for that matter).

You might get ‘the treatment.’

Read the whole thing.

Gizmodo takes perhaps an overly censorious view of one man’s passion.

Personally, I think the Bradster’s setup is highly impressive, in its own peculiar way Homeric. It would be interesting to watch him multi-task.

World of Warcraft player/dorkmaster supreme Bradster has caved to his smack addiction-like dependence on WoW and created 36 separate accounts that he plays simultaneously on an epically ridiculous rig. He claims to spend over $5700 per year just on the game, and plans to pick up 36 copies of the new expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King when it’s released. ...

Bradster’s setup features a whopping seven separate laptops, four desktops hidden away under the desk, and an array of screens that’s disorienting even in a static image. He might be the only person on earth who’s capable of using the 15-button mouse.

Techradar.com discusses the behemoth software maker’s struggle for survival.

Microsoft is still making enormous sums of money, but cracks are appearing in its $16 billion Windows business. The death of XP has been postponed several times – the current rash of ultra-small, ultra-cheap laptops don’t have the horsepower to run Vista – and while Microsoft claims to have sold 180 million Vista licences, many of those licences are for machines running XP.

As Jane Bradburn of HP Australia told reporters in July, “From 30 June, we have no longer been able to ship a PC with an XP licence. However, what we have been able to do [is] to ship PCs with a Vista business licence but with XP pre- loaded. That is still the majority of business PCs we are selling today.”

There’s no compelling reason for users to upgrade: Vista requires more powerful hardware than XP, and it’s been plagued by driver problems and incompatibilities. As a result, it’s faced an avalanche of bad publicity – some of it deservedly so, as users found that their devices didn’t work.

The bad publicity isn’t helping enterprise adoption. According to Forrester analyst Ben Gray, “Desktop operations professionals tell Forrester that they see the value in standardising on Vista, but many are having a hard time convincing their CIOs that the move isn’t a risky bet, given the mixed reaction it’s received in the press and the speculation surrounding what to expect after Vista.” Forrester reports that 8.8 per cent of enterprise customers have migrated to Vista; 87 per cent are still running XP.

The ‘mixed reaction’ has been a gift for Apple, whose ‘Mac vs PC’ campaign mocked Microsoft ruthlessly. The ads worked: according to BMO Capital Markets analyst Keith Bachman, “More than 50 per cent of customers buying Macs in Apple stores are first time buyers.” ...

So has Microsoft lost it? A company with 93 per cent of the worldwide operating system market, rising revenues, a $60billion turnover and around $22.49billion in operating income is hardly struggling. However, the world in which Microsoft operates is changing dramatically, and Microsoft knows it. ...

Microsoft is fighting back on multiple fronts. It’s “developing versions of our products with basic functionality that are sold at lower prices than standard versions”, but more importantly it’s chucking enormous sums of money at things that may or may not work. ...

To many observers, the way in which Microsoft’s online division is haemorrhaging cash is a sign that Microsoft has missed the boat – but the ‘let’s throw money at this until it works’ approach has worked in the past for Windows, Office, Internet Explorer and Xbox, none of which were immediately successful. Microsoft may not be the leader in search, cloud computing or mobile phones, but the combination of determination and deep pockets is a powerful one.

Hat tip to Meaningless Hot Air.

MacRanger

Obama campaign supporters’ thuggish efforts to suppress criticism of Obama have progressed to the level of hacking attacks (using “sql bombs”) on prominent conservative blogs like Macsmind, published by Jack Moss, who signs his posts “MacRanger.” Moss is a journalist and lecturer, retired from a professional military career focused on Intelligence and Logistics, who writes commonly on Intelligence and Defense issues as well as politics.

Gateway Pundit has the story.

This is MacRanger of Macsmind. As you know I was hacked by operatives of the Obama Campaign last month. Well, it happened again. Basically they flooded the site with “sql bombs” according to the host that caused the shared server to stop running. Subsequently he had to disable the site. This had to do with running the “Obama wants to Disarm America” post which more than 2 million people viewed on the site. Just like the goons in Missouri, the Obama truthers can’t let the truth be known. I’ve now moved the blog back to blogspot at macsmind.blogspot.com at least temporally. Because of the hacking job I had to move to another host but unfortunately they haven’t got the server up yet to redirect the traffic to blogspot. I would appreciate a mention to your readers. I’m getting a couple of hundred emails about “what happened”, but as you can imagine it hard to get the word out by reply.

Thanks,

MacRanger

MacRanger’s temporary site is here.

MacRanger believed the hacking attacks were in response to this political ad criticizing Obama’s avowed policy of unilateral disarmament.

0:51 video

The Hindustan Times says Rusty Shackleford and Aaron Weissburd did it.

They both say they didn’t, and also that they wouldn’t tell you if they did.

Those loveable clowns Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld are back. This time intruding on a suburban family in order “to connect with real people.” Our heroes, as Seinfeld explains to Gates, have a problem with being “a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic.”

4:30 video

Mildly amusing, at least in parts, but still completely and utterly irrelevant to competition from Mac and Linux, or the merits of Vista as an operating system (or the lack thereof). The complacent condescension of the great men’s self-referential exercise is beginning to wear thin.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Attacking John McCain as so 1980s with the 0:31 ad accusing him of being unable to send an email.

If I were Rick Davis and managing John McCain’s campaign, I’d whip up an ad showing McCain beating a couple of youthful geeks in a computer game. Hint: Spore just came out.

The Anchoress pictures the scene in which a poll-sinking prodigy comes hat-in-hand asking for the aid of the man he disrespected.

Jeffrey Bell explains why the left hates Sarah Palin.

From the instant of Palin’s designation on Friday, August 29, the American left went into a collective mass seizure from which it shows no sign of emerging. The left blogosphere and elite media have, for the moment, joined forces and become indistinguishable from each other, and from the supermarket tabloids, in their desire to find and use anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family. In sharp contrast to the yearlong restraint shown toward truthful reports about John Edwards’s affair, bizarre rumors have been reported as news, and, according to McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt, nationally known members of the elite media have besieged him with preposterous demands.

The most striking thing in purely political terms about this hurricane of elite rage is the built-in likelihood that it will backfire.

Read the whole thing.

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And Bill Kristol think it has already backfired.

A special thank you to our friends in the liberal media establishment. Who knew they would come through so spectacularly? The ludicrous media feeding frenzy about the Palin family hyped interest in her speech, enabling her to win a huge audience for her smashing success Wednesday night at the convention. Indeed, it even renewed interest in McCain, who seems to have gotten still more viewers for his less smashing—but well-received—presentation the following evening.

The astounding (even to me, after all these years!) smugness and mean-spiritedness of so many in the media engendered not just interest in but sympathy for Palin. It allowed Palin to speak not just to conservatives but to the many Americans who are repulsed by the media’s prurient interest in and adolescent snickering about her family. It allowed the McCain-Palin ticket to become the populist standard-bearer against an Obama-Media ticket that has disdain for Middle America.

By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin—who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times—lamented in a piece for Slate: “So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin’s wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison.” I suppose it was ungenerous of conservatives, in our broad-mindedness and tolerance of human frailty, to have let Ms. Rosin down, just when she was counting on us to bring out the tar and feathers. But she gives us too much credit when she suggests we make the liberal media look stuffy and slow-witted. They do that all by themselves.

link

I wonder if this program is as obtrusive and controlling as Vista.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

And it isn’t going to work.

Time Magazine’s Nathan Thornburg finds he likes Sarah Palin’s hometown, and agrees with its residents on the irrelevance of yesterday’s pregnancy story. So will the voters.

I just got off the phone with a longtime Wasilla resident. She had urged me to find time today to go up to Hatcher Pass—”the most beautiful place in the valley!”—when I mentioned that the story on Bristol’s baby is now national news. Her voice slowed. “Oh,” she said. “I’m so sorry. That’s so unfair.”

Wasilla seems at times to be utterly without guile. It’s a large part of the town’s charm, and it’s exactly the quality that could make an unorthodox pick like Palin pay off. Don’t get me wrong — she’s a tough politician with sharp enough elbows on her own. But still, she appears to be more steeped in the values of her hometown than any politician I’ve ever come across.

Maybe that means Palin is a little too much Northern Exposure for America—after all, her father’s good friend Curt Menard happily showed me a picture of the governor as a high schooler in 1981, in a root cellar with family and friends, helping skin and cube and cure a whole moose. It’s enough to make you almost miss fake hunters like John Kerry and Mitt Romney.

People in Wasilla are Alaskan tough, so not only does a thing like teen pregnancy not seem like anyone’s damn business, but it’s also not seen as the calamity so many people in the lower 48 might think it is. This is dangerous country — it’s not just the roughneck jobs on cable reality shows. It’s real life here. I listened to the absolutely heartbreaking story of how the godfather of Track Palin, Sarah’s oldest son, died in small plane crash just minutes after having dropped off four kids. Another family invited me into their home and told their incredible story; with one son in Iraq, their other son was working on a conveyor line in Anchorage, got caught in the belt and had his head partially crushed. He lived to stand across the kitchen table from me and his parents, looking fully healed just three months later, grinning at his dumb luck and wondering what comes next in life. “It makes you realize that a thing like a little teenage pregnancy isn’t such a big deal,” his mom said. “Bristol—and lots of other girl like her out there — are going to be just fine.”

If you haven’t guessed yet, the people here are genuinely friendly. Even those in Palin’s inner sanctum who have been told since Friday not to talk to reporters by McCain’s media team, are almost apologetic that they can’t be neighborly and chat, since you came all this way to little Wasilla. And those who can talk, do. All weekend they had the decency not to pretend that they didn’t know the governor’s eldest daughter was pregnant. But they also expected decency in return, that I wouldn’t be the kind of person to make sport out of a young girl’s slip.

The fact is, regardless of what you will hear over the next few days, Bristol’s pregnancy is not a legitimate political issue. Sarah Palin is a longterm member of a group called Feminists for Life, which is not opposed to birth control. So you probably can’t tag her for consigning young people to unwanted pregnancies.

The attempt by the dirtbags of the left to whip this into a scandal will only backfire on them.

Leftwinger Larry Johnson, a former Hillary supporter, has a few apt comments on when family members are and are not appropriately made into political issues. He’s right about the clowns at Kos and the turncoat poofter Andrew Sullivan, too.

Did you catch Barack Obama threatening to fire “his” people if they are helping fan the flames about the preganancy of the Republican Vice Presidential candidate’s 17 year old daughter? Families, so he says, are not fair game.

So, why do you think Barack came out on this? Because immediate internal polling is running very negative against the Obama campaign, which is perceived as pushing the Bristol pregnancy story. They are being painted as bullies and hypocrites. Most Americans, especially those bitter white folks clinging to God and guns, view this as a private matter and none of the media’s business.

For starters, anyone who is 21 years of age or less should not be a target of any campaign. Attacking a 17 year old girl and spreading vicious lies, as have the clowns at Kos and Andrew Sullivan (just to name two of the more prominent offenders) is beyond the pale. Family members who are over 21 are fair game if they are using the fame of their parent, spouse, or relative to make a buck or get an advantage. I think the views and actions of a spouse also are relevant if the man or woman has engaged in conduct such as hurling racial epithets or promoting policies that most Americans reject.

I think it is noteworthy that Sarah Palin’s husband resigned his job in the Oil and Gas industry in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety while Michelle Obama used her husband’s position to enrich herself. She got a job she would not have if her husband had not been a player in the Chicago political machine. To that extent I think the actions and words of spouses are relevant and potentially important.

1:43 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Stingray puts a dramatic spin on the everyday adventure of using a PC.

Ok, who brought the cheetos?”
“Yo.”
“Sweet, we’re all set. Everybody got their characters rolled?”
“Yeah, what’s this run again? Will there be decent gold? I need more gold.”
“Shaddup. You know you’ll find out when you’re in there. All right. It’s morning and your party is preparing to adventure.”
“My sysadmin orders a barrel of coffee.”
“My programmer lights a cigarette.”
“The first challenge approaches. A digital anachrotroll draws near, brandishing the smoking ruins of the laptop you prepared for last week’s adventure.” ...

“The laptop remains broken.”
“All right. My sysadmin casts information request.”
“Rolling… you receive gibberish.”
“Damnit. My sysadmin arranges a pickup on the machine.”
“The troll misses the pickup and grows irritated.”
“Screw it. Your turn.”
“My programmer arranges a pickup.”
“The troll arrives with the laptop and deposits the smoking yet still slimy remains on your best pack.”
“Delightful. Will you have your damn sysadmin fix this thing already and get rid of the troll?”
“Yeah yeah. I’m rolling. Crap, the dice are not friendly today. At least it’s fixable, technically. Ok, my sysadmin returns the laptop in working order.”

Read the whole thing.

Since I detest Vista, I’ve started fooling around with Linux on a new laptop. Ubuntu installed easily, but there is this little problem with accessing the Internet.

My wife sent me the following cartoon some weeks ago as a warning, and I’m afraid it already seems to be a very accurate picture of my Linux experience.

Mac may be humiliating poor old PC in those amusing television commercials, but both of them have been caught napping by the penguin in the high tech world of special effects, Stephen J. Vaughn-Nichols reports at ComputerWorld.

While top animation and FX (special effects) programs are run on Macs and some of them, like RenderMan Pro Server are being ported to Windows, it’s on Linux clusters that the really serious movie and television visual effects are created. As Robin Rowe writes at LinuxMovies.org, “In the film industry, Linux has won. It’s running on practically all servers and desktops used for feature animation and visual effects.”

Rowe’s not just being a Linux booster. It’s the Gospel truth. The animation and FX for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; Star Wars: The Clone Wars; WALL-E; 300; The Golden Compass; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; and I Am Legend, to name but a few recent movies, were all created using Pixar’s RenderMan and Autodesk Maya running on Linux clusters.

The really short version for why this is so comes down to Linux clustering enables you to put massive computational firepower into rendering 2D and 3D images. It’s ironic. While getting the most out of NVIDIA and ATI graphic cards on a Linux desktop is still a pain and there’s always some trouble dealing with proprietary video formats on Linux, the top animated and FX-heavy videos usually have their start on Linux systems.

Specifically, most photo-realistic special effects are created with programs using Pixar’s RISpec (RenderMan Interface Specification) compliant programs. RISpec is an extremely detailed open-standard set of APIs (application program interfaces) for 3D graphics rendering programs. To be more precise, RISpec isn’t quite an open standard. While Pixar, the animation giant owned by Disney, has published the specifications for all to use, and no longer even requires a no-charge license to create a RISpec-compliant rendering program, Pixar doesn’t go out of its way to specify exactly how developers can, or can’t use RISpec.

That said, there are open-source RISpec-compliant programs like Pixie and other rendering programs such as Blender, which can be used as a source for RISpec software. Pixar’s RenderMan software suite itself, while it relies on Linux in most animation and FX shops, is unlikely ever to be open-sourced.

So, while you can’t point to animation and special effects software as a major win for open-source software, there is absolutely no doubt that every time you gasp at a breath-taking escape by Indy or grin at a particularly clever visual bit of fun in Ratatouille, you’re appreciating the power of Linux.

The Sunday Times Business section this week described an interesting reverse development taking place at high tech environments like Adobe, Intel, Stanford, and M.I.T.: a return to hand-ons, build-it-yourself engineering training featuring physical tools inculcating manual skills.

At Stanford, the rediscovery of human hands arose partly from the frustration of engineering, architecture and design professors who realized that their best students had never taken apart a bicycle or built a model airplane. For much the same reason, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a class, “How to Make (Almost) Anything,” which emphasizes learning to use physical tools effectively.

“Students are desperate for hands-on experience,” says Neil Gershenfeld, who teaches the course.

Paradoxically, yearnings to pick up a hammer — or an oscilloscope — may deepen even as young people immerse themselves in simulated worlds. “People spend so much time in digital worlds that it creates an appetite for the physical world,” says Dale Dougherty, an executive at O’Reilly Media, which is based in Sebastopol, Calif., He manages a magazine, Make, that is devoted to building digital-era gear.

Fifty years ago, tinkering with gadgets was routine for people drawn to engineering and invention. When personal computers became widespread starting in the 1980s, “we tended to forget the importance of physical senses,” says Richard Sennett, a sociologist at the London School of Economics.

Making refinements with your own hands — rather than automatically, as often happens with a computer — means “you have to be extremely self-critical,” says Mr. Sennett, whose book “The Craftsman” (Yale University Press, 2008), examines the importance of “skilled manual labor,” which he believes includes computer programming.

Even in highly abstract fields, like the design of next-generation electronic circuits, some people believe that hands-on experiences can enhance creativity. “You need your hands to verify experimentally a technology that doesn’t exist,” says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s photonics technology lab in Santa Clara, Calif. Building optical switches in silicon materials, for example, requires engineers to test the experimental switches themselves, and to build test equipment, too.

This sort of thing would make all the difference in the Humanities and Social Studies, too, where only too many people, trained only in the manipulation of words, symbols, and ideas, inevitably come to repose infinite confidence in the calculative powers of human reason and the decisions of the State to do more or less anything, including changing fundamental aspects of the human condition. Al Gore obviously believes that we can pass a few laws, add some taxes, regulations, and subsidies and magically economically viable new technologies will promptly spring into being, allowing us to change completely the carbon-based cycle of energy production not only underlying the human economy from the time of the discovery of fire and the domestication of livestock onward, but underlying all life on earth (with the exception of a few bacteria). Barack Obama expects to be able to control the levels of the oceans. You can see that neither of those guys ever built anything complicated and mechanical.

In the case of John Edwards, as in the case of John Kerry before him, as in the affair of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky still earlier, the mainstream media refrained from investigating or reporting unpleasant stories about their favored political leaders until widespread dissemination by alternative sources made the stories impossible to overlook.

Tom Maguire observes that Jerome Corsi, who wrote the book (Unfit for Command) which helped the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth sink John Kerry’s presidential hopes, has a new very recent book, The Obama Nation , currently ranking 7th in sales on Amazon. I’ve ordered a copy myself.

Tom mentions that Glenn Reynolds has been wondering what skeletons has Obama got in his personal closet that the media has so far been unwilling to investigate. The Corsi book is likely to point to a few, and that means the serious scrutiny of Barack Obama’s personal history, career, finances, and associations has only just begun.
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For example, one of Tom Maguire’s commenters reports that the relationship between the Obamas and 1960s radicals William Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn was clearly rather more intimate than Obama himself represented in his “”a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago” dismissive description. He says that, to his personal knowledge, the Ayres babysat the Obama children.

Peter Wehner really does a marvelous job of demolishing Andrew Sullivan’s pretensions to any kind of moral authority, merely by contrasting Sullivan’s current anti-Iraq-war diatribes with what Sullivan was saying five and six years ago.

Sullivan has changed sides too frequently and too frivolously to be taken seriously in his favorite pose of lone, small voice of integrity.

Yahoo Sports explains that, though fireworks were actually used at the Beijing Olympic Games opening ceremonies, the astonishing display broadcast around the world on television was faked, combining computer generated images with prerecorded shots of fireworks.

Gasoline is $4+ a gallon. It takes over $70 to fill-up my car, and around $10 more to put some gas in the plastic jerrican for the lawnmower.

Congressional Republicans want to pass a bill to do something about this by freeing up more domestic production. They have the votes, but democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuses to allow a vote, has adjourned the House of Representatives for a five-week vacation, and turned the lights off in the Capitol in an effort to evict Republicans who have stayed on the floor in protest.

As Patrick Ruffin notes, a watershed has occurred in which Republicans are succeeding in mobilizing a grassroots protest effort using the Internet.

The prime tool for organizing currently is Twitter free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates, known as “tweets,” text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Sign the petition.

1:38 Call Congress Back video

Weev, man of mystery, commodity investor,and Rolls Royce-owner (according to the Times): a troll

LULZ is an Internet abbreviation, produced as a variation on LOL “laughing out loud,” meaning “laughing at your expense.”

In the Sunday Times, Mattathias Schwartz (who clearly comes from a family afflicted with serious typo problems) ventures into the Internet jungle to meet its most fierce and exotic denizens, the perennially immature, the inadequately socialized, and the congenitally rude, i.e. the objectionable participants in on-line dialogue traditionally referred to pejoratively as trolls.

Journalists are clearly too busy writing features and brown-nosing editors to spend all that much time on the Internet, and our intrepid explorer finds some idiots, listens gravely to their nonsense, and a legend is born.

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!” ...

As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called “Internet Crime” at a San Diego hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets — untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact date of a political leader’s demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses “the ruin lifestyle” — moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of hackers called “the organization,” which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.

We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the hood. “Your bag, sir?” said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.

“This is my car,” Weev said. “Get in.”...

Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.”

Somewhere in the caves of California, I hear the cackling and gibbering of trolls busily typing LMAO.

Lord knows, I don’t often agree with ultra-left blogger Glenn Greenwald about anything, but what do you know? Even the most unlikely of occurrences are possible in this best of all possible worlds.

Here’s Glenn responding to the recent Rasmussen Poll finding national approval of Congress to have fallen to an all-time low of 9% by concluding the democrat House majority is safe in perpetuity and it’s time for moonbats to turn on the democrat party leadership and start defeating any democrat congressmen discernibly to the right of Leon Trotsky.

That’ll learn ‘em. And those democrat leaders will then start obediently toeing the Party Line (and I don’t mean the democrat party line).

Many progressives and other Democratic supporters are reflexively opposed to any conduct that might result in the defeat of even a single, relatively inconsequential Democratic member of Congress or the transfer of even a single district to GOP control. No matter how dissatisfied such individuals might be with the Democratic Congress, they are unwilling to do anything different to change what they claim to find so unsatisfactory. Even though uncritically cheering on any and every candidate with a “D” after his or her name has resulted in virtually nothing positive—and much that is negative—many progressives continue, rather bafflingly and stubbornly, to insist that if they just keep doing the same thing (cheering for the election of more and more Democrats), then somehow, someday, something different might occur. But, as the cliché teaches, repeatedly engaging in the same conduct and expecting different results is the very definition of foolishness.

As foolish as it is, this intense aversion to jeopardizing any Democratic incumbents might be considered rational if doing so carried the risk of restoring Republican control of Congress. But there is no such risk, and there will be none for the foreseeable future. No matter what happens, the Democrats, by all accounts, are going to control both houses of Congress after the 2008 election. Their margin in the House, which is currently 31 seats, will, by even the most conservative estimates, increase to at least 50 seats. No advertising campaign or activist group could possibly swing control of Congress to the Republicans this year, and—given the Brezhnev-era-like reelection rates for incumbents in America—it is extremely unlikely that the House will be controlled by anyone other than Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi for years to come.

The critical question, then, is not who will control Congress. The Democrats will. That is a given. The vital question is what they will do with that control—specifically, will they continue to maintain and increase their own power by accommodating the right, or will they be more responsive, accountable and attentive to the political values of their base?

As long as they know that progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do, then it will only be rational for congressional Democrats to ignore progressives and move as far to the right as they can. With the blind, unconditional support of Democrats securely in their back pocket, Democratic leaders will quite rationally conclude that the optimal way to increase their own power, to transform more Republican districts into Blue Dog Democratic seats, and thereby make themselves more secure in their leadership positions, is to move their caucus to the right. Because the principal concern of Democratic leaders is to maintain and increase their own power, they will always do what they perceive is most effective in achieving that goal, which right now means moving their caucus to the right to protect their Blue Dogs and elect new ones.

That is precisely what has happened over the past two years. It is why a functional right-wing majority has dominated the House notwithstanding the change of party control—and the change in direction—that American voters thought they were mandating in 2006. As progressive activist Matt Stoller put it, “Blue Dogs are the swing voting block in the House, they are self-described conservatives, and they are perfectly willing to use their status on every action considered by the House.” The more the Democratic leadership accommodates the Blue Dog caucus—the more their power relies upon expanding their numbers through the increase of Blue Dog seats—the less relevant will be the question of which party controls Congress.

The linchpin for that destructive strategy is uncritical progressive support for congressional Democrats. That is what ensures that Democratic leaders will continue to pursue a rightward-moving strategy as the key to consolidating their own power. Right now, when it comes time to decide whether to capitulate to the demands of the right, Beltway Democrats think: “If we capitulate, that is one less issue the GOP can use to harm our Blue Dogs.” And they have no countervailing consideration to weigh against that, because they perceive—accurately—that there is no cost to capitulating, only benefits from doing so, because progressives will blindly support their candidates no matter what they do. That is the strategic calculus that must change if the behavior of Democrats in Congress is to change.

Democratic leaders must learn that they cannot increase their majority in Congress by trampling on the political values of their own base.

Let’s hope the entire nutroots base, responds to Glenn in the manner of Molly Bloom:

I was a Flower of the mountains yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him and yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.

Typical Daily Kos commenter delivers a
well-reasoned rejoinder.

Daniel Libit discusses one of the curious features of the blogosphere, what he refers to as “the Commentocracy,” the critical mass of enthusiastic participants who not only read some of the most influential blogs (on both the left and the right), but who impact the political debate with their own contributions, some thoughtful and of high quality and others vulgar, violent, and obscene.

It’s not unusual these days for prominent commenters to develop their own readership, and to go on to become regular contributors to the blogs where they have been habituees, or to proceed to found new blogs of their own.

A certain number of blogs, in my opinion, tend to rely on the vehemence of their commenters’ responses to shield them from criticism or rebuttal. A hooting posse of blogospheric sycophants is virtually de rigeur on the left, but there are some conservative blogs which are also known to contain a comment mob.

Ed Bott likes Microsoft’s initial ad attempting to defend Vista, but observes that it’s going to take more than trying to ridicule the messenger.

That’s a pretty good start. The real hard work begins with the messages that immediately follow this one. Microsoft has to identify the real benefits in Windows Vista and communicate them clearly and crisply. That’s not going to be any easy task.

Not easy at all, IMHO.
——————————————————————————————————-

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out that MSFT’s ad isn’t going to get it done, because although the earth was not flat, Vista really does suck.

Even the overall message that the ad is trying to convey is uninspiring. For example:

Meanwhile, a series of independent speed tests found that Windows Vista with SP1 performed comparably to Windows XP SP2.

Why doesn’t it win? Simple. Behind the scenes, Windows Vista is doing a lot more on your behalf than Windows XP does. It’s indexing your files so you can find them fast, keeping your hard drive organized, saving your work so nothing gets lost, and defending your computer against hackers and phishers.

So, when your favorite first person shooter starts to stutter, or that photo is taking a little too long to open in Photoshop, you can take comfort in the fact that Vista is doing a lot more on your behalf than Windows XP ever did.

I tried Vista recently, and I thought it was doing a lot too much for me. Every mouse click produced a close relative of MS Office’s infamous dancing paperclip freezing the action and popping up to warn me that opening a browser or clicking on an application could expose my system to viruses or possibly initiate a fatal sequence of events leading to the heat death of the universe.

I gathered a distinct impression that Vista’s designers really believed one should take that PC and admire the nice Microsoft wallpaper through the lucite block you had cast around it.

Everyone assured me that one could reduce the level of pestering by tweaking security settings, so I reduced them alright. I just installed XP right over it.
——————————————————————————————————-

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Andy Borowitz reports:

McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet—Will Spend Five Days at Key Sites.

In a daring bid to wrench attention from his Democratic rival in the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today embarked on an historic first-ever visit to the Internet.

Given that the Arizona Republican had never logged onto the Internet before, advisors acknowledged that his first visit to the World Wide Web was fraught with risk.

But with his Democratic rival Barack Obama making headlines with his tour of the Middle East and Europe, the McCain campaign felt that they needed to “come up with something equally bold for John to do,” according to one advisor.

McCain aides said that the senator’s journey to the Internet will span five days and will take him to such far-flung sites as Amazon.com, eBay and Facebook.

With a press retinue watching, Sen. McCain logged onto the Internet at 9:00 AM Sunday, paying his first-ever visit ever to Mapquest.com.

“I can’t get this [expletive] thing to work,” Sen. McCain said as he struggled with his computer’s mouse, causing his wife Cindy to prompt him to add that he was “just kidding.”

———————————————————————-

Hat tip to David L. Larkin.

Ann Althouse, responds to James Risen’s New York Times story on the left blogosphere’s recent conniption fit over Obama’s flipflop on FISA Telecom immunity:

You can’t please everybody, and if you want to be President, you really can’t please Greenwald, Hamsher, and Kos. Obama is taking the right position now, and he should defend it frankly.

The liberal blogosphere was aflame today with new accusations that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) is trying to win the 2008 presidential election.

Suspicions about Sen. Obama’s true motives have been building over the past few weeks, but not until today have the bloggers called him out for betraying the Democratic Party’s losing tradition.

“Barack Obama seems to be making a very calculated attempt to win over 270 electoral votes,” wrote liberal blogger Carol Foyler at LibDemWatch.com, a blog read by a half-dozen other liberal bloggers. “He must be stopped.”

We’re beginning to understand why Barack Obama keeps protesting so vigorously against the prospect of “George Bush’s third term.” Maybe he’s worried that someone will notice that he’s the candidate who’s running for it.

Most Presidential candidates adapt their message after they win their party nomination, but Mr. Obama isn’t merely “running to the center.” He’s fleeing from many of his primary positions so markedly and so rapidly that he’s embracing a sizable chunk of President Bush’s policy. Who would have thought that a Democrat would rehabilitate the much-maligned Bush agenda?

Take the surveillance of foreign terrorists. Last October, while running with the Democratic pack, the Illinois Senator vowed to “support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies” that assisted in such eavesdropping after 9/11. As recently as February, still running as the liberal favorite against Hillary Clinton, he was one of 29 Democrats who voted against allowing a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee reform of surveillance rules even to come to the floor.

Two weeks ago, however, the House passed a bill that is essentially the same as that Senate version, and Mr. Obama now says he supports it. Apparently legal immunity for the telcos is vital for U.S. national security, just as Mr. Bush has claimed. Apparently, too, the legislation isn’t an attempt by Dick Cheney to gut the Constitution. Perhaps it is dawning on Mr. Obama that, if he does become President, he’ll be responsible for preventing any new terrorist attack. So now he’s happy to throw the New York Times under the bus.

Next up for Mr. Obama’s political blessing will be Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy. Only weeks ago, the Democrat was calling for an immediate and rapid U.S. withdrawal. When General David Petraeus first testified about the surge in September 2007, Mr. Obama was dismissive and skeptical. But with the surge having worked wonders in Iraq, this week Mr. Obama went out of his way to defend General Petraeus against MoveOn.org’s attacks in 2007 that he was “General Betray Us.” Perhaps he had a late epiphany.

Look for Mr. Obama to use his forthcoming visit to Iraq as an excuse to drop those withdrawal plans faster than he can say Jeremiah Wright “was not the person that I met 20 years ago.” The Senator will learn – as John McCain has been saying – that withdrawal would squander the gains from the surge, set back Iraqi political progress, and weaken America’s strategic position against Iran. Our guess is that he’ll spin this switcheroo as some kind of conditional commitment, saying he’ll stay in Iraq as long as Iraqis are making progress on political reconciliation, and so on. As things improve in Iraq, this would be Mr. Bush’s policy too.

Mr. Obama has also made ostentatious leaps toward Mr. Bush on domestic issues. While he once bid for labor support by pledging a unilateral rewrite of Nafta, the Democrat now says he favors free trade as long as it works for “everybody.” His economic aide, Austan Goolsbee, has been liberated from the five-month purdah he endured for telling Canadians that Mr. Obama’s protectionism was merely campaign rhetoric. Now that Mr. Obama is in a general election, he can’t scare the business community too much.

Back in the day, the first-term Senator also voted against the Supreme Court nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But last week he agreed with their majority opinion in the Heller gun rights case, and with their dissent against the liberal majority’s ruling to ban the death penalty for rape. Mr. Obama seems to appreciate that getting pegged as a cultural lefty is deadly for national Democrats – at least until November.

Obama supporters exploited a Google policy (reporting them as spam sources) to get anti-Obama Hillary supporters’ blogs shut down.

Blogasm

Larry Johnson lists victims and their new locations.

Andrew Sullivan commends to our attention this Indian music video, with subtitles attempting to capture its apparently ?English-language? lyrics.

4:39 video

Patterico:

In a slightly ironic twist, the AP is taking content from a blog site. Namely, mine.

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

He should send Michelle Malkin to collect. Michelle is tough, and she’s a wizard with figures.
———————————————-

AP crackdown on bloggers posting

The Chicago Tribune is attempting to innoculate readers against the possibility that the rumor published by Larry Johnson of a tape of Michelle Obama ranting about “Whitey” may turn out to be true.

It’s hard to come up with an ethnic slur that has less of a sting than “whitey.”

A prevalent yet unsubstantiated Internet rumor has it that Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, used this term at some point in a speech, and the Obama campaign is concerned enough to have posted an online rebuttal.

I’ve got to ask, though. Are there really white people out there so ignorant of history, so unaware of the nuances of language and so threatened by minority grievances that they take genuine umbrage at the term “whitey”?

More a taunt than a threat, the word has no ugly history and hints at no particular stereotypes. It may have been hurled in a menacing fashion in ugly personal confrontations from time to time, but it’s never been used to keep a people down, to put them in their place, to rank them as subhuman.

To be truly offensive, a derogatory term needs to have an ominous context that “whitey” lacks.

Those who take offense are confusing prejudice—which is making negative assumptions about people based solely on external characteristics, of which all races and ethnicities are guilty—with racism, which is prejudice in action.

It requires them to imagine that “whitey” marginalizes, diminishes and therefore harms white people.

And if they’re really that dumb, then I guess they deserve to be insulted.

So there!

They really lit Jeff Goldstein’s fuse with this one. Jeff retorts:

So yeah. It looks like an Obama presidency will give us a frank discussion on the issue of race. If by “frank” we mean, “shut up and quit you’re bitching, whitey. We’ll tell you what racism is.”

Read his whole Don’t call me nigger, Whitey.

Kevin Drum is experiencing a bit of schadenfreude at Hillary Clinton’s expense this morning.

....It turns out that Barack Obama’s hiring of Patti Solis Doyle is even more interesting than I thought at first. Perhaps because I deliberately pulled back from campaign coverage during the final couple of months after Texas and Ohio, I didn’t realize that Solis Doyle had become so estranged from Hillary Clinton after she was fired as Hillary’s campaign manager. Far from her hiring being a conciliatory gesture, the developing conventional wisdom is that Team Obama is sending the same kind of message to Team Clinton that the Tattaglia family sent to the Corleones in The Godfather:

“It’s a slap in the face,” Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Clinton backer, said in an interview. “Why would they put somebody that was so clearly ineffective in such a position? It’s a message. We get it.” She said it was a “calculated decision” by the Obama team to “send a message that she [Clinton] is not being considered for the ticket.”

Other Clinton insiders also seethed. “Who can blame Obama for rewarding Patti? He would never be the nominee without her,” one person who has worked for both Clintons and remains close to them said. The sentiment reflected what another person in the immediate Clinton orbit described as “shock” that Obama would send such a strong signal that he is not considering Clinton as his running mate so soon.

Another Hillary supporter puts it even more bluntly: Hiring Solis is the “biggest f*** you I have ever seen in politics.”

And he’s not alone. The whole left side of the blogosphere is buzzing like a beehive over this one.

The Associated Press cracked down Friday on an obscure blog, titled the Drudge Retort (evidently a leftwing parody of Matt Drudge), having invented its own draconian version of a Fair Use Policy, amounting essentially to no use. AP ordered Drudge Retort to remove seven items which quoted between 39 and 79 words of AP articles.

(Note: the last paragraph’s two sentences fall well within the range of quotation AP proposed to forbid, amounting to 55 words.)

Faced with mounting criticism, and a proposed boycott, AP behaved in a self-contradictory fashion, announcing that it was “re-thinkng” its policy and would suspend its attacks on blogs, but AP also said it would not withdraw its demand to the Drudge Retort to remove the seven postings, and suggested short summaries of AP stories be used instead of actual quotations.

New York Times 6/16

Newshoggers’ Boycott emblem:

Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch)’s Boycott Emblem:

Tech Crunch announced:

Here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.

Larry Lessig:

What I mean by “the Kozinski mess” is the total inability of the media—including we, the media, bloggers—to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective. The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel – and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage.

Here are the facts as I’ve been able to tell: For at least a month, a disgruntled litigant, angry at Judge Kozinski (and the Ninth Circuit) has been talking to the media to try to smear Kozinski. Kozinski had sent a link to a file (unrelated to the stuff being reported about) that was stored on a file server maintained by Kozinski’s son, Yale. From that link (and a mistake in how the server was configured), it was possible to determine the directory structure for the server. From that directory structure, it was possible to see likely interesting places to peer. The disgruntled sort did that, and shopped some of what he found to the news sources that are now spreading it.

A lawyer (Cyrus Sanai) who has long had a grudge against Judge Kozinski finds out that the Kozinski family has a network server with various files on it. The controversial files on that server aren’t linked to from the Web, and aren’t indexed on search engines. They are generally meant only for family members and a few other people who get specific pointers to them.

But the lawyer figures out the private server’s internal directory structure, rummages around, finds some of the files, and downloads them. And some of the files contain what is basically — if what I saw at Patterico’s site is representative — visual sexual humor. There are some spoofs, for instance of the MasterCard commercials, some puns, some absurdities. Kozinski, or someone in his family, apparently got them sent to him, and decided to save them alongside a bunch of other stuff he found interesting or amusing.

Now the fruit of this disgruntled lawyer’s rummaging through someone else’s personal files somehow becomes a national news story. Why? Because Kozinski is presiding over an obscenity trial? All this stuff — the sort of sexual humor that gets circulated all the time — is not remotely in the same league as what the defendant is being criminally prosecuted for. Recall that the defendant is being prosecuted precisely because his sex-and-defecation movies are so far out even by modern standards of actual pornography. Sanai’s discoveries are similar to someone’s finding that a judge who’s presiding over a drunk driving trial has some screw-top bottles of rosé wine in his cupboard at home, shamelessly displayed in a way that the whole world can see them, if the whole world stands on its tiptoes and peers through a back window. The news value of that would be what, exactly? (Yes, I know screw-tops are becoming legit, but pretend it’s ten years ago.)

OK, people are saying, it was careless of Kozinski not to make sure that the site (which was apparently managed by one of Kozinski’s grown sons) was properly secured. Sure, in retrospect, whenever something leads to this sort of media circus, by definition one would have been wise to take more care to prevent it. But surely even otherwise reasonable people might fail to plan for their enemies’ rummaging around through the files on a private family server.

It’s kind of like your parking your car on the street, locking it, but forgetting to close a back window — or like your throwing out something in the trash without shredding it and leaving the trash cans by the curb. Then someone who has a grudge against you comes by and starts using the open window to rummage around in the stuff you have piled up in the back seat, or starts rummaging through your trash. (Note that to my knowledge such rummaging probably isn’t even a crime in many places.)

Lo and behold, one of the items your enemy finds is a notebook in which you’ve pasted some visual sex jokes that people have sent you. He takes pictures of all the pages and then runs to the newspaper; because of your high-profile job, the newspapers all cover this. Should you have closed the back window? Should you have shredded the stuff before putting in the trash? In retrospect, sure. But how many of us live like that in everything we do?

Jeez, folks, Kozinski has a quirky sense of humor, and keeps some joke pictures and videos on his computer rather than throwing them away. I’m sure they aren’t the kinds of things some people would enjoy seeing. But he wasn’t trying to show them to those people! He was just minding his own business, keeping some files on his own private server. And now it’s a national news story.

Jason Fagone, at Stale, has an article on a program calculated to keep people like my wife out of mischief for days.

In April, an online font clearinghouse called FontShop quietly uploaded a program that, the company wrote, was meant to be “purely entertaining—something to kickstart creativity.” FontStruct, a browser tool that lets anyone create an original font, was so popular that the site’s servers crashed within days of the official launch. ...

No disrespect to Adrian Frutiger—who is, of course, the Swiss graphic designer who created the Univers and Frutiger typefaces—but why would anyone want to be a little Frutiger? More broadly, why do people create their own fonts? What’s the payoff?

There’s something about that moment when your own letters begin to flash across the screen. Partly, it’s sheer childlike bliss—after all, how many hours do we spend as kids learning how to write in cursive, writing our name over and over, regarding our handwriting, hoping it’s special, stylish, distinguishable from the next kid’s? But it’s also satisfying in a distinctly grown-up way. If you’re reading this, you’re probably like me, and you have a job in which you stare at a screen all day. And it’s not even your screen. It’s somebody else’s pixels and windows and letters. Make a font and you start to screw with the scenery—the banal yet elemental DNA of your daily existence. It’s as if you could design and build your own subway turnstile or change the color of a Starbucks cup from off-white to fuchsia. Here’s a program that lets you commit a small, safe, infinitesimally subversive act and then share it with the world. FontStruct may make it worth aspiring to be a little Frutiger, after all.

What little evenhandedness exists in the mainstream media is found in the willingness of the press to report the substance of Republican attacks on democrat presidential candidates in the interested manner of an old-time radio broadcaster describing a heavyweight boxing match. “The Swift Boat Veterans just delivered a powerful right to John Kerry’s jaw, and he’s on the canvas!”

Conservatives like myself are always surprised, what with all the favoritism in coverage they get, that the left continually expresses outrage and indignation that the mainstream media is only 99% on their side. They know that they deserve 1000% support.

Well, the left is mad at the media, and they’re not going to take it anymore. From now on, you journalists mess with their candidate, and they are going to mess with you.

Media Matters reports.

The Associated Press last week got a preview of how this presidential season is going to unfold, and how online liberal activists aren’t going to stand down when the press takes cheap shots at Democratic front-runners.

After AP reporter Nedra Pickler wrote a news story highlighting how some fringe Republican operatives were raising questions about Sen. Barack Obama’s patriotism, angry readers dispatched nearly 15,000 electronic letters protesting the piece. Why? Because instead of providing balance and context, which is what good journalism does, the article simply offered a platform for Obama’s opponents to roll out their smears, to broadcast their dark doubts about the senator’s character.

That kind of media shortcoming has become predictable; reporters love to quote partisan Republicans about how deficient Democrats are. And in the past it would have likely produced angry denunciations online within the liberal blogosphere—a blog swarm, perhaps. ...

But nearly 15,000 letters sent in just a matter of days in response to a single news wire article? That’s something else entirely and could mark the dawn of a new era in progressive media activism. The phenomenon has received very little mainstream media attention (journalists probably don’t want to encourage this sort of thing), but make no mistake: It was a very big deal.

Hat tip to LGF.

New Republic’s Dana Goldstein describes the war between Clinton and Obama supporters in the blogosphere.

These people are not pretty when they’re angry.

As anybody with high-speed Internet knows, MyDD and Daily Kos sit at the top of the liberal Netroots movement, which over the last five years has made astonishing strides in its campaign to transform the Democratic Party into a hard-fighting, proudly liberal, and, most importantly, victorious entity. Though their websites offer distinct communities and commentaries, and though they have very different personalities, MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong (a former astrologer) and Kos’s Markos Moulitsas (a former Army man) have always gotten along—the two co-authored a 2006 book, Crashing the Gate, about the rise of their movement. Their bond has been rooted mostly in common foes: Republicans, namby-pamby Democrats, the Iraq War, divisive “identity politics,” and the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. But the harmony that existed between MyDD and Kos since the birth of the Netroots no longer exists today, and a bitter internecine struggle within the progressive blogosphere is to blame. Just as bilious in tone as previous fights with Republicans or Joe Lieberman, it has revealed fault lines in the movement that will be tough to cover back up. There have been charges of misogyny and of bullying, and some longtime members have walked away from their cause altogether. And what’s at the heart of it all is that most loaded of questions: Barack or Hillary?

The Netroots have been arguing about the 2008 campaign since the day after John Kerry lost, but the debate turned ugly when Armstrong revealed his vote in the February 12 Virginia primary. “In the end, what compelled me to vote for Clinton was looking at someone that seemed practical about the battle we have on our hands and looking ready to engage in the fight,” Armstrong blogged that day. “I’d rather be part of the fight than be told to stay on the sidelines because I’m too partisan.”

Armstrong had long voiced concerns that Obama’s campaign was too personality-driven and too reliant on the votes of Independents and Republicans. But his official endorsement made readers go ballistic. “Voting for the DLC candidate makes you part of the fight? Come on,” wrote one commenter. Another suggested, “If you aren’t a part of her campaign, you really oughta try to sign up and get some of those $$$ while you can”—a dig at Armstrong’s past campaign work for politicians like Howard Dean, Jon Corzine, and Mark Warner. A group of far nastier comments were deleted.

At Daily Kos, commenters were ripping Armstrong to shreds. One user wrote, “MyDD isn’t even a pro-Clinton site these days. It’s just a toxic waste dump dedicated to throwing slime at Obama and hoping it sticks. ... I know that Kos and Jerome are friends and partners, but it’s perhaps time for Kos to reconsider linking to MyDD from the DK blogroll.”

Clintonites and Obamabots were ferrying between the two sites, “recommending” posts sympathetic to their favored candidate (thus ensuring more prominent placement on the page), and brutally attacking one another in the comment sections. In late March, Armstrong, upset by name-calling between Clinton and Obama supporters on MyDD, barred new user accounts on the site for a week. The sense of betrayal among fellow Netrooters after his Clinton endorsement was palpable. Armstrong was backing a candidate who, as Chris Bowers, another leading lefty blogger, wrote on Open Left, hadn’t fully rejected the DLC, hadn’t opposed the Iraq war from the start, hadn’t offered overwhelming support for Net Neutrality, and hadn’t campaigned in small caucus states.

Andrew Sullivan’s brain seems to have turned still more completely into mush, as he quotes approvingly this message from a younger reader on the Left.

Your old farts really do miss the point completely, don’t they? These younger people were convinced that political involvement was useless because the system was so broken. They came of age anywhere from the second Clinton term (Lewinsky) through the disaster of the Bush years. They have no reason to believe that politics can work, or that it is possible to effect any large scale change, so they work locally or just opt out.

This is what Obama has tapped into. The reason all those thousands of young Dems registered for the first time and voted in a primary was because he made them believe honorable politics was possible. And if someone like Obama gets chewed up by the system because the forces arrayed against him are too strong—just look at the sworn enemies who are teaming up to bring him down, united by nothing more than a vested interest in the status quo—then they will conclude that the system is as broken as they thought it was.

The mistake is reading this as an Obama personality cult, in which case “grow up” would be appropriate. But the Obamaniacs I meet are nothing like that…

they don’t sing his praises, they sing their own. They are intoxicated by the idea of a politics where things they thought were not possible become possible, and people talk to each other like adults. They don’t think he’s going to fix things, they think they are.

What the old farts might want to consider is that these young people who have no particular vested interest in the current system might be seeing the rot much more clearly than the fogeys who have been entangled in it for decades. And the mature folk might want to accept that the burden of proof is on them to show why such a viscerally disgusting political game is worth playing.

Opting out of that is not immaturity, it’s intelligence.

Let’s see. These kiddies figured that if they registered to vote and campaigned for a leftist candidate, the Archangel Gabriel would show up and blow his horn, human nature would totally and completely change, the two party system and all opposition to immediate Socialism would vanish, and they would be able to do exactly as they pleased. After all, they deserve nothing less, being finer and better people and more sensitive and intelligent human beings than any other group of people or any generation which has ever lived. And if they don’t get the total and complete political gratification they are entitled to (on the basis of their youth and overall marvelousness) in this their first election, well! that will certainly prove that the American system is fatally broken and irredeemably corrupt, and they should simply opt out.

I certainly agree with the last part, as I don’t think young people so unsophisticated and self-infatuated have much of anything useful to contribute to the American political dialogue anyway.

I really wanted to blog about the Village Voice’s review of the Conservative Blogosphere, but (sigh!) all my efforts to find something quotable or amusing in their Onanastic efforts failed. The whole thing was simply too lame to live. Its low point had be its typical mindlessly-conformist leftwing author striking Olympian poses and rating people like Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, and John Hinderaker as such percentage stupid versus such percentage evil.

Armed Liberal has it right:

The author is Roy Edroso from the ever-wise alicublog...and aside from being a juvenile jackass, he’s a tool. Why? Because while nonsense like this is great for making the 15% of True Believers feel Really Really Good about themselves, it makes the other 36% that we on the left need to do things like – you know, win elections – pretty pissed off at the smug arrogance that’s so proudly on display.

And it’s timely, because Obama’s perceived invulnerability is being rattled by the fact that he dropped the mask at least rhetorically in Bittergate.

Look, I’m not sure why urban intellectuals feel so disrespected as a class, and why they have such a chip on their shoulder. But you know what?

We’re in an election cycle where the GOP candidate should be staked out like a sacrificial goat waiting for the knife. Instead, we get Democratic thinkers worrying – appropriately – that the Democratic candidate is going to actually lose in November. And one of the big reasons is that the public voice of the Party is cranky, smug yuppies.

The SF Chronicle describes how Obama’s famous “bitter” condescending remarks were captured by an enterprising (Vassar ‘68) Huffington Post blogger.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been in full damage control mode since the senator’s blunt remarks about the nature of small town Pennsylvania voters were secretly recorded by a Huffington Post blogger at a recent San Francisco fundraiser that was supposed to be off limits to the press.

Obama, asked last Sunday why it was so hard for him to reach blue-collar voters, said that many had been overlooked economically and that “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton pounced on the comment over the weekend, calling it “elitist and divisive.”

An Obama campaign insider tells us the blogger, Mayhill Fowler, had tried to get into one of two Obama fundraising events in the Bay Area a couple of months back where former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley stood in as a proxy.

She was turned away, even though she had offered to pay, says our source.

“There’s a very basic (fundraiser) rule – you don’t let press in, and anyone with an interest in reporting shouldn’t get in,” said the source.

Just how the MP3 – wielding Fowler managed to secure an invite to the $1,000 a head fundraiser at the San Francisco home of developer Alex Mehran wasn’t immediately clear – but Obama campaign higher-ups were said to be livid, with fingers pointing at a local fundraising consultant for the slip-up.

There should be a special award for bloggers like Charles Johnson (who debunked the Dan Rather forged National Guard letter in 2004), and Mayhill Fowler, who this year exposed the views about the common people that Barack Obama shared with a wealthy audience at a private fund-raiser held atop San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, whose reporting of the truth makes a significant impact on the course of Presidential Election contest.

The MSM and the blogosphere has moved on from unimportant subjects like Islamic terrorism and the upcoming presidential election to what really matters: Is that really a babe reflected in Dick Cheney’s fishing shades?

McClatchy:

Since Wednesday, the blogosphere has been atwitter over a photograph on the White House Web site of Cheney with a caption that said he was fly-fishing on the Snake River in Idaho.

The photo is a tight shot of Cheney’s face sporting dark sunglasses and his trademark grin.

What’s stirring all the buzz is the reflection in the vice president’s dark glasses. Some thought that the reflection looked like a naked woman and, this being Cheney and this being the Internet Age, they immediately shared that thought with the world.

In a Google search for the words “Dick Cheney” and “sunglasses,” 79,300 hits came back at mid-afternoon on Thursday. By 7 p.m., the count was 130,000.

On DemocraticUnderground.com, the discussion starts with this question: “Notice anything … interesting … reflected in his sunglasses? Something that has little to do with conventional ‘fly-fishing’?”

Photographers discuss.

The New York Times warns of the latest occupational health peril: blogging.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

When Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin (who each do about five or ten times the work most of the rest of us do) start falling over, then I will begin to worry.

London Times:

The internet (as we know it currently) could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day – the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs – enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern – where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 – would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

Michelle Malkin wants to raise your consciousness.

France24 The Observers:

Yahoo! China pasted a “most wanted” poster across its homepage today in aid of the police’s witch-hunt for 24 Tibetans accused of taking part in the recent riots. MSN China made the same move, although it didn’t go as far as publishing the list on its homepage.

Yahoo indignantly wrote France24 saying: “Yahoo! isn’t doing this. It’s Yahoo! China*.”

*Yahoo had to accept a Chinese partner, and Chinese control, to gain access to China’s market.

Hat tip to Matt Brown Hamlin