Glenn Reynolds: John Galt was unavailable for comment.
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Ed Driscoll: The Road to Perdition is Becoming Increasingly Rather Bumpy.

The way the French do it. 1:33 video.

Clay Shirky, in a new book titled Cognitive Surplus, maintains that the post-WWII age of suburbanization was one of those eras of abrupt, dislocating social change which left Americans morose and seeking for self-medication just like 18th century Englishmen driven by economic change from the countryside to the city.

They used gin, a new, potent yet inexpensive distilled spirit, whose method of production had arrived from Holland as part of the the fashionable baggage accompanying William and Mary. Americans used television.

Shirky contends that the Internet is bringing about the end of the age of self-narcotization via sitcoms and game shows. Leisure time sucked down the television time sink, the cognitive surplus simply wasted previously, will instead be transferred to more useful and communitarian activities (like writing Wikipedia entries and blogging) and a wonderful new era of transparency, creativity, and productivity will bloom.

Hmm. I wonder if he has ever heard of World of Warcraft.

Barnes & Noble review.
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Jonah Leher brings formidable Friedrich Nietzsche to television’s defense.

I would disagree. In some peculiar way, if I hadn’t watched and re-watched The Sopranos then this sentence wouldn’t exist. (And I would have missed out on many interesting, intelligent conversations…) The larger point, I guess, is that before we can produce anything meaningful, we need to consume and absorb, and think about what we’ve consumed and absorbed. That’s why Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, said we must become a camel (drinking up everything) before we can become a lion, and properly rebel against the strictures of society.

William Hogarth, Gin Lane, Engraving, 1751

Ouch! I don’t get to type this often…: “He had acetylene torch injury to the penis.”
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John Hinderaker from Power-Line, respects Obama’s behavior.

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Conservative cultural commentary venues The Notes and Culture11 went under. (link 1 & link 2).

Some people think they were not populist enough, but I am inclined to believe that the fact I never previously heard of either one of them could be part of the problem.
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Cigarettes $10 a pack in NYC.

New Yorkers ought to take up chewing tobacco.
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Write fiction based on your own life experience and they’ll sue you.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Ed Driscoll rubs in the fact that the Internet changed the news and information business permanently, causing establishment media outlets like Newsweek, CBS, and CNN, all notorious for partisan reporting, to wonder where their audience went.

Silicon Graffiti 7:55 video

“Ever complained about your boss to your boss? Told your son you’re getting divorced through a wall post? Lied about your grandma dying only to be called out by your own electronic trail?” HuffPo collects a selection of Facebook postings demonstrating technology’s ability to take carelessness and ineptitude to interesting new places.

Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.

It turns out (inevitably) that there is an entire website devoting to collecting Facebook gaffes. It’s called Failbook.

Hat tip to Scott Priddy.

Darth Jobs in mufti

Blogging is the kind of ivory tower intellectual activity resembling college that seems to take place at one level of remove from ordinary reality. Bloggers don’t really typically think of themselves as possible subjects of police raids and lawsuits by giant corporations.

And that is, doubtless, why Gizmodo thought that purchasing an iPhone prototype lost in a Redwood City bar and reviewing the prototype would not be a major problem as long as they offered to give the prototype back to Apple in the end.

Clearly, they did not reckon with the rather old-fashioned kind of influence large employer corporations have over certain California counties. (Who even knew that the San Mateo county sheriff’s office possessed a “Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team?”)

I recall thinking myself that, yes, Gizmodo can just give back the prototype, and Apple cannot really prove damages from Gizmodo’s story, so the whole incident will simply fade away, but that theory failed to take into account Apple’s corporate cult of secrecy and and the propensity of Apple management (Steve Jobs) to be vindictive.

CNET:

Police have seized computers and servers belonging to an editor of Gizmodo in an investigation that appears to stem from the gadget blog’s purchase of a lost Apple iPhone prototype.

Deputies from the San Mateo County Sheriff’s office obtained a warrant on Friday and searched Jason Chen’s Fremont, Calif., home later that evening, Gizmodo acknowledged on Monday.

In an article on Friday, CNET was the first to report on the criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the iPhone prototype and Gizmodo’s acquisition of it, including that Apple had contacted local police. A San Mateo County judge signed the search warrant, which said a felony crime was being investigated, a few hours later.

“When I got home, I noticed the garage door was half-open,” according to an account by Chen. “And when I tried to open it, officers came out and said they had a warrant to search my house and any vehicles on the property ‘in my control.’ They then made me place my hands behind my head and searched me to make sure I had no weapons or sharp objects on me.”

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press told CNET on Monday: “This is such an incredibly clear violation of state and federal law it takes my breath away. The only thing left for the authorities to do is return everything immediately and issue one of hell of an apology.”

Dalglish said that the San Mateo County search warrant violated the federal Privacy Protection Act, which broadly immunizes news organizations from searches—unless, in some cases, the journalists themselves committed the crime. The 1980 federal law requires police to use subpoenas to obtain information instead of search warrants, she said.

Editors at Gizmodo, part of Gawker Media’s blog network, last week said they paid $5,000 for what they believed to be a prototype of a future iPhone 4G. The story said the phone was accidentally left at a bar in Redwood City, Calif., last month by an Apple software engineer and found by someone who contacted Gizmodo, which had previously indicated that it was willing to pay significant sums for unreleased Apple products.

CNET has not been able to confirm whether the investigation is targeting Gizmodo, the source who reportedly found the iPhone in a bar, or both. Apple has acknowledged that the lost device is its property. Calls to law enforcement sources on Monday were not immediately returned.

Gizmodo said on Monday:

Last Friday night, California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen’s home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

Darbyshire was referring to the portion of California law that prevents judges from signing warrants that target writers for newspapers, magazines, or “other periodical publications.”

In 2006, a California appeals court ruled that the definition of “periodical publication” protects Web logs. “We can think of no reason to doubt that the operator of a public Web site is a ‘publisher’ for purposes of this language…News-oriented Web sites… are surely ‘like’ a newspaper or magazine for these purposes,” the court concluded.

The federal newsroom search law known as the Privacy Protection Act is broader. It says that even journalists suspected of committing a crime are immune from searches—if, that is, the crime they’re suspected of committing relates to the “receipt” or “possession” of illegal materials. (Two exceptions to this are national security and child pornography.)

The police hauled away three Apple laptops, a Samsung digital camera, a Seagate 500 GB external hard drive, USB flash drives, a HP MediaSmart server, a 32GB Apple iPad, an 16GB iPhone, and an IBM ThinkPad, according to documents that Gizmodo posted.

The bar in Redwood City

Poor Gray Powell, a 27 year old software engineer working at Apple, inadvertently left his prototype of the next iPhone on a bar stool at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German beer garden in Redwood City.

Steve Jobs is probably going to roast Gray over a slow fire, because that next generation iPhone was picked up by a guy sitting nearby, who tinkered with it and found a new iPhone camouflaged in an old iPhone package. After a few weeks, he sold it to Gizmodo (who paid $4000, some say $10K).

Gizmodo got its money’s worth, having a great deal of fun analyzing what’s different technically and in the design of the new prototype (and scoring off Apple’s notorious secrecy policy concerning new products).

They awarded the prototype excellent reviews. The new design was sturdier and more attractive, and the new model has a bigger battery and spectacularly sharper resolution.

Now, we get to sit back and see what Apple does to Gizmodo.

Gimme that old time religion department: the Times of India reports that Tekam Das, a Hindu priest in the province of Sind, on Tuesday sacrificed three daughters (all aged under six) and then himself to the goddess Kali.

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Technological tour de force: Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque 6:20 video of virtual choir performance, 185 performers from 12 countries recorded on 243 tracks.

Audition videos (link).

How it was organized (link).

How it was made (link).

Via Kottke.
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What American states & cities have the best-equipped male residents? Condomania has the list. New Hampshire and New Orleans win.
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Why do I walk like that?

Detail of Megan Jaegerman police graphic discussed by Edward Tufte.

Via Cory Doctorow.

UPI reports that the cops in Oklahoma City received an interesting offer.

Authorities in Oklahoma said a man who crashed into a parking lot walked into a jail and offered a stick he called the “last tree in the universe” as payment.

Oklahoma County sheriff’s deputies said Rondell Bailey walked into the downtown Oklahoma City jail with a stick and told deputies he wanted to offer the object, which he called the “last tree in the universe,” in exchange for dropping any possible charges against him, KOCO-TV, Oklahoma City, reported Wednesday.

The deputies said Bailey left after being told the stick was not an acceptable form of payment and threw a brick through a jail window.

Investigators said they discovered a white powder suspected to be methamphetamine during a search of the suspect’s truck.

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Steve Hoefer made a glove which will play Rock, Paper, Scissors against its wearer. The glove was winning in this 1:36 video

Hat tip to Rosa Golian and Karen L. Myers.
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Satire of typical news report (Warning: lots of off-color language). 2:02 video.

From Vanderleun via Karen L. Myers.
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“Just buy me a sun dress and put me in a Prius!” Hitler declares angrily on learning that Jerry Brown is again running for governor of California in the latest “Der Untergang” take-off.

3:49 video.

Hat tip to Kenneth Grubbs.

Fox News detects a partisan slant in potential virus warnings pertaining to Drudge Report, one of the most active and infliential agggregators on the Internet, whose reporting commonly, but not always, features a conservative perspective.

[A]n e-mail is circulating warning U.S. Senate staffers not to view one of the most popular news sites on the Web, claiming it could spread computer viruses.

The Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, the chamber’s official gatekeeper, said the Drudge Report, a news aggregator, and whitepages.com, a telephone directory site, “are responsible for the many viruses popping up throughout the Senate,” according to an e-mail from the Environment and Public Works Committee obtained by FoxNews.com.

Another e-mail from a separate office warned that staffers who had visited the Drudge Report or White Pages had experienced viruses on their PCs.

“Please avoid using these sites until the Senate resolves this issue,” the e-mail read. “The Senate has been swamped the last couples (sic) days with this issue.”

But the Drudge Report suggested that politics might be behind the warning, noting in an original story that the e-mail came as the “health care drama in the Capitol reaches a grand finale.”

The Drudge Report noted that it served more than 29 million pages Monday without an e-mail complaint about “’pop ups,’ or the site serving ‘viruses.’” ...

A spokesman for the Environment and Public Works Committee said the Senate Help Desk cited the Drudge Report and whitepages.com only as possible examples of Web sites generating pop-up ads that might be causing a recent increase in the number of virus infections.

“Our non-partisan systems administrator notified both Majority and Minority staff that this issue had been brought to her attention,” the spokesman said in a written statement. “It is still not exactly clear where the increase in viruses is coming from, and staff have been advised to be cautious with outside Web sites at all times.”

A GOP aide to the Environment and Public Works Committee told FoxNews.com that there has been “a flurry of activity in the last couple of days” and that a couple of people on the staff had had “computer problems.”

But Brent Baker, the vice president for research and publications at the Media Research Center, wondered why the conservative Drudge was cited as an example instead of a liberal site like the Huffington Post.

I look at Drudge Report daily and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that there is any legitimate basis for such warnings at all.

Cyber vigilantism punishes kitten killing, adultery, and a variety of other things in China these days.

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Essex cockerel and hens victorious when fox invades their coop.

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The LA Times finds that Italians have better political scandals.

Reporting from Rome — The governor made off to a monastery after having affairs with transsexuals, but not before the cops videotaped a tryst, all flesh and white powder, and offered to sell copies to a magazine owned by the prime minister, who, at the time, was rumored to be entangled with an underage Neapolitan model.

Then one of the transsexuals, a Brazilian named Brenda, turned up naked and dead, her laptop computer submerged under a running tap. Oh, yeah, and the drug dealer who supplied cocaine to the governor and Brenda would meet his own demise. It’s an odd coincidence.

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Glenn Reynolds explains why the federal government has come to resemble Schlitz beer.

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Leo Grin, at Big Hollywood has a four part essay on Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and “Grizzly Man” (2005). Pt1, Pt2, Pt3, Pt4.

Big Hollywood is promising more in-depth reviews of significant conservative films.

Multiple hat tips to Karen L. Myers.

Mickey Kaus

Relatively rational liberal commentator Robert Michael “Mickey” Kaus has filed his nomination papers to run against Barbara Boxer in the democrat primary in California for that party’s nomination to the US Senate.

Kaus went to Harvard and has been a prominent blogger since 1999. Although he’s a liberal, he fairly frequently posts well-reasoned analyses I agree with and link.

Investor’s Business Daily describes his politics as follows:

Kaus is a strong supporter of national health care, though he harshly criticized the White House “cost control” marketing strategy. However, he is a harsh critic of labor unions, a skeptic of affirmative action and an opponent of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Kaus is known for his honesty about the motivations of his allies, his opponents and himself.

I’m not sure that Mickey Kaus is any worse than Carly Fiorina overall, and either of the two would be a definite improvement over Barbara Boxer. I think Kaus has a chance of winning the primary, and is bound to make it an interesting race.

That Skull and Bones balloting box was not actually sold. Apparently, Christie’s withdrew it from the sale late last month, IvyGate reports, after receiving a mysterious “title claim.” The Russell Trust has plenty of lawyers.

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Hot Air (one of the most important conservative blogs) has been sold to Salem Communications. Congratulations and good luck.
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As part of the Carnival celebration, preceding the beginning of Lent, in the Spanish village of Laza, “Peliqueiros” or ancient tax collectors, are portrayed wearing warning cowbells and prepared to beat the villagers with sticks. 39 Carnival photos.

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Stratfor: Tradecraft in Dubai Assassination
3:14 video

The Oldest College Daily reports:

Information Technology Services administrators plan to join with Google Apps for Education to bring students, faculty and employees the Gmail e-mail service by the end of this month, said an undergraduate member of the Student Technology Collaborative who asked to remain anonymous because of ITS policy. The service, tentatively called “Bulldogs,” will also offer users a suite of tools for communication and collaboration — including Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs. The new interface will look like the standard Gmail layout, but without advertisements, the student said.

The Gmail-based service will gradually replace the University’s current e-mail client, Horde, the student said. The incoming class of 2014 will be the first to go directly to the new Google system, and current freshmen and sophomores will have to make the switch. Upperclassmen will have the option of keeping Horde, but the University plans to phase out Horde by spring of next year, the student said.

Planning for “Bulldogs” did not include computer science faculty, computer science professor Michael Fischer said, adding that he and his colleagues have not yet discussed the transition with ITS administrators.

“It’s a complicated issue, and I’ve just learned about the plans for the switch myself,” Fischer said. “They’re certainly not finalized yet, and we’re going to be holding discussions over the next few days to work things out.”

The transition to Google Apps will also give users more storage capacity — 7.4 gigabytes — than the two gigabytes that the University’s Pantheon data storage system currently offers, the student said. Students and faculty will be able to upload any file smaller than one gigabyte to the Gmail server and share it with other users. With Pantheon, students can upload files of no more than 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte.

Another student tech, who also asked to remain anonymous, said switching data to Google Apps would save Yale 12 gigabytes of on-site storage per student, totalling tens of thousands of gigabytes’ worth of data.

“Now [Yale] can host it all off-site and allow Google to maintain it for them,” the second student said in an e-mail. “The extra space can be reallocated or shut down to save money.”

Yale’s in-house disc space will then be given to only faculty or graduate students who need large amounts of data storage for academic purposes, the first student said.

Another factor in the decision to make the switch, the student said, was Gmail’s user-friendly interface.

“Since settings for ‘Bulldogs’ will be identical to Gmail settings, e-mail forwarding and the use of e-mail clients (such as Thunderbird or Outlook) will be easy,” the second student said in an e-mail.

I’m so old that I can remember the days when IT at Yale consisted of playing Star Trek and Adventure on a PDP-10.