Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Hope less
Christopher Buckley, son of Wm. F., former spechwriter for Bush the Elder, hardcore Republican, says Let's quit while we're behind. A sample:
On Capitol Hill, a Republican Senate and House are now distinguished by—or perhaps even synonymous with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy Cunningham (bandit, 12 o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million Bridge to Nowhere, Jack Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate Majority Leader who declared, after conducting his own medical evaluation via videotape, that he knew every bit as much about the medical condition of Terry Schiavo as her own doctors and husband. Who knew that conservatism means barging into someone’s hospital room like Dr. Frankenstein with defibrillator paddles? In what chapter of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is that principle enunciated?
In A self-initiated intervention, Britt Blaser finds that's just the tip of the op-edberg, as cats abandon the stinking ship.
Read the whole things.
Living end
Kevin Marks: The real revolution is hinted at by Jobs showing Rocketboom in his set-top box demo.
He also has a bunch of questions for Apple. The big one for me is, Will it play HD content made by independents cleanly, or will it require broadcast flag handshakes? If it's the latter there's no way I'll ever buy one.
Good question
Mike Linksaver asks, why isn’t the Ad Council, or the blogger equivalent, running an educational campaign teaching people to avoid spam and malware?
Adventures in Duopolyville
Dave: It's apparently impossible to get Internet service in Berkeley. Brother, I know your pain.
And the bastards don't just fail you at home. It took me almost two months to get Verizon's EVDO to work for more than a few minutes through my new Verizon-only Treo 700p. Advice for laptop owners with Treo 700p phones: don't even bother using them as a bridge to the Net. Get an EVDO card. It's not heaven, but sometimes it gets off the ground. (For $57 a month. If you commit to two years.)
Worse, it turns out that, even after years of training by phone company call centers, a majority of Americans are unprepared for the apocalypse.
Quote du jour
Britt Blaser: Open source politics is a chance for a society to put zero-cost majorities in politicians’ laps.
Thinking outside a different box
Over at IT Garage I'm looking for thoughts about Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. Here's the first blog post about it by Kim Cameron, the main man behind it.
Five years ago today
We are hearing warfare metaphors everywhere. Attack, Ground Zero, etc. But they are more than metaphors - they are real. And so I want to share this:
The aftermath of battle is horrendous. Be it the plains of the Ancient civilizations, the woods and fields of Gettysburg or a village in Bosnia, most poignant is the fading of the cacophony of battle into the individual voices of the wounded and dying. The women of Sparta heard it, Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, Whitman in the Civil War, Hemingway in WWI, Ernie Pyle in WWII, Dan Rather in Vietnam.
They were highly skilled at telling the story, but no matter how hard they tried - even with TV, it was still just a story. Remote. Sad but...over.
But yesterday, the voice of the fallen, the cry of the dying, the reach for a hand, was heard the world around. It reached out to mothers, fathers, children and spouses.
And it came on a cell phone.
Yesterday, the battlefield become boundary-less.
Never again will the sound of battle fade away after the heat.
Bonus link: New terrorism strategy.