Why I Hate Web 2.0

I didn't want to waste space here ragging about the disgusting young entrepreneurs being lionized in the Web 2.0 environment, so I will just point to my EE Times blog rant on the subject. Lord protect me from Facebook MySpace Ning Flikr and the zillions of worthless blogs like this one...

FISA: Trust but Verify

I had the distinct honor this past week of participating in a Colorado ACLU Fall Forum panel on electronic surveillance and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The panel featured such luninaries as Jean Dubofsky, the first woman justice on the Colorado Supreme Court (pictured), talking about the Denver Police Intelligence files; Bill Hochman, Colorado College history professor and FISA legislation expert; and Pat Huhn, Pikes Peak Community College English professor who keeps tabs on data mining.

One thing we all agreed on is that civil libertarians could reach reasonable compromises with the National Security Agency as to how domestically-located switches and routers could be used for monitoring legitimate terror networks -- provided a revamped version of the Protect America Act provided specificity. That same specificity should be applied to telecom carriers seeking indemnity from helping government agencies without obtaining warrants -- in fact, Sen. Patrick Leahy said this week he'd look at indemnity, provided no blank checks were offered. The people fighting such explicit and formal legislation are not necessarily the intelligence agencies. Instead, there is a clear majority among Republicans in Congress, a significant minority among Democrats, and far too many media pundits, who do not want the topic of signals intelligence discussed under any venue. They want us to simply trust leaders like Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, former head of NSA. Hats off to Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, who blasted the entire editorial-page staff of The Washington Post, as well as Joe Klein from Time, for saying that we should simply amend FISA in open-ended ways and hope our leaders are honest. As Greenwald said, this kind of thinking is dangerous for democracy. As my old pal Ronald Reagan said about Soviet arms-control treaties, "Trust, but verify."

NEWS FLASH: In the October 20 edition of The New York Times, the editors gave us a long and very hard-hitting editorial blasting the Oct. 18 Senate compromise on FISA. The editorial was titled "With Democrats Like These..." and concluded by saying that the only thing worse than having a single party rule Washington prior to late 2006, was having the Democrats win both houses and still have a single party ruling Washington. You can say that again!

Jihad vs. McWorld

Remember that great 1992 book by Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld? Seven years before the anti-globalization protests erupted in Seattle, six years before the first big terror actions of al-Qaeda, Barber was warning us that, if a stark choice had to be made between globalized corporate branding led by Ronald McDonald and worldwide violent Wahhabism, most Westerners would have no trouble picking the Golden Arches. Now, thoughtful critics insisted the choice Barber gave us was no choice at all, but after witnessing the bombing of the Bhutto parade today, I continue to see his point.

I always had a problem with cheering the Westernizing tendencies of Benazir Bhutto, since she came from that Georgetown-Harvard-CIA clique responsible for so much Cold War liberalism. And even though she was set up by Musharraf, it was pretty clear that her husband was at least partially guilty of corruption charges. I'm not ruling out the possibility that one of Musharraf's friends in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency set this up as a dirty trick, but it seems likely that al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban was responsible. This not only gives Bush more fuel for pursuing his endless War on Terror, but it underscores the belief that the planet simply is too small to allow such catastrophist forms of belief as end-times Wahhabism. In fact, if we're going to get anywhere in cultural meetings of minds, I would insist in my Western-steeped ways that a baseline requirement for living on this planet is tempering one's belief system through the filter of 17th-century Enlightenment thought. Too hung up on reason? Well, a violent faith-based way of knowing allows no cross-cultural discussions outside a frame of reference. How can you talk with someone about restoring the caliphate if you don't believe Muhammad has 50 virgins in paradise? How can you talk about missionary work if you don't believe "Jesus is the way the truth and the light"? Only reason, Enlightenment, and the scientific method allow this. So let's hear it for Ronald McDonald, Isaac Newton, and Benazir Bhutto - not my favorite people, admittedly, but consider the alternative.

Sunburned Circle

Oh, boy, here's the collaboration album of the year - Finland's Circle and Boston's Sunburned Hand of the Man got together in late 2006 for a session that resulted in The Blaze Game, part freeform noodling, part percussive nonsense, part Deadhead hippie jam. Wacky, sophisticated, and goes well with intoxicants of all types. Two. Thumbs. Way. Up.

That '70s Shtick

There seems to be a lot of strange fascination with the 70s lately - Rilo Kiley loves that disco and Fleetwood Mac sound, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is channeling a dimension between J. Geils and Climax Blues Band, and now Fiery Furnaces gives us an Eleanor Friedberger wishing she were a Joan Jett/Suzi Quatro hybrid. (I saw Fiery Furnaces in Denver last year and hoped for some of that strange piano-driven Rundgren-style stuff, and got Eleanor being a metal queen - nice, but...)

What's my problem? It's not the 1970s I knew and loved. The one where the burst of punk in 1976-77 represented the highlight of the decade. The one where the glam rockers early in the decade, precursors to goth types, could always trump lovers of Bachman Turner Overdrive and Deep Purple with their collections of Roxy Music, New York Dolls, Mott the Hoople, and Velvet Underground. In fact, the only place where me and the metalheads came to common cause was Blue Oyster Cult, a band everyone could love for their cheesy chutzpah.

Given that prejudice, my vote for 1970s retro of 2007 goes to Thurston Moore's Trees Outside the Academy. Yeah, I know, Thurston is destroying the indie cred of his band, Sonic Youth, with a Starbuck's contract, but think of the wonderful things he continues to do in promoting unusual and non-commercial improv music. What's special about this album is he gets weirdo artists like Christina Carter to sing actual songs with traditional melodic structure on this album, and gives us a booklet with pics of himself as a teenager, worshipping Patti Smith and The Ramones and The Dead Boys while letting his red-haired freak flag fly. Now that's a 1970s I recognize.

Homeland Security Shopping Network

When Strategic Space conference came to Omaha, the conference was met by activists from Nebraskans for Peace driving an oversized shopping cart filled with fake weapons. Here's a picture of everyone's favorite choir director Frances Mendenhall leading her group in a canticle for arms purchases. Even Elliot Pulham, CEO of the US Space Foundation which sponsored the conference, made a not-unkind mention of the humorous protest during the opening ceremony for Strategic Space.

Red-Hot Racism for Columbus Day

I haven't liked Columbus Day for a long time, and the whole "500 Years of Oppression" is just a secondary reason for me -- even given Denver's annual Columbus parade, complete with American Indian Movement civil disobedience. Those who think there was something positive in Columbus coming to the North American continent, have to overlook his very genocidal tendencies in helping Ferdinand and Isabella chase the Jews and Moors out of Spain (Housley, The Later Crusades, pg. 311). In his later years, Columbus was becoming a messianic racist nutcase, spouting about how God had chosen him to eradicate the Jews of Europe. This is someone to celebrate?
Well, I guess so, given the way people are responding to recent hoopla about an African-American teenage girl being pepper-sprayed and punched in Fort Pierce, Fla. Admittedly, the facts in this case can be as controversial as those in the Jena Seven events, and the cops in Fort Pierce arguably used restraint. But when I saw the user comments regarding the YouTube video in question, I was dumbfounded (they might have been removed by the time you read this). Users, some giving full names, bandied about the word "nigger" as though it's commonplace and OK to use as a white person, which several YouTube observers obviously are. Now, the Fort Pierce brutality case is a borderline event, because the 15-year-old wasn't doing the slightest thing to comply with a cop's request. But to use a discussion as an excuse to dredge out racist terms that should have died a century ago, shows how far we have to go to eradicate racism in this country. 515 years of white folk eradicating everyone else in North America, ain't ya proud?