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| Wednesday, October 16, 2002 |
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Ennui source found 
| | Britt Blaser is a real bright guy who reliably delivers well-informed contrarian perspectives. |
| | This book is a tour de force and should be required reading for anyone who is part of the neural network called web logging, whether as a writer or reader. The blogging world seems to generate as many words about it as we bloggers write about our other interests. This must be a powerful meme that is probably building its own neural network. Notice that many astute bloggers are already calling for mechanisms to consolidate our burgeoning collective so its collective archive is as searchable as one of our RSS feeds. |
| | Did you catch that line about America's decline? In this 1995 book, Bloom described the real dangers that fundamental Islam poses to the withering American civilization. The chapter is so prescient that it's now available online, along with photos from Bloom's apartment of the burning twin towers. |
| | American Decline?!! Can he say that in Public? |
| | Bloom did say it, in 1995, and his case is airtight. He demonstrates that we've been in decline since 1973 and any honest reader will be forced to agree with him. The reason one is forced to agree with him is that he uses real metrics - not vague impressions - to show that we're behaving just like the Chinese empire when confronted by the Europeans, the Aztecs facing the Spaniards and the English upon the rise of the Germans and Americans. |
| | It also answers Larry Lessig's important question - why aren't we Netizens up in arms over the travesties being perpetrated in Washington by corporate toadies and religious zealots? The reason is that thinking people have given up hope and are suffering from a collective depression. The best and brightest who may be the only ones who might lead us out of this dark political era are asleep at the switch, presumably watching The West Wing, imagining how we might also act like Toby and Sam and Bartlett, if we could only muster the energy. |
| | I don't agree with what Bloom says about Islam (though I offer it to my warblogger friends as primo fodder), but I do have to say it creeps the shit out of me. |
| | Especially lines like this: |
| | The moral is simple. Never forget the pecking order's surprises. Today's superpower is tomorrow's conquered state. Yesterday's overlooked mob is often the ruler of tomorrow. Never underestimate the third world. Never be complacent about barbarians. |
| | Anyway, provocative stuff. |
Dead right, indeed
| | You're dead wrong, says the RIAA's Cary Sherman to the CEA's Gary Shapiro. Sherman calls for "constuctive dialog," when the RIAA never engaged in a word of it with the Internet radio pioneers, who were never about "stealing" a damn thing, and only wanted to start a vital new industry where the old one died of greed, co-optation and terminal bean-counting. Those pioneers now lie bloody and beaten, victims of the RIAA's punishing manipulation of lawmaking and regulatory machinery. |
| | Smart of them to respond in ZDNet, though. |
By popular request
| | The new link to my RSS feed is that orange XML button over the calendar. This puts it where everybody can find it easily. The RSS has been improved, too. |
History lessons
| | Making coffee, I'm listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross. The guests are Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Peter Kornbluh. Schlesinger is a historian and former aide to JFK. Kornbluh runs National Security Archive's Cuba Project. They met recently in Cuba with Fidel and a bunch of former Soviet and American officials who are veterans of the Cuban Missle Crisis, which took place forty years ago, when I was fifteen and a sophomore in high school. |
| | In other words, I'm old enough to remember it very well. It scared the piss out of everybody — far more than that ominous sense of what now that followed the 9/11 attack. That Soviet missles were targetted at the U.S., and vice versa, was an all-too-familiar fact. I frankly believed, as many did, that the chance that we'd blow up the world was quite large. |
| | Both men are waxing wise. |
| | Advice to Bush from Schlesinger (who must be quite old now): Continue the processes of containment and deterrence that have kept Saddam behind his borders for a decade, return the inspectors (calling his bluff on unconditional inspections). He calls Saddam a monster, but believes Saddam will not use WOMD if the U.S. takes a strong stand. |
| | He also thinks we are in a different situation than the one we faced forty years ago, but not equipped with the same level of wisdom in the cabinet. Referring to the Spielberg movie Minority Report, in which "precogs" were "phsycically equipped to predict crimes to be committed in time to prevent them," Schlesinger says Cheney and Rumsfeld seem to see themselves as precogs in respect to Iraq. "History is full of surpises hat outwit all our certitudes," Schlessinger says (great line!). To believe we can fortell consequences is a "gross illusion." |
| | Kornbluh quoting Kennedy: "It's easier to be courageous before blood is shed." JFK also came up with the deal, over the objections of his aides that ended the crisis: telling Krushchev that the U.S. would pull missles out of Turkey, over the objections of his aides. |
| | Bush has not been a good student of history, Kornbluh says. "The greater the risk, the more prudent we need to be." Guess he doesn't see prudence coming out of the White House these days. |
| | "War doesn't solve any problems." Kornbluh is quoting somebody, not sure who. |
| | Many years ago I spoke at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Before the talk, I asked some of the guys there what the organization — famous for many years for its R&D on nuclear weaponry — really was. "We're the world's best problem solving organization," one guy said. "How do you solve problems," I asked. "With a smoking hole," came the reply. "If your problem needs a smoking hole, we're here to help." |
A small piece
The ethics bug
| | Here's Mitch on the wave of ethics conversation that seems to be going around blogland: |
| | I think the discussion of ethics is exceptionally healthy, especially amid the waves of corporate corruption, with a White House that lies and hides facts from the public, in a world where the truth is always hidden under a veneer of righteousness. If blogging does want to be different, its practitioners should be having this debate. Apparently, no one else is asking these hard questions of themselves. |
| | "Ethics bug" is his term, by the way. I like its several meanings. |
Writes of way
| | A reader writes to share one of many reasons why he doesn't publish a personal weblog: I don't want to give others the *right* to know personal information about myself. |
Paging oneself
| | This was read at FLW's funeral: "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." |
| | I want my epitaph to say "He was almost finished." I say that by way of procrastination, since I still feel like I've almost started. |
Related
| | If you want to know what Möbius 2000 was about, here's the site/blog, courtesy of Phillip Torrone. His report on my talk is at the top of Day 2. At the bottom is this Day 2 is a report on hanging out at GameWorks. An excerpt: |
| | ...when you see Bill Gates walk in an arcade on a Saturday night checking out the scene -- It's pretty amazing, out of all the places, all the things one could do if one were Bill Gates, he's here, seeing what we see, doing what we do... |
| | Shoulda stayed and challenged Billg to some arcade basketball. It's my game, man. I got two tokens here that say I'll kick his ass. |
A post that will live in ignomy
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