I know John Hiatt’s coming to town soon (with Lyle Lovett, a show I saw and loved last year) but I don’t think he’s here yet. Maybe this was an advance man ...
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
“Put the cow horns back on the Cadillac/ change the message on the codaphone"
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Researching "Write Hard, Die Free": a time machine to Alaska 1972-1992
I've been busy doing the first major revision of Write Hard, Die Free, the history I'm writing about the Alaska Newspaper War. Sometimes I play music we once listed to in The Club China Doll while I work and it feels like I'm actually living in 1974.
The working title is
Write Hard, Die Free
Battling corruption, Big Oil and bad journalism
to win the Alaska Newspaper War (and two Pulitzers)
I'm working toward release in the spring of 2012, Insha’allah Boukrah Ma’alesh. Seems slow after living at internet speed for so long.
I'll have a Facebook page for the book when things are a bit more certain. Please watch for it; I've been telling the truth, so I'll need all the friends I can get.
(A draft of Chapter One is online.)
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Is Silicon Valley going the way of Hollywood, creating little lasting value?
This Tech Bubble Is Different [longform.org]
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm
My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. “An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn’t fundamentally increase American competitiveness.”
(via Instapaper)
Friday, April 22, 2011
George RR Martin (Game of Thrones) makes the case for comic books
This excerpt from a 1981 speech by George RR Martin makes good on its promise: The Case for Comic Books:
Block Quote: ‘The Case for Comic Books’
Every would-be writer needs comic books. I certainly did. I can still vividly recall my discovery of comic books, followed closely by the revelation that this reading stuff was actually good for something. Because comic books had it all over Readers. Comic books had pictures, and so did Readers, but in comic-book pictures somebody was flying or punching somebody, while in my Reader little Sally was crying about her little red boat. Even in my prepubescent days I had this vague feeling that Wonder Woman had it all over Jane, although I couldn’t put my finger on the reason. I did know that watching Spot run was a real drag when I could watch Krypto the Superdog fly instead. And I knew that if they ever met, Krypto would bite Spot’s head off.
So I read every comic I could get my hands on, and my reading got better and better. My teachers soon began to marvel that I read with such “expression,” while the rest of my class read . . . like . . . this. I knew the reason. You need a lot more expression for, “Aha, Superman, now my red kryptonite will turn you into a BOILED EGG!” than you do for “See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.” So if the schools don’t do it, remember comic books. Maybe your kid won’t be as quick as I was, and regular comic books won’t do, but even that’s no problem in this day and age. There’s always the undergrounds. “Tales of the Leather Nun” should do it every time.
Adapted from a speech delivered by George R. R. Martin at Ambercon 3 in Wichita, Kan., on May 31, 1981.
I also found a lot to nod in agreement with in this review of Game of Thrones by Heather Havrilesky in the NYT Mag -- not everything, but a lot. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Riff-t.html
Twiiter as the anti-TV for news coverage: personal, transparent, real
Importantly, this discussion isn't about Twitter as citizen journalism as it is about the way a professional journalist uses the medium to gather, filter and disseminate news. Very insightful:
"One important way in which the curator/anchor role differs on Twitter compared to television relates to the second mechanism, the availability of unfiltered, graphic content. There has been a steady stream of photographs and videos depicting the reality of war and violence: images of the dead, dying and wounded of all ages, from small babies to elderly men and women have been circulating on social media sites. Understandably, victims of such violence did not feel a need to censor their very real suffering and keep it from us, the way television steps between us and the victims and isolates us, the audience, from reality."
View full story at http://technosociology.org/?p=393
via News.me
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
A poem that begins "Lost and trapped, there's naught but dirt between him and the sky..."
I found this poem via Seoul Brother, a Tacoma blogger I follow ("Good, Clean. Fun. Pick two."). It's apparently by somebody who posts as drcairns at Talk Dirty to Me, Paul Krugman.
I don't understand these people, but I enjoy them. And I liked this poem a lot:
under groundLost and trapped, there’snaught but dirtbetween him and sky.Buried alive there aremonsters down here,always hunting;his only company,the dragons,they dig too, buthe kills them with abicycle pump or something.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Just rediscovered my old web gallery with pix of European street art. God, I love this stuff. http://bit.ly/edtn4K
I've long collected photos of street graffiti in Sacramento (a pal and I called it Expression Without Permission). Today I came across another web gallery of mine with photos of stencils and grafftiti from a European vacation.
Wondrously creative ads for a bookstore from a Lithuanian agency. http://thurly.net/1brq
This is just one from a series of marvelous ads created by Love Agency advertising for the Mint Vinetu bookstore.
I don't know a thing about the bookstore (translated website here) but I know I like it. A quick search turned up a series of YouTube poetry videos, too. One guidebook says, "Hooray for the lovely people who opened this very welcome second-hand bookshop with small attached café in Old Town. The choice of books, including titles in English, may be small but it’s the best anybody’s managed to do so far."
Hawaii hotels use washable RF chip to track stolen towels, saves $16k/mo. No kidding. http://thurly.net/1bqw
Hawaii's Civil Beat news site reports that one Honolulu hotel is one of the first in the country to use washable radio frequency tracking chips to track linens. Stolen pool towels have dropped from an average 4,000 per month to 750, the RF manufacturer says, saving the hotel $16,000 a month.
(Disclosure: I did some work with the folks at Civil Beat. And I like them.)
Friday, April 15, 2011
About a minute of audience reaction at Animal Collective concert in SF Wednesday
We had nearly perfect seats for observing Animal Collective Wednesday (slightly less oiptimal for listening, on accoutn of speaker locations). I shot about a minute of video in the dim light during the first encore (maybe "Brothersport"?) that does show how fully enthralled the audience was.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
President Obama starts playing offense in the budget war: http://thurly.net/1b1l
As Kevin Drum points out at MotherJones.com, the president threw down in plain language during his budget speech: the deficit is the Republican's fault. Pure and simple. Nearly 100%.
Shame on any Democrat (or Republican who cares about the country's future) if they don't follow suit. This has been about giving huge breaks to the hugely wealthy and taking things away from people who need them—mostly while paying for wars we didn't need and probably can't win.
America’s finances were in great shape by the year 2000. We went from deficit to surplus. America was actually on track to becoming completely debt free, and we were prepared for the retirement of the Baby Boomers.But after Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program — but we didn’t pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in unpaid-for tax cuts — tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade.To give you an idea of how much damage this caused to our nation’s checkbook, consider this: In the last decade, if we had simply found a way to pay for the tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit, our deficit would currently be at low historical levels in the coming years.But that’s not what happened. And so, by the time I took office, we once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a Baby Boom retirement that is now starting to take place. When I took office, our projected deficit, annually, was more than $1 trillion. On top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession that, like most recessions, led us to temporarily borrow even more.
Shame on any Democrat (or Republican who cares about the country's future) if they don't follow suit. This has been about giving huge breaks to the hugely wealthy and taking things away from people who need them—mostly while paying for wars we didn't need and probably can't win.
How can this be tough to sell to the majority of American voters? Honestly, how??
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Sunday, April 10, 2011
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Non-profit raises $1.2 mill, pays Bristol Palin $262K, gives only $35K to charities. http://thurly.net/194x
from Forbes columnist Elisa Doucette:
This week, in Oops They Did It Again, the Associated Press is reporting on the financial statements from “non-profit” charitable organization, The Candie’s Foundation. At the center of the firestorm is Bristol Palin, America’s most idolized teen mom, behind those MTV kids (pictured above, with Palin at an event sponsored by The Candie’s Foundation in NYC).Apparently, the organization was only able to find $35,000 to grant to charities from the $1,242,476 donated from the public. Meanwhile, the young Ms. Palin managed to pull in a $262,500 paycheck for her role as an ambassador for their teen pregnancy prevention campaign in 2009. Other celebrities affiliated (past and present) with The Candie’s Foundation include: Hayden Panettiere, Beyoncé, Ciara, Jenny McCarthy, Vanessa Minnillo, Ashley Tisdale, Hilary Duff, Ashlee Simpson, Usher, Rachel Bilson, and Teddy GeigerAn ambiguous unnamed source from Palin’s camp spoke out yesterday afternoon, citing the work that she had done for the organization. Palin filmed numerous PSA’s, shot print and internet ads, hosted and participated in town hall meetings and attended multiple events for the charity she represented. A quarter of a million dollars is apparently in line with celebrity endorsements.
Friday, April 01, 2011
If you ever drank coffee in Anchorage: http://thurly.net/17q3
Kaladi Brothers Coffee President Tim Gravel, right, said the Cafe del Mundo brand built by Perry Merkel (left) wouldn't be changed in any way after the sale. (Anchorage Daily News photo by Bill Roth).
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Dear Glenn Beck: Take this domain and shove it. http://thurly.net/17pu
The satirical site at issue here was GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com, a protest against Beck's use of scurrilous accusations in his commentary.
The way the story of Beck's protest and subsequent loss in a WIPO appeal is a perfect example of how *not* to deal with internet criticism. And, in my opinion, a well-deserved "up yours" to Mr. Beck.
Here's correct link for How To Steal Like An Artist: http://thurly.net/17po
I've been using Posterous to cross post some things to various media and apparently haven't got it all figured out yet. Regrets to all you searched and found naught.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
'How to steal like an artist' has great advice about creativity
Here's a presentation called "How to steal like an artist (and 9 other things nobody told me). It's really interesting and — at least when I read it this morning — sometimes feels profound. It's by Austin Kleon and it's worth reading all of. Here's a taste:
- Nothing is original. Ecclesiastes:That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.
- You are a mashup of what you choose to let into your life.
- The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.
- The question every young writer asks is: “What should I write?” And the cliched answer is, “Write what you know.”
- This advice always leads to terrible stories in which nothing interesting happens. The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s write what you *like*
- As Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Why taking somebody seriously might be the biggest favor you can do for them:
A nine-year old wrote to a favorite TV program asking for help because "I think I no how to make people or animals alive." Their reply didn't ridicule or ignore him. 35 years later, as a professor of rheumatology and tissue engineering, he played a key role in a record-breaking feat of surgery and changed a life.
Says he:
"If [the letter in reply] had shown any hint of ridicule or disbelief I might perhaps never have trained to become a medical scientist or been driven to achieve the impossible dream, and really make a difference to a human being's life. I remember being thrilled at the time to have been taken seriously. Actually, even nowadays I am thrilled when people take my ideas seriously."
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Launching Angry Birds at the dictator level
Some levels are more easily cleared than others. It's apparently all a question of tools.
NYRB buys idea of Palin's 'arduous...even dangerous' feats. Alaskans don't.
Janet Malcom in the New York Review of books offers this credulous appraisal of things Sarah Palin did on her television show: "Palin, who is both narrator and star of the series, performs arduous and sometimes even dangerous feats of outdoorsmanship to demonstrate the conservative virtue of self-reliance." http://goo.gl/aitoe
Well, bullshit.
Longtime Alaska outdoor journalist Craig Medred dissects that claim in Alaska Dispatch: " National Park Service rangers and other personnel who monitored the activities of Palin and her producers in the park say no one involved with "Sarah Palin's Alaska" was ever in any danger." http://goo.gl/ZuSq3
Test takers at Michele Rhee's showcase DC school changed answers
USA Today investigation found wholesale erasures on standardized tests, with answers always changed from wrong to right "The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance," statisticians said. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-28-1Aschooltesting28_CV_N.htm ♨ http://flavors.me/howard
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Why are we ignoring more than 20,000 deaths in Japan?
As far as I know, the nuclear plant accidents in Japan haven’t killed anybody yet. The earthquake and tsunami killed more (perhaps far more) than 20,000.
Why is it just about all the news I read is about nukes?
Of course the situation at the nuclear plants is serious, and could become much worse — although probably not nearly as bad as you think. It could kill people eventually and demands attention. There are many lessons to be learned and, we prat, applied.
But we’re basically ignoring human tragedy on a vast scale while we breathlessly wonder whether any trace of radiation might possibly reach Hawaii. This speaks very badly about us.
Irish- born, U.S.-raised baseball loving redhead is the voice behind Obama's Libya action
President Barack Obama's decision to back a multilateral intervention in Libya suggests that [Samantha Power’s] voice is being heard. The 40-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Harvard academic is a senior adviser to Obama's national security team. She's also an Irish-born, U.S.-raised redhead with a deep voice, an abrupt manner and a love of baseball.
The United States should not frame its policy options in terms of doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the Marines," Power wrote in her book "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," for which she won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize. "America's leadership will be indispensable in encouraging U.S. allies and regional and international institutions to step up their commitments and capacities.”
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Let’s hear it for innovation writ small: http://liten.be//cHFVI
Via Nick Bilton at Bits: "As my colleague Miguel Helft noted recently, although companies that sell cases for the iPad are impressed with Apple’s new Smart Cover design, competitors said they were confident they would be able to offer a better and more innovative solution."
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Friday, March 25, 2011
for every laugh in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders and a vomit
Mark Twain offers his honest opinion about a book written by a friend. 
Transcript
via Letters of Note by Letters of Note on 3/24/11
In 1874, publishers Chatto & Windus asked their most renowned author, the inimitable Samuel Clemens, for a brief but quotable review of 'Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California by Dod Grille,' the most recent book by another of their authors, Ambrose Bierce. Given that Clemens and Bierce had known each other since the 1860s and remained good friends, the idea was perfectly understandable; if not a surefire way to generate some positive buzz about a book which had, so far since publication, failed to sell in quantity. What they hadn't considered was that Clemens would respond with brutal honesty. Transcript follows. Image courtesy of Boston Public Library. Image: Boston Public Library
Transcript
SLC Farmington Avenue,
Hartford 4/8/74 Gentlemen: "Dod Grile" (Mr. Bierce) is a personal friend of mine, & I like him exceedingly — but he knows my opinion of the "Nuggets & Dust," & so I do not mind exposing it to you. It is the vilest book that exists in print — or very nearly so. If you keep a "reader," it is charity to believe he never really read that book, but framed his verdict upon hearsay. Bierce has written some admirable things — fugitive pieces — but none of them are among the "Nuggets." There is humor in Dod Grile, but for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders and a vomit. The laugh is too expensive. Ys truly Samuel L. Clemens
Disgusting, should be criminal: Gannett doubled CEO pay to $9.4 million
Via Gannet blog:Gannett just disclosed that it paid Chairman and CEO Craig Dubow $9.4 million last year -- double his 2009 pay -- as the company laid off hundreds of workers and imposed wage cuts on thousands more. His pay included a $1.75 million all-cash bonus.Chief Operating Officer Gracia Martore got $8.2 million, more than double her $4.0 million in 2009, according to the new shareholders proxy report filed this afternoon with federal regulators. Her pay included a cash bonus of $1.25 million.
via Poynter. » Romenesko by Jim Romenesko on 3/25/11
Gannett Blog
Craig Dubow‘s pay included a $1.75 million all-cash bonus, reports Jim Hopkins. Chief operating officer Gracia Martore was paid $8.2 million, with a cash bonus of $1.25 million. The bonuses were awarded partly on the basis of cost-cutting… Read more
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Excuse me, Google, this is open? http://liten.be//euNcv
Google says it will delay the distribution of its newest Android source code, dubbed Honeycomb, at least for the foreseeable future. The search giant says the software, which is tailored specifically for tablet computers that compete against Apple's iPad, is not yet ready to be altered by outside programmers and customized for other devices, such as phones. via Daring Fireball @gruber
Sepressing: HuffPo is one of Craig Newmarks standards for journalism integrity
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NiemanJournalismLab/~3/riOIJfQc6GQ/ 
via Nieman Journalism Lab by Justin Ellis on 3/23/11
Craig Newmark’s most recently announced project, CraigConnects, is, as best as I can tell, a way of funneling Newmark’s attention capital towards (mostly) nonprofit organizations. In the way Craigslist leveraged a simple, open system to bring together people looking for stuff with people looking to get rid of stuff, CraigConnects will play a similar role in supporting work in areas like technology, veterans issues, open government and community building.
And something else called “journalism integrity.” Newmark explains on the site:
Okay, the deal is that trustworthy media really are the immune system of our country, as Jon Stewart says, “If we amplify everything we hear nothing. The press is our immune system of democracy. If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker and perhaps eczema.
Or, as I like to say it, trustworthy media should be “the immune system of democracy”.
Newmark’s examples under “journalism integrity” reads like a coverage list from the Lab: ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, NewsTrust and Huffington Post among others.
I swapped a few emails with Newmark, and it’s clear he sees attention as a powerful currency. For instance, when I asked him about the issue of supporting HuffPost, which by most accounts got a nice big bag of money from AOL, he wrote “HuffPost is a high integrity publisher, and individuals need to stand up and support that.” (Of course, it should also be noted that Newmark is a regular contributor to HuffPost.) Attention is good for raising awareness of social causes or building the valuation of a startup. But in the business of journalism, getting attention to translate into dollars (and let’s face it, dollars are a primary concern these days) is not an easy science.
What does Newmark mean by journalism integrity? “It means a reasonable adherence to traditional journalistic ethics like fact checking, and truth in advertising when an interviewee is paid to present a position; more so if the interviewee has been caught lying repeatedly,” Newmark wrote.
Newmark isn’t indicting the media for a lapse in ethics — at least not completely — but more pointedly directing light on organizations that are built specifically for investigative work and transparency. It’s not enough to keep government honest, but journalists have to keep themselves and their organizations honest, putting everything on the table and letting the audience decide.
Newmark told me that means disclosing conflicts of interests not just of reporters, but also their sources. “There are many news outlets competing for our attention and only a limited amount of news any day. That motivates sensationalistic reporting, and devalues traditional values like fact checking and the firewall between reporting and advertising,” he wrote.
The continuing struggle for news organizations, aside from making money to support news gathering, is gaining a foothold or step up on competition. What CraigConnects can offer to some degree is a Craig-approved vetting of reliable news sources for readers to consider. (I asked Newmark what he reads on a regular basis. His list includes HuffPost, TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Buzzmachine, Mashable, and The New York Observer among others.) It’s an extension of the recommendations you get from friends or a fine-tuned Twitter feed, but in this case there’s an implied suggestion to give more than your readership and clicks. I asked Newmark whether he thought news organizations can operate as nonprofits. “I think so, a lot of people are willing to pay for trustworthy news, as in the case of NPR,” he wrote.
Talking with Newmark, I get the sense he hasn’t fully defined the extent of how CraigConnects can help journalism, but he senses it’s an important time to start backing the journalism you use and can trust. And as he makes plain on the project’s website, he’s still figuring out how CraigConnects will work as a platform for all the areas he’s trying to support. Either way, he’s committed to a 20-year calendar for CraigConnects.
We know that one of the ways Craigslist revolutionized classifieds was by getting the buyer and seller in direct contact, eliminating the need for the newspaper. With CraigConnects, it seems Newmark wants to put a middleman back in play for the sake of journalism.
Image courtesy of Stephanie Canciello, unali artists.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Stan Lee has good advice for budding comic artist: http://liten.be//AH7gU
From Stan Lee’s advice:
“...if you really wanna become a pro, you're kidding around too much...Do real serious stuff. For example, pick a character you think you could handle--HULK for example. Then do a serious, no-kidding story about him-- using your own drawings and layouts (no swipes). That's the only way to really tell if you have the stuff or not."
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
Obama on his Libya shift: "This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values."
The key decision was made by President Barack Obama himself at a Tuesday evening senior-level meeting at the White House, which was described by two administration officials as "extremely contentious." Inside that meeting, officials presented arguments both for and against attacking Libya. Obama ultimately sided with the interventionists. His overall thinking was described to a group of experts who had been called to the White House to discuss the crisis in Libya only days earlier.
"This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values," a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.
Read more from Foreign Policy: http://t.co/Al0M0oB
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Progressively more astonishing Cassini footage from Saturn; keep watching (via kottke.org)
I'm very excited to present the first test from "Outside In" that actually represents real footage in progress from the film. Camera moves are still being tweaked and this is cropped version as IMAX-sized stuff does not play well online. But thanks to the new version of Adobe After Effects, "Outside In" can be made as I have always envisioned.
thanks to kottke.org
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FOMO: How the Fear of Missing Out fuels social media
There is a company that sells radar equipment to the police as well as radar detectors to the public. Clorox is one of the world’s worst polluters of water, and also sells Brita filters to get the bad stuff out of the water again. Lawyers create mazes that you have to hire a lawyer to escape. Similarly social software both creates and cures FOMO. If you didn’t know that party was going on, you’d be home contentedly reading your latest New Yorker. But since you do, you hungrily watch each new tweet.
Is 2011 the last year of the album and start of a whole new music concept? Kaplan thinks so.
Last week marked the release of an album I have been associated with in some form for two years now. That doesn’t mean that I had anything to do with its creation, just that I was associated with it. To that regard, I was there for mixing, marketing and release. The record is from a group of people collectively known as R.E.M.
I predict it is the last “Album” they will release.
In fact, I predict that 2011 is the last year of the Album (capital A).
Read more at BLACKRIMGLASSES by Ethan Kaplan.
Why watch TV networks at all? You don't go to movie listings and say, "I wonder what Paramount is showing this week"
From Time’s Tune In television blog:
The entertainment-biz press, led by a report in Deadline.com, has the news this morning that Netflix may be about to acquire a high-profile original drama—political thriller House of Cards from David Fincher and Kevin Spacey—by outbidding the likes of HBO. Does this mean, if the deal pans out, that Netflix wants to become a TV network?Actually, it could mean something bigger: the beginning, albeit the very beginning, of a much-theorized about move to a business model in which TV networks are optional.Why do you watch TV networks at all? You don't go to the movie listings and say, "Gee, I wonder what Paramount has showing this week!"—you just look for a movie. The reason for TV's configuration was, first, technical and practical. A network controlled the means of distribution: it had the hardware and the system of affiliates that were necessary to literally beam a program from a tape somewhere into your living room.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
"US, Europe focused on nukes rather than thousands actually killed"
"... in the United States and European Union, what’s happening at the power plant is receiving more attention, and generating more anxiety, than thousands of innocents crushed or drowned." Japan’s real disaster
blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/03/1...
blogs.reuters.com/gregg-easterbrook/2011/03/1...
Jon Bon Jovi blames Steve Jobs for ‘killing the music industry” (via @gruber)
From the item: "You know who never complains about the shift to digital music? People who buy and listen to music.”
Word.
Something in the alleyway
Doubtlessly there’s a story behind this abandoned couch and stylish shoes in the alley behind an upscale apartment complex here in downtown Sacramento. Any ideas?
Monday, March 14, 2011
Hit by Japan's worst earthquake & worst tsunamis...Not one reactor container has failed.
Japan's nuclear crisis and the 2011 earthquake tsunami: Let's cool the political meltdown.
www.slate.com/id/2288212
www.slate.com/id/2288212
For 40 years, they've quietly done their work. Three days ago, they were hit almost simultaneously by Japan's worst earthquake and one of its worst tsunamis. Not one reactor container has failed.
Kansas GOPer: Let's shoot illegal immigrants like pigs
Kansas GOPer: Let's Shoot Illegal Immigrants Like Pigs
tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/kansas-go...
tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/03/kansas-go...
NPR on string video: you can't buy coverage
The message that [NPR's Shiller] said most often — I counted six times: ... (was) that you cannot buy coverage,
Elements Of NPR Gotcha Video Taken Out Of Context : NPR
Footage posted online last week by conservative activist James O'Keefe III captured NPR's chief fundraising official, Ron Schiller, disparaging conservatives and the Tea Party and saying NPR would be better off without federal funding.
Fueled in part by the attention given the video by the conservative Daily Caller website, an 11 1/2-minute version of O'Keefe's hidden camera video ricocheted around the blogosphere Tuesday.
It mortified NPR, which swiftly repudiated Schiller's remarks and in short order triggered his ouster along with that of his boss, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, who is no relation to Ron Schiller.
A closer review of those tapes, however, shows that many of Ron Schiller's most provocative remarks were presented in a misleading way.
'There Are Two Ways To Lie'
O'Keefe's tapes show Ron Schiller and his deputy, Betsy Liley, at an upscale cafe in Georgetown for lunch in February. They meet with two men posing as officials with an Islamic trust. The men are actually O'Keefe's associates — citizen journalists, he calls them.
O'Keefe also posted a two-hour tape that he said was the "largely raw" audio and video from the incident so people can judge the credibility of his work.
The Blaze — a conservative news aggregation site set up by Fox News host Glenn Beck — first took a look late last week and found that O'Keefe had edited much of the shorter video in deceiving ways.
"There was certainly a lot there for conservatives and people of faith and Tea Party activists to be bothered about — but we felt like that wasn't the whole story," said Scott Baker, editor in chief of The Blaze. "There were a lot of other things said that may have been complimentary to conservatives and to people of faith and Tea Party activists in the same conversations."
My review was conducted with several colleagues. I also relied on outside people, including Baker, who have expertise in analyzing video and audio to review the two tapes.
Broadcast journalist Al Tompkins said he was initially outraged by what he heard in that first, shorter video by O'Keefe. Tompkins now teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla.
"What I saw was an executive at NPR expressing overtly political opinions that I was really uncomfortable with," Tompkins said. "Particularly the way the video was edited, it just seemed he was spouting off about practically everything."
But Tompkins said his mind was changed by watching that two-hour version.
"I tell my children there are two ways to lie," Tompkins said. "One is to tell me something that didn't happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen. I think they employed both techniques in this."
Sacramento, Calif.-based digital forensic consultant Mark Menz also reviewed both tapes at my request. He has done extensive video analyses for federal agencies and corporations.
"From my personal opinion, the short one is definitely edited in a form and fashion to lead you to a certain conclusion — you might say it's looking only at the dirty laundry," Menz said. He drew a distinction between that and a compressed news story.
O'Keefe's 'Investigative Reporting'
O'Keefe hasn't replied to several requests for comment for my stories on his tapes. On Twitter last week, he replied to me that his editing was no different from what other journalists do in crafting their stories — including my own.
On Sunday, he told CNN's Howard Kurtz that his use of hidden cameras is in the finest traditions of muckraking journalism.
"Journalists have been doing this for a long time," O'Keefe said. "It's a form of investigative reporting that you use to seek and find the truth."
O'Keefe said on CNN's Reliable Sources that his sting was inspired by NPR's decision to drop longtime news analyst Juan Williams last October after Williams made comments on Fox News about Muslims.
"The tape is very powerful," O'Keefe said. "The tape is very honest. The tape cuts to the core of who these people are."
But 26-year-old O'Keefe's own record is checkered. His takedown of the community organizing group ACORN relied on undercover videos that the California state attorney general's office concluded significantly distorted what occurred. Last May, O'Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor after an attempted video sting at the offices of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA).
'A Big Warning Flag'
In the review of the NPR tapes, O'Keefe's edited video triggered criticism right from his introduction. He ominously describes the phony Islamic group, saying that its website "said the organization sought to spread the acceptance of sharia across the world." (Shariah is Islamic law based on the Quran, although there are wide disparities in how different Muslim sects and cultures interpret what that entails.)
On the tape, Ron Schiller is then shown and heard creased with laughter, saying, "Really, that's what they said?"
In reality, as the longer tape shows, that laughter follows an innocuous exchange as Schiller and Liley greet the two supposed donors at their table.
"That to us was a signal that they were trying to condition the person watching the piece to feel as though there was assent to these ideas," said Scott Baker of The Blaze. "That was a big warning flag."
Tompkins said O'Keefe sought to portray the fundraisers as though they would do anything to appease donors.
On the shorter tape, for instance, one of the fake donors is heard assailing a "Zionist" influence on the media — and Liley, NPR's senior director of institutional giving, is heard responding affirmingly.
The O'Keefe associate posing as potential donor Ibrahim Kassam says NPR is "one of the few places that has the courage to present it [fairly]. There's kind of a joke that we used to call it National Palestinian Radio."
Some laughter follows. But the shorter tape does not include Ron Schiller immediately telling the two men that donors cannot expect to influence news coverage.
"There is such a big firewall between funding and reporting: Reporters will not be swayed in any way, shape or form," Schiller says on that longer tape, in one of several such remarks.
Tompkins found that meaningful, noting that Ron Schiller was a fundraiser, not an official affecting the newsroom.
"The message that he said most often — I counted six times: He told these two people that he had never met before that you cannot buy coverage," Tompkins said. "He says it over and over and over again."
Confusing The Context
In addition, several times the donors seek to goad Schiller and Liley into making inflammatory statements about conservatives or Fox News personalities, and they deflect them. At one point, Liley explains that she attended Purdue University, which she describes as a conservative and respected research university, and that people there relied on Fox to get much of their news.
Menz, the digital forensics consultant, said he found some of Schiller's actual remarks disturbing. But by analyzing time stamps, Menz concluded that many of Schiller's remarks in that shorter video are presented out of sequence from the questions that were posed.
"For me, in my background, it immediately puts things into question," Menz said. "You really don't know what context these were in, what was going on in the 20 minutes before and after this question was asked."
Take the political remarks. Ron Schiller speaks of growing up as a Republican and admiring the party's fiscal conservatism. He says Republican politicians and evangelicals are becoming "fanatically" involved in people's lives.
But in the shorter tape, Schiller is also presented as saying the GOP has been "hijacked" by Tea Partyers and xenophobes.
In the longer tape, it's evident Schiller is not giving his own views but instead quoting two influential Republicans — one an ambassador, another a senior Republican donor. Schiller notably does not take issue with their conclusions — but they are not his own.
Fueling The Public Broadcasting Funding Debate
Upon their release last week, O'Keefe's videos gave fresh life to the push by Congressional Republicans to strip federal funding for public broadcasting. In the shorter video, Schiller appears to be saying that NPR would do just fine without federal dollars, though some stations would go dark. On the longer tape, it's clear Schiller says it would be disastrous in the short term.
Tompkins said O'Keefe's editing is repeatedly and blatantly unfair.
"Except for a couple of unfortunate forays for political opinion, I think that Ron Schiller actually did a fairly remarkably good job of explaining how NPR works and what you can and cannot expect if you contribute money to the NPR Foundation," Tompkins said.
Blaze editor Baker said he emerged from analyzing the tapes with a surprising degree of respect for the professionalism of the two NPR executives, Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley.
"I think if you look at two hours in total, you largely get an impression that these are pretty — they seem to be fairly balanced people, trying to do a fairly good job," Baker said.
In recent days, several influential journalists have written that they regret giving O'Keefe's NPR videos wider circulation without scrutinizing them for themselves, given his past record and some of the objections that the Blaze first raised. They include Ben Smith of Politico, James Poniewozik of Time magazine and Dave Weigel of Slate.
"The speed at which the media operates when a video comes out is a problem," Weigel said Sunday. "I mean, the rush to be the first to report on a video — and, let's be brutally honest, the rush is to get traffic and to get people booked on [cable TV] shows to talk about it — and that nature leads you to not do the rigor and fact-checking that you would do in other situations."
An Accelerated Departure
Late Sunday night, NPR Senior Vice President Dana Davis Rehm wrote in an e-mail that the videos unfairly present several innocent comments by Ron Schiller and Liley as inappropriate.
"No one should be surprised based on O'Keefe's record that the video was heavily edited with the intention of discrediting NPR," Rehm said.
But from the outset, Rehm wrote, NPR confirmed that "egregious comments were made that were not distorted, doctored or fundamentally misrepresented."
Ron Schiller had already announced in early March that he would be leaving NPR for a job at the Aspen Institute in his hometown in Colorado. He had been commuting across the country, at his own expense, since joining NPR 18 months ago. But in the wake of the backlash to the videos, his departure was accelerated to take effect immediately. And then the Aspen Institute announced Schiller would not be joining its ranks. Liley has been placed on administrative leave.
Neither has commented — save for Ron Schiller's apologies for some of his political comments on the day the story broke last week.
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Team Burgers (TeamBurgers) wrote:
Silke Lipp (frauleinschuss) wrote:
@Bunny Guy I'm curious to know how you reconcile your posts with the deceitful phone call made by an imposter the Gov. Walker of Wisconsin. (Again I'm not on the Right.)
Well for one thing the call to Gov. Walker was not distorted.
March 14, 2011 2:20:39 PM PDT
Bob Potter (watches) wrote:
Art Aficionado (Art_Aficionado) wrote: "... Juan Williams' trivial remark ..."
That's not right. It must be a typo. I'm sure you meant to say "... Juan Williams' repeated violations of his employment contract ...". I know you're not one to distort the truth, Art.
March 14, 2011 2:20:30 PM PDT
Dale Keys (DaleKeys) wrote:
I didn't have too much of a problem with what Schiller said in the edited tape. It was inappropriate for him to say the things he said because of the nature of his work and position, but I pretty much agreed with him. Tea Partiers are gun-toting inbreds.
Dale Keys
Boise
March 14, 2011 2:20:01 PM PDT
Ryan Holdor (landsmatter) wrote:
Doesnt matter how you slice it: What was said by Schiller is true. Furthermore I might add manipulative, subversive and purely inane. It does come as no surprise that NPR is backpeddling on the issue. Deep pockets will do that.
March 14, 2011 2:19:42 PM PDT
Silke Lipp (frauleinschuss) wrote:
@Bunny Guy I'm curious to know how you reconcile your posts with the deceitful phone call made by an imposter the Gov. Walker of Wisconsin. (Again I'm not on the Right.)
March 14, 2011 2:17:40 PM PDT
Robin B (RockinRobinHood) wrote:
Team Burgers (TeamBurgers) wrote: Robin B (RockinRobinHood) wrote: Where is the proof what O'Keefe did was misleading? #1 he is O'Keefe...#2 The article is full of examples. Read it.
---------------
I read it an there is no proof of anything misleading. If you think there is then you are engaging in wishful thinking.
March 14, 2011 2:17:38 PM PDT
c g (cdgraves) wrote:
Ken Vee (KenV) wrote:
Didn't Ron Schiller say "hey, hold on, there is more to this story"? Or was he not even consulted?
---
He did, but apparently that was not as important as getting the scoop on FOX and CNN.
My only criticism of NPR with regard to this is that their journalism is suffering trying to compete with corporate news. Let FOX and CNN get the first headline wrong. I listen to NPR for thorough coverage. Save the rushed deadlines and breaking news for strict documentary coverage. That kind of hurrying can be excused when important things are happening RIGHT NOW, but not when there is ample opportunity to investigate and find decent sources (including the actual video!) before putting up the main story.
To the constant NPR critics: What course of action could NPR have taken that you would find appropriate or admirable?
If NPR waits to put out a more thorough story, you're upset that they're being sluggish and taking their time to get the slant right. If they put out a story right away, they're being hasty and clamoring to defend themselves. So which is better? What's the ideal course of action?
March 14, 2011 2:15:50 PM PDT
Bob Potter (watches) wrote:
Hideo Katsu (Tamotsu) wrote: "Funny, there is no link to ANY of the videos on this post."
NPR is primarily a radio medium. As such, it doesn't do links. You should learn about this new-fangled thing called "Google".
March 14, 2011 2:14:58 PM PDT
Jeff Schmidt (JeffFromOhio) wrote:
Is anyone that surprised? When that video first came out, and I watched a few minutes of it, I could tell with about 90% confidence that the video was a lie. Most of the time, highly editted videos that show 5-10 second clips of video in montages, are carefully constructed lies.
Ironic that O'Keefe's organization calls itself Project Veritas when it works so hard to lie. It's Orewellian NewSpeak. "Lies" are truth and the "Truth" are lies.
I'm just somewhat relieved that such conservative sources as Blaze are speaking up for the truth - sometimes I'm not convinced that the viewers/listeners of Beck, Limbaugh, et al. have any interest in the truth. I consider myself moderately conservative, and it disgusts me when people have as much disregard for the truth as O'Keefe and his crew obviously do.
Schiller and Schiller (Ron and Vivian, respectively) should both be getting lawyers - Ron to sue Project Veritas and O'Keefe; Vivian to sue NPR for wrongful termination.
March 14, 2011 2:14:37 PM PDT
Art Aficionado (Art_Aficionado) wrote:
A knee-jerk reaction to Juan Williams' trivial remark is followed by a knee-jerk reaction to an edited video. There's a pattern here.
March 14, 2011 2:13:41 PM PDT
via npr.org
Duh.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Google to Launch Major New Social Network Called Circles, Possibly Today
Google to Launch Major New Social Network Called Circles, Possibly Today
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