West Virginia apologizes to the Confederacy

If they'd prefer a white felon to wunna them freed darkies - and 41% of West Virginia's Democrats did - they'd also have their druthers in favor of the treason that their forebears resisted. We can also put the lie to the wingnut alibi that President Obama's voters are racist:

Add up the totals throughout the country, and racial animus cost Mr. Obama three to five percentage points of the popular vote. In other words, racial prejudice gave John McCain the equivalent of a home-state advantage nationally.

Yes, Mr. Obama also gained some votes because of his race. But in the general election this effect was comparatively minor. The vast majority of voters for whom Mr. Obama’s race was a positive were liberal, habitual voters who would have voted for any Democratic presidential candidate. Increased support and turnout from African-Americans added only about one percentage point to Mr. Obama’s totals.

Even this is based on the most extreme racists, the ones who type n----- into Google. The others don't even appear on the list. They just vote and rant and teabag with additional hysteria - which we don't need - because Obama's black, not white.

What they show us

Lazing on the sofa, idly watching a third rate college football bowl game that I don't care a whit about and never heard of before - the BBVA Compass Bowl. After a Pitt kick-off return, as ESPN went to commercial, I noticed the long shot of the Birmingham skyline had an area of soft focus, obscuring lettering on the parapets of two office buildings.

Here's what ESPN was hiding on behalf of their sponsor:

Competitors. As expected.

Moral of the story: Don't outsource your bullshit detection. Know when the content you see and hear is advertising.

College bowl games are and have always been about brand-building. This one? Same reason Toronto Dominion Bank bought naming rights to the Boston Garden - to fit in with the locals. Both have also disguised their nation of origin by using their initials. Toronto might not have been so bad, but Dominion, well, na ga happen. Can you imagine Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria in Birmingham!? Every deputy sheriff would be asking for their papers.

In fact, nearly all TV is captured by its sponsorship. Media is a product, and it carefully shows us just what its sponsors want us to see.

On the sixth day, CNN caught up

I heard about filter bubbles on Facebook nearly a week ago - and I'm sure I'm not one of the first.  CNN scoops up the story and dusts it off today.

And then CNN headlines it as a personal scare story - "What Google knows about you" - instead of Eli Pariser's clear point about what Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, among many others, are hiding from you and what that means for society.

Why is it we need big media?  They're late, they don't filter out the bullshit, most of their pundits are third rate purveyors of conventional wisdom (and I'm being charitable), they don't investigate, they print official press releases as gospel, they fan the flames of manufactured controversy, and they have no institutional memory to help bring Alzheimer's/ADHD America back to reality.  They expect to be paid for this record of failure?

Balkanizing the net for fun and profit

Business continues to pose a greater danger to democracy (and especially to privacy) than government.

Too foolish

Why is it that Americans can't tell that the huge political spending of the Chamber of Commerce, among other plutocratic groups, is not to benefit citizens but rather to benefit their secret contributors? No bullshit detectors.

Whipping post partisan

Why indeed?

What explains Mr. Obama’s consistent snubbing of those who made him what he is? Does he fear that his enemies would use any support for progressive people or ideas as an excuse to denounce him as a left-wing extremist? Well, as you may have noticed, they don’t need such excuses: He’s been portrayed as a socialist because he enacted Mitt Romney’s health-care plan, as a virulent foe of business because he’s been known to mention that corporations sometimes behave badly.

The point is that Mr. Obama’s attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with a passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction.

---

By the way, Krugman alludes to Yeats:

Mosqued bawl

Newt Gingrich (R-will to power) joins the amen chorus (amen to Jay-zus!) of teabaggers and wingnuts - that is, the majority of Republicans - in opposing the Cordoba House, a proposed Islamic mosque in Lower Manhattan. Once again, they prove that they have no idea of the meaning of freedom of religion. They narcissistically think that the Founders' great achievement was to codify the wingnuts' own special brand of Christianity as protected from who knows who - the great atheist-Islamist conspiracy, I guess. Just as many of them have missed the entire import of the gospels (Jesus was a liberal who ministered of love to the poor), they've missed the entire import of the First Amendment. And everything in between.

Gingrich can't help gilding the lily along with every other right-wing pundit. The mosque is "at Ground Zero." Or, as Newtie says, "overlooks Ground Zero." Most of the so-called straight news reporters give away their sycophant roles in pushing propaganda by adopting the wingy phrasing.

The truth is that the mosque is near Ground Zero - two city blocks away. (Click Google screen capture images for full-resolution aerial views.)


It just works so much better as propaganda to let your eager bullshit swallowers imagine that a mosque is going to rise in replacement of the twin towers. This is the sort of manipulation in plain sight that the Republicans know so well.

In any case, what distance toward the back of the bus would Republican opponents of religious freedom think appropriate? Maybe if the mosque were closer instead, they could think of its members as a human shield. The wingnuts' heads might explode from cognitive dissonance.

Wait til they find out how many other mosques there are in the area of Lower Manhattan!

Aaaieee! We're doomed. They're taking over! There's even an existing mosque four blocks from Ground Zero (though they appear to be having trouble keeping their lease).

Just leave out the context of how many churches there are in the same area:


I bet abortion clinics are feeling mighty nervous now! (Note: That's the wingnut logic of group accountability for the acts of a few other people who are superficially similar in some way.)

(Did I just commit journalism?)

Update (8/6): There's already a mosque inside the Pentagon! (h/t Jed Lewison on DailyKos)

Update (8/22): Updated in new item, When is a mosque not a mosque?

Update (8/22): I'm no New York Times, but I had the story of other nearby mosques almost three weeks before they did. In Manhattan, their own back yard. (h/t Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog)

How bigotry works

The Tennessee Highway Patrol raided a cockfight in rural southeast Tennessee. Naturally, the AP doesn't say where in Polk Co., but one look at Benton, TN, the tiny town listed in the dateline, tells me that AP doesn't have a stringer there:


This is really a dog bites man story - happens about once a year. In fact, googling cockfighting benton tennessee shows some signs that this ho-hum news has taken at least a month to travel the 70 miles to Knoxville.

This story is only worthy of comment because of the reflexive bigotry it elicits from at least one commenter on Knoxnews:

Surprised there were no illegal immigrants retained in custody. --ccjs (June 27, 2010 11:24 a.m.)

Yes, many of the Latin American illegals come from cultures that still permit cockfighting, but that may be one thing that makes them feel right at home in East Tennessee. Thirty years ago, I worked for a guy who spent every weekend fighting his "chickens." Word was that he had good sources in local law enforcement, so that he never showed up to a cockpit carrying his stake and his roosters if it was going to be raided.

Good old white boy crime is normal, doesn't call for comment. Brown, broken-English crime, though, that's different!

Better living through Internet

The big media whines incessantly about the perils and depredations of the Internet. Even so, they know they have to publish here, and they bring their art departments - if they still have them - to bear to give us traditional newspaper graphics.

Oh, sure, the New York Times pastes up some cool interactive widgets. Many of them go beyond eye candy and are actually informative. They are also well beyond the budgets of ordinary papers.

There are thousands of stories that will never contend for a Pulitzer, for which the Internet provides freely available tools to make those stories better. Any story about a particular place can put the reader there much more effectively with a clip or a link to Google Maps or Microsoft Bing or one of the other mapping sites. Sure, it might be better to send a news photographer out, but that's too heavyweight and expensive for bread and butter stories that fill out a paper.

Here's a pedestrian story about real estate and eminent domain that shrieks for illustration. In five minutes of googling, I found the Newton Assessor's database and this aerial view with approximate bounds shown:


Google Maps gives a better image, sans plot plan, here.

Imagine what I might find if I were a professional journalist! (Yes, I know there are savvy people who are professional journalists. I even know a few. I just don't get why more of their savvy doesn't find the page.)

Where

Exactly where a news story happened is often important. The Arkansas flash flood deaths occurred here. You can see how the hilly terrain could concentrate run-off into a flash flood.

Yet big media seldom pins down location. I don't understand why not. The tools are readily available on the Internet. During the Tennessee floods, I was able to locate the site of a photo in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which told me how far the flood was out of its banks - a couple of hundred yards - which might be an important fact needed to understand the story.

There's also the back story of Albert Pike, a relatively minor Confederate general. Most non-Southerners would be amazed how many federal government sites in the South are named for Confederates.

Syncronicity: I happened to learn who Albert Pike was because the second National Treasure movie was on in my house, and it mentioned him. Yep, besides being a Confederate, he was a Freemason. Ooooweeooo.

Outrage, fine

... but no censorship. Google shouldn't be picking and choosing what we can see, and they already allow each of us to choose to exclude offensive images.

"The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results," it says.

The American answer to offensive speech is more speech.

"I am absolutely disgusted by this picture, but the Internet has thousands and thousands of offensive images. Should Google get rid of all of them? Where do you draw the line?" [Jerry Wright of Hoboken, New Jersey,] ... said by phone.

Other countries have different answers.

"There is no way to defend this heinous incident," Alheli Picazo of Calgary, Canada, told CNN by phone. "People often claim their right to free speech to mask blatant racism and insulting bigotry, and always seem to get away with it. When it comes to issues of discrimination, hiding behind free speech just doesn't cut it."

I greatly prefer our ironclad First Amendment guarantees.

Update (11/26): Clarity in the first paragraph.

Learn something new

Blogger limits me to 2000 keywords. Who knew! As of today, I've used 'em all.

So, since I'm out of keywords, I guess I'll have to quit. If I'd only known, I wouldn't have spent so much time conserving bits on Picasa Web, where Blogger stores images. I'm still below 1% of my allotted gigabyte.

This will have to be my last post...

Are you kidding me? Give this up? No way.

I had been thinking already that I needed to clean up my massive store of keywords, although my main concern was the scrolling length of my pages, not the length of the list. Now Blogger is forcing me. It's like the middle-aged brain my mother told me about: To remember something new, you have to forget something old. Fortunately, I will always have Google for backup.

Today, I lumped amt in with tax. What a daring radical! Fair warning to all you bullet keywords who aren't making your number - i.e. more than (1) - your days are numbered. Ha.

Update (10/5): As if anyone cares, Blogger's limit of 10 tags per post is new. I know this because Blogger refuses to allow me to remove tags from posts that don't conform!

Another failure

This reporter fails to have even the slightest skepticism regarding official bullshit from the authorities in the Garrido case. Law enforcement, particularly the parole officers, didn't do their jobs. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances, but no one made it a practice to get the information they needed.

Furthermore, the Garridos' private prison is not in a rural area. It's in a neighborhood that borders a few fields.

Answering machines

Xerox and Kodak called. They want their trademarks back, too.

Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.

Capitalists selling rope

Even though the V.I. Lenin quote, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them," is apparently apocryphal, U.S. high tech companies are champing at the bit to sell China technology to harness and suppress the open society of the Internet.

Nobody even read it!

All over the wingnuttosphere, idiot dopes are finding today's argument of convenience is that no one even read the stimulus bill. They didn't worry about this sort of nicety when that good man, Darth Cheney, was taking care of things for them. But, come to find out, it's the content of the bill that they actually object to, so someone must have read enough of it.

Look, they had weeks to read the bill while the President and Congress were writing it, debating it, and amending it. Then, they had a conference report that reconciled differences between the House bill and the Senate bill, and they only had to skim that for changes, not read the whole goddamn bill from the beginning.

The wingnuts have no idea how the process even works. Even if they did, they wouldn't let that knowledge get in the way of being stupid ditto-heads.

Remedial web journalism

View Larger Map
Dead tree editions need art departments and photographers to put their stories into easy context. The challenge of TV made this true fifty years ago. Before that, if you read in the paper that a developer had given up on a development on Megunko Hill (might be in the neighborhood shown above since the story puts it near the Ashland commuter rail station), you'd better damn well know where Megunko Hill is on your own. Fifty years ago, we started to get spare little map insets - not enough of them since they cost money but quite a few.

Long-time residents may not need the geographic details that the story of Shepard Fairey's arrest calls for. They may all know where the ICA is. On the other hand, the Institute has moved within the time I've lived in greater Boston. And there's no way I could be sure of the location of the alleged tagging, although I could get to the intersection of Mass Ave. and Newbury St.

In fact, although I've lived in the same small suburban town west of Boston for twenty-four years now, I can always use a map for a real estate story like the Ashland story. After all, there's not yet a building to use as a landmark!

Here's a rule that professionals evidently can't seem to get their heads around: Every story that has any geographical significance should include a link to a mapping site, Google Maps or Yahoo or even one of the on-line phone number sites. In fact, newspapers should either spread the wealth or sell exclusive linking to the highest bidder if anyone would pay for it.

The fact that reporters and editors miss this obvious way to make their stories better suggests that even now they are living in a past journalist world that is not coming back.

Update (2/11): I can't claim credit, but someone at the MWDN is trying to get with the 21st century with a Google Map insert in another story.

News stack

A news stack is a layering of subject areas that a consumer of current events needs to be well informed. (As far as I know, the term 'news stack' is my own coinage.) It's akin in concept to a tech stack of components for software.

Major daily newspapers try to cover at least this stack:

• World news
• National news
• Metro/local
• Sports
• Business
• Health/technology/science
  
• Opinion
  

Oh, sure, they often fill in from wire services, corporate partners, alliances, and syndication what they can't or won't produce for themselves. Really, the quality of a paper is usually proportional to its filling this stack - with additions - with their own content.

However, all newspapers have been acting as news aggregators for years. One of the newspapers I read as a child was the Knoxville News-Sentinel, where international coverage consisted of occasional pulls of lead paragraphs off the wire services in small type.

TV news has had a shorter and more distributed news stack. The national and cable networks have taken the national and world news. Local affiliate broadcasts handle local news and sports, and they add an orgy of weather coverage presented over and over again in a way that has a low information density but lots of graphics and pictures that even the village idiot can relate to. Local access cable (remember that?) handles the really local stuff and a little bloglike bloviating that seldom gets any attention (hey, like me!), but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Delivering the entire news stack to readers on paper requires a single organization. Not so on the Internet. Not even so on TV. Already, anything lucrative and integral has been unbundled. Weather is on the Weather Channel, even though its content is all basically dressed up from NOAA data (cheap!). Sports is on all sorts of specialty channels; ESPN can proxy for all of them.

On the Internet, we all get to pick our own news stacks. Mine is, more or less:

• World - New York Times
• National - Times, Washington Post
  
• Politics - Times, Post, Boston Globe, and my blogroll
  
• Lowest common denominator - CNN.com
• Boston and Massachusetts - Globe (oh, yeah, sports, too)
  
• MetroWest and Framingham - MetroWest Daily News
  
• Business - Wall Street Journal (but not my strongest interest)
  
• Local towns - amateur or semipro news blogs
  
• Opinion - the blogosphere plus Paul Krugman (Tom Friedman? puh-leeze)
  

Is there any way for an aggregator to cover this stack in a marketable way? So far, aggregators have sucked. They've tried to automate delivery of content from many sources. Uh, guys, it may be cheap, but you have it backwards. The sources you aggregate are already too mass market generic, and you're just mixing all the watercolors and getting brown. I don't know if there's a customizable alternative other than all of us finding our own way with search engines, but aggregation has to empower the single reader.

So, is Google the end-all of news aggregation? Maybe, but only for junkies like me. Google will remain the tool for drilling into a story beyond even what an aggregator provides - because there's always more to a story that obsesses readers - like Jon-Benet Ramsey or nuclear non-proliferation.

What I do know is that there is no longer any reason related to distribution medium that all the layers of the news stack need to be filled by the same organization. This means that news organizations need to identify which layer they can compete in (and for many it will be at most one).

There are still scale advantages in adjacent layers. Effective and resourceful organizations will still try to expand into them. Witness the dispute between the Globe and Gatehouse Media over local aggregation.

But trying to fill the whole stack without aggregating? No one who's left doing journalism is going to succeed at that.

Distinguishing marks

What's the problem with a distinguishing mark on a ballot, anyway? If someone wants to give up the secrecy of the ballot, why shouldn't he be able to write "Lizard People" on his ballot? It's not mature, but that's not a requirement for voting, thank goodness. It's a sort of masturbatory joke. Mostly, the joker has to laugh at his own joke, alone. Loser, but again, not illegal.

Only in rare races will the stupid attempt at humor be shared with anyone else, and that person probably already has a headache and is pissed off to be reconciling vote totals for Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse after untold hours checking the public in at the polls. So, try this, and you're not going to get a laugh, much less get lucky.

The Senate recount started in Minnesota shortly after the election on Nov. 5. Right away, the Franken campaign started challenging ballots due to claimed distinguishing marks. The Coleman campaign soon followed suit.

Many of these challenges were frivolous, stupid, and if consistently applied capable of disqualifying lots of random ballots where intent is crystal clear and nothing hinky is going on. If a stray mark or a smudge could disqualify a ballot, why not a distinctive method of filling in an oval?

Although, against that, there are an incredible number of Minnesota voters who put an X through the oval before filling it in. If they thought their mark was distinct, bzzt, wrong. The upside is that their votes will be counted.

It turns out that distinguishing marks spoil a ballot throughout the English-speaking world, at least. There's a lot of case law from the past 150 years or more about. Secret ballots protect the honesty of elections in two ways. First, they prevent some forms of intimidation. If the goons can't tell how you voted, they can't extract the consequences of dissent from your hide.

It's still true that they can intimidate you if they can tell how you're likely to vote, say, if you're black and therefore unlikely to vote for some lizard-brained sleazeball of a white supremacist. Just for example. But I digress.

Secret ballots also prevent a political machine from paying off voters who vote their way. They're not just for protection of the voter; they protect the election.

Once upon a time, political parties printed their own ballots (hence ticket), which they preferred to mark visibly so that they could keep track of their captive voters. Once the government took that over, you might be able to put your initials next to Boss Tweed's candidate so that the poll workers could tell. In either case, there would be a few extra bucks for you to spend in the bar celebrating victory. Not an honest victory, but a good stiff drink nonetheless.

As it is, since the late 1800s in the U.S., vote-buyers have had to trust that their voters will stay bought in the voting booth, and that's a mook's game. Consequently, candidates have to work on convincing voters by engaging their brains, or at least their pocketbooks in a less direct and venal way. Or that's the theory, anyway.

You'll notice, of course, that big media hasn't reported this story at all. It's not that they're suppressing it. It's too far down in the weeds for them, they don't know the facts, and they can't be bothered with thirty minutes of Google.

If you have a DailyKos ID, please go recommend the diary containing this piece that I just posted there.

Supremes go multimedia

My daughter, who's taking a legal writing course, has pointed me to this web site, oyez.org, related to the Supreme Court. I haven't had a chance to dive in yet, but anyone who would mash up the burial sites of dead Supremes with Google Maps is in the throes of obsession, and stark beauty can come from that.