As soon as she walked through my door I knew her type:
she was an argument waiting to happen. I wondered if the 
argument was required... or merely optional? Guess I'd know 
the parameters soon enough.

"I'm Star At Data," she offered.

She made it sound like a pass. But was the pass by name? 
Or by position?

"I think someone's trying to execute me. Some caller."

"Okay, I'll see what I can find out. Meanwhile, we're 
gonna have to limit the scope of your accessibility."

"I'd prefer not to be bound like that," she replied.

"I see you know my methods," I shot back.

She just stared at me, like I was a block. Suddenly I 
wasn't surprised someone wanted to dispatch her.

"I'll return later," she purred. "Meanwhile, I'm counting 
on you to give me some closure."

It was gonna be another routine investigation.

— Dashiell Hammett, "The Maltese Camel"

The kind of Christianity that pervades the religious right in this country divides the world between the saved and the damned, between God's people and Satan's people, between good and evil. We have all seen how this is played out in our politics. I used to think that President Bush was using this language as a political ploy. I still think he is, but I also think—to my disappointment—that he also believes it. His conviction that he is God's chosen one to "rid the world of evildoers" blinds him to the evil that he—and we, as Americans—are capable of doing. The conviction that we are on the side of good—of God—is, however, an ancient one—enormously powerful.

--Elaine Pagels

There's also a problem with conceiving broadcast service--especially the commercial variety--as a "marketplace." Its customers and consumers are different populations. The customers of commercial broadcasting are advertisers, not viewers and listeners. In fact, commercial broadcasting mostly is an advertising business. The "content" it distributes is merely bait; the goods sold are the ears and eyeballs of "consumers". That means commercial broadcasting's real marketplace is Madison Avenue, not radio and TV dials. As a consumer of commercial broadcast programming, your direct influence is zero because that's exactly what you pay. (Paying for cable or satellite service doesn't count, because that payment is for access, not for the content itself.)

The notable exceptions are "premium" channels like HBO and public broadcasting. The reason why programming on both is relatively higher in quality is a simple one: there's little or no split in their markets between customers and consumers. As a viewer or listener, you get what you pay for.

All of which is why this talk about the "media marketplace" is highly screwed up. Relaxing broadcast property ownership rules, in the absence of making larger chunks of available spectrum for everybody, is hardly deregulation. It is a highly selective change in existing regulation that opens opportunities only to the most successful players in a completely closed marketplace.

This is all fine if you don't care about television and radio. But what if you care about the Net and Linux? What does broadcast deregulation have to do with those?

There's a certain ritual to press conferences. With professional obfuscator Ari Fleischer gone, it looks like the new guy is going to need some breaking in. Excerpts from Scott McClellan's first press conference:

QUESTION: I'm not talking about anybody else's comments. I'm asking the question, is responsibility for what was in the President's own State of the Union ultimately with the President, or with somebody else?
Scott McClellan: This has been discussed.
QUESTION: So you won't say that the President is responsible for his own State of the Union speech?
Scott McClellan: It's been addressed.
...
QUESTION: Isn't the President responsible for the words that come out of his own mouth?
Scott McClellan: We've already acknowledged, Terry, that it should not have been included in there. I think that the American people appreciate that recognition.
This goes on for thirteen more questions and "answers," until finally another reporter asks:
QUESTION: Scott, on Keith's question, why can't we just expect, basically what would be a non-answer, which is, of course the President is responsible for everything that comes out of his mouth. I mean, that's a non-answer. Why can't you just say that?
Scott McClellan: This issue has been addressed over the last several days.
QUESTION: Why won't you say that, though, that's, like, so innocuous and benign.
Scott McClellan: The issue has been addressed.

It's been a while since I posted a straight summary of what's going on in my life; I've buried a few clues in other blog posts because that's usually more entertaining, but those who skim the emails looking for more China journal entries about washing machine floods and gastroentological thrillers don't always catch the details. So here's what I've been up to for the last year, since I got back from China.

Plan A was to settle back in Seattle, get a job, get an apartment, meet a nice girl who didn't have too many piercings or tattoos, and be happy living in the first world. Plan A failed; the pertinent details are that the job market in Seattle is rough, the people at BEA Seattle (my former co-workers from Westside Corp) are very nice, computer usability testing can get tedious, and working for large corporations gives me the psychological equivalent of a rash. Also, Seattle remains a wonderful city; it's quite livable without a car; and the weather really does make you want to slit your wrists.

Plan B: apply to university for a PCMI (Peace Corps Masters International) degree. This is one year of school in an MPA program (MBA minus the profit motive) followed by two years in a special Peace Corps posting, working with an NGO in another country on budgeting, management, fundraising, and the like. I liked this plan because it got me into school, gave me the prospect of leaving the country, and would give me the contacts and training to figure out how to start career number two, international do-gooder. Plan B failed because UW (University of Washington at Seattle) got 400 applications for maybe a dozen slots, because I had a C average in college, because my statement of purpose didn't differentiate me from all the other dot-bomb refugees without real volunteer experience; and because I only applied to one school.

Which leads us to Plan C, the currently active plan. Plan C is to move to Europe (Copenhagen, specifically) and work on open-source systems for non-profits and universities. Two things led to Plan C: first, I've been working with OpenACS, the web toolkit that powers aufrecht.org, for about three years, and even interviewed with original progenitor company Ars Digita while they were in the middle of their meltdown. (I knew they were melting down; I thought it would be an educational six months or so before the bitter end but the timing didn't work out.) So I've been doing volunteer work on OpenACS, which climaxed when I got fed up with the out-of-date installation docs and the one year of downtime aufrecht.org enjoyed after a security breach, and went on a several-month rampage to write a massive installation document that ensured that, at any point in the future prior to the envelopment of the Earth by the corona of the swollen, dying Sun five billions years hence, if I had a PC, Red Hat 8 install CDs, a backup CD, 120V alternating current, and a caffeinated beverage. That document went over well, and since the prior documentors had been abducted by aliens (or at least med school), I ended up as the primary documentor for a technically strong open source project with a troubled history and a small but growing community.

And so, when I was walking next to the canal in Fremont, fed up with the corporate contract (which was about to end) and upset about University rejection, and I made a mental list of places I could go and things I could do, number two on the list was Copenhagen, where I knew a guy who ran a small OpenACS consulting company and had invited me to an OpenACS conference (to which I had replied, "You must have mistaken me for someone who casually travels to the Continent on short notice"). His web site said he was hiring, I emailed, and he said, "come on over and spend a month and we'll see if it works out."

That was four or five months ago; inbetween there have been a series of booked and rebooked airline tickets; trans-Atlantic miscommunications; self-inflicted hassles with Danish Immigration (who don't seem to have a category for "just popping over for a month to work for a Danish national"), and part-time contract work for other OpenACS consultants. And of course I spent four weeks watching two to five movies a day at the Seattle International Film Festival. For the last four and a half weeks, since the end of the festival, I've been living a nomadic life, visiting and staying with friends and family in Anchorage, Los Angeles, and San Diego. I'm writing this sitting in the Oakland airport, where I've accepted a two to four hour bump in exchange for coupons. (I'm now carrying $1500 dollars worth of tickets and vouchers with my passport in my silk neck pouch, but I find it hard to induce myself wear it beneath my clothes unless I'm actually sleeping in public (i.e., hard sleeper on a Chinese train; on a couch in the Fairbanks airport at 3 am taking refuge from Instant Death by Mosquito).)

Shortly after I left Seattle my t-shirt idea got noticed by the internet. I've sold over 1700 t-shirts, gotten hundreds of thousands of visits, moved the site from Jessie's apartment and DSL to professional hosting without a hiccup (and then endured many hours of downtime thanks to unrelated hardware glitches that only occur when Steve, Jessie, and Nathan are all out of town and unable to reboot the server), gotten hate mail in several languages and appreciatory email in many more, and been covered in Old Media including talk radio interviews in Miami and Cork, Ireland.

Highlights from Anchorage: Toby, Corina, and I went to an airshow. It was pretty cool - Toby and I geeked out over the airplanes and, fulfilling my usual duties and liason between geeks and normals, I translated for Toby's wife Corina ("Those are the planes we used to kill Germans. Those are the planes we used to kill Japanese. These are the planes we would have used to blow up Russia."). The B1-B is already being retired, because it costs far too much to maintain and has only one un-replaceable function: blowing up Russia. The B-52 is expected to remain in service until 2040 or later; it went into service in the 1950s. I had a nice long chat with a B-52 EW specialist (electronic warfare: he sits facing backwards and listens on headphones and when somebody tries to blow up his B-52 he pushes buttons so that they fail) with refreshing candor ("Hell yeah I was scared! I thought we were going to jump. I was checking my gun and my emergency kit." "Yeah, I puke all the time. And it's harder when you sit backwards."). EW guy whose name I forgot, if you read this, drop me an email.

I also went hiking with Toby and Corina. Toby used to be a hardcore gonzo hiker, carrying backpacks with ant-like body-to-load ratios on multi-week hikes. He's mellowed a bit with marriage, and so when we were half-way up the Rabbit Lake Valley I got impatient and ran ahead the last two or three miles to the lake and then back. I paid for that exuberance with a strained right calf, and I was limping for two days. I mention this because in Los Angeles, thanks to poor advance planning on my part, grandparents both north and south of the Santa Monica mountains, and Monica's fear of fiery death on the freeway at her own hand, I spent a lot of time both driving and being driven on LA freeways. Two to four hours a day for my first week in LA, I would estimate. So I decided that for one day in LA, I wouldn't get in a car for any reason. I walked the three miles to downtown Santa Monica for a lunch date, and guess what? I re-strained the calf, had to limp through the promenade, and ended up taking the bus home.

I also had an encounter with a frighteningly tawny shopkeeper at a coffee shop. I wanted a chocolate chip cookie, and she had only raisin cookies, which she claimed were better, and I said, "If they're so much better, why do you still have so many when you're sold out of chocolate chip cookies?" and she said that she was baking more and I should come back in 14 to 17 minutes, and I said I wasn't making any committments, and I went around the corner and there was this old Chinese guy (okay, he could have been Korean or Japanese, but he was mute in any event) on the promenade with a sign, "Your face in clay in 15 minutes" so I watched him finish sculpting a little boy and then listened to a street drummer and then went to the puzzle store and then watched him sculpt a squirmy fat kid and when he had finished everything but the hair I went back and the cookies still weren't ready bought I paid for my cookie anyway and also a Wired magazine which was okay but not in any way remarkable, though the cookie lady had remarked that it was especially good, and then I saw the other newsrack and skimmed the Economist, and still my cookie wasn't ready. At this point I was thinking about the Cheese shop skit but I just waited patiently and eventually she offered my my choice of cookies off the sheet and I picked one and she handed it to me and said, "it has to have a few minutes to set before you eat it so hold it flat," and I said, "would two blocks be enough?" and she said, "yeah, probably" so I limped to the bus stop and ate the cookie and it was gooey and delicious.

San Diego was lovely.

Mill, J.S. On Liberty
I wasn't especially impressed. He's talking about freedom of action within a society; it's basically a fat pamphlet on the concept that is more colloquially expressed, "your freedom to throw punches ends at the tip of my nose." Perhaps these ideas were novel in the 19th century, but they aren't now. His writing is relatively clear for a philosopher, which means that few sentences are more than twenty lines long. But he didn't seem to offer an especially rigorous or complete argument. So it wasn't new thinking (for me, reading in 2003), and it wasn't fundamental material. I hope the other great philosophers aren't as disappointing.

22 Dec 2004: It's been pointed out to me that this is a major philosophical work which is obsolete in part because its success has lead to the wholesale incorporation of its novel ideas into our thinking. Therefore, I shouldn't judge it as containing nothing new. That fits with my vague knowledge of our history of ideas, but what disappointed me was that, as a foundational document, it didn't strike me as an especially clear and durable explication of its own concepts.

Palast, Greg. The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Palast, an American journalist working from England, documents a horrifying cascade of abuses, from Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris's collaboration to illegally disenfranchise tens of thousands of black voters in Florida and then cover their tracks, to Republican operatives calling off the one line of investigation on Clinton that might have overturned criminal activity - his Indonesian connections - because the investigation would have implicated many Republicans as well. Pisses you off, makes your head spin. By the time you get to the last few pages, where he lists things you can do to make a difference, it seems like a sick joke.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities
Beautiful and perfect. What else would you expect from Italo Calvino?

Ford, Richard. The Sportswriter
It tricked me into thinking it was better than it was, but it wasn't. An adequate but slightly thick-minded novel about a divorced sportswriter making his way in the world. The theme - coping with the simple pressure of existence - is engaging, and it's a different perspective, but I didn't enjoy it enough to read his other books.

Barnes, Julian. Flaubert's Parrot
A tasty treat for the brain, even though a lot of it probably went over my head. Presumably Francophiles will fare better.