Hard News, Inc.

Obama Reaches Out on LinkedIn

Yet another quick hit - just checked to see how many more answers I'm getting from the LinkedIn question I posted earlier this week, and noticed that the Obama campaign today posted a question on what the best ideas are to "keep America competitive in the years ahead."

What ideas do you have to keep America competitive in the years ahead?

In a recent speech, I proposed a new competiveness agenda centered
around education and energy, innovation and infrastructure, fair trade
and reform.

You can watch it, and read the full-text, here: http://my.barackobama.com/competitiveness





What ideas do you have to keep America competitive in the years ahead?

Smart. Very smart. These people "get it." They are using Web 2.0 in a very inclusive, forward-thinking way; the mere fact that they're posing such a question in a professional forum means that they are reaching out to business professionals in an unprecedented way.



Again, I'm going to have to get back to this in a later post, but it's tying into what I call the "Help Line Mollification Effect." You know - how you dial customer support, mashing the buttons on your phone with excessive force, blood pressure up around nuclear reactor containment sphere levels ... and you yowl at the poor schlub on the other end ... until he helps you out and gently leads you through the answer ... and by the end of the call, after the problem is resolved, you feel like a total ass, and want to send him something from his Amazon wishlist. Or is that just me?

Look folks, a lot of the anger simmering under the surface of our society is because everyone feels that no one is listening. The fact that Obama & his people are actually reaching out to people - well, hell. That's disarming. It breaks down the resistance - that whole "Obama is a dangerous socialist who's going to destroy the country with his hippie/commie ways" meme that's been festering on the internets. It kinda says, "Hey, if you've got a great idea on how to fix things, let's hear it."

Who knows? Maybe the answer is that all of us are indeed smarter than any of us, and that out of this question will arise some fantastic new strategy that will restore the U.S. to greatness.

Or a buncha Digg kids will all get together, rig the question-answering, and we'll wind up with an army of giant killer robots that all look like Lara Croft.

News Flash to Military: The Media is NOT Your Enemy

All the shallow thinkers seemed to draw from Vietnam was that the brave military could have "won" that war, had not the craven, cowardly, hate-America-first media not stabbed them in the back.

So in our most recent misadventure in Iraq, the military set out from the outset to muzzle, coerce, co-opt and neuter the media. That was Job One, and they spent billions of dollars and millions of man-hours making sure that their talking points were crammed down the throats of any media outlet.  The recent NY Times investigation revealed just how much all the "analysts" were being fed useless, false and ultimately harmful propaganda.  In a recent Miami Herald article, Ed Wasserman convincingly argues that the media is going to have to self-police to rid itself of hacks disguised as objective, independent observers:

Some of the analysts confessed that to avoid displeasing their Pentagon patrons they choked back misgivings they had about administration claims of steady military gains.

One Fox News analyst came back from a trip and told his viewers, ''You can't believe
the progress.'' Actually, he told The Times, ``I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south.''

The report is based on 8,000 pages of documents that the administration spent two years fighting demands to disclose. It describes a cozy arrangement involving more than 75 retired military who consulted for Fox News, NBC, CNN and other networks with round-the-clock cable operations. Few of those operations made much effort to find out whether their analysts were benefiting from the policies they zealously defended.

It's true, as Glenn Greenwald wrote on Salon, that ``news organizations were hardly unaware that these retired generals were mindlessly reciting the administration
line on the war and related matters. To the contrary, that's precisely
why our news organizations turned to them in the first place.''

Here's a line of thinking - I hesitate to use the word "fact," since the Pentagon and the current administration have so discredited even the concept of "facts" - that I hope some of the brighter minds in the military arrive at:  all the relentless bright & happy talk, the insistence on "progress is being made," the demands to blindly support our troops, the devotion to this vision of the U.S. military as an "Ever-Victorious Army," wreathed in golden glory, incapable of making a mistake ...

...all that propaganda and denial of tough examination of exactly what was going on, where we were headed ...

... that effort to castrate the media and control the message is what is going to ultimately going to be responsible for the disaster in Iraq.  I talked last night to a formerly wild-eyed right-winger, who works with/for/in the military, and he admitted that it's just a matter of time before we have the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, just like Saigon in '75.  

If the military had acknowledged in the years 2003-2006 that perhaps things were not quite going exactly according to plan, that there were flaws in the Great Sacred Rumsfeld's Master Plan, then perhaps, hmmm, I dunno, adjustments could have been made to that plan.  Adjustments that have since been made. 

Adjustments that would have saved American lives. Adjustments that would have stemmed or even reversed the disintegration of Iraqi society that has led us to the dead end where we now find ourselves.

Truthful reports in the media would have put pressure on the politicians above to change the plan rather than the insistence on "staying the course" despite the (OK, I'll say it) fact that course was heading right straight off the cliff.

Here's a last quote, ringing out from the lessons that should have been learned - were learned by Colin Powell, since he was in Vietnam, ignored by Cheney and Bush since they were not:

The armed forces contributed to their own defeat in Vietnam ''by fighting the war they wanted to fight rather than the one at hand.''

(snip)

In the end it all boils down to one question: Could we have won a military victory in Vietnam? Record's answer is: Yes, but not at any price even remotely acceptable to the American people.

One thoughtful former infantry battalion commander told me he had reflected long and
hard about what would have resulted from unlimited war, including an invasion of North Vietnam: ''We could have won a military victory without question. But today my sons and yours would still be garrisoning Vietnam and fighting and dying in an unending guerrilla
war.'' The war was ours to lose, and we did; it was for the South Vietnamese to win, and they could not.

Great Use of a Mash-up to Tell a Story

Where has Hillary really been, and under what circumstance? Check out this use of the Google map-customization features...

In the wake of the "Platoon coming into a hot LZ" story that Hillary floated last week - and that rose up to bite her in the ass, and make her a reliable butt of jokes for a few news cycles - comes this bit of multimedia storytelling.

It kinda threw me for a loop, at first - I was trying to see what message it was that the map was trying to tell me.  And then, I realized that this was a more sophisticated use of the web than the traditional use of infographics, that normally serve to cram complex information at you in as short a time as possible. 

No, this is use of multimedia that is far more demanding - it demands that you have the time, patience and attention to really browse through all the data collected here, and that you arrive at a conclusion on your own (should you so wish).

And also, should you also not wish. Because if you were only interested in a few segments of the story (such as, what the hell was Hillary doing in Dakar? GIving away a trophy to some dust-caked winner of the Paris-to-Dakar rally?) - well then, you can just skim & browse over the map and pick out the bits of information that you are interested in and that are relevant to you.  A more trenchant hypothetical would be if you're a foreign minister of one of these countries, and you want to see how long it's been since the Clintons swung by on an official visit.

Anyway - brilliant use of non-linear storytelling techniques, and the possibilities offered by the web.  This is an infographic that works on a lot of levels, from the most sophisticated, to the most casual interest.  And yeah, it kinda sucks you in after a bit - you want to keep mousing over all the points and trying to imagine from the sparse description what the hell was going on during that visit back in the '90s.

The Road to Barranquilla

...and no, this is not some forgotten Hope & Crosby "Road" movie, co-starring Ginger Rogers & Betty Grable.

This is a "Guest Post" by Janine, and I'm running it here because it's well-written and also because I'm so frickin' burned out right now that I would have great difficulty stringing together an account half as coherent as this about some of the surprises we've encountered here during our "World Tour 2007-8" of Colombia for Andiaros and the government agency SENA.  Earlier today, I was able to show the roomful of very young journalists here just how easy it is to use the TypePad software to post something to a blog (BTW - the pic that appears there was take about 2 months ago, in Moscow, at a restraurant located on "Clean Lake" across from the Moscow offices of OLMA.)

Anyway, here's Janine:

This picture was taken by Dave through the window of a military checkpoint that we hit on the way to  Baranquilla, a medium-sized city about an hour's drive from
Cartagena.  W e hit a nasty rainstorm on the way here so it took us
nearly two hours. As we drove, our driver told us about how the road was
impassible only a few years ago because of the Guerillas/Narcotraffickers.
Now there are Colombian military stations every several kilometers along
the way that protect the road and have made it possible for people to make
the drive without fear.

To help us appreciate how things have changed, he told a personal story
about a bus trip he took to Bogota a few years ago. Part way there, the
bus was stopped by guerrillas who boarded the bus and demanded everyone's
Cedulas (the national ID). They then consulted the laptop they carried
with them, looking up each person's name in a database to see if they were
related to anyone rich enough or powerful enough to make them worth
kidnapping.(Dave and I noted this was an impressive use technology, albeit
for all the wrong reasons.)

As the Guerrillas checked IDs, they had one of the children on the bus go
around and collect everyone's shoes, which he explained they did routinely
to make it harder for anyone to run away, especially when they are being
led through the jungle at night and stepping off a path in the dark could
cause serious damage to bare feet.

But what really amazed us about the story, was that apparently the
guerrilla's radio discussion about the bus was picked up by the
US-supported Colombian army, which then called for a Black Hawk helicopter
to be sent to help them. That radio message was in turn intercepted by the
guerrillas, who took off once they realized they'd been discovered and
that the helicopter was on the way. (An interesting case of spy vs. spy,
and a moment that I think represents well the turning point that led to
these roads being so much safer.)

Unfortunately for the passengers on the bus, the guerrillas had already
poured gasoline all over the inside of the bus, which they planned to set
on fire before they left. They didn't take the time to burn the bus. but
the passengers had to  ride to the next town in a bus full of gas fumes so
strong it made most people sick. Still, I'm sure they all agreed it was
better than being kidnapped and walking barefoot through the jungle.

Today, he said he drives down these roads without fear, happy to see the
Colombian military on the side of the road. And I have to admit, Dave and
I both appreciated the soldiers a bit more after his story.

For my part, I've been amazed by how much more peaceful things are here
than they were just 6 years ago the first time I came to Colombia.
Everyone we've talked to about security has commented on the improvements,
how President Uribe has made such a difference by cracking down on
corruption and guerrilla activities, and how great it is that they can now
go out at night and travel the roads around the country without fear.

Russian Bloggers to the Rescue

The Russian Equivalent of Wingnut Welfare

More and more, I'm noticing that the news here in Russia (and yes, I do try to watch the news on TV here, despite the language barrier) seems to exist in some strange parallel universe.  When I switch back and forth between the BBC World News, CNN International, and then the Russian news on RBK and Channel First, there is a massive disconnect. Maybe it's just because we're in a particularly delicate election year - an editorial that ran in the Moscow Times recently talked about all the simmering uneasiness regarding Putin's succession (the original ran in Vedomosti, and I can only hope that the editor who wrote it isn't re-living a Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch right now).

Trying
to guess the identity of President Vladimir Putin's choice as his
successor and how he or she will come to power is a game that just
continues to grow in popularity. Speculation is also swirling over
whether the next president will use the system Putin has created to
determine national and international policy, ditch the system
altogether, or keep parts of it.


Analysts
at Renaissance Capital, for example, believe the successor will either
follow the "Brezhnev model" and try to maintain the status quo, or will
be a reformer, following what they label the "Peter the Great model."
These comparisons are a bit surprising, but not because of the nature
of historical parallels.

This issue is becoming particularly urgent because under Putin, a lot of people have amassed staggering wealth.  Quite naturally, they'd like to keep it.  And now that they have this much money, they can certainly shell out a few bucks here and there to, shall we say, "influence" things to continue going pretty much as they have in that past.  Which is why speaking out about the theft, corruption, murder, intimidation and bombings here is becoming quite perilous.

Politics under these conditions is a third rail for established media.  But there is still a great deal of interest in what is going on in this country that isn't being talked about in the media.  And as nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the media ecosystem.

Bloggers to the rescue

Here are the nut grafs:

Masha Lipman, a political expert at the Moscow
Carnegie Center, says that web forums like Live Journal provide an
arena for free debate that is no longer available in much of the
conventional media.

"There is indeed a lot of free exchange on
the Internet," Lipman says. "The question in Russia is not that there
are no outlets where free expression is possible. The question is that
the Kremlin has radically marginalized all outlets that pursue even
reasonably independent editorial lines.

"Russians are the
second-largest group of users of Live Journal, a popular U.S. blogger
site. In Russia, the site currently has more than 1.1 million users and
67,500 interest groups. On September 5 alone, 1,600 new users joined
Live Journal in Russia and almost 500,000 new comments were posted.

Censorship Impossible?

"Actually,
I think the Internet is one of the reasons Russia is still not an
authoritarian regime, because you cannot really shut down the Internet
without very serious measures," says Yulia Latynina, a political
commentator whose columns are frequently posted on Live Journal.

Just this week, a blogger got thrown in jail for two years for advocating revolution.  The Kremlin has, belatedly, realized that they need to try to clamp down on the discussion online - but the tools that they've employed to do so have only ensured that more and more ordinary Russians are getting interested in what it is that was said that caused so much of a reaction.

However, the censorship is getting subtler and more insidious. Apparently, the Kremlin is paying bloggers to go into LiveJournal and produce pro-government content.  Not out-and-out propaganda - the average Russian has very sensitive antennae that can pick up a bullshit press release a mile away.  But apparently, they are getting sophisticated about producing content that subtly reinforces what the government wants you to see, hear and think.

The U.S., of course, has problems along these lines - it has long been an article of faith that bloggers and internet sites that promote the pro-Bush stance have been getting secret payments and support from the government and Bush's allies.  There's even a phrase for it: "Wingnut Welfare."

Still, it is inspiring to see that even under these conditions, the ordinary people on the web are brave enough, and inspired enough, to defy the attempts to brainwash them, to suppress them, to intimidate them.  In this way, at least, the web is struggling to live up the hype of being the invention that allows freedom to reign ... although I fear that the increasing sophistication of the governments to stack the ideological deck are only going to get more insidious.

Technorati Tags: Russia, blogs, blogging, LiveJournal, Putin, mind control

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Estonia in Putin's Crosshairs - DDos Attack and Counterattack

The Future is Here: Russia and Estonia are living up to the fantasies of hack sci-fi authors and computer security salesmen.  They are engaging in a virtual war.  

The reasons for this war are pretty thin - most political insiders in Moscow dismiss this as a shallow and meaningless concoction on the part of Putin, designed mainly to distract the Russian electorate in an election year.  It's old and time-worn tactic, but one that still finds favor with politicians that want to play the old magician "nothing up my sleeve" distraction game.   

My friend Dave Mitchell devoted the latter part of a column on his blog to this issue, and I've had a front-row seat to some of the events as they have unfolded. In a nutshell, the Estonians took down a gaudy bronze statue of a Soviet soldier a couple weeks before the big May 9 V-E Day celebrations.  Putin seized on the action (the Estonians were apparently not getting rid of the statue, just moving it to another place) and branded the Estonians as a bunch of pro-Nazi ingrates who were persecuting the ethnic Russians, yada yada blah blah.

I particularly liked the pictures of the forlorn pro-Russia protesters chasing after the Estonian ambassador's car, as it pulled away from the embassy, on its way to a vacation.  The "youth groups" that are making the most noise are widely known to be paid by the Kremlin to feign outrage and generate flashy TV images.

No big deal.  But in the last couple of weeks, the conflict has moved to a whole new arena - cyberspace.  Estonia's economy is apparently quite web-dependent.  Russian hackers have pretty much taken down the Estonian web presence through waves of DDoS attacks.  (Quick explanation: DoS is "Denial of Service" which is what happens when a whole bunch of zombie robot slave computers under the control of a hacker all try to access your webservers at the same time.  In real-world traffic terms, it's like sending a million cars to jam the drive-thru windows of Mickey D's.)

Check out the front page of the Moscow Times, scanned here for your convenience:

This is the story from a couple of weeks ago, when Putin gave a fiery speech during the May 9 parades, denouncing the Estonians. 

The latest update from Moscow says that the tactic is starting to spread in the provocation/response pattern so familiar to anyone who's paid attention to, well, just about any of the wars in the last century or so.  Viz:

Hackers this year have also attacked the sites of groups as politically disparate as the ultranationalist Movement Against Illegal Immigration; the pro-Kremlin youth groups Nashi, Young Russia and Mestniye; and The Other Russia, the opposition coalition that has organized a series of Dissenters' Marches this year.

Alexander Kalugin, a spokesman for Young Russia, said a six-hour DDoS attack on his group's web site in March was likely the work of Estonian nationalists angered over its protests outside the Estonian Embassy over plans to relocate a Soviet World War II monument in central Tallinn that sparked a recent diplomatic dispute.

"We were burning Estonian banners and trampling an effigy of the Estonian president," Kalugin said.

The Movement Against Illegal Immigration had 40 of its regional web sites struck by DDoS attacks from early February to early April, said Alexander Belov, the organization's leader.

Belov blamed the security services for carrying out the attacks under the pretext of battling extremism.

I'm tempted to say that any kind of warfare that doesn't involve streets choked with bodies and rubble is an improvement - but I am uneasy.  The fact that more and more people are getting hip to the idea that there are cheap and easy ways to hit below the belt; the fact that the web is still very vulnerable to this kind of thing - all that is definitely a blinking red light.

The Parade So Good You're Not Allowed to See It

In Russia, they threw a Victory in Europe celebration, and barred the public from attending

From time to time, all the shops full of the latest European fashions and giant blazing neon signs trick me into forgetting that Moscow and Russia have some serious and profound differences. And then along comes something like Wednesday, and I find myself utterly puzzled, back at Square One, trying to figure out the rationale behind what I've seen.

Here's the deal.  For the last two weeks, the streets and buildings in Moscow have been growing giant red-orange banners and signs and decorations in preparation for the big May 9 Victory Day festivities.  At stoplights all over Moscow, the government hired street people to hand out gaily-color ribbons to motorists and commuters, to be tied around car aerials, pinned to jackets or tied around children's arms. I shot pictures of these giant Stalin-era 50-story apartment blocks, each with a letter spelling out 9 MAY. The papers were full of stories about whether or not there were going to be tanks and missiles launchers in the streets (how cool is THAT) along with rank after rank of grim-faced goose-stepping Red Army soldiers, and limping, medal-festooned veterans of the march to Berlin and the siege of Leningrad...

The day arrived and the streets were utterly deserted. I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning.  Richard the IT Wizard, Olga and I set off to find the best place to see all the neat stuff go by.  We walked to Tverskaya Street, which is a broad avenue, best described as "The Rodeo Drive of Moscow" that leads downhill to Ground Zero and the main gate into Red Square. As we approached the street, we noticed a big crowd crammed into the alley mouth. 

It turned out that the Red Army was keeping the public off the sidewalks.

WTF?

Usually when you have a parade, you want the people all lined up on each side of the street, cheering, holding the little kids up to see, waving flags, tossing flowers, etc.  I mean, the concept of a victory parade is one that has been around pretty much since Ceasar rode his chariot down the Appian Way and through the throngs of screeching Roman citizens with a slave next to him whispering "Remember, you are still mortal" in his ear...

I must have missed something.  The Red Army soldiers were adamant. Nobody was allowed out on the street.  The view we got from the alley mouth was approximately the same as you would get trying to watch TV from under the old athletic equipment crammed into the hall closet. 

So we set off walking, hoping that we'd find some better vantage point.  At every turn, we encountered the same thing.  Streets blocked off, tense Red Army security saying "Nyet."

We got a great tour of the back alleys of all the old, neo-classical buildings north of the Kremlin.  Some of them are quite spectacular.  Some of them have curious steel and glass pyramids built in their courtyards.

We finally wound up on a slight hill, under the massive bronze statue of Dostoevsky, with a pretty good view (albeit from about 1/2 mile away) of the parade route.  I figured this was as good a place as any to hang out.  Then the wind kicked up and it started to rain.  From far off, we heard thousands of men shouting - apparently the WWII veterans, when they entered Red Square.  And of course, at this point, yet another Red Army officer appeared and gave us the bumrush.

I refused to give up. Richard's feet were sore from an hour and 1/2's walking, but I was on a mission.  So we walked up to Pushkin Park, and over to Tverskaya again.  There were all kinds of big colorful balloons bobbing in the chill breeze, but once again, the barricades were up and the guards were only letting people out, not in.  A rather surly mob was starting to collect around the barricades, and people were passing bottles back and forth.  I could see where this one was going, so I beat feet back to the hotel, but not before a squadron on MiG-29s and Su-27s flew over at about 300 ft. elevation and 600 mph. Man, that is LOUD.  And impressive. Those are some big planes.

Anyway, it turns out that the only place to see the parade is to either be invited to Red Square (i.e. to be a veteran, a dignitary, or a current Army officer), or to watch it on TV.  Which was a shame, because the soldiers were flawless in their close-order drill and they had all manner of cool equipment.  Of course, in St. Petersburg, things were a little more relaxed, and they had video of all the old veterans allowing regular citizens to shoot their old machine guns and throw grenades.

The one saving grace is what you can see in the photos here (I will post more that I shot with the big Canon later) of the fireworks display that I got to watch from out my 7th floor window.  They really did it up - from horizon to horizon, there were fireworks for at least 1/2 an hour over the Kremlin and the city center.  Most of the shots that I got were somewhat blurry, but I managed to get the mini-tripod in place so that I got a couple of time exposures showing some of the lights over the domes and peaked roofs.

Second Life + Politics - This Should Be Fun To Watch

Dem. Congressman holds press conference in Second Life

The techno-optimists will condemn this as another example of the messy real world intruding on their utopian cyber-reality (although damn few people still subscribe to this Pollyannaish view of the web as a place where we all sing the Smurf Tra-la-la-la song and skip happily through fields of sunlit daisies).  

The hype merchants will seize this meme and use it to scam some more startup cash from gullible angel investors - "Yeahhhhh ... see, it's all comin' together now! If wanna do business in Washington these days - and who doesn't, right? - then you wanna get them where they are. Which is on the web. You can't take the congressmen on junkets no more - in the real world - but there's nothing in the law that says you can't take them on a virtual private plane and golf junket, right? You wanna get in on the ground floor of this one, trust me pally ... "

[Note from Dave: In retrospect, that's as good a scam as I've heard recently. Damn, I'm good! Someone get me an appointment with IdeaCrib and GrowThink! (C) 2007 Hard News Inc., all rights reserved.]

And the snarksters amongst us will wonder how many Congressmen are already trolling the notoriously kinky demimonde of Second Life et al., getting their Mark Foley on... 

As jubilant Democrats in Washington celebrated their newfound control of the U.S. Congress on Thursday, Rep. George Miller was doing the same thing in a more unusual place: Second Life.

Miller appears to be the first member of Congress to hold something akin to a press conference in this virtual world, which is operated by Linden Lab and boasts its own currency and a population of more than 2 million "residents."

The event, which lasted about half an hour, took place in a virtual adaptation of the Capitol building on an island in Second Life. Instead of a neo-classical dome, the virtual equivalent featured an open-air amphitheater, mammoth video screens and an orange sky above.

There's a massive "gold rush" fever going on right now, amongst marketers and advertising firms, still trying to wrap their expense-account fattened noodles around how to use Web 2.0 to hawk their shite. Hey - I'm not complaining.  it's keeping a lot of arrogant shit-for-brains in Beemers and Upper West Side 2+2s ... and away from the rest of us bitgrunts.  This event took place through the ausipices of the Clear Ink marketing firm, which set up the virtu-cast and tried to round up a Second Life crowd for something other than being tied up in stocks and spanked by a Rhinemaiden-type. (BTW - I have a grudging respect for Clear Ink - you gotta love anyplace that whimsically names one of its apps "Banana Slug" - shout out to the grads of Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp, eh?)

The results for this little exercise are decidedly mixed - one the one hand, they got sweet coverage on CNet, and it fits in with the Democratic party strategy/belief that the future of the party lies with the cyber-connected Gen-X, Y & Zers - who are responding to the way that the Dems are reaching out to them on blogs and the net. The netroots, despite being derided by the entrenched Old Bull power structure as the "nutroots" were instrumental in the last election - and the news flash that they ain't going away, but are going to come back in two years even harder seems to be penetrating even through the fabled Foggy Bottom reality-denial filters.

Thus, the Dems are moving aggressively to build their party's presence in cyberspace, because they know that how you are perceived on the net winds up in the meatspace media.

But on the other hand, the anarchic nature of the net intruded even here (although at least they weren't assaulted by swarms of flying penises - see earlier post in these regards) as a leather submissive-type wrapped himself around the podium during the conference.  Not something you'd expect to see on C-Span. Although, once again, if the GOP had gotten another coupla few years, we might've tuned in to see Hastert wearing a leather cowl half-unzipped over the mouth and brandishing a flogger, while Ted Stevens sodomizes a tranquilized polar bear while arguing for more oil drilling in the ANWAR.

Was that over the top? Really? You think so? Ok, check it out - as more of our national discourse moves to the web, you are all going to find that the griefers out there are going to create surreal scenes of mass absurdity.  Which, on some level, I find rather gratifying.  Viz:

the elements of Second Life that make it attractive to users make it a highly volatile place to work in. You can deal with nasty comments on your corporate blog much more easily than you can handle someone with in-world superpowers deciding that your press conference would be a great venue to unveil his exploding chicken bombs that shower your island with porn.

"Take someone and deprive them of any sort of 'real' social contact. Give them the ability to script any program, animate any action, or build any object through intuitive processes. Allow them to own their creations, and to sell them to the highest bidder. ...Now make the person in question the psychotic neighborhood kid who slashes holes in the back of the schoolbus with his Swiss Army knife, and you will begin to realize the Lovecraftian horror of Second Life. "

-- Chris "Petey" Peterson, Second Life Safari (Not Safe For Work, unless you work for a marketing agency and are reading it for research. Ahem.)

If nothing else, as we work out how to toss a rope around this bucking bronco of Web 2.0, it's going to make for some interesting viewing...

Dave's Tours of Hellholes (one in a continuing series)

I yanked a story yesterday about what happened to me when I covered a riot in Ecuador.  Today, I see that the town of Buenaventura has gone Somalia.  By which I mean, the joint has had a total breakdown of central authority, and the streets are controlled by the machinegun-toting gangs, vying for control of the drug trade.

This is Buenaventura, a city where drug-traffickers and demobilized veterans of Colombia's political violence are warring with a seriously underpowered police force in a struggle that has killed hundreds in the streets this year.

"They all are fighting for control of this zone because it's close to the sea and that, for them, is strategic," said Londono, who has run this church for eight years. "The young people look to them for jobs as a narco, an informer or a hit man."

Some 215 miles southwest of Bogota, the city of 300,000 is the country's largest port. It's from here that the coffee is exported and the imported cars roll in.

The port is also a key way station for the world's largest cocaine industry. Some 20 tons have been captured in and around Buenaventura this year, a third of all the cocaine netted along the Pacific coast.

Being poor and having a port make Buenaventura a tempting place for drug traffickers, said Roy Barrera, the region's congressman. "This perverse marriage of these armed groups and drug traffickers has turned the town into a ghetto in the hands of the mafia."

Lying halfway down Colombia's 815-mile Pacific coast, Buenaventura is its biggest slum. According to the government, some 80 percent of the mostly Afro-Colombian population survives on less than $3 a day, compared with a national rate of 50 percent.

Killings have doubled in two years to top 300 in 2006 — 24 times the homicide rate of New York City. And that doesn't include the unknown numbers who have disappeared.

The authorities appear to have little control over the daily slaughter.

Ahh, nostalgia. Apparently, in a cruel trick of fate, what was supposed to bring peace and stability to the country turns out to have only made things worse.  The right-wing paramilitary death squads accepted a settlement, which means that the thugs and gunmen they used to employ are all sitting around with nothing to do ...

Well, almost nothing, that is. This is a lesson that the U.S. is having to learn in Iraq, as well. When you have a generation of guys who have grown up knowing only war and killing, and you take away the structures (army, paramilitary group) that used to give them cohesion and a common goal, then you leave them sitting around with a lot of time on their hands and only one thing that they know how to do really well.  It's not long before an opportunistic criminal comes along and offers them a gig.

It's like the bad noir movies of the 70s. Former soldiers who can't acclimate to civilian life turn mercenary or turn criminal - not that there's much difference between the two, really.

Things have gotten so bad in Buenaventura that Bishop Quintero was forced to flee the city after he denounced the drug traffickers.

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Even Rummy Has His Defenders

...although they are a strange and alarming bunch...

Douglas Feith, widely derided as one of the key reasons that Iraq descended into the Pit of Hell ... a neocon Defender of the Faith venal and small-minded enough that Gen. Tommy Franks called him "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth."

Yeah, Feith is banging the drum for dear departed Rummy, saying that if we only understood Rummy, the scales would fall from our eyes, and the full glory would just suffuse us like God's love. Viz:

Those of us in his inner circle heard him say, over and over again: Our intelligence, in all senses of the term, is limited. We cannot predict the future. We must continually question our preconceptions and theories. If events contradict them, don’t suppress the bad news; rather, change your preconceptions and theories.

To quote Darkman: Oh, you gotta be shittin' me.

If there is one constant of the Bush administration, it has been their commitment to denial.  No mistakes were made.  Things are going fine.  Free people do bad things.  The insurgency is in its last throes.  Move along. Nothing to see here.  Hey - the world changed on 9/11.  Code Orange.  Be afraid. 

When all four branches of the armed services combined to call for Rumsfeld's ouster, however, the jig was up.  The Repub/neocon totem object of worship is anyone in the uniform of the armed services (well, as long as they don't speak out against the war or anyone in authority, that is).  If the military were to turn outright and openly against the Bushies (as is apparently happening, as many soldiers are starting to wake up to the conclusion that they and their friends are all dying for a hatful of hollow), then the Repubs and neocons would experience a total psychological breakdown.  Up would be down, right would be wrong, and the whole political philosophy would ...

would ...

Would actually begin to resemble the surrealistic neo-zen exchanges of a Rumsfeld press conference.

And I just had to grab this last comment on the story from Sadly, No - this is hilarious. And disturbing. Disturbingly hilarious? Hilariously disturbing? Someone has been dwelling too long on the utterances of Rumsfeld, and I believe it hath made them mad...

Rumsfeld is a bundle of paradoxes, like a fascinating character in a work of epic literature.

Rumsfeld is a pile of dirty clothes, the ones that you think might
be clean enough to wear around the house, but not out on a date. And
then you have to go to the store. Should you wear the
suspiciously-smelling Rumsfeld? It is a fascinating mystery.

Rumsfeld is an apple strudel that someone has bitten into, and you
don’t know whether they decided to leave the rest because it was
unpleasant to taste, or they realized it wasn’t their apple strudel in
the first place.

Rumsfeld is an erect penis, existing percariously between relaxation
and ejaculation, easily coaxed into orgasm but ready to subside if
neglected. Do not use your mouth to further inflame Rumsfeld. He hates
that.

Rumsfeld is a stray booger that has landed on a work of great art.
One cannot wipe him away without risking a streak on the canvas, so one
must consider him to be part of the painting itself. He is multi-hued
green and will dry, in time. Be patient.

Rumsfeld is the midnight sun and the moon of the afternoon, a cancer
cell that may be a viable mutation, the breath of a newborn infant with
colic. He is life itself, with the sting of death ever-resting in his
tail. He does not actually have a tail, however. He enjoys cheese, not
for the purpose of consumption, but simply because it exists. It is
cheese, he is Donald Rumsfeld, all things have their proper place in
the world. He is content. Do not call him “Rummy”. He will become
cranky.

Technorati Tags: politics, Rumsfeld, Feith, Iraq

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