I’ve started a webcam. You never know what you might find. Stop by sometime.

I am also very excited to have just begun blogging news and opinion pieces for WIRED magazine’s News Editor, Leander Kahney, on his Cult of Mac website. I’ll be putting up several pieces there Monday through Friday and actually will be getting paid to do so! Leander says he’s going to pay me, anyway - we’ll see how it goes. Stop on by regularly to keep up with Apple and Mac-related developments, post some comments to my pieces and Digg them, too. If i can help Leander drive more traffic to his site I just might be able to afford to remain in the Bay Area for a while longer.

And finally, I’m still doing some stuff on occasion for MacLife magazine. I had a long feature piece in the June issue, with a profile of US Olympic swimmer and world record holder Nathalie Coughlin coming up in the July issue, so that gig’s coming along, too. Links to everything I’ve done for MacLife should be available here.

I’m going to think out loud, if you don’t mind. I’ve been ruminating on something for a while now and I would like to indulge the openness and apparent civility of this forum to throw some very incompletely formed ideas against the wall to see what sticks. Maybe we’ll end up with a collective Rorschach test that can tell us something about ourselves, or maybe, as with making so much spaghetti back in college, we’ll just end up with strands of uncooked pasta and a mess on the kitchen wall.

The back-story here is that I thought Al Gore was a bit of a chump in 2000. I felt he ran a timid, lifeless campaign against one of the most eminently beatable pretenders ever to aspire to national office. He deserved to lose, even if he did win, really.

I also thought the five Supreme Court justices who decided Bush v. Gore should have been arrested and tried for treason, or at least for failure to defend and protect the constitution.

I agreed, in many respects, with Ralph Nader’s contention that there was very little substantive difference between the two candidates, even less between the two parties they represented, and that we Americans and our media had no stomach for discussing (much less actually tackling) the real issues we face as a nation and a society.

From the current vantage point, I believe George W. Bush has been more of a disaster than even the most pessimistic of us dared imagine eight years ago, and I am afraid my eight year-old son will be struggling to overcome the ill effects of the Bush administration twenty, thirty, perhaps even forty years from now.

In the 2004 election cycle, it was clear to me the only candidate approaching the task with any real combination of intelligence, vision, creativity and promise was Dennis Kucinich. I soon accepted that I was in an elite minority of single digit proportions, but took comfort in the fact that I would have been happy to sit down and have a beer with every single DK supporter I came across that year.

After the first Bush/Kerry debate I thought Kerry was a lock for the presidency. The gulf between the two men’s intellects was so vast and so stark, and we had already suffered such incredible depredations to our body politic, I thought, “how could any thinking person choose to stay the course we are on?”

And yet.

I wrote a song in the wee hours of election night that year, the chorus of which laments, “It’s gonna take a little time / to find some peace of mind / gazing at the great divide.” Listen to a very rudimentary recording of it if you’re interested.

So now we’ve had the four more years, and despite the ‘success’ of the surge, Iraq is no less of a quagmire than it was always predicted to become. There is credible expectation that we’ll begin aerial bombardment of, if not all-out war with Iran before Bush and Cheney leave Washington. The economy is on pins and needles, our stature in the community of nations is that of a laughingstock, and the outgoing chief executive has the lowest public approval rating of any president who was not impeached in our history.

One might think We the People are ready for something different. That we’ve come to our senses. That the indomitable spirit and can-do attitude which are the birthright of every American will step to the plate and by sheer force of will manifest the best and the brightest the world has to offer, that we might lead mankind in this new millennium on wings of invention, ingenuity and a refusal to be trod upon.

But, no. People are tired. People are weary. People want it to be over. People can’t stand the pettiness and the superficiality and the crassness of the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the right to try and define a new way forward.

Well, I hate to put it this way, but maybe we haven’t had enough yet. Maybe it’s got to get even worse before it can get any better. Maybe the dark heart of neoconservatism has to become so glaringly exposed there can be no doubt, even among those who agree on no other thing, that we must finally drive a stake through it to rid ourselves of the fear and greed and cruelty its grip on power engenders.

Maybe John McCain is just the guy to get us there.

Framed in festive graphics with bubblegum hues of pink and purple, Miss Cyrus currently adorns the bedroom walls, backpacks, lunchboxes and projected star-fantasies of millions of young girls across the globe. She has headlined sellout concerts of 10,000-seat plus arenas for much of the past two years and sold several million records of saccharine flavored countrypoppyrock music.

But having the whole world in her hand is never enough and a girl’s got to grow, right?

Miss Cyrus now claims that her VF photo-shoot with acclaimed celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz was “supposed to be artistic,” not “skanky,” and claimed, “you can’t say no to Annie.”

The reality is far more likely that her parents (she is the daughter of one-hit-wonder Billy Ray Cyrus) can’t say no to any opportunity to exploit their daughter or goose her earning potential in the wake of all the prurient publicity and wagging tongues sure to erupt from such a career move.

The question, or one of them, anyway, is whether Miss Cyrus will go the route of Brooke Shields, whose screen debut as a child prostitute in the 1978 movie Pretty Baby raised many an eyebrow, then followed not long after as a titillating shill for Calvin Klein jeans, proclaiming that “nothing” came between her and her “Calvins.”

Ms. Shields overcame her provocative early exposure and a relative lack of actual talent to become a generally well-regarded celebrity spokesperson, and has lately raised awareness of both post-partum depression and the Church of Scientology through her book on the former and her very public feud about it with Tom Cruise, celebrity point man for the latter.

Or will Miss Cyrus follow the tawdry path of Britney Spears, the former Disney Mouseketeer who enjoyed worldwide acclaim as a bouncy teen singer before morphing her way through high-energy dance vixen to platinum-selling Pop Star to Tabloid Victim to Mentally Suspect Court Conservatee.

The sad thing is that for all the positive role modeling Miss Cyrus may have created, giving millions of young girls the idea they, too, might achieve fame, fortune and school-age acclaim through writing, singing and performing their own music (as unlikely a route to success as that might in fact be), she’s now helped perpetuate the stereotypical expectation that success as a young woman inevitably involves disrobing in front of a camera.

Remembering all the while, of course, the difference between artistic and skanky.

As it turned out, most writers of the classical and modern literature I studied were men, and disproportionately damaged ones, at that. But the back stories of their lives always seemed interesting and sometimes transcended the stories they wrote themselves. Authors seemed larger to me, and more heroic than the masses of other men from every epoch, who invariably led lives of quiet desperation.

In all likelihood, the chances of my story ever inspiring some youngster the way Byron or Twain or Homer or Hemingway lit certain fires in me are … well, as a correspondent of mine likes to put it — vanishingly small. But I am desperate to live what remains of my life driven by inspiration rather than by fear or desire, to reach for the best within me and not grasp at some external vision of success, or worth, or meaning.

To these lofty ends I have begun to receive my first commissions working as a freelance journalist. This month I’ve got a piece published in the Bay Area-based computer magazine Mac|Life, the print edition (May 2008) of which is on newsstands now. An extended online version of my interview with Wired magazine editor Leander Kahane should have a hyperlink within days. I’ll update it here when it goes live.

Next month, my contribution to a feature-length piece on the Apple iPhone SDK is scheduled to hit, and in July you’ll be able to read my reviews of gear ranging from a home media server, to a hand-held scanner, music-enhancement software and a bluetooth-equipped iPod boombox.

Tomorrow morning I’m interviewing Olympic swimmer and world-record holder Natalie Coughlin, who collaborated on the design of a waterproof case and headset for the iPod mini and produced her own swim training program.

It’s all part of an exciting change of direction for me after an abortive and largely unsatisfying foray into the realm of technology start-ups and corporate sales quotas.

I hope I Just Have To Say readers will check out my online writing for Mac|Life and leave comments or diggs to help the editors there understand what a valuable resource they’ve come into, and I encourage as well, subscription to this blog’s RSS feeds for both posts and comments so as not to miss any of the action.

Who knows, if I can get enough paid freelance work I might write a novel that could one day pop out of some school kid’s Norton Anthology and steer him or her toward a life of the mind and the heart.

Police arrested at least 30 people in London on Sunday, as a roster of British sports luminaries and entertainment personalities spent eight hours surrounded by a phalanx of Chinese government security personnel and London police, who fended off protesters trying to get to the torch and snuff it out. Dozens of people managed to break through security cordons and get near the torch before being wrestled to the ground; one man was beaten back as he ran toward the flame with a fire extinguisher. Police said over 2000 officers were deployed along the 31 mile route to maintain order.

On Monday in Paris, the scene devolved to chaos as 3000 police and security personnel in boats, on bikes and inline skates struggled with angry protesters along the route from the Eiffel Tower,

past the Louvre, and along the Champs-Elysees. Anxious relay organizers halted the procession, extinguished the torch, and placed it aboard a bus five times throughout the day before finally deciding to cancel the last leg of the journey into Charlety track and field stadium across the Seine from central Paris.

Ahead of the flame’s planned arrival in San Francisco on Wednesday, when more protests are expected, climbers wearing harnesses and helmets scaled the Golden gate bridge to hang protest banners reading “Free Tibet.”

Time was, China the slumbering giant lived behind its Great Wall and was largely a great mystery to much of the rest of the world. But the world has become a smaller, far less private place in the past thirty years and China’s ascendant position in its economic and political hierarchy places it squarely in the sights of many who feel her rise has come at far too great a human cost.

The tension between China’s desire for acceptance on the world stage and its demand to be free from interference in the ordering of its internal affairs adds a curious and none-too-welcome edge to the coming Olympic games.

Odds are, the experience will change both China and the Olympics, if not the world, forever.

In a bad omen for Senator John McCain’s fledgling presidential campaign, “a majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction.”

Not surprisingly, the last time this particular poll registered such a dismal assessment by the American public, a fellow by the name of George Bush was getting ready to vacate the White House amidst an economy in dire straits.

An interesting twist to the current pulse of the nation is that dissatisfaction usually hits its low point in the months and years after an economic downturn (such as the low reading in late 1992 after the recession that began in 1990), not at the beginning of one.

Today, however, Americans report being deeply worried about the country even though many say their own personal finances are still in fairly good shape.

Two out of three current poll respondents believe the country is already in recession, though government economic data have yet to confirm their opinion.

In under a week, one of the venerable names of American capitalism turned to vapor. Shareholders, fully one third of whom are Bear Stearns executives and employees, whose stock traded less than a month ago at over $80, saw their interest in the company repriced at a mere $2 per share. And the offer was not for cash, but rather for the happy prospect of shares in the savior, JP Morgan!

Of course, news accounts and yammering commentators talking about this story yesterday described it as a ‘bailout,’ with critics of the system saying the bank should have been allowed to ‘fail,’ while government officials like SEC Chairman Christopher Cox rushed to reassure nervous investors, saying, “We have a good deal of comfort about the capital cushions at these firms at the moment.'’

President Bush himself mounted the plunge-protection hustings, gathering Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, along with Mr. Cox and others in the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets at the White House on Monday for a Sunny Jim cheerleading session designed to shore up public confidence in the orderliness of financial markets. “The United States is on top of the situation, ” he said.

As this is being written, New York markets are trading today with index gains of more than 2%. Another investment bank rumored to have capital cushions not unlike those recently enjoyed by Bear Stearns — Lehman Brothers — is up more than 30%. A third, said to be in even greater peril than Lehman — Merrill Lynch — is up nearly 10%.

Mr. Bernanke will meet later today with the Fed’s Open Market Committee, with the entire universe expecting him to announce further significant reductions in the short-term federal funds rate, designed to bolster an economy that many credible observers believe has already entered a recession.

It’s never advisable to consult a crystal ball when talking about future economic prospects, though, ironically, public confidence in the economy and investor decisions about whether to buy or sell shares in a particular concern are often based, not on things as they are, but on things as corporate executives predict they will be.

For example, one of today’s trading session leaders is Yahoo, the Internet company that was recently the subject of a merger offer from Microsoft valued at $31 per share. Today the company reiterated sunny prospects for the future, saying it expects to roughly double operating cash flow over the next three years from $1.9 billion to $3.7 billion and generate $8.8 billion in revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs in 2010.

While Yahoo is posting a one-day gain of more than 5%, its stock is still trading below Microsoft’s offer price. Founder and CEO Jerry Yang said the company has “a combination of unique assets” whose value “is not fully appreciated.”

Well, maybe so.

Less than a week before his company’s bottom fell out from under him, Bear Stearns’ Alan “Ace” Greenberg responded to concerns about the firm’s liquidity saying, “It’s ridiculous, totally ridiculous.”

Turns out he was right, though not in the way many people thought at the time.

A collective peek up the panty-free skirt of a Former Teen Idol or a glimpse of nipple through the diaphanous gown of This Year’s Model beats the Comeback Victory, the Shaggy Dog, and the Horatio Alger story every time for getting the attention of the caffeine-fueled ADHD citizens of the Most Powerful Nation on Earth.

Combining sex with clergy, or sex and politics, will very nearly get the nation’s arbiters of all things newsworthy soiling themselves in excitement over the eyes and ears a sex scandal will send their way in the next 24-hour news cycle.

Thus, the front page of every newspaper in America today features the frowning, disconsolate mug of Eliot Spitzer. The lede story on every Internet news and gossip site tells the gripping tale of his ‘monumental’ fall from grace, the tragic story of Client 9 — the hard-bitten, former federal prosecutor-turned Governor of New York, who yesterday admitted to contracting for the services of a prostitute.

Conversation at water coolers throughout the land will feature breathless moralizing over the shame and ‘criminality’ of Mr. Spitzer’s behavior. Some of it will rightly consider the hypocrisy of a man who, at least partly, earned his public service stripes pursuing prostitution rings as the head of New York’s organized crime task force.

Few will ponder the difficulties of reconciling the illegality of prostitution with the fact of America’s (legal) multi-billion dollar adult pornography industry.

Calls for Mr. Spitzer to be treated like any other John nabbed in a prostitution sting — that is, not to be prosecuted for much of anything, or be otherwise bothered to face much more than the wrath of an angry spouse — will be inaudible among demands for his immediate resignation and pleas for his incarceration as an ‘example’ of the reprehensible public official.

Even less likely to be generally considered are questions about how the particular prostitution ring involving Mr. Spitzer became the subject of federal wiretapping activities in the first place, why the FBI and the IRS were bothered to examine the small-time bank transactions that led to the wiretapping, or why Mr. Spitzer has been the only person associated with the sordid affair so far identified.

Scott Horton at Harper’s magazine has relentlessly covered the corruption and debasement of the Bush Justice Department for years, and he asks a few of the germane questions unlikely to come up in today’s office gossip or to be found in the terabytes of email discussing the scandal on the Internet.

Mr. Spitzer forged his bona fides — and was elected governor of New York with 69% of the vote in 2006 — on the strength of his success prosecuting the white-collar crimes of Wall Street greed-heads and financial hucksters during seven years as the state’s Attorney General.

Widely regarded as a rising star of the Democratic party and hailed for his denouncements of securities fraud, price-fixing, excessive executive compensation, and environmental depredations, he once struck fear in the hearts of rapacious titans of high finance, and stood in stark contrast to the friends and benefactors of mighty power brokers in the Republican party.

Today he’s but another schmuck caught with his pants around his ankles, whose entire life of good deeds and a potential future of beneficial public service are drowned in the scum-ringed tub of America’s prurient self-regard.

Notoriously decided on the merits in favor of plaintiffs’ claims by Federal Circuit Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in August, 2006, the ruling in ACLU v. NSA was overturned and the case dismissed by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose 3 judge panel ruled 2-1 last year that, because the plaintiffs could not prove their communications had been monitored, they lacked standing to claim harm under the program.

As usual, Glenn Greenwald writes very plainly about what is going on and what are some of its implications.

For me, the takeaway from Glenn’s piece today would read:

In a minimally functioning Republic, when political leaders are accused of concealing wrongdoing, [the legislature] investigates, uncovers what happens, and informs the people.

When political leaders are accused of breaking the law, courts decide whether that occurred.

None of the branches of the U.S. government do that any longer. They do the opposite: they not only fail to perform those functions, but they affirmatively act to block investigations, help the conduct remain concealed, and ensure there is no adjudication.

When it comes to ensuring the NSA spying scandal specifically remains forever uninvestigated, secret, and unexamined, telecom amnesty will be the final nail in this coffin, but it is merely illustrative of how our political culture now functions.