Workbench

Watching the Watchers Makes Use of Creative Commons

Rogers Cadenhead — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:11:14 -0400

I've completed the second phase of the Watching the Watchers relaunch, which I began in late May. The site has become a digest of interesting news and commentary from sites that permit redistribution. As you can see, the traffic graph's become a lot more fun to look at lately.

The site now includes stories that were published under a Creative Commons license that permits reuse. If you're unfamiliar with Creative Commons, it's a popular way to allow your copyrighted work -- whether it's text, photos, audio or video -- to be reused by others under terms that you select. On the RSS Advisory Board, we use the license to share the RSS specification, RSS best practices profile and other documentation we author. Some people have used our license to create foreign-language translations of those documents.

Here's a sampling of stories I've republished on Watching the Watchers that came in over the commons:

I wrote a Java application that looks for weblog content shared under Creative Commons and a PHP web application that lets me manually review stories for potential republication. So far, the richest source of reusable content is coming from WordPress blogs because they include content:encoded, an RSS element explicitly defined as the full text of a weblog entry. WordPress does not use the Creative Commons RSS namespace in its feeds, so my Java application loads the web page associated with a blog entry and looks for HTML markup that identifies a license. Here's an example of that markup:

The contents of this website are licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License</a>.

As I was reviewing stories that came in, I decided to expand the focus of the site beyond liberal news and commentary and make it non-partisan. If I find something compelling that's worth sharing with a wider audience, I don't want to leave it out because it expresses a conservative or libertarian viewpoint or isn't political at all.

Sarah Palin Violates the U.S. Flag Code

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:02:22 -0400

The August 2009 issue of Runner's World includes a Q&A with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin about her lifelong interest in jogging. The interview reveals that she took an unreported fall while running with the Secret Service before the vice presidential debate and describes how Sen. John McCain loves being up a creek:

I used to joke around with John McCain during the campaign about coming jogging with me. And once I asked him what his favorite exercise was, and he said, 'I go wading.' Wading. He lives on a creek in Arizona, so he goes wading. That cracked me up.

The most newsworthy part of the story is probably the last question, where she affirms her support for Title IX, the gender equity law that requires schools to offer as many programs for female athletes as for males:

Is there anything else the world should know about you as a runner?
The only other thing I'd like to add is I've been very fortunate to be a recipient of all the efforts people put into Title IX all those years ago where girls got equal opportunity to participate in sports and extracurricular activities because sports growing up were my world. I'm so thankful for Title IX allowing equal access to these opportunities, and I'm a huge proponent of girls being able to realize what they're made of by participating in sports and whatever I can do there I'm going to be doing.

The story includes eight photos of Palin in running attire, and the last one shows that Palin still has a knack for turning a harmless publicity stunt -- like pardoning a turkey -- into a potential black eye.

Palin's violating the U.S. Flag Code, which you can read on the American Legion's site, in how that U.S. flag is treated in the photo. Under the heading Respect for the Flag, the code states, "The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise." There's also a rule against using it as drapery.

Though adherance to the Flag Code is optional, some people take it pretty seriously, as the American Flag wall of shame demonstrates, and a lot of them are in what Palin would consider the "pro-America areas of this great nation." You shouldn't drape it over a chair like a cover you bought at Bed Bath and Beyond.

It's a wonder that Palin hasn't shot her publicity team from a helicopter.

Update: A commenter points out a picture of Palin wrapping herself in the flag that was reprinted in Newsweek and taken by Wasilla, Alaska, photographer Judy Patrick, who has included it in her Palin calendar.

Transformers: Less Than Meets the Eye

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:41:53 -0400

Roger Ebert's review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen appears to be considerably more entertaining than the film itself:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Decepticons and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

Ebert writes more about the movie on his blog:

The day will come when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms. ...
The action scenes can perhaps best be understood as abstract art. The Autobots and Decepticons, which are assembled out of auto parts, make no functional or aesthetic sense. They have evolved into forms too complex to be comprehended. When two or more of the Bots are in battle, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. You can't comprehend most of what they're doing, except for an occasional fist flying, a built-in missile firing, or the always dependable belching of flames.

I'm surprised that Ebert thinks the film will make a huge amount of money. My kids saw the first Transformers but have shown absolutely no interest in seeing them again, thus robbing me of several opportunities to see Megan Fox running in slow-motion. Films that feed dad's nostalgia for childhood don't go over well in my house. No amount of pleading on my part could get the family to see Speed Racer.

Richard Corliss Makes Excuses for Michael Jackson

Rogers Cadenhead — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:15:12 -0400

Before Michael Jackson's death Friday, I wasn't aware that I had any affection left for the King of Pop. Like millions of others, I grew up watching Jackson and the rest of his family grow up. Janet Jackson's my age, and when she played Penny as a 10-year-old on the sitcom Good Times, I was in love. I decided to save myself for her -- not that she appreciated it -- until I finally gave up at age 18.

I'm not the only one who still had some affection for Jackson, but the extent of the tonguebath he's getting from the mainstream media has surprised me. It's one thing to downplay the accusations about child molestation and other inappropriate behavior with children that dogged the last 15 years of his life, but another thing entirely to explicitly make excuses for him. Writing for Time magazine, movie critic Richard Corliss rationalizes that even if Jackson molested kids, he was not a sexual predator because he thought of himself as a child:

Yet Jackson's profound weirdness Ã¢ÂÂ not just the glove or the seaweed hair striping his face but the blanched skin, the pained eyes, the tremulous soul -- hinted that Peter Pan was the wrong role for him. Wasn't Jackson really one of Peter's Lost Boys, stranded between childhood and adolescence, loved by the public yet feeling caged and abandoned, and searching, groping for the Edenic innocence he believed was any child's birthright? ...
When he welcomed handicapped kids to the ranch, he felt he was their equal, and they were friends he could play with, or sing to -- or, he must have thought, love, in the purest sense of the word. The litany of alleged misbehavior in the 2005 trial -- making prank phone calls, sneaking drinks, scanning porn sites, even a lesson in masturbation -- is not unfamiliar among preteens. If Jackson committed these acts, it was not predator-to-prey but peer-to-peer. Having forgiven the father who abused him, could he not forgive himself for bonding with the children who came into his Neverland bed? Could this Lost Boy even understand the difference between hugging and fondling, affection and assault, generosity and lechery?

If you find any other examples of the media making excuses for child sex abuse when celebrities are involved, share the link.

IMDB Strikes Crude with 'Year One' Sex Advisory

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:46:35 -0400

The movie reference site IMDB has a parents guide feature that's useful when determining whether a movie contains sexual content that would be inappropriate for your children. (Like most Americans I'm much more comfortable exposing the younguns to movies that contain bloodshed than any film that makes even the slightest reference to sex. I blame my Catholic upbringing and spaghetti Westerns.)

The feature is edited by users in the manner of Wikipedia and does not get editorial oversight from IMDB.

When considering whether to see Year One this weekend, I found that the users had been incredibly thorough in describing scenes that had anything to do with sex or nudity. Here's the full text of the warning, which looks like it spoils at least a dozen scenes:

A large orgy is shown on screen: over 50 people are shown engaging in sexual acts, passionately rubbing against one another, laying on one another, groping and kissing, as half-dressed people are shown walking about the room. Two people are shown in a passionate embrace, kissing then falling to the ground, off screen, and sexual moans are heard, as well as the man asking if he should remove his underclothing; the two emerge later and announce that they had just had intercourse and that it was enjoyable and they would like to have intercourse again. A man instructs a woman that they should kiss with their mouths open. A man erotically licks the face of a woman. A woman is shown licking the face and ear of another woman. A man and a woman are shown in a passionate embrace, kissing. A man and a woman are shown kissing passionately. A man and woman dance together suggestively. Two men are shown lying in the same bed, after a man offers that they can "lay" with one another. A shirtless man demands that a young man pour oil on his body and rub it in with his hands and genitals; the young man pours oil on his chest and rubs his chest with his hand as the man moans and makes sexual and suggestive comments. A man states that he has sex with animals and is later shown trying to have sex with an animal. A statue is shown bearing an exaggeratedly large erection, a man closely inspects the statue, places his hand on the erection, accidentally snaps off the statue's genitals and then tries to hide the broken parts. A woman is shown running her hands up and down two spears in a purposefully suggestive fashion, which two men discuss as being blatantly sexual in nature. A woman leans over, her cleavage exposed, and two men are shown ogling her breasts. Men and women look at one another in a very suggestive manner. A man looks at a young man and licks his lips suggestively. A man stands before a woman with his leg up, and it is implied that the woman can see his genitals and she smiles. A woman is shown erotically eating and licking a banana and two men talk about the sexual nature of her eating the banana and a man tries to imitate her by erotically eating a chunk of meat. A man jokes about incest, saying that it was awkward the morning after he had sexual intercourse with his mother, so he would not have sexual intercourse with his sister. A woman is asked how she can be "had." A man offers his daughter for sex, saying that people need to be fruitful and multiply. A man tells a woman that he wants to have sex with her and makes two crude references to erections. A woman rebukes a man's advances for sex, saying instead that she is sexually interested in women and that she is a practicing lesbian. A man is told, "sodomize this" and is pushed into a rioting crowd. A man speaks in a suggestive manner to a young man, stating that he would like to see the man perform sexual acts. A man says he just received a "rub and scrub." A young man discusses how his body was painted by another man, with a focus on his genitals. The phrase "where sinners are winners" is used after a discussion of free sex, orgies, and over-consumption of alcohol, including a remark that any ill behavior that takes place will not be discussed once leaving the city. People discuss prostitution and the practice of sodomy, encouraging participation in open sex (both homosexual and heterosexual) orgies, and sexually transmitted diseases. People discuss how virgins are pure of sexual mark, and a man talks about being a virgin himself. A man introduces himself as a eunuch and explains the process of how he became a eunuch, including retaining a portion of his male genitalia which he keeps in a pouch. A man is shown with hair on his hands and mentions that the hair was pubic hair as well as chest hair from giving another man a massage with oil. A man mentions that he had just had a "long, wet, hot" bath with another man. People discuss a fertility dance and how it would be an excellent opportunity to dance with a person who they are sexually interested in (the dance is never shown on screen). Two men discuss "laying" with a woman, implying having sexual intercourse. A man advises another man that he can simply hit a woman over the head and then drag her back to his house to have sex with her, even if she shows no interest in doing so, and then adds that women like it that way. A man says he does not want to wake up his parents while having loud intercourse. Men repeatedly speak of "lying with" women meaning intercourse, and a person asks where babies come from. A man makes a crude reference to masturbation. A man tells another man that he would be happy if the man produced many children with his sister. A man says that he will use his "short spear" to "straighten out" a group of men (while he means this as a violent threat, the implication of his speech is sexual). A man discusses how he will perform circumcision on three other men, he explains in detail the actions required to perform circumcision, including crude and vulgar terms for parts of the male genitalia. People discuss, at length, circumcision and the sexual implications of circumcision, including making crude references to the act of circumcision and male genitalia and the appearance of male genitalia after circumcision. When being attacked by a snake, a man is instructed to stick a finger in its "hole" (the man does not do so). A man holds up the cooked carcass of an animal and asks a question implying that the carcass resembles the nude female figure. A man offers to kiss another man. Women are shown wearing low-cut tops, shirts which expose bare mid-drift, and short skirts.

We didn't see the film.

Everybody's an Expert on Iran

Rogers Cadenhead — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:52:38 -0400

Dave Winer on Twitter Sunday:

BTW, it's lame to change your location to Tehran and your timezone to GMT +3.30. Instead, our friends at twitter.com should detect and block about 13 hours ago from web
It should be against the terms of service to use the Twitter API to persecute and kill users. Yes? about 12 hours ago from web

There's a lot of cringe-inducing commentary coming from American bloggers and twitterers about the situation in Iran. Although most of it is well-intentioned, the massive outbreak of overnight expertise reminds me of warbloggers lining up Muslim countries for the U.S. to bomb in the days after 9/11.

Who knew there were thousands of people who could speak with authority on the complex internal politics of an anti-American Islamic theocracy halfway around the globe? Take that, Juan Cole! You may have a master's degree in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, but I reloaded Andrew Sullivan's blog 150 times on Saturday alone. And I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.

The situation in Iran also has sparked numerous calls for symbolic gestures like turning your web site green or switching your Twitter timezone to GMT +3:30 and your location to Tehran, thus making it harder for Iranian authorities to find and crack down on real Iranian protesters using the service.

I love Winer's suggestion that the Twitter API be amended to forbid its use to "persecute and kill users."

If the Iranian regime decides to hunt down its own citizens for participating in Twitter during the election unrest, I'm not convinced that it could be stopped by a terms of service agreement.

Meet the Fourth Jonas Brother

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:34:56 -0400

You may not know this, but there's a fourth Jonas Brother -- a ginormous bald black guy named Big Rob who comes out occasionally to supplement their musical caterwauling with rap.

Until I found a blog entry by Rickey Laurentiis, I was not aware that Big Rob was an attempt to establish white supremacy in an unsuspecting audience of tween girls:

I've seen them around, figuratively, on the covers of magazines and on the TV, but I didn't really take notice until So You Think You Can Dance final where they performed. I was bored, to say the least, until this big, black guy came jumping onto the stage like the Koolaid Man. He appeared to be some sort of hype man ... rapping or whatever. I didn't really listen after the first few minutes. I was nauseated.
I just couldn't help but think about the (national) image of black men as soon as he -- I've learned his name is Big Rob and he's the brothers' body guard -- appeared. I mean, historically and presently. The black man as monster, brute, murderous; the black man as mandigo, rapist, oversexed animal; gross, perverse. Perhaps, perhaps I'm overreacting (but, sorry, I'm not white so I don't have the privilege not to think of these things), but when I see Big Rob flanked by the three other Jonas Brothers, I can't help but to see a very strategic move:
Big Rob is mostly obviously Other. On that stage, in that audience. His skin, bald head and not mention very large, tall size completely otherize him. In turn, as the surrogate "what is that?", The Jonas Brothers, their whiteness, is cemented, so to speak.

When I saw the Jonas Brothers perform on the broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game last fall, I noticed there was something different about Big Rob too. I think he's adopted.

Relaunching Watching the Watchers

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:22:34 -0400

I recently relaunched Watching the Watchers as an Utne Reader-style digest of interesting political news and commentary published on sites that permit redistribution. In the first phase, most of the content is coming from Daily Kos, which has the following license:

Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified.

Hundreds of diary entries roll through Daily Kos every day, and a lot of interesting stuff falls through the cracks. I only consider Kos diaries that didn't make the site's front page or get linked on the front page in the 24 hours after they were published. Stories are chosen manually, not through an automated process, and all republished stories have a link to the author at the top and the original Kos page at the bottom.

Here's a sampling of stories selected for Watchers:

I'm trying some new things with the site, including a stripped-down design that was inspired by how Google News displays wire stories from AP and AFP. I also decided not to accept comments.

Because the Kos license permits redistribution "unless otherwise specified," when a diary indicates that it should not be redistributed or contains a copyright statement, I honor that. I also would stop republishing anybody who told me to stop, of course. Some concerns were raised by Kos users when one found his work on the site, but for the most part the community supports reuse. Site founder Markos Moulitsas made this comment:

To be clear this is perfectly cool and within site rules. If anyone has a problem with it, which is perfectly understandable, slap a copyright notice at the bottom of your diaries ...
I'm a content anarchist, so I don't try to hoard and control what's written on this site (even the stuff I myself write). But I've got no problems with people disagreeing and wanting to control their own material.

Although Kos has RSS feeds for the front page and user diaries, so much is posted there that the feeds don't contain all of it. I wrote a Java application that parses the links on the front page and diary page. The Apache HTTP Client Java library makes it easy to retrieve web documents.

In the next phase of the project, I'll be adding the ability to republish Creative Commons-licensed content.

Andrew Sullivan, Iran News Sites Under Denial of Service Attack

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:52:51 -0400

The political weblogger Andrew Sullivan, who has been covering the protests in Iran around the clock for several days, reported early Monday that his site appears to be suffering a denial of service (DOS) attack intended to knock it offline:

The Atlantic is struggling to keep the site up despite what seems to be a digital attack. Please be persistent in trying to reload.

Sullivan's site, which has been passing along updates from the election protests in both English and Farsi, has been unusually slow to load throughout the day Monday. Although it's possible that enormous demand is overloading the servers at The Atlantic, as a longtime reader of his blog I can't recall it ever having problems despite huge demand in the final days of the American presidential election. His site served 23 million visits in October 2008.

The RSS feed for Sullivan's site, which is hosted by the Google service FeedBurner, can still be accessed normally.

Another American site that has been reporting on the election, TehranBureau.Com, has been completely offline since Sunday. The publisher of the site used its Twitter feed to report that they're flooded with requests from Iranian government computers.

problem w/ site pinpointed: webmaster says the Iranian govt is overloading us with requests to disable our site: "denial of service attack"

The site's changing servers, but in the meantime is offering updates on the Twitter account TehranBureau. Sullivan has a Twitter account at DailyDish.

A denial of service attack, sometimes described as a distributed denial of service (DDOS), is an attempt to make an Internet resource unavailable by overloading it with requests. The attacks take many forms, but can be as simple as running a script that requests every page on a web site hundreds of times per second.

Credit: The photo of Andrew Sullivan was taken by Trey Ratcliff and is available under a Creative Commons license.

Conservative Blogs Doing Better Under Obama

Rogers Cadenhead — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:59:18 -0400

Blogger Simon Owens is tracking the traffic of the 20 largest liberal and conservative blogs to see how they've fared since the election. The blogs have collectively dropped 109 million unique visitors from October 2008 to May 2009:

Right of center blogs weathered the post-election season a little better, falling only 37%, while blogs that were left-of-center fell by 64%.
Some blogs did better than others. Instapundit, for instance, was the only blog to show a slight increase in page views between the two months. Hot Air and Ann Althouse also saw a much less significant drop compared to all other blogs. Out of all the blogs surveyed, MyDD saw the most significant drop, with a decrease of 80% in pageviews.

There's always a slump after a presidential election as people who have been consumed with politics rediscover the rest of their lives, but Owens has found a dramatic difference in how liberal and conservative blogs have fared since the election. Partisan media tends to do better when its side is out of power, because that fuels more activism and passion than being in charge. Readership of The Nation doubled after the election of President Bush in 2000.

The Drudge Retort has dropped from 2.8 million unique visitors last October to 1.8 million last month. I was surprised to learn that the Retort has lost less of its audience than any other liberal blog tracked by Owens. The Retort's 36% drop is close to the average drop of conservative blogs.

I'm not sure why the Retort has suffered less of a post-election slump than Daily Kos, Washington Monthly and other liberal-leaning sites. One possible reason is that the Retort actively encourages conservatives and libertarians to contribute dissenting views, so some of those folks have stuck around to express opposition to President Obama and the Democratic-led Congress. I get bored with echo chambers, so I've tried to cultivate a more ideologically diverse audience than most political blogs.

Andrew Breitbart's Mad About Hollywood (Or Just Mad)

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:57:31 -0400

Andrew Breitbart's a right-wing journalist in Los Angeles who coauthored the Drudge Report for years without getting any credit. He now runs Breitbart.Com and Big Hollywood and writes columns for the Washington Times. Breitbart.Com, which consists primarily of wire content, receives 1.7 million unique visitors a month, an audience he built by linking to the site frequently while working for Drudge.

All external indicators would suggest that Breitbart has a lot to be happy about, but I've followed his work for years and he operates in a constant state of anger at the perceived mistreatment of conservatives, particularly in Hollywood. Since he's around my age, he's lived during an era in which the right wing was ascendant in American politics. I'm not sure he could have survived the '60s and '70s, back when conservatism was the marginalized ideology of Barry Goldwater and washed-up B-movie actors.

After the blog Gawker ran an item Thursday criticizing Matt Drudge's coverage of the Holocaust Museum shooting, Breitbart left the writer an irate voicemail complaining about the use of "right-wing extremist" to describe shooting suspect James von Brunn:

I'm basically fuming and I'm reading your shit at Gawker right now saying that this guy is a right-wing extremist and it's such a fucking slander on people like me.
This guy went after, this guy was after neocons like me who are conservative. He had the address to Weekly Standard there. Conservatives believe in individual liberty. They don't believe in groups' rights. This guy's a multiculturalist just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses. This guy was a 9/11 Truther. This guy's hardly a right-winger. This guy's political philosophy is more akin to the drivel that you hear on a college campus that delineates us by group -- not by individuality. It's the exact opposite of my political philosophy.
It's deeply offensive that you would use this for political gain. I could care less how you describe me in regards to Drudge or anything, but for you to put on me this fuckface crime against humanity -- so fuck you beyond the pale.

I don't pay much attention to attempts by liberals and conservatives to score points by branding the latest homicidal nutjob as a member of the other team. When you go far enough to the extremes, the right and left wing meet. But I love Breitbart's logic in calling anybody who maligns an entire race or religion a liberal because he's treating people as a group instead of individuals. So all racists are multiculturalists! Up is down. Cogito ergo stupidum.

Last month, Breitbart devoted his Times column to an apology to some protesters he flipped off in a rage as they marched past Shutters, a Santa Monica restaurant where he had taken his wife on a date:

... when one dude raised his fist like runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos did at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, I could not hold myself back. I jumped from my seat and bolted to the center of the balcony, where the American flag waved furiously in a now-harsh wind. Positioned next to Old Glory, I countered the young punk and reached out my right arm directing my middle finger in his direction.
As soon as my finger was raised, a phalanx of photographers began snapping away at the white middle-aged man wearing a white LaCoste shirt next to the old red, white and blue. Cognizant of the power of imagery, I owned the moment and refused to back down. The fist wielder immediately dropped his arm. I clearly had won and envisioned photos of the anti-antiwar protester making the front pages of the Los Angeles Times.

It turned out that the protesters were not marching against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as he originally surmised, but against the abduction of children to fight wars in Uganda and the Congo. Though Breitbart's apology was gracious, he makes clear that he would have no problems ruining dinner for his wife and other restaurant patrons if those other antiwar activists needed to be put in their place.

In a piece last year for New York Observer, writer Spencer Morgan managed to make Breitbart look crazy simply by following him around a few conservative social gatherings and quoting him at length. After Breitbart went on for hundreds of words about how "uninteresting" Hollywood is, and he declared that sex with Maggie Gyllenhaal would "almost disgust me," Morgan described him this way:

Mr. Breitbart grew up in Los Angeles. His father owned a restaurant, mom was a bank executive. At Brentwood High School he watched administration types socialize with certain parents in the entertainment industry. He got C's, played baseball, was a class clown, but hung out with the smart kids. He always suspected that school had been against him, a conspiracy theory that was eventually confirmed by a friend's mom who confessed to him that the principal had called her into his office to turn her against the young Breitbart. This, he says, was the beginning of a lifelong crusade against bullies.

I'm guessing that principal was a liberal, and perhaps even a black lesbian multiculturalist.

Leo Laporte Gets All Up in Michael Arrington's Shiznit

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:59:19 -0400

There was some unexpected drama this weekend when Leo Laporte, a longtime technology journalist well known for his work on TechTV, flipped out during a live Internet broadcast after his integrity was questioned by TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington.

Laporte has a reputation for being genial and non-confrontational, making it all the more amusing to see him drop a bunch of F bombs and kick the entire Gillmor Gang show off the air. After Arrington apologized the two mended fences, but I'm posting the video here to ask a broader question about how people react when they're the target of a tirade like this.

When someone you think of as a friend unloads on you in a moment of anger, itemizing the accumulated list of things that fucking piss them the hell off motherfucker, in most cases you probably make nice-nice with them later. Water under the bridge. Let bygones be bygones. Peace in our time.

But it's not like you forget the things that were said when the rage knob was dialed up to 11. So as you go forward in the relationship, do you really write off the comments as the product of a fit of anger? I think that most people go through life being nice to a bunch of people they don't like, because the cost of being candid is usually higher than the benefit of telling them off. This is particularly true at a workplace or another professional environment.

As nice as Laporte is reputed to be, if I'm Arrington I would not let the guy take me fishing out on Lake Tahoe.

P.s. If you're reading this and we're not strangers, do not interpret this blog post to mean that I'm hiding the fact that I do not like you. We're totally BFFs.

Teach Myself Novel Writing in 73 Days

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:45:38 -0400

I recently finished the first draft of Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours, the 22nd book on computer programming and web publishing that I've written in the past 13 years. The book comes out in September -- buy early and often.

I decided while working on the book that my next writing project would be a novel.

I've never written a novel before, so I sit down to work each morning with absolutely no idea what the hell I'm doing. I recommend the experience highly -- when I was in my 20s, attempting things I didn't know how to do was second nature. That's how I got my first girlfriend, my first job, my first wife, my first house, and back on topic, my first computer book writing assignment. I was doing copy editing for Sams Publishing in 1995 as a freelancer, and a manuscript I was reviewing required so many edits I decided it would be faster to write books myself (I did not want for ego). So I pitched myself as an author to Mark Taber at Sams, got a couple chapter assignments, and moved up to books. I didn't know back then how much I didn't know, so I could tout my mad authoring skills to Taber without reservation.

Now that I'm in my 40s, I find myself sticking to the road more traveled. I do not as a rule enjoy growth experiences.

The novel I'm writing is a thriller about nuclear terrorism. I can't reveal more about the plot, because I'm afraid that if I do, it will completely remove my motivation to actually write the book. I began by outlining the story in full and have written a prologue and the first two chapters at a speed of around 1,300 words a day. At that rate, I will have completed a 100,000-word novel in around 73 days.

Please don't take my advice that a novel should be 100,000 words long. I don't know what I'm doing.

Groups That Pursued Tiller Share Blame for His Murder

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:30:39 -0400

With the murder Sunday of George Tiller, a Wichita, Kansas, doctor who performed abortions, some anti-abortion groups that targeted Tiller's clinic, home and church for protest have moved swiftly to distance themselves from the killing. Jenn Giroux, the executive director of Women Influencing the Nation, posted this message on the group's web site:

Women Influencing the Nation condemns all form of murder. The murder of George Tiller is in direct contradiction with the beliefs and morals embraced by those of us who believe that every life is precious in the eyes of God and no individual has the right to take the life of another. We encourage everyone to pray for the repose of Dr. Tiller's soul.

Scott Roeder, the suspect in Tiller's murder, visited the group's web site ChargeTiller.Com, which led a petition drive calling for criminal charges against Tiller for two years. Roeder posted the following message on the site Sept. 3, 2007, according to the Wichita Eagle:

It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the 'lawlessness' which is spoken of in the Bible," it said. "Tiller is the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.

Giroux's site described the doctor as "Tiller the Killer" and "the most notorious late term abortionist in the nation." The site's home page made the false claim that he was performing illegal abortions and had bribed Kansas government officials to get away with it:

Tiller has literally committed thousands of illegal late term abortions. Who is continuing to investigate that? Final note: Don't be surprised to see Tiller get off. Keep in mind that Tiller poured millions of dollars into getting this Attorney General's office elected to protect him. Do we really think that they will now agressively prosecute?

These quotes come from cached copies of the Charge Tiller web site, which was taken offline after Tiller was shot to death at his church. Giroux's a registered nurse and mother of nine who traveled from her Ohio home to Kansas to speak at legislative hearings urging his prosecution.

Tiller's abortion services were legal in Kansas, as demonstrated by his March acquittal on 19 misdemeanor charges related to abortions. The doctor was one of the only providers of late-term abortions in the U.S. because of anti-abortion activists who harass doctors at work, home and elsewhere. His clinic had been attacked by a bomb and he was shot twice in 1993, so activists like Giroux had to know that he could be the target of violence again.

Anti-abortion groups that go after individual doctors with rhetoric as strong as Giroux's share responsibility for his death. When you tell people that a doctor is committing murder and has bribed government officials to escape prosecution, you're encouraging people like Tiller's murderer to view violence as a justifiable act. Anti-abortion activists know this. Since 1993, there have been 14 attempted murders of abortion providers, 13 bombings of medical care locations, and now two doctors killed.

No matter how you feel about abortion, you should recognize that protests against doctors at their hospitals and homes are a form of political violence intended to stop Americans from engaging in a legal activity. If Giroux is genuinely remorseful about Tiller's murder, her group should repudiate the practice of going after individual abortion doctors the way they pursued Tiller.

Advanta Closes One Million Credit Card Accounts

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:54:07 -0400

Advanta, a credit card provider for small businesses, announced today that it is shutting down all one million of its customer accounts on May 30. As a longtime customer I was told today via email that I must stop using the cards in four days. The bank has reassured me, however, that I may keep paying the bill after that date. "You may continue to pay down your account balance over time, as allowed under your Advanta Business Card Agreement," the email states. Since Advanta has been jacking up interest rates like crazy lately, as the Los Angeles Times reports, it would probably help the company if I took as long as possible to pay the remaining balance.

I've been relying on Advanta for day-to-day expenditures while running World Readable, my network of web sites. I fortunately have a second credit card, which I set up a while back when poppa needed two high-definition TVs. I should be able to switch all of my recurring charges for the business to that account.

Because Advanta provided almost no notice, I've been scrambling today to download all of my transactions and billing statements, which I need for tax purposes. Because there are one million people with a compelling reason to be using its web site today, Advanta.Com has been crashing worse than our country's financial system. At the moment, the site says that I owe a balance of "NaN" dollars in my account. NaN is a constant value that means "not a number" in several programming languages, including PHP, JavaScript and Visual Basic. It could be worse -- there's also a constant called Infinity.

The weblog Consumerist broke this story eight days ago and provides a followup explaining why the company is in such big trouble:

Advanta's customers defaulted last month at a rate of 20.15 percent, compared with 17.31 percent in March, the company said Monday in a regulatory filing related to the Advanta Business Card Master Trust, which bundles Advanta's small-business loans for sale to investors.
Outstanding credit-card balances at the end of April were $4.5 billion.

I know one of the disgruntled Advanta customers quoted by the LA Times:

Television writer and producer Bill Taub, president of Jabberwock Corp. of Los Angeles, didn't notice for four months that the interest rate on his Advanta small-business credit card had jumped to 19.99% from 7.99%. A call to customer service got it dropped to 10.99%, but he said his request for a refund was refused.
"That was outrageous," said Taub, whose TV credits include episodes of Hollywood Babylon and Relic Hunter. He hadn't yet heard that Pennsylvania-based Advanta Corp., which has been hit with rising losses in its portfolio, won't allow any of its small-business customers to put new charges on their cards after June 10.

Taub and I worked briefly together in 1994 for Zing Systems, an interactive TV venture based in Denver that went bankrupt years before banks and insurance companies made it cool.