aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, March 31, 2006
Flocking to You Tube
CNet says You Tube is the talk of Tinseltown:
Executives from heavyweights such as Yahoo, America Online and Turner Broadcasting were buzzing about YouTube’s sudden success at the Digital Hollywood conference here this week. Even though it’s not clear exactly how YouTube will make money, no company generated as much excitement at the gathering of Hollywood studios, electronics manufacturers and Internet media companies. [...]
YouTube has sped past a host of competitors by tapping the public’s thirst for reality programming. By mixing some professionally made clips, including music videos and movie trailers, with homemade content, YouTube has seen the number of viewings on the site shoot up from 3 million a day to 30 million since the Web site’s December launch, according to YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan.
Not everyone at the conference was impressed, however. Plenty of executives wondered how the San Mateo, Calif., company plans to fend off the likes of Google, iFilms and Atom Entertainment, all of which possess far more resources. And nobody knows how YouTube, which has 20 employees, plans to make money.
There is still no advertising on YouTube; it doesn’t charge to view or upload videos; and its executives so far have been mum on their business plan.
RELATED: A VC sezs, “You [can] put the video on your own page… That is key, and I mean key. People want to turn their MySpace pages, their blogs, and whatever else into their own TV station. And that’s critical to viral distribution.”
A stranger’s prayer has no effect on recovery
Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.
And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.
Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation.
Your own prayers are a whole other topic.
Here’s the American Heart Journal paper they’re talking about. Here’s WaPo. Here’s Reuters. No mention in the AJC?
Innocent people confess to crimes they did not do
All interrogations should be videotaped. All of them!
Last night Primetime had a story on Roberto Rocha, an innocent man who confessed to murder:
Rocha went to the police voluntarily to be questioned. After all, he had an airtight alibi: He’s been out of the country, in Brazil, the day Hamlin was killed.[...]
After more than two hours, Rocha said he became confused and exhausted. He and his attorney said that police told Rocha if he went along with them, he could go home.
“Roberto Rocha just cracked and said, fine, I’ll tell you what you want to know,” said Steel.
But from the start, Rocha had trouble with key details of the case, such as where Hamlin’s body was found. But the police “helped” him with that. One officer drew a map and said: “There’s the bridge. You were there. … Here’s where you were parked.” “OK, I parked there,” Rocha said on the videotape.
“The best alibi that I could ever imagine a person having” was reduced by police to “equivocal.” Without that videotape Rocha would still be in jail. Innocent people in jail mean guilty people on the streets. It’s in our best interest to have videotaped interrogations.
There was an important Washington Post series on false confessions; unfortunately, the links to the individual articles are dead right now. I have a request in to the Post to find out how to access them.
Liza is a hoot
Set your TiVos! A “painstakingly restored and remastered” ’Liza with a Z‘ is on Showtime tomorrow. 
And because they’re having a free preview weekend, all of us with cable can watch. From the NYTimes review today:
For those who never quite understood her standing in pop culture - or gay iconography - and are alarmed by her Page Six woes (and her recent, unmoored interview with Larry King on CNN), the hourlong film provides some clues. There are only a handful of female performers of her generation who have that over-the-top, knock-’em-dead stage presence, but Judy Garland’s daughter was neither as gifted a singer as Barbra Streisand nor as roguishly self-aware as Bette Midler. Ms. Minnelli’s stardom is based on a unique confluence of talent and biography, persistence and collapse. And of course, luck: she sings a medley from “Cabaret,” the musical that gave Ms. Minnelli an Oscar and her greatest and only plausible movie role as a romantic lead; every heroine she played after that was at best a watery distortion of Sally Bowles.
My nephew recently came out to me. I had earlier hints, one of them when he asked, “Who was that woman who was Liza Minnelli’s mother?”
Here’s clips from Liza’s appearance on Larry King that include her “gravelly Phyllis Diller cackle.” Better yet, this clip from Ellen where she croons, “Oh I’m so glad I’m not young any more!”
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Copyright clothes?
[T]hose inexpensive copies could be history if the Council of Fashion Designers of America has its way in a new anti-copying campaign in Washington.
Designers like Diane Von Furstenberg, Narciso Rodriguez and Zac Posen have been journeying there to lobby for copyright protections like those governing books, music and other creative arts. Mr. Posen was in Washington on Tuesday with Steven Kolb, the executive director of the council, who said a bill could be introduced in Congress as early as today by Representative Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican. [...]
“That is the most ridiculous thing,” Mr. Schwartz said. “There is no such thing as an original design. All these designers are getting their inspiration from things that were done before. To me a spaghetti strap is a spaghetti strap, and a cowl neck is a cowl neck.”
Google subpoena: Tip of the iceberg
In its effort to uphold the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), the U.S. Department of Justice is leaving no stone unturned. Its widely reported issuance of subpoenas to Internet search companies AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo is just the tip of the iceberg: The government has demanded information from at least 34 Internet service providers, search companies, and security software firms.
Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by InformationWeek, the Department of Justice disclosed that it has issued to subpoenas to a broad range of companies that includes AT&T, Comcast Cable, Cox Communications, EarthLink, LookSmart, SBC Communications (then separate from AT&T), Symantec, and Verizon.
Asked which companies objected to, or sought to limit, these subpoenas, Department of Justice spokesperson Charles Miller declined to comment because the litigation is ongoing. He also declined to comment on utility of the information gathered by the government. [...]
The full list of companies subpoenaed by the Department of Justice includes: 711Net (Mayberry USA), American Family Online, AOL, ATT, Authentium, Bell South, Cable Vision, Charter Communications, Comcast Cable Company, Computer Associates, ContentWatch, Cox Communications, EarthLink, Google, Internet4Families, LookSmart, McAfee, MSN, Qwest, RuleSpace, S4F (Advance Internet Management), SafeBrowse, SBC Communications, Secure Computing Corp., Security Software Systems, SoftForYou, Solid Oak Software, Surf Control, Symantec, Time Warner, Tucows (Mayberry USA), United Online, Verizon, and Yahoo.
Via John Battelle.
A history of porn
From Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing:
I love how the timeline does one humongous warp-speed leap from the 1400s to Dr. Ruth. Guess there wasn’t much shagging going on for 500 years! Snip:
1st century BC - Kama Sutra was created
1440 - Gutenberg Press Invented
1928 - Dr. Ruth was born.
1953 - Hugh Hefner starts Playboy
1965 - Bob Guccione starts Penthouse
1968 - Al Goldstein starts Screw
1969 - First mainstream movie to represent the swinger lifestyle - Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Directed by Paul Mazursky
1970 - Penthouse shows pubic hair for the first time.
1970 - Notable Porn Movies - Cycle Studs - Le Salon (Gay)
1971 - Notable Porn Movies - The Boys in the Sand - Wakefield Poole (Gay)
1971 - First condom to appear in a movie - Carnal Knowledge, Directed by Mike Nichols
1972 - I graduate high school… The porn timeline continues - the iPod is included but no mention of MySpace or webcams? - after the jump.
Read the rest of "A history of porn" in the extended entry.
Child pornographers
Is this really the way to handle this?
Two teenage girls face child pornography charges after posting sexually explicit photographs of themselves on the Internet.
The pornographic pictures of Elizabeth Muller, 19, of North Smithfield, and an unidentified 16-year-old Lincoln girl were discovered on MySpace.com, a social networking Web site, said a spokesman for the attorney general’s office.
The photos of the two teenagers together were posted on each of their respective Web site accounts, spokesman Michael Healey said. [...]
A police officer assigned to Lincoln High School, where the girl was a student, discovered the photographs while monitoring the Web site.
I’ll say again and again that there are serious issues here to be dealt with. Criminalizing and arresting teenagers is not the way.
Advertising is in the toilet
Remember chic bathrooms in New York? I do. (None here.) They were often ad filled. 
AdFreak found one in Germany where a newspaper’s urinal mirrors deliver ‘the truth’:
We’ve got a urinal theme going this morning. First we looked at Brazil’s urinal soccer games. Now we see that the newspaper Bild has installed tilted mirrors above urinals in Germany, more or less forcing men to contemplate their masculinity while taking a leak. The headline on the mirrors delivers the newspaper’s brand message while at the same time insulting the viewer (or at least the less-endowed viewer): ”Nothing is harder than the truth.”
And in other urinal news, Falcon Waterfree Technologies got a million dollars in the Department of Defense spending bill signed by President Bush last December for a Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
McCain’s appeasement
I never understood why liberals liked Colin Powell. And I don’t want to understand why they like John McCain. The Lynchburg News Advance, in a story reporting that McCain will speak at Liberty University’s graduation:
[Jerry] Falwell said McCain’s appearance at LU’s graduation is another sign that McCain is wooing evangelical Christians.
“He is in the process of healing the breech with evangelical groups,” Falwell said.
Falwell said McCain has expressed a willingness to support a Federal Marriage Amendment, an issue dear to conservative Christians.
It prompted the DNC’s Karen Finney to say, “Here he goes again, more double talk and pandering to the right wing from John McCain. It looks like there are real questions about where he truly stands on this issue, in fact, it’s getting hard to tell where he truly stands on a number of critical issues.”
According to The Note, Falwell clarified the issue with ABC News, saying that McCain is not pushing the constitutional amendment “at this time,” but would support it if federal court ruled against state bans on gay marriage.
I guess McCain was sort of against the amendment before he was sort of for it.
SEE ALSO: Joe Gandelman, John McCain’s Political Tightrope Act.
I’m rich!
In equivalence.
Economists John Helliwell and Haifang Huang at the University of British Columbia have done estimates based on an analysis of life satisfaction surveys considering four key factors of job satisfaction. They conclude:
Trust in management is by far the biggest component to consider. Say you get a new boss and your trust in management goes up a bit at your job (say, up one point on a 10-point scale). That’s like getting a 36 percent pay raise, Helliwell and Huang calculate.
In other words, that increased level of trust will boost your level of overall satisfaction in life by about the same amount as a 36 percent raise would. [...]
Having a job that offers a lot of variety in projects, Helliwell and Huang found, is the equivalent of a 21 percent hike in pay.
Having a position that requires a high level of skill is the equivalent of a 19 percent raise.
And having enough time to finish your work is the equivalent of an 11 percent boost in pay.
Via Kevin Drum.
The “War on Christmas Christians” II
Among the conference’s speakers were former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) [Brownback cancelled because he was needed for a vote] as well as conservative Christian leaders Phyllis Schlafly, Rod Parsley, Gary Bauer, Janet Parshall and Alan Keyes.
To many of the 400 evangelicals packed into a small ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, it was a hard but necessary look at moral relativism, hedonism and Christophobia, or fear of Christ, to pick just a few terms offered by various speakers referring to the enemy.
To some outsiders, it illuminated the paranoia of the Christian right.
“Certainly religious persecution existed in our history, but to claim that these examples amount to religious persecution disrespects the experiences of people who have been jailed and died because of their faith,” said K. Hollyn Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
“This is a skirmish over religious pluralism, and the inclination to see it as a war against Christianity strikes me as a spoiled-brat response by Christians who have always enjoyed the privileges of a majority position,” said the Rev. Robert M. Franklin, a minister in the Church of God in Christ and professor of social ethics at Emory University.
Via Media Matters, “ABC’s Tapper reported on “War on Christians” conference, again quoting no dissenting voices.”
The “War on Christmas Christians”
A strange mix of dejection and ecstatic expectation pervaded the War on Christians conference… At a time when the foot soldiers of the right feel weary and betrayed by the administration they helped put in office, it was meant to rally the base for 2006 by presenting the election in eschatological terms. The energy in the room sometimes felt sluggish, and people were clearly worried about November, forcing their leaders to work all the harder to motivate them for the political crusade… In the face of lassitude, speakers repeatedly cautioned against giving in to disillusionment and apathy. They reminded the audience that they are one judge away from overturning Roe v. Wade. They warned that Christianity is on the verge of being criminalized in America, and they harped on the manifold dangers of the “homosexual agenda.” [...]
At one point, speaker Herb Titus held up a copy of Kevin Phillips’ “American Theocracy,” offering it as evidence of the putative war on Christians. It was an audacious move, given that Sara Diamond, the preeminent scholar of the Christian right, reported in a 1998 book that Titus was forced to resign his post as dean of the law school at Pat Robertson’s Regent University because he refused to renounce Christian Reconstructionism. Christian Reconstructionism is a theocratic sect that advocates the replacement of civil law with biblical law, including the execution of homosexuals, apostates and women who are unchaste before marriage. Christian Reconstructionists used to be politically radioactive, but a new generation of religious right leaders like Scarborough have embraced them, and some members of today’s GOP apparently see no problem associating with them. This does not mean that America is on the verge of theocracy, but it signals an important shift. The language of religious authoritarianism has become at least somewhat politically acceptable.
UCC’s rejected ads
Remember last spring when ABC rejected a United Church of Christ ad while running an ad by Dobson’s Focus on the Family? The networks are at it again:
The nation’s major television networks have rejected an ad that shows a gay couple and others being banished from a church, saying it violates their rules against controversial or religious advertising.
The 30-second commercial for the United Church of Christ will begin airing on cable networks and Spanish-language stations next week. The ad, called “Ejector,” shows a gay couple, a single mother, a disabled man and others flying out of their pews as a wrinkled hand pushes a red button.
Text on the screen reads, “God doesn’t reject people. Neither do we,” and a voiceover says, “The United Church of Christ. No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.”
It’s a good thing then that UCC has teamed up with Media Matters “to fight the pronounced tilt toward the Religious Right in mainstream media news.”
Here’s the ad.
Via PageOneQ.
Follow the finger
My blogger buddy PhillyTim suggests we all follow the finger and have us some fun! He spotted it on the side of a bus; where I live we don’t even have busses! But we do have Butterfinger. And we’re as responsive here as they are in Philly to viral marketing.
Katie & gravitas
What is gravitas? And why does it kick in at nightfall?
Gravitas lurks at the heart of the concentric speculation about Katie Couric’s television future: Should she leave Today for the CBS Evening News? Should the Evening News want her to?
It’s one thing to be the most successful morning news anchor. Being an evening news anchor is something else-something more … grave? More Latinate?
Ms. Couric lacks it, by various accounts, because of her legs or her boyfriends or her perky giggle. An evening news anchor is a different kind of person than that.
“It is essentially a chauvinistic word,” Connie Chung said.
It sure looks that way to me!
The story references this piece from Geneva Overholser on All Things Considered. I missed it then, don’t you miss it now.
I hope Overholser is right; I want her at CBS. I’ve compared Katie, favorably, to Edward R. Murrow.
Since Koppel left there’s a big news hole; I’ve virtually abandoned TV news. Katie - with my hoped-for new format - can bring me back.
Via Romenesko.
AP Truthiness
It seems AP got the story from Raw Story, but attributed it instead to “lesbian and gay advocacy groups.” Read the whole sad story at Huffington Post.
Raw Story then spoke with Jack Stokes, AP’s Director of Media Relations. Stokes took careful notes regarding our concerns and said he would investigate our claims. He found that the AP had, indeed, gotten our article from “human rights groups” but that it was AP policy not to credit blogs.
“It does turn out that we don’t give mentions to blogs when we’re researching our stories and when we’ve been given material by others such as in this case human rights groups that brought this stuff to us that we independently check,” Stokes said in a voicemail message.
Stokes elaborated Tuesday, saying the AP does give credit to blogs. He said the reason Raw Story wasn’t credited in the Mar. 14 article was because the bureau “hadn’t heard of” Raw Story, and because they had received the article from third-party groups. He said the agency would be issuing a statement, most likely later today.
“We do credit blogs that we know,” Stokes said. “We had no idea who you were.”
In the past, AP has given credit to such blogs as Instapundit and Pajamas Media. Raw Story has previously received credit from The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, Roll Call, The Hill, The Salt Lake Tribune, MSNBC and Rolling Stone, though major media publications have repeatedly lifted the site’s work without attribution.
UPDATE: They did it at TPM too. Josh Marshall, “ripping off original reporting from blogs is clearly routine.”
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
‘Bushit’ an expletive in GA
It was 9:30 on a recent Friday night when Denise Grier saw blue lights in her rearview mirror.
She pulled over on Chamblee-Tucker Road, unaware of her infraction.
“The officer asked if I knew I had a lewd decal on my car and I thought, ‘Oh gosh, what did my kids put on my car?’ “
As it turns out, the decal was an anti-Bush bumper sticker Grier slapped on her 2001 Chrysler Sebring last summer. The bumper sticker - “I’m Tired Of All The BUSH-” - contains an expletive.
So being pulled over is bad enough, but then the ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSITUTION CALLS IT AN EXPLETIVE???
The Athens Banner Herald (registration required) printed it:
Is BUSHIT lewd?
Is it even a word? [...]
The Georgia Supreme Court ruled more than a decade ago that the law against lewd bumper stickers is unconstitutional, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Grier, the officer and an ACLU attorney will meet in court next month when Grier contests the misdemeanor charge, which carries a $100 fine. [...]
While Grier argues her bumper sticker is political speech protected by the First Amendment, the case that challenged the lewd decal law didn’t involve such a serious message. In 1991, the ACLU backed a motorist who was cited for a “S--- happens bumper sticker.
The court called the decal law vague and overly broad.
The current edition of the Georgia Law Enforcement Handbook, which officers rely on, doesn’t mention that the decal law was overturned.
UPDATE: Case dismissed.
Facebook worth $2 billion?
Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.
CNet’s roundup of blogger reaction: a big puh-leez!
Viacom makes sense to me, and the article a negotiating ploy.
Irreligious Intolerance
This new study finding that atheists are the most distrusted minority of all got Andrew Sullivan * all * fired * up * about * it. I quote him quoting a Eugene Volokh law article [pdf]…
...on how atheist fathers and mothers are routinely discriminated against in child custody cases. He cites over 70 recent cases across the country - and these were only the ones which were appealed, so they probably represent a fraction of the actual cases. Volokh recalls how Percy Byshe Shelley was the first father to be denied custody because of his atheism - but his dilemma doesn’t belong to a different time and place:
“That time and place, it turns out, is 2005 Michigan, where a modern Shelley might be denied custody based partly on his ‘not regularly attend[ing] church and present[ing] no evidence demonstrating any willingness or capacity to attend to religion with [his children],’ or having a ‘lack of religious observation.’ It’s 1992 South Dakota, where Shelley might have been given custody but only on condition that he ‘will agree to present a plan to the Court of how [he] is going to commence providing some sort of spiritual opportunity for the [children] to learn about God while in [his] custody.’ It’s 2005 Arkansas, 2002 Georgia, 2005 Louisiana, 2004 Minnesota, 2005 Mississippi, 1992 New York, 2005 North Carolina, 1996 Pennsylvania, 2004 South Carolina, 1997 Tennessee, 2000 Texas, and, going back to the 1970s and 1980s, Alabama, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska. In 2000, the Mississippi Supreme Court ordered a mother to take her child to church each week, reasoning that ‘it is certainly to the best interests of [the child] to receive regular and systematic spiritual training’; in 1996, the Arkansas Supreme Court did the same, partly on the grounds that weekly church attendance, rather than just the once-every-two-weeks attendance that the child would have had if he went only with the other parent, provides superior ‘moral instruction.’”
Fairy meanness
Augusto calls this Dodge Caliber add homophobic, ”I thought the ad was not nice:”
It appears a “fairy” is trying to give a queer eye to the tough car, and the fairy is bumped to the sidewalk for trying to do so. Even language is used, a guy points to the fairy and laughs: “You silly little fairy!” Not nice. The fairy turns him gay as a revenge I guess.
I looked to Commercial Closet for an opinion. None yet. My guess is it will be:
Gay people are shown in this collection as classic gay stereotypes, including leathermen, sissies and queens, and Liipstick Lesbians, but are otherwise accepted by characters in the ad. While some in the gay community now accept these depictions as “diversity” and “reality”—others remain sensitive to them and do not. These ads do not meet Commercial Closet’s Best Practices.
I note that they played the Dodge ad during Desperate Housewives. Do these marketers have a clue about who’s watching???
Meanwhile, TBS sent this ad [WMP] parodying the Lord of the Rings suggesting I link to it. It looks like they want to appeal to the gay people in their audience rather than risk offending them.
UPDATE: GayWheels.com gives the Caliber a good review and says Dodge is a Gay Friendly car company. BMW, on the other hand, they call a hypocritical car company.
ANOTHER UPDATE: This post continues to attract traffic, while my later post, No fun with fairy, which looks at the Commercial Closet rating for the ad sits unread. Please check it out.
Super Hero madness
I’ve known forever that Happy Birthday is copyrighted. How did I miss that “Super Hero” is a Marvel & DC Comics trademark? From All Things Considered last night:
ULABAY: The word superhero was trademarked by Marvel and DC Comics in the 1960’s says Michael Lovitz. He’s a lawyer who focuses on intellectual property like comic books.
MICHEAL LOVITZ (Lawyer): Marvel and DC created this category of adventurers, of costumed adventurers.
ULABAY: But Marvel and DC Comics super lawyers will leave you alone if you use the word superhero casually. You can even use it in a comic as long as that word stays off the cover.
Mr. LOVITZ: The law basically says that no one has the right to exclusively appropriate a word.
ULABAY: Neither DC Comics nor Marvel agreed to comment for this story. Ronald Coalman is a lawyer who blogs about intellectual property issues. He says both companies are so powerful that they constitute an industry duopoly. He finds preposterous any claims that their brands might be comprised by unauthorized use of the word superhero.
Mr. RONALD COALMAN (Lawyer): People in the comic book area know very well who are Marvel’s superhero’s, who are DC’s superheroes, and who are indie comic book superheroes. There’s zero chance of actual confusion.
ULABAY: For Marvel and DC to protect the word superhero as a trademark, he says, it takes…
Mr. COALMAN: A little bit of audacity and a lot of lawyers on retainer with a generous mixture of judicial indifference.
Ronald Coleman’s a super hero if you ask me. Check out his post, Super Hero® my foot, at Likelihood of Confusion for much, much more.
RELATED: Just for the fun of it Which Super Hero are you?
Monday, March 27, 2006
Trapped in the Closet in Canada on Friday night
Just a quick note re South Park in Canada. While it frustrates me that Canada’s Comedy Network is not yet showing the new South Park episodes (if they follow the pattern of previous years, they won’t start airing them until October), they are currently re-showing the episodes from last season. Your Canadian readers might be interested to know that The Comedy Network (according to my digital receiver TV listings, online TV listings, and the Comedy Network website) is planning to re-air “Trapped In The Closet” on Friday (9:30 pm Eastern/Pacific).
They’ve been re-airing season 9 in order, and this is NOT the episode that should be airing next. They’ve undoubtedly adjusted their schedule based on the events of the last couple of weeks. (It’ll be interesting to see if their plans change in the next four days...)
The Minuteman & the Mexican
In the midst of all the inflammatory talk about immigration, along comes Gustavo Arellano with a piece on Latino USA [MP3 Real] explaining why he genuinely likes Minuteman Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist:
I was one of the first reporters to interview Gilchrist. When I talked to him last February, I expected a frothy jerk. Now, Gilchrist did say some far out stuff. He thinks, for instance, that this country will devolve into warring tribes in about 20 years. And that Mexican immigrants can’t assimilate. Ever.
What a dope!
But, at the same time, I thought Gilchrist was one of the nicest people I’ve ever interviewed. He graciously answered all of my questions and when it was published he called and said it was tough but fair. Gilchrist, whose a Purple Heart veteran, even defended me when conservatives attacked my article. That was going beyond the call of duty.
You HAVE to listen to this. This is a model for all of us on the Left and Right - or those battling factions (bloggers take heed) within and without - on how to agree to disagree. And, most importantly, respect the people with whom we disagree, no matter how vehemently.
As to Gilchrist, his son-in-law is Mexican American and he likes fajitas. How bad could he be? 
Listen, too, for his views on the “capitalist pigs” (his words) that he calls “professional slave traders.”
Perpetual Partial Attention II
Here are O’Reilley Radar’s ”near-verbatim notes” of Linda Stone‘s talk last June at Supernove 2005:
I see twenty year cycles. Coming through in the cycles is a tension between collective and individual, and our tendency to take set of beliefs to extreme then it fails us and we seek the opposite.
1945-1965: organization/insitution center of gravity. We paid attention to that which we serve. Lucy paid full attention to phone conversations, Seinfeld does not. Belief that by serving insitution of (marriage|employer|community) we’d leave happy and well-ordered lives. Marketing, command-and-control lifestyle, parents and authority figures, all fit in. Service to institution would bring us satisfaction. We paid full-focus attention to that which served the institution: family, community, marriage. We trusted experts in authority to filter the noise from the signal, to give us the information that matters. As those things failed us, we embraced what we’d suppressed.
1965-1985: me and self-expression. Self and self-expression new center of gravity. Trusted ourselves, entrepreneurial. Apple, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines. Marketers said we have our power to be our best. Fashion broke free. We paid attention to that which created personal opportunities. Paid attention to full-screen software like Word and Excel. Willing to fragment attention if it enhanced our opportunity. Multitasking was an adaptive. Our sense of committment dropped: rising divorce rate, 3 companies/career, etc. Became narcissistic and lonely, reached out for network.
1985-2005: Network center of gravity. Trust network intelligence. Scan for opportunity. Continuous partial attention[*] is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour. Being connected makes us feel alive. ADD is a dysfunctional variant of continuous partial attention. Continuous partial attention isn’t motivated by productivity, it’s motivated by being connected. MySpace, Friendster, where quantity of connections desirable may make us feel connected, but lack of meaning underscores how promiscuous and how empty this way of life made us feel. Dan Gould: “I quit every social network I was on so I could have dinner with people.”
Here’s the podcast of the full panel discussion. Here’s my first Perpetual Partial Attention post, which hints at my own future iteration of her observation. Her prediction and prescription for the next 20 years follows below.
* Much as I love the brilliance of her observations, I prefer and have been saying Perpetual Partial Attention for so long now that I’m going to stick with it.
Read the rest of "Perpetual Partial Attention II" in the extended entry.
