People Are Mean
People are obnoxious online. News at 11.
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July 31, 2007
CNN: Idiots
"Also, you should remember all that talk earlier this week about the terrorist dry runs at airports here in the U.S. Well, just kidding. It turns out it was all one big false alarm. We'll explain."
-- CNN anchor T.J. Holmes, at the top of Saturday morning newscast (via Attytood).
Yeah, uh, ha ha.
July 30, 2007
From Celeb to Schlub
Planet Hiltron gives celebs the schlub makeover.
Yannick Puig
Alphabet City
Alphabet created by buildings & Sky, Lisa Rienermann.
July 27, 2007
How AT&T Cons The Public (Google, Pay Attention)
What it looks like when groups that are supposed to be supporting their constituents instead get paid off to regurgitate phone company propaganda.
Phone companies pay groups like The Latino Coalition or the National Association For the Deaf a chunk of change for a new recreation center, and in turn these groups will repeat whatever policy lies they're asked to in major papers.
The use of these groups (and in some case fake consumer groups) creates the artificial perception that support for a phone company political position is much broader than it actually is, AND makes it seem like these positions have consumer support, even when the bills themselves are frequently anti-consumer.
The public, who can't be bothered to study actual issues if they require extensive thought, sees that a group that should be representing their interests supports the position, so they do as well.
The entire linked article regurgitates dishonest talking points, portrays Google as a tyrant for not wanting to be double billed for bandwidth, lies about the impact of network neutrality, and inaccurately portrays powerline broadband (which causes radio interference and just isn't used) as a functional technology.
That last bit's necessary to prop up the myth that the broadband market is actually competitive, instead of it being a monopoly (or duopoly if your area is lucky).
Meanwhile, go take a look at who wrote the "primer" for the National Association For the Deaf over at their website. Also check out their biggest contributers.
AT&T and Verizon's donations purchased this enthusiastic support for laws that allow the phone companies to deploy broadband to only the most profitable neighborhoods, while in some cases stripping away eminent domain rights and consumer protections (surely in every deaf and Latino person's best interests).
Google, you should pay attention, because this is how Verizon & AT&T roll.
The Badlands Guardian
The Badlands Guardian in Alberta, Canada is a natural formation. Other oddities from Google Earth
Moore, Cuba, Streisand Effect
The Bush Administration is about to discover what the Streisand Effect is.
July 26, 2007
'Neon Deion' Defends Dog Killing
If you hadn't heard, star NFL quarterback Mike Vick is in some very deep shit for participating in dog fighting, and the indictment makes several references to wholesale slaughter of animals:
"In or about April 2007, PEACE, PHILLIPS, and VICK executed approximately 8 dogs that did not perform well in "testing" sessions at 1915 Moonlight Road by various methods, including hanging, drowning, and slamming at least one dog's body to the ground."That's bad enough, but then go read former NFL star Deion Sander's mentally limp justification spew in the Fort Myers News-Press:
"What a dog means to Vick might be a lot different than what he means to you or I."and
"The reason this is turning into a three-ring circus is that baseball is boring, basketball is months away, football is around the corner and we in the media don’t have a thing interesting to write about,"So Vick's murder of animals is just because his unique intellectual perspective causes him to view the mortality of dogs differently than you or I, and the media coverage of a major NFL star getting busted for the dumbest fucking thing in the world is a unique result of their boredom.
That kind of distortion is usually reserved for K-Street and Congress.
With a few exceptions, writers don't return punts because they suck at it. The reverse is (or should be) apparently true.
Che Schwag
Obviously the poster maker has never been to Amsterdam tourist shops, where the deceased revolutionary's image is emblazoned on everything from lighters to ash trays. I'm still trying to grok the suggested association of having Che Guevara on your four foot hookah.
To date my favorite bit of Che schwag is made by an Atlanta company named Urban Medium:
July 24, 2007
Ron Mueck
Ron Mueck, Russian gallery.
July 23, 2007
Alan Watts
That's Alan Watts speaking.
July 20, 2007
Dying In AppleBees
Though I'm not proud of it, I found myself at AppleBees this week with the goal of inhaling a Margarita before a movie.
Somewhere across the tchotchke-riddled promenade, some middle-aged man's heart simply stopped beating in his chest.
I assume the last thing he ever saw was the pseudo-vintage prop of a non-existent airplane hung on the wall, shipped from Taiwan to give the restaurant its carefully manufactured all-American rustic appeal.
I'm not sure what I expected to happen then. Maybe the radio would stop. Maybe customers would stop shoveling chicken fried chicken into their heads to momentarily acknowledge another human in mortal crisis. An announcement? Something. What would a tribe have done? What would you have wanted to be done to you?
A handful of diners offered sidelong glances as the EMTs arrived; the professionals quietly and quickly failed to revive the man, and then carted him off to be officially pronounced dead outside in the ambulance (the waitress told the next table) so customers would not be bothered.
The staff then buzzed about the aortic crime seen like silent insects, prepping his table for new customers in sixty seconds. The entire episode couldn't have taken more than five minutes total. Half the restaurant patrons had absolutely no idea that a human being had died just ten yards from their Weight Watchers Tortilla Chicken Melt.
It was an efficient and perfect disposal in every way. My dining experience remained enjoyable throughout, my consumer satisfaction was not disrupted in the slightest, and the ambiance at no time shifted out of the realm of 'pleasant'.
I find that ant-like efficiency a little depressing some two-days later, in part because I sat there like a slack-jawed idiot myself. I don't know what the alternative communal reaction could or should have been. I just know the passing of a man or woman from this world should not reside on the same emotional plane as the cleaning of toddler vomit.
update: Note below that the first response to this blog post is "fuck you" from a random passerby on a Verizon IP address, which somehow feels thematically and culturally appropriate in context. An all-American Internet idiot makes my point as if in punctuation.
Dreamcast Guitar
Dan, if you're reading this, I'm afraid I'll be needing my Dreamcast back, because, frankly, I need to rock.
Air Travel Survival
Sit in the back of the plane if you want to live, says Popular Mechanics.
"Survival rates for various parts of the passenger cabin, based on all commercial jet crashes in the United States since 1971 where detailed seating charts were available."
July 19, 2007
Uncov
I knew we were in trouble a few years back when the self-contained nuzzle-verse that is the Silicon Valley technology blog world started having coordinated orgasms every time some tiny company decided to put fucking calendars online.
It quickly became apparent that while these bloggers originally wanted to out-perform traditional media in terms of distributing truth, what many of them really built was a new network of conflicted startup-fondling caricatures whose primary function was self-promotion (and by self I mean self in the 'look at me I'm John Dvorak' sense).
The new world they've built suffers from the same thing that haunts the lobotomized shell of humanity known as cable news: muddy integrity, rabid ego, advertiser fealty, bubbly, doe-eyed coverage of topics (Iraq war), a notable lack of humanism, sparse consumer advocacy, blurred lines between marketing and news, a rush to be first (more ad views) instead of being right, pandering to the lowest common denominator (Another iPhone story instead of a real issue like franchise reform)....blah freakin' blah...
I mean this is a sector that just last week was shocked to realize that some people think selling your name to promote the same companies you're supposed to be objectively analyzing might not be a great idea. And really, after the last droplet of geek spittle fell to earth and the digital chatter faded into history, the consensus was, among most of them, that they did nothing wrong.
So I find sites like Uncov, though sparse and few and far between, to be pretty god damned refreshing -- just in the sense that they seem willing to walk up to it all and jam a massive needle of reality into the preposterous balloon of incestuous ego.
Have to love their advertising banner as well:
A counter-revolution to the digital tech news counter-revolution.
Let's Kill Godwin's Law
You know, I've always thought Godwin's Law was really, really apocalyptically stupid. Or at least the way it's used in modern online conversation as some kind of obnoxious red hanky people hold up to halt and invalidate a line of discussion should Nazis be mentioned.
There's an increasing number of instances where comparisons to jack-booted sociopaths of old are valid and necessary in order to properly marginalize some people as utterly batshit insane. Unless we as a country really do think that constant war, oppression of free speech, genocide and nationalistic propaganda are truly the cornerstones of our Democracy.
A great read from a British reporter who spent some time on a recent annual New Republic cruise with members of the Neo-Conservative 'movement' (bowel in nature at this point):
"I lie on the beach with Hillary-Ann, a chatty, scatty 35-year-old Californian designer. As she explains the perils of Republican dating, my mind drifts, watching the gentle tide. When I hear her say, " Of course, we need to execute some of these people," I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," she says. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and smiles. " Then things'll change."
and
"A red-faced man who looks like an egg with a moustache glued on grumbles, " If the Germans think they can take responsibility for the world, I don't care about German courts. Bomb them." I begin to witter on about the Pinochet precedent, and Kate snaps, "Treating Don Rumsfeld like Pinochet is disgusting." Egg Man pounds his fist on the table: " Treating Pinochet like that is disgusting. Pinochet is a hero. He saved Chile.""Exactly," adds Jim. "And he privatised social security."
The table nods solemnly and then they march into the conversation - the billion-strong swarm of swarthy Muslims who are poised to take over the world. Jim leans forward and says, "When I see these football supporters from England, I think - these guys aren't going to be told by PC elites to be nice to Muslims. You're going to get fascists rising up, aren't you? Why isn't that happening already?" Before I can answer, he is conquering the Middle East from his table, from behind a crème brûlée.
"The civilised countries should invade all the oil-owning places in the Middle East and run them properly. We won't take the money ourselves, but we'll manage it so the money isn't going to terrorists."
July 18, 2007
Warren Ellis: Crooked Little Vein
Transmetropolitan author and dirty redcoat Warren Ellis has put the entire first chapter of his new novel online for free (pdf).
It's very much a Better Homes and Gardens meets Harry Potter affair to be sure:
"I opened my eyes to see the rat taking a piss in my coffee mug. It was a huge brown bastard; had a body like a turd with legs and beady black eyes full of secret rat knowledge. Making a smug huffing sound, it threw itself from the table to the floor, and scuttled back into the hole in the wall where it had spent the last three months planning new ways to screw me around. I’d tried nailing wood over the gap in the wainscot, but it gnawed through it and spat the wet pieces into my shoes. After that, I spiked bait with warfarin, but the poison seemed to somehow cause it to evolve and become a super-rat. I nailed it across the eyes once with a lucky shot with the butt of my gun, but it got up again and shat in my telephone."
July 17, 2007
The Ron Paul Blog-O-orgy
I can't turn around without elbowing some rabidly optimistic Libertarian Ron Paul supporter.
I love his anti-war positions, and it's refreshing to see him in interviews. Particularly when compared to the manicured plastic ivy league heads that are the majority of choices this upcoming presidential election.
Who doesn't love the first four stanzas of the Libertarian vision? More privacy, less spending, no taxes, lots of sex with Indonesian hookers, errr....
But in reality, here's another white, affluent male who thinks if you strip away government powers and let industry wander the earth unchecked, utopia springs forth from between sidewalk cracks and Walmart, now free of the pesky bonds of 'unnecessary regulation' (like 'don't dump shit in our rivers'), gives us all a great, big existential hug.
But really. Then comes the real plan, partially cooked: no Department of Energy, Homeland Security, Education or FEMA. No more U.N., NATO, CIA or NAFTA. A weak regulatory authority that can't protect consumers (not that the current system does a remotely good job, but it could if you drastically reduced influence peddling)...
Note his website is absurdly surface oriented and mentions none of this.
If you dig below all this bubbly enthusiasm over his anti-war stance, his positions are extreme. That's not interpretation, it's fact. Total deregulation of industry is his agenda. That isn't some assumption, it's his vision. The primary goal of course being no taxes or pesky government so Bob the Libertarian can afford a new boat and dump old paint behind his shed.
Modern Libertarianism is greed wearing a dress, trying to pretend it's a political plan.
That said, there is something positive to be said about an administration where you're only seeing deregulation, instead of deregulation, ridiculous subsidies, and lobbyists (89 at last count) now overseeing the industries they belong to ....but I'm stretching even to come to that positive.
Stephanie Halleux
Some fun steampunk-esque sculptures here.
Alone
July 16, 2007
Sunrocket
The SunRocket rumor breaks last Thursday in the DSLReports.com forums, garners more than 50,000 page views, employees post oodles of insider information to the letter, we spend four days talking about it on our front page yet we aren't even considered a Techmeme sub-topic discussion as-so-far as the Web 2.0 bubble-verse is concerned.
And five days after we started discussing this, the New York Times tells me there's trouble at SunRocket.
Maybe we need sexier pants.
I feel horrible for these call center employees. When I talked to them they were blissfully unaware until the very last second, protected via outsourcing gossip firewalls from the stinky business going down on the mothership.
I don't think anyone is getting any severance. Customers also haven't been told squat officially, which borders on criminal.
CEO Lisa Hook was let go from AOL when their broadband adaptation struggled, and is so far getting the lion's share of blame for this implosion as well. At least from the employees I've spoken to, who suggest she isolated herself with a dozen-plus yes men & women she brought in as pals from AOL. One employee tells me four of them did the job one employee did previously.
Now SunRocket employees are scrambling at the last second for unemployment, yet I assume Duke graduate Hook is doing ok financially. Probably weighing a presidential run.
I Have No Idea
This was in my inbox today.
Don't ask me, because I have no idea.
Sock Puppets
I love this article in the NY Times about execs (and companies) trying to manipulate public opinion by posting "anonymously" to Internet message boards.
"[Whole foods CEO] John Mackey, used the online handle “Rahodeb” (an anagram of his wife’s name, Deborah). In one Internet posting sure to enter the annals of chief-executive vanity, Mr. Mackey wrote as Rahodeb, “I like Mackey’s haircut. I think he looks cute!”
Yes, uh, welcome to the Internets.
Employees. public relations officials and investors all pretending that they're objective readers or forum participants just out for an Internet stroll. Mackey is not unique. He's just one of the first ones I've seen get caught.
There's an entire universe of people on most message boards pretending to be Joe Public whose primary goal is to spin reality their direction. Some are part of sophisticated guerrilla marketing campaigns, some are part of lobbying machines, some are think tankers, and some, like Mackey, apparently just do damage control drive bys over tea.
I'm not sure what the fuck Mackey was thinking, since the smart CEOs hire people to do that kind of thing for them.
If I pen a critical piece on a major broadband provider that veers too far from the accepted press release reality, I can be fairly sure my mom will be called names within 24 hours by a coordinated assault of company employees and think tankers that appear to readers to be objective everyday users.
All of these folks are playing an endless game of digital tug of war with truth.
I think a law was passed sometime in the late 90's that stated truth was no longer fixed; that it could be shifted from its once-solid foundation if you penned a convincing enough diatribe. Once fixed truth was abolished, there was no longer any winning of arguments on-line. Now you see, nobody is ever wrong on the Internet; they just didn't try hard enough.
One thing the article doesn't go much into is the fact that entire organizations are created to act as sock puppets tasked with corporate damage control or disinformation. It's a huge story when one CEO says dumb shit while pretending to be someone else. Yet somehow more sophisticated & coordinated disinformation attempts never quite get the same press.....
Faces of Age
The Faces of Age.
July 13, 2007
Tall/Small
No Sleep, Sunrocket
Two hours sleep. Woke up at 3:30 this morning. Drove the girlfriend to the airport and have since been trying to confirm the rumored Sunrocket implosion for most of the day while marginally delirious, but nobody at the company wants to chat.
July 12, 2007
Wardenclyffe Tower
The the 187-foot-tall Wardenclyffe Tower, the start of a project Nikola Tesla never finished:
"In essence, Tesla's global power grid was designed to "pump" the planet with electricity which would intermingle with the natural telluric currents that move throughout the Earth's crust and oceans. At the same time, towers like the one at Wardenclyffe would fling columns of raw energy skyward into the electricity-friendly ionosphere fifty miles up. To tap into this energy conduit, customers' homes would be equipped with a buried ground connection and a relatively small spherical antenna on the roof, thereby creating a low-resistance path to close the giant Earth-ionosphere circuit. Oceangoing ships could use a similar antenna to draw power from the network while at sea. In addition to electricity, these currents could carry information over great distances by bundling radio-frequency energy along with the power."
"In this system that I have invented, it is necessary for the machine to get a grip of the earth," explains Tesla, "otherwise it cannot shake the earth. It has to have a grip… so that the whole of this globe can quiver."
Verizon Bill
I need a BASIC copper landline so my DirecTV DVR could be activated, and so it can call the mothership once a month to check for firmware updates. I use my cell phone for everything else.
A few months ago I had Verizon install the most bare bones copper line I could get. I'm now cancelling the line. I'll find some workaround.
After all of their nonsense fees and surcharges are tacked on, the bill is nearly thirty dollars a month. All for a line that makes one call a month over decades old infrastructure that probably costs Verizon a buck or two to provide.
Note that in the above bill, the "FCC line charge," "surcharge," and "911 surcharge" are bogus fees that go right back in Verizon's pocket. The $2.24 charged for long distance is a new fee they bill AS A PENALTY FOR NOT USING THEIR LONG DISTANCE.
With the exception of the federal and state taxes, it's all nickle and dime below the line milking. Charging a customer extra for NOT using a service? Disguising pure profit as legitimate government fees?
This is what you get when you've got a toothless regulatory authority and a corrupt FCC and Congress.
And these companies continue to strip away consumer protection laws while you're napping.
Bridge
"Bridge, by Michael Cross, is a series of steps that rise out of the water as you walk across them, as if walking on water. On entering the exhibition the visitor is met by an empty expanse of water with one step at its edge."LINK
July 11, 2007
Cheating Bastard
A private investigator who has been investigating infidelity for a decade pens a great piece on why (aside from it being, uh, wrong) you should never cheat. But it's the retaliation photos that provide the most entertainment....
"laughing"
From a recent trip to Amsterdam. I love the explanation of "portions," which indicates that a full box of magic mushrooms is "very intence (sic) and visual for most people," while gobbling down half a box is good for "loosing up emotions such as 'laughing.'"
The portions suggested would have a lot of people gibbering on cobblestone.
July 10, 2007
TSA Stops Kool-Aid Threat, Bomb Threat: Not So Much
The obnoxious new TSA 3 oz. fluid travel restrictions may help stop the menace that is gatorade from finding its way onto airplanes, but bombs? Not so much.
"Federal inspectors were able to slip a fake bomb through a checkpoint at Albany International Airport during a test of the facility's Transportation Security Administration screeners, according to individuals familiar with the incident. -- In one test, TSA inspectors hid the components of a fake bomb in carry-on luggage that also contained a bottle of water. The screeners at Albany International confiscated the water bottle but missed the bomb."So now I'm unsafe AND fucking thirsty. Great.
Skull A Day
Designer/artist Noah Scalin uses random objects to create one skull for every day this year -- because he can (via).
Emergency
Photo thanks to Dan Allen.
July 09, 2007
Wolf Gets Bitten
Note how before having Moore on, they need to run a hit piece professing the film, which criticizes plenty of CNN's sponsors, is filled with errors (which Moore addresses one by one over at his website). Some nice jabs about war coverage, CNN's drug sponsors, etc. It's probably the last time CNN has him on.
The treatment Moore gets is what happens when a humanist criticizes conventional corporate wisdom in a culture that lives off of regurgitated industry nonsense. I'm aware he uses hyperbole to make a point, but the people who really loathe the guy are usually defensively drunk with myopic nationalism or the kind of high-quality characters who think making a killing off the blood of the poor is a constitutional right.
And just for fun, Noam Chomsky (pre-empted for intellectual giants like Ann Coulter or William Kristol, neither of whom will ever be criticized on-air by the actual network for factual error) reminds you that things haven't changed all so much, no matter how impressed we are with ourselves.
In Defense Of Ma Bell
I'm probably the first guy on the Internet to write a report when Verizon, AT&T, or Qwest does something crooked or stupid (which happens often, though it's almost always restricted to their lobbying or marketing departments). Usually this is perceived as "bias" by telco employees who are bred as loyal as soldiers by these companies.
These are guys who take criticism of employer as criticism of crown, god and country, and literally believe objective journalism really is a phone company press release (in the way a Fox News fan laments bias everywhere).
It's usually called "telco think" in the industry. It runs deep with some of these career guys, and I think it would make a great psychological study.
Criticism of ma bell is almost sacrilegious, and they'll work in shifts to defend their corporate honor by calling my mom names and such in our forums. Even if I'm just pointing out to readers that the company is screwing people over by say -- making up a disingenuous fee on your bill, or pushing some type of propaganda under the guise of a consumer advocacy outfit.
I imagine if I don't piss off these loyal phone company warriors at least once a week, I'm not doing my job.
That's why it was strange penning a Broadband Reports blog piece defending them from sloppy AP reporting today.
How Does Bill Kristol Still Have a Job?
William Kristol is a Harvard talking-head and ex-worker bee for Reagan and Dan Quayle. Kristol was a huge Iraq war monger, was wrong in nearly every god-damned one of his predictions and calculations, and was rewarded for his idiotic prognostications and propaganda regurgitation with a full time journalism position at Time magazine.
I understand that coming from significant sums of money with a free ride to Harvard gives you the ability to fuck up repeatedly without consequence, but come on now. The party is over. It's time for "Neo-Conservatives" to be shelved in the museum of historical idiocy right next to 'head drilling as madness cure'.
The cost of the war is now at $12 billion per month, much of this going to Bill's friends. I've yet to see the guy be correct on any foreign policy analysis I've ever seen, and he's already personally responsible for a lion's share of dead human beings.
Yet his gaping war maw just never closes. I still see the guy brought in as an "expert" on everything from Fox News to PBS.
This guy would have to eat goat feces while wearing a banana colored negligee on live television before losing his soap box and being appropriately marginalized as a moron.
A Better Version of Beyonce's 'Irreplaceable'
July 06, 2007
Conspiracy Theory
Someone at Blue Cross has leaked an internal e-mail from the company's Vice President of Corporate Communications, Barclay Fitzpatrick. He was tasked with watching Moore's new movie on HMOs and the country's medical failings and then directing the company's damage control efforts.
My favorite two lines from the report:
"In typical Moore fashion, Government and business leaders are behind a conspiracy to keep the little guy down and dominated while getting rich. Legislators are presented as bought stooges for the political agendas of insurers and big Pharma."
Yes. What a vast, completely insane conspiracy.
Next thing you know, Moore will be telling us that the government largely operates independently of the will of the people and simply jerks its attention like a lobotomized inmate toward the largest cash contributions.
Someone stop Moore, he's gone wild.
Poor Teddy
Artist Kent Rogowski guts, inverts and then photographs teddy bears...because he can.
Middle East Conqueror History in 90 Seconds
5,000 years of middle-east conquerors in 90 seconds.
July 04, 2007
Happy Holidays
July 02, 2007
Commemorative Schlock
As I was walking home that day across the Queensboro Bridge with tens of thousands of other NYC residents, staring in abject horror at the smoldering plume rising into the cloudless sky, my very first thought of course was: "when can I get a commemorative coin that uses real silver from the crash site?"
I find it particularly classy that the ad urges the viewer to "do their part," as if sending your cash to these shitheels saves a patriotic white person's puppy somewhere.
Found via this site. Note the very first comment there is an attack that suggests you should move out of the country for simply wondering if there's a better way than the current system of lobotomized capitalism.
A day in the American life....
