Author Archives: Karl

He’s Made His Nomination, Now Comes The Fight

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Right on cue to knock the Rove controversy out of the news, Bush makes his choice for the Supreme Court known.

CNN.com – Roberts’ nomination mobilizes advocacy groups – Jul 20, 2005:

..If confirmed by the Senate, the conservative Roberts would replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who gained a reputation as a moderate swing voter in her 24 terms on the nation’s highest court.

The conservative group Progress for America rallied in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington on Tuesday night, carrying signs reading “Confirm.”

A liberal advocacy group, People for the American Way, sent out 400,000 e-mails to supporters after the announcement, according to the group’s president, Ralph Neas.

…A prominent liberal advocacy group — NARAL Pro-Choice America — opposed Roberts’ second nomination to the appeals court, saying he has worked to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that struck down state laws outlawing abortion.

Arguing a case for the first Bush administration in 1990 when he was deputy solicitor general, Roberts said Roe v. Wade “was wrongly decided and should be overruled.”

In his 2003 confirmation hearing, however, he told senators he was acting as an advocate for his client, rather than presenting his own positions.

He told senators Roe was “the settled law of the land” and said “there’s nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent.”

Roberts, a native of Buffalo, New York, who now lives in Maryland, is married and has two children. He is a Roman Catholic.

Mainstream Rightwingers Sets Sites To Frame the Word “Blog”

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I hear, more and more, mainstream rightwing news organizations attacking blogs on the left, and indeed blogs in general. A whole bunch of generalizations that could apply to the left or the right. They are attempting to frame the word “blog” the way they framed the word “liberal”. Consider this a warning.

The Electoral-Based Community:

…Democratic party seems to be under the impression that bloggers are an enormous, important constituency–and that it must go to whatever lengths necessary to win the hearts and minds of this virtual community.

…This seems like a major miscalculation, because the politics of the left-wing blogs are far out of the American mainstream. Where most of the 120 million Americans who voted in the last election bear a benign indifference to political matters, the left half of the blogosphere seethes with hatred for George W. Bush and his supporters. What’s more, the blogs take numerous positions that would strike all but the most passionate Democratic partisans as patently preposterous. For example, several of the left-wing blogs recently ran an advertisement that referred to West Virginia Senator and former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd as an “American Hero.”

Also, the level of discourse on the Daily Kos and other prominent liberal blogs is not something that would be attractive to the majority of the American public. The writings are often obscene and usually relentlessly hostile and negative. Crude personal attacks, whether aimed at right-wing bloggers or politicians, are the order of the day.

Boffins create zombie dogs

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Boffins create zombie dogs | The Other Side | Breaking News 24/7 – NEWS.com.au (27-06-2005):

Scientists have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.

US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.

Scary. That picture they have there doesn’t help either. The thing of nightmares.

My mom is in ICU with pneumonia

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Having COPD, it is easy for her to suffer bouts of pneumonia, but she normally bounces back surprisingly fast. She’s tough. But this time they had to intubate her to assist her breathing. They are working on weaning her from the tube. We are awaiting results of a CT scan they did to look for more fluid and mucus in her lungs. She’s stable and doctors are hopeful for a good recovery. She’s lucid and aware of what’s going on, which is great. She knows we’re here for her I think. Still, not being able to communicate in a substantial way (she can’t write – she’s too weak, and she can’t speak of course) is disconcerting. I wish I could talk with her.

Fox buys MySpace.com

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PaidContent.org is abuzz with the news and its after shocks. An interesting purchase of a very forward thinking social, participatory media hub. One that reminds me of old AOL (user profile directory in particular) in someways.

Speaking of social media, and social engineering, Dave Rogers applies some thoughts he picked up while reading “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D. to Technorati.

An update on my CivicSpace upgrade odyssey

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I’ve been having difficulty upgrading my CivicSpace implementation for Philly Future. Here is the latest.

If I had more time, I’d hop into the source code myself. The next step is to get the latest out of SVN. Many bug fixes are supposedly checked in there. I’m a little hesitant to do that since doing that would break me out of the release cycle, and that’s a little worrisome. The great thing is that by following CivicSpace’s best practices, I can attempt to upgrade at will without disturbing my site. I must be doing something wrong here though. What I just don’t know yet 🙁

Moore’s Deep Space Journey

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Ron Moore’s Deep Space Journey – New York Times:

The original ”Battlestar” was often dismissed as a ”Star Wars” rip-off, but it was always stranger and more ambitious than that. There was an element of 70’s-era ”Chariots of the Gods” crackpot-ism to it. (”There are those who believe that life here began out there,” spoke the tweedy voice of Patrick Macnee at the opening of each episode, and proof of this common ancestry was provided weekly in the King Tut-style space helmets Apollo sported.) But that was blended in an intriguing way with late-cold-war anxiety over Soviet appeasements and an openly biblical story line, widely considered a tribute by its creator, Glen A. Larson, to the parables of his own Mormon faith. Twelve colonies of space-faring humans, survivors of slaughter driven away from their home planets, had set off through space in search of the mythical 13th tribe that, legend tells, settled a promised land called ”Earth.”

…Compared with the thriving ”Star Trek” and ”Star Wars” franchises, ”Battlestar” fandom was marginal — the province of a few diehards making Web sites and sewing Colonial-warrior costumes. But these diehards rallied around Hatch, donating the costumes and props they had fabricated or volunteering to do the computer graphics for the space battles. And as they did, Hatch became for most of them the face of the fight for the new ”Galactica.”

In 1999, at the San Diego Comic-Con, he showed his completed trailer, titled ”Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming.” He reports that it received a standing ovation. I can report that it looks remarkably professional and engaging and certainly faithful to Larson’s original story. But you will probably never see it, because Hatch spent somewhere between $20,000 and $40,000 of his own money to create a film within a franchise in which he owned absolutely no rights and which, for this reason, as well as actors’ union regulations, he can never show or distribute for money.

But that was fine. Because for Hatch, it was always about convincing the world that it made sense to bring back ”Battlestar.” And in fact, soon Universal would indeed be relaunching the Galactica — although Richard Hatch would not be on board.

…Moore said he would do it, but he wanted to make some changes. After numerous meetings and a full script treatment, he wrote a two-page memo that laid out the basic tenets of what the new ”Battlestar Galactica” would eventually become. ”We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics has run its course, and a new approach is required,” it began. ”Call it ‘naturalistic science fiction.”’ There would be no time travel or parallel universes or cute robot dogs. There would not be ”photon torpedoes” but instead nuclear missiles, because nukes are real and thus are frightening.

”To this day,” Eick says, ”I don’t think either of us could have anticipated how valuable the memo would be.” It would repair everything that had been worn down to convention in a genre Moore had once loved. But ”Battlestar” would be more than just an opportunity to do ”Voyager” correctly.

”When I watched the original pilot,” Moore says, ”I knew that if you did ‘Battlestar Galactica’ again, the audience is going to feel a resonance with what happened on 9/11. That’s going to touch a chord whether we want it to or not. And it felt like there was an obligation to that. To tell it truthfully as best we can through this prism.” In the miniseries Moore wrote to introduce the new ”Battlestar,” the echoes of the war on terror were unapologetic and frequently harrowing: what happens when an advanced, comfortable, secular democracy endures a devastating attack by an old enemy that it literally created (which enemy, in Moore’s version, also happens to be religious fanaticism)?

“filters, aggregators and producers”

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The Long Tail: Brands: response:

…my point about brands becoming people rather than products or companies is specific to long tail markets. In short tail markets, such as traditional retail, I imagine that the usual brands will continue to dominate for a good long time.

Second, here’s a little more detail on the role of people as “branded filters” in the long tail: There are, as it happens, three main long tail businesses: filters, aggregators and producers. Each of those will have its own sort of brands, but those brands are all related in that they’re increasingly about real people, rather than abstract advertising messages, invented characters or slogans.

Some Good News, Tempered With The Bad

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Support for Bin Laden, Violence Down Among Muslims, Poll Says:

Osama bin Laden’s standing has dropped significantly in some pivotal Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has “declined dramatically,” according to a new survey released yesterday.

…The one exception is attitudes toward suicide bombings of U.S and Western targets in Iraq, a subject on which Muslims were divided. Roughly half of Muslims in Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco said such attacks are justifiable, while sizable majorities in Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia disagreed. Yet, support for suicide bombings in Iraq still declined by as much as 20 percent compared with a poll taken last year.

The results, which also reveal widespread support for democracy, show how profoundly opinions have changed in parts of the Muslim world since Pew took similar surveys in recent years.

Army Times – Soldier survives attack; captures, medically treats sniper (Video):

During a routine patrol in Baghdad June 2, Army Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, hiding in a van just 75 yards away. The incident was filmed by the insurgents.

Tschiderer, with E Troop, 101st “Saber” Cavalry Division, attached to 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, was knocked to the ground from the impact, but he popped right back up, took cover and located the enemy’s position.

After tracking down the now-wounded sniper with a team from B Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Iraqi Army Brigade, Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs and gave medical aid to the terrorist who’d tried to kill him just minutes before.

Summary: GOP Ignored Warnings on Veterans – Yahoo! News:

…several House Republicans cautioned that not enough money was being budgeted this year for veterans health care given the number of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

The House refused to provide more money. Two of the congressmen who sounded the alarm were pulled from their committee chairmanships.

The predictions of too few dollars for veterans care proved accurate. The Bush administration has now acknowledged a shortfall of at least $1.2 billion, and embarrassed Republican lawmakers are scrambling to provide it.

Weekend of slaughter propels Iraq towards all-out civil war – World – Times Online:

Iraq is slipping into all-out civil war, a Shia leader declared yesterday, as a devastating onslaught of suicide bombers slaughtered more than 150 people, most of them Shias, around the capital at the weekend.

One bomber killed almost 100 people when he blew up a fuel tanker south of Baghdad, an attack aimed at snapping Shia patience and triggering the full-blown sectarian war that al-Qaeda has been trying to foment for almost two years.

Iraq’s security forces have been overwhelmed by the scale of the suicide bombings — 11 on Friday alone and many more over the weekend — ordered by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

“What is truly happening, and what shall happen, is clear: a war against the Shias,” Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, a prominent Shia cleric and MP, told the Iraqi parliament.