Wed. August 24, 2005
Bloggers Do It Daily
Having just returned from a nice 3-day break in lovely Aspen, Colorado, I am constrained to write a bit about the discipline of blogging. Here I do not mean "discipline" as in genre, but rather discipline as in what is needed to maintain a blog.
As readers will note, I've basically been absent for several months. Well, surprising to me, there are some people out there who actually read what I write!! Two of them -- an erstwhile "cousin" whose genealogical connection I've yet to trace in detail, and a business associate who specializes in wireless Internet networks -- have reached out to say they miss my posts. I was astounded about that in two respects. First, as is obvious that surfers actually bookmark or RSS this blog. Second, that there are readers who know and regret the recent lapse in posts.
All of that reinforces the aphorism that "Bloggers Do It Daily." See, it's not that blogging requires daliy updates. It's just that, like excercise, if the author is not sufficiently disciplined to write every day, then it's VERY easy to get out of shape.
That's what's happened to me. But I'm back and will strive to write every day. Hopefully, there'll be a flash of insight once in a while. It seems like the least I can do in light of the fact that some folks in cyberspace actually care about what I think.
Posted by glenn at Wed. April 6, 2005
Human Cannonball
Very cool. Hunter S. Thompson's ashes will be blasted from a cannon sculpted into a 53-foot high fist in a public ceremony in August, his widow said Tuesday. Mr. Gonzo journalist was also a gun freak, and this was one of his dying wishes. Have a blast, Hunter!
Mon. February 21, 2005
Gonzo is Dead
Last night Hunter Thompson, author of Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas ("A savage journey to the heart of the American dream"), preeeminent practitioner of self-styled "gonzo" journalism and the inspiration for this blog, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his ranch in Woody Creek (Aspen), Colorado. Hunter S. Thompson Takes His Last Trip, Echoing Hemingway [MercuryNews.com]. Amid all the obituaries, many ask how a man who lived so hard could commit suicide, without even leaving a note.
That's not a quandry; it's perfectly in character. Given his exccessive consumption of drugs and alcohol for 30+ years, it's a wonder the man made it to 65 at all. And it seems that Thompson planned it himself, spending an intimate weekend with his kids and shooting himself in the kitchen while his wife was working out at her health club. Once the fun was over, Thompson often made clear, he wasn't going to stick around and watch the janitors sweep up.
Suicide is painless. It only hurts those left behind. Yet as Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Indeed, it may be the only rational way to exit this insane world of ours.
Goodbye, Hunter. You died like you lived. Gonzo is dead; long live gonzo.
Update: Like Markos of The Daily Kos, there's only two authors for whom I have gone out of my way to read everything they've written -- Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Actually, there are five for me, since I've also read everything by Michael Chrichton, Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum.) Oh well, serendipity is all we've got folks. Enjoy life while it lasts.
Thu. February 17, 2005
Bloggers Don't Do It Daily
Well it's 500 posts for me at Fear & Loathing since this blog was launched in March 2003. That's an average of 1.378 days between entries, or just a little under one a day (689 days since inception). Not bad for a part-time gig slotted into the busy life of a practicing lawyer, but also not the "do it daily" ideal -- for whatever that's worth -- of the blogosphere.
Sat. January 29, 2005
Fair & Balanced?
Carl Frank at No Oil for Pacifists has, once again, used me as his whipping boy, this time suggesting that I am some sort of lefty pacifist who is opposed to the U.S. using military force against terrorists.
Frank says I wrote him that "I don't 'resent' Bush, I just think it's ironic that a war started to stop an imminent threat that turned out not to be imminent." NO! Carl has disingenuously ommitted the most important part of my emailed comment, without even including an elipses.... Here's what I actually wrote:
Anyone who could just edit out all the stuff after the first dash is obviously not interested in a balanced or fair discussion of the issue. And any conservative who doesn't face up to the fact that the present rationale for the Iraq war -- making Iraq safe for democracy and to save Iraqis from Saddam's oppression -- is an ultra-liberal, leftist justification (Wilsonian foreign policy at its worst) is either self-deluding or just hypocritical. Without WMDs, the only reason for this war is "human rights," Jimmy Carter's albatross. Running away from accountability while presenting a shifting, neo-Wilsonian idealization of a war that started as a way to disarm a dictator who was said to have nukes pointed at Jerusalem and dirty bombs ready for explosion in New York is worse flip-flopping even than the greatest flip-flopper of them all, John Kerry.
Lest one think this is just another liberal or elitist Democrat talking (I am neither by the way), here's what George F. Will -- certainly not a liberal, leftist or even a Democrat -- says:
Duh. Will characterized the Bush doctrine of democratic nation-building as "the stunningly anticonservative idea animating the administration's foreign policy." Bush won't say "human rights" because it would expose him as a foreign policy liberal. His inauguration address was straight from John Kennedy in 1961, i.e., "bear any burden, pay any price . . . to ensure the survival of liberty" around the world. And to make matters worse, the day after the inauguration, the Administration immediately backtracked, using anonymous "sources" to announce that the speech did not mean what it said, that America would not intervene militarily in other nations to free people from tyranny and oppression.
Bush wants it both ways and so does his lapdog Frank. But reality has a way of intruding on idealism, which is what we have here. There needs to be an asterisk after the inauguration speech's stirring rehtoric about defense of freedom and liberty, namely "unless your country has lots of oil (e.g., Saudi Arabia) or supports the U.S. in the war on terrorism (e.g., Russia, Pakistan)." The rest of the world has long thought that American foreign policy was hypocritical because for decades this country supported dictators and repressive regimes out of Kissingerian realpolitik concerns. That caused the Iranian revolution in 1978 which started the whole Shiite Muslim backlash against America and the West.
Now we're finally at least fighting one war on the side of the oppressed, but our government is still caught in the same hypocritical trap. Putin and Musharef are oppressive, anti-democratic depots -- no need even to mention the House of Saud -- yet we support them without even a word of criticism. Oppressed people in other nations will rightly look at this, once again, as cynical, in turn devaluaing American ideals and the strength of our foreign policy. As Jonathan Alter observed, calling the liberty justification "a suspiciously convenient, third-string rationale for war:"
But Bush prefers Ronald Reagan to Wilson as an exemplar, which begins to explain where his vision falls short. Reagan wasn't much interested in promoting democracy except as a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union from within. All over the world, dictators like Saddam Hussein cheered his election. Reaganism was effective and inspiring but also hypocritical -- the kind of ersatz idealism that apparently allows Bush to press for democracy in every Middle Eastern country except the ones that sell us oil or help us fight terrorism. That's a rather long list.
Two more things. First, Frank implies that I am opposed to preemptive war and American unilateralism. Not true. As I blogged 18 months ago, well before the 2004 presidential race even really began, "Unilateralism is one thing -- something I most definitely can approve of -- but ginning up fake rationales is quite another." Second, Frank ends his ranting post with this admonition to me: "My recommendation, Glenn: courage" (which he links to a Wikipedia entry on Dan Rather, whom I have always detested). Well, that was also the name of Walter Cronkite's sailboat (his old one, before retirement). The same Cronkite, liberal and all, who by coming out against Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam war changed the course of history. And it's the heart of JFK's book Profiles in Courage, from another liberal Democrat. So yes, Carl, "courage" indeed. Like the president you admire so much, you too are a closet liberal.
Oh, and my 13-year old son says "Don't mess with my dad." He's bigger than you, Carl (in so many ways, including character), so watch out!
Mon. January 3, 2005
We're Not Alone
By the end of 2004, seven percent of U.S. adults, or more than 8 million people, had written a blog, according to a recent study. Big Boost for Blogs in 2004 [ZDNet.com]. But at the same time, a majority of Americans still do not know what a blog is.
This amusing contradicton was brought home to me last week, at lunch with an old friend. He knew that blog was shorthand for "weblog," but had never seen one and just could not get his arms around the concept that ordinary people now are empowered to write about -- and publish on the Internet -- anything they want. So the blogosphere is gaining traction, but like the Internet itself will take some time before its mysterious DNA is explicable to the casual user. Back in the "old days" of 1994-95, the Web itself was the same way. In other words, everything new is really old!
Not that all this stuff is so great, however. Witness an article today in the New York Times about whacko politico-scientific "theories" for how the War in Iraq actually caused the Southeast Asian tsunamis of last week, i.e., revealing that even faced with real suffering by millions of people on this sphere we call Earth, "the blogosphere's tendency toward crackpot theorizing and political smack down could not be suppressed for long."
Wed. June 16, 2004
Comments are Back!!
Well I was wondering why there had been no comments on Fear & Loathing for about six weeks, so I tested the blog by trying to post a comment myself. Got an error message saying I was "not permitted" to post comments! Weird. So I looked in the Movable Type support forum and realized that in screening out IP addresses from blog spammers -- those hateful characters who post spam comments on blogs advertising drugs, pornography, etc. -- I had inadvertently left a blank line, meaning that EVERY address from ANY domain was being blocked. Fixed now. Comment away, but spammers beware!!@#
Sun. April 4, 2004
The Slow Grind of the Law
Reacting to Sun's $1.6 billion settlement of its antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, some observers believe that Silicon Valley has given up trying to constraing pedatory conduct by Gates & Co. "After two decades of inflamed criticism, many here in the technology sector have come to accept the slowly acquired reality that the legal system can do little to resolve their quarrel with Microsoft," summarizes John Markoff in the New York Times. More on point is this commentary by Alan Saracevic in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Don't kid yourself. These compassionate overtures from Microsoft are signs of benevolent dictatorship. The boys up in Redmond have won the war. Now they're helping the Germans rebuild Berlin."
Mark these words. We haven't seen the end of Microsoft's antitrust battles. It took the government 50 years and three antitrust lawsuits to constrain the power of -- and finally dismantle -- the Bell System. Yes, the law moves slowly. But like the Mounties, they always get their man in the end.
Mon. March 29, 2004
One Year Ago
It has been one year since the U.S. invasion of Iraq -- Iraq One Year Later [MSNBC.com] -- and this blog is also one year old today. My first post from March 29, 2003 was a short one, saying that I did not know whether Fear & Loathing would turn out to be a quickly passing fad or a personal journal. I don't think it's really either -- more focused on technology, politics and popular culture than my own individual life traumas -- but that may make this blog a little more interesting to my tiny, devoted cult of readers (all 10 or so of you) worldwide.
Happy birthday Fear & Loathing!
Thu. January 22, 2004
Google Bombing
So if you enter "miserable failure" into Google you come up with George Bush's White House bio. Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point [nytimes.com]. They call this networked use of Web links "Google Bombing," since it takes a coordinated effort to influence the search engine's algorithms.
The only weird thing is that BBC reported on this fad nearly six weeks ago. What took The Times so long to catch up? And why haven't our conservative blog colleagues counter-attacked to place someone else in the #1 Google position for "miserable failure"?
Sun. January 18, 2004
Spamming Blogs
Well I just spent an hour deleting 200 spammed comments -- advertising online casinos -- from Fear & Loathing. So I went over to Movable Type and upgraded to the new release version, which promises to "throttle" commenters by limiting the number of seconds between posted comments. We'll see if this works.
Fri. June 13, 2003
Gagging the Bloggers
BBC News headlines its article "gagging the bloggers." One might think the story would center on the pedantic drivel of pre-teen bloggers and the cultural consequences of online therapy diaries. But the article is really about how blogging is the technology-empowered eiptome of personal expression, which has serious political and civil liberties consequences in many nations.
Power to the people. That is really what the Internet is all about.
Tue. April 15, 2003
Messing With Their Heads
Right-Thinking Comments - Penile PsyOps. Our friendly conservative on the "Left Coast" cites an interesting MSNBC article titled "The Secret War" which talks about pychological operations directed against Iraqi troops, by broadcasting 400-watt arabic messages from Bradley fighting vehicles saying that Iraqi men are impotent.
Well, if all it takes is a little insult to their dicks, then Iraqis really are dickless wonders. And their former leader either never had a battle plan or is the most inept general in history. It was the battle-that-never-was, defended by soldiers who died from taunting. Like the memorable line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- "Go way or I shall be forced to taunt you once again"!!
Tue. April 8, 2003
The Second Superpower - Googlewashing
Is worldwide public opinion, or more precisely, a "Second Superpower," wielding the power to make or break international foreign policy regarding the conduct of the Iraq war? In The Register, analyst Andrew Orlowski explains that is less important than how the phrase came into general use, and was transformed, almost overnight as a result of blogging and the virtually instantaneous transmission of global information made possible by the Internet.
Saying that what started out as an Orwellian reference from 1984 has been repurposed in just 42 days from an anti-war analysis (in the N.Y Times) into a politically-neutered description of the information commons, Orlowski concludes that this sort of "Googlewashing" is permitting a relatively small handful of bloggers to "disappear" information for the masses:
So, there you have it. Not only does Google allow people to get information more quickly than ever before, it also allows people to lose information more quickly than ever before!!
Sat. April 5, 2003
Real-Time Music List
Kung-Tunes, a new "donation-ware" Mac OSX app from Adriaan Tijsseling, is a great tool for adding real-time content to weblogs. Kung-Tunes uses AppleScript to pull MP3 information from iTunes and upload it to an FTP server, with an array of formatting options. I use a server-side include (because it's simpler), which allows my main index page to retain the CSS formatting of its stylesheet.
A very cool application. Far superior to myMediaList.com because it requires no work and isn't limited to the few formatting options available on a remotely hosted javascript. You can see the results in the right sidebar of my main page. Available at kung-foo.tv. Thanks, Adriaan! (I'll be donating soon.)
