Chris Boese's Weblog

President Clinton Emerges in Group Bidding for Philadelphia Inquirer - The New York Sun

Now this is getting interesting! I sure would like to see some sort of unique staff-ownership thing emerge, like the Green Bay Packers or something.

Wouldn't that just be a radical idea? Have reporters, editors, photojournalists, the people who care most deeply about journalism, OWN their own journalistic venture?

Gee, that sounds an awful lot like... BLOGS! Hey, if you can't join 'em, BEAT 'EM!

Link: President Clinton Emerges in Group Bidding for Philadelphia Inquirer - March 29, 2006 - The New York Sun - NY News.

President Clinton Emerges in Group Bidding for Philadelphia Inquirer

BY JOSH GERSTEIN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 29, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/29968

A private investment group whose board of directors includes President Clinton made a bid yesterday to take over a dozen daily newspapers owned by Knight Ridder, including the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Mr. Clinton serves as a senior adviser to the Yucaipa Companies, a Los Angeles-based investment firm that has joined with a journalists' union, the Newspaper Guild, to seek control of the 12 newspapers and gradually transfer ownership to the news outlets' employees.

"The Yucaipa Companies are putting in a bid today for the 12," a spokeswoman for the union, Candice Johnson, said in an interview. She declined to say how much the union-backed group is offering. "We think the bid will be a very strong bid," she said.

The papers on the auction block include both of Philadelphia's leading newspapers, the Inquirer and the Daily News, as well as the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the San Jose Mercury News. Industry analysts have estimated that the dozen newspapers will fetch between $1.4 billion and $2 billion.

Earlier this month, the McClatchy Company agreed to buy the Knight Ridder chain for $6.5 billion. Mc-Clatchy, which is based in Sacramento, surprised many observers by immediately announcing plans to shed a dozen of Knight Ridder's 29 newspapers. McClatchy's CEO, Gary Pruitt, said most of the papers being sold are in slow growing markets.

[You know, those markets where the 20% profits aren't INCREASING TO 30% fast enough. Stockholders (stakeholders, heh) hate when that happens. Gotta get rid of those. Just dead weight and all that.]

The Yucaipa-led bidding group has been locked in a dispute with the firms selling the newspapers over access to confidential financial information about the papers' performance. In a statement last week, the president of the Newspaper Guild, Linda Foley, complained about unfair treatment and threatened to involve unnamed powerful allies if McClatchy refused to turn over financial data given to other bidders.

[Is this business standard operating procedures? I mean, if you're buying something, don't you get to LOOK AT what you're buying? Sounds like somebody claiming to have a right to sell a pig in a poke. Imagine if you had to sign for your mortgage without bringing in your own home inspector. Sheesh. ]

"I am prepared to recruit the strength of friends of the labor movement in the investment community as well as opinion leaders in the various communities where my members practice their profession to assist us in the process of insuring that our bid is treated fairly," Ms. Foley said.

McClatchy has denied any favoritism.

A spokesman for Mr. Clinton, who delivered a speech in London yesterday at a conference on globalization, said the former president has not played a role in the proposed newspaper acquisition.

[...]

During his presidency, Mr. Clinton rarely visited Los Angeles without stopping at the home of the supermarket magnate who founded Yucaipa, Ronald Burkle. In his memoir, the former president described Mr. Burkle as "one of my best friends."

In 2002, Mr. Burkle's investor group announced that Mr. Clinton had signed on as a senior adviser to Yucaipa American Funds and Yucaipa Corporate Initiatives Fund. Mr. Burkle, who is known for orchestrating leveraged buyouts at companies that have suffered from union strife, said in a statement that the funds were pursuing socially conscious investments in low-income neighborhoods.

Senator Clinton's financial disclosure forms indicate that Mr. Clinton was a partner in Yucaipa Global Opportunities Fund I and received "guaranteed payments" of more than $1,000 in 2003 and 2004. The forms do not require disclosure of the exact amounts.

[...]

Wow! You go, Riverbend!

A friend sent this link from the New Zealand Herald. I haven't checked yet to see if its getting any coverage in the U.S. media.

Riverbend on Baghdad Burning remains one of my very best sources for understanding at a deeper level what's really going on in Iraq.

Link: Anonymous Iraqi blogger in the running for literary prize - 27 Mar 2006 - World News.

Anonymous Iraqi blogger in the running for literary prize

27.03.06 1.00pm

By Terri Judd and Louise Jury

An anonymous Iraqi woman has been nominated for one of the Britain's most prestigious literary prizes, after writing a blog charting "three years of occupation and bloodshed" in Baghdad.

Alongside literary giants such as Alan Bennett, the 27-year-old Iraqi university graduate has been longlisted for the £30,000 (NZ$85,000) Samuel Johnson Prize, the most valuable award in non-fiction.

Writing under the pseudonym Riverbend - the blog (see link below) chronicles three war-ravaged years in her home city and calls for the withdrawal of US troops.

Baghdad Burning, published by the independent publishers, Marion Boyars, is among 19 candidates for the award which is open to any writers whose books are published in English.

Other contenders include Untold Stories by Alan Bennett, After The Victorians by AN Wilson, and a biography of Mrs Beeton by Kathryn Hughes.

Little is known about the author of Baghdad Burning, who prefers to remain anonymous.

The blog begins in September 2003 with the words:

"I'm female, Iraqi and 24.

I survived the war.

That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway."

A former computer programmer before the invasion, she lost her job as travel to and from her workplace became too dangerous.

Instead she has chronicled her anger and fear in postings.

[...]

One reviewer has called her writing "a cross between an underground manifesto and a polished cultural history".

[...]

A compact to swear off "new things"

Hard to imagine how consumerism has turned into a religion, along with articles of faith. Some bloggers are even accusing these people of trying to single-handedly destroy the American way of life. Now that's simply frightening, not only because they presume to believe such a wacky thing to the point of openly dressing down detractors, but beyond the wacky reasoning, the emotionalism and shrillness of such a response belies the thinness of the thing being held on to, so that the defenders have an air of desperation about them.

And if that isn't what fuels such a bizarre response (you have a DUTY to shop! I heard it on APM's "Marketplace") then we have to assume they're sophistic rhetors, crassly adopting an argumentative position and faking the emotionalism because there's something in it for them.

Link: BAY AREA / Out of the retail rat race / Consumer group doesn't buy notion that new is better.

Consumer group doesn't buy notion that new is better

Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, February 13, 2006

While many people will spend countless hours this year lining up at Wal-Mart and maxing out their credit cards at Nordstrom, a small Bay Area group has declared it will do just the opposite.

About 50 teachers, engineers, executives and other professionals in the Bay Area have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006  --  except food, health and safety items and underwear. 

"We're people for whom recycling is no longer enough," said one of the members of the fledgling movement, John Perry, who works in marketing at a high-tech company. "We're trying to get off the first-market consumerism grid, because consumer culture is destroying the world."

They call themselves the Compact. They have a blog, a Yahoo group and monthly meetings to reaffirm their commitment to the rule, which is to never buy anything new. "I didn't buy a pair of shoes today," said Compacter Shawn Rosenmoss, an engineer and a San Francisco resident of the Bernal Heights neighborhood. "They were basically a $300 pair of clodhoppers. But they were really nice and really comfortable, and I haven't bought new shoes for a while. But I didn't buy them. That's a big part of the Compact  --  we show that we're not powerless over our purchasing."

Compacters can get as much as they want from thrift shops, Craigslist, freecycle.org, eBay and flea markets, as long as the items are secondhand. And when they're in doubt, they turn to their fellow Compacters for guidance.

[...]

The Compact  --  named after the revolutionary credo of the Mayflower pilgrims  --  proved immensely popular and quickly increased its membership.

[...]

Kate Boyd, a drama teacher at Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco, said she enjoys the extra time, money and perspective that a consumer-free life brings.

"It's just a relief to get away from the pressure to always have new clothes, gadgets and other things we don't need," she said. "And I find that I have more money to spend on the dried cherries for my Manhattans."

The Compact is part of the larger trend of consumers beginning to "tread gently on our planet," said Peter Sealey, adjunct professor of marketing at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

[...]

For more information

Here are some Web links to the Compact:

groups.yahoo.com/group/thecompact

sfcompact.blogspot.com

An old friend

By accident tonight I came across a book I'd gotten many years ago... in the late 1980s, I think. In flipping through favorite folded-over pages, I found a little meditation, not much to it, really. But in rereading it again after all this time, the simple four lines, the force of it just rolled over me like a steamroller. Wow.

I'd spent a good bit of time with these four lines back then, so part of the force is the power of what I was learning in meditation at that time. And still, the lines just have force. So thank you Thich Nhat Hanh, one more time.

Here it is:

Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment.

"Being Peace," Thich Nhat Hanh

180 mph winds hit Queensland, Australia with Cyclone Larry

My friends down under say this part of the continent is pretty sparsely populated. I can't imagine what that area is going to look like when we get pictures from there tomorrow (today? is the sun just coming up down there? One friend was slow to reply, said she was sleeping in. Guess no worries in Sydney.)

It also looks like Aussies are smart and build their houses to higher code standards. The U.S. wouldn't want to do that, because that might deprive some slumlord of his exorbitant profits, let alone worry about silly things like building levees to withstand Category 5.

Link: CNN.com - Category 5 cyclone hits Australia - Mar 19, 2006.

Category 5 cyclone hits Australia

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- A powerful tropical cyclone packing winds of up to 290 kilometers per hour (180 mph) has slammed into Australia's northeastern coast Monday after more than 1,000 tourists and local residents were evacuated to higher ground, the weather bureau said.

Tropical cyclone Larry smashed into the coastal community of Innisfail, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Cairns, a popular jumping-off point for the Great Barrier Reef, forecaster Jonty Hall said.

The weather bureau on Monday upgraded the storm to a category five -- the strongest category possible -- and thousands of local residents were evacuated ahead of the cyclone's arrival.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, but officials predicted the storm could cause widespread devastation.

Hall said conditions were "terrible" in the region, and warned of surging coastal tides and gale force winds along a 300-kilometer (186-mile) stretch of coast in northeastern Queensland.

"There's extremely dangerous conditions," he said. "We're starting to see a very dangerous storm surge come to shore ... It doesn't get much worse than this."

The weather bureau said destructive winds were occurring along the exposed coast from Port Douglas, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Cairns, to Ingham, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) south.

[...]

"This is the most devastating cyclone that we could potentially see on the east coast of Queensland for decades ... there is going to be destruction," Pagano told reporters in the state capital of Brisbane.

National flag carrier Qantas canceled a scheduled morning flight to Cairns and another to Townsville -- the two largest cities in the cyclone's path. Cairns has a population of 125,000 while Townsville is home to 160,000 people.

Brisbane Tropical Cyclone Warning Center Web site advised: "People in the path of this very dangerous cyclone should stay calm and remain in a secure shelter -- above the expected water level -- while the very destructive winds continue."

[...]

"There have been mandatory evacuations of coastal shires south of Cairns ... and emergency shelters set up for people who feel at risk with nowhere to go," a Cairns City Council Disaster Coordination Center spokesman told Australian Associated Press.

"It's most likely thousands of people are evacuating to avoid the high tide," he added.

[...]

"Buildings themselves may withstand the force of the winds because of our building codes, however, a category four and category five will be devastating," Pagano said.

 

Social network theory has far-reaching ramifications

Who would have thought that Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think" and hypertext theory could take us so far? I love sitting and thinking about these ideas, even tho I don't do algorithms at all. I understand what they do, but don't ask my to actually look at their guts. I mean, I can understand a colonoscopy too, but I don't want to see the video of the inside of my colon.

This stuff is just fascinating to me, tho. It's from the New York Times Magazine.

Link: Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists? - New York Times.

March 12, 2006

Idea Lab

Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists?

By PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE

Recent debates about the National Security Agency's warrantless-eavesdropping program have produced two very different pictures of the operation. Whereas administration officials describe a carefully aimed "terrorist surveillance program," press reports depict a pervasive electronic net ensnaring thousands of innocent people and few actual terrorists. Could it be that both the administration and its critics are right? One way to reconcile these divergent accounts — and explain the administration's decision not to seek warrants for the surveillance — is to examine a new conceptual paradigm that is changing how America's spies pursue terrorists: network theory.

During the last decade, mathematicians, physicists and sociologists have advanced the scientific study of networks, identifying surprising commonalities among the ways airlines route their flights, people interact at cocktail parties and crickets synchronize their chirps. In the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are "nodes," and relationships and interactions form the "links" binding them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. Researchers are applying newly devised algorithms to vast databases — one academic team recently examined the e-mail traffic of 43,000 people at a large university and mapped their social ties. Given the difficulty of identifying elusive terror cells, it was only a matter of time before this new science was discovered by America's spies.

In its simplest form, network theory is about connecting the dots. Stanley Milgram's finding that any two Americans are connected by a mere six intermediaries — or "degrees of separation" — is one of the animating ideas behind the science of networks; the Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi studied one obvious network — the Internet — and found that any two unrelated Web pages are separated by only 19 links.

[...]

Announced in 2002, Adm. John Poindexter's controversial Total Information Awareness program was an early effort to mine large volumes of data for hidden connections. But even before 9/11, an Army project called Able Danger sought to map Al Qaeda by "identifying linkages and patterns in large volumes of data," and may have succeeded in identifying Atta as a suspect. As if to underline the project's social-network principles, Able Danger analysts called it "the Kevin Bacon game."

Given that the N.S.A. intercepts some 650 million communications worldwide every day, it's not surprising that its analysts focus on a question well suited to network theory: whom should we listen to in the first place? Russell Tice, a former N.S.A. employee who worked on highly classified Special Access Programs, says that analysts start with a suspect and "spider-web" outward, looking at everyone he contacts, and everyone those people contact, until the list includes thousands of names. Officials familiar with the program have said that before individuals are actually wiretapped, computers sort through flows of metadata — information about who is contacting whom by phone or e-mail. An unclassified National Science Foundation report says that one tool analysts use to sort through all that data is link analysis.

The use of such network-based analysis may explain the administration's decision, shortly after 9/11, to circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court grants warrants on a case-by-case basis, authorizing comprehensive surveillance of specific individuals. The N.S.A. program, which enjoys backdoor access to America's major communications switches, appears to do just the opposite: the surveillance is typically much less intrusive than what a FISA warrant would permit, but it involves vast numbers of people.

In some ways, this is much less alarming than old-fashioned wiretapping. A computer that monitors the metadata of your phone calls and e-mail to see if you talk to terrorists will learn less about you than a government agent listening in to the words you speak. The problem is that most of us are connected by two degrees of separation to thousands of people, and by three degrees to hundreds of thousands. This explains reports that the overwhelming number of leads generated by the N.S.A. program have been false positives — innocent civilians implicated in an ever-expanding associational web.

[...]

One way to make sense of these volumes of information is to look for network hubs. When Barabasi mapped the Internet, he found that sites like Google and Yahoo operate as hubs — much like an airline hub at Newark or O'Hare — maintaining exponentially more links than the average. The question is how to identify the hubs in an endless flow of records and intercepted communications. Scientists are using algorithms that can determine the "role structure" within a network: what are the logistical and hierarchical relationships, who are the hubs? The process involves more than just tallying links. If you examined the metadata for all e-mail traffic at a university, for instance, you might find an individual who e-mailed almost everyone else every day. But rather than being an especially connected or charismatic leader, this individual could turn out to be an administrator in charge of distributing announcements. Another important concept in network theory is the "strength of weak ties": the most valuable information may be exchanged by actors from otherwise unrelated social networks.

[...]

[this "strength of weak ties" stuff is going to be key in the development of the theory, just as The Long Tail is turning out to be key in thinking about how interactivity works. (Mark Granovetter's American Journal of Sociology article, The Strength of Weak Ties) ]

There is also some doubt that identifying hubs will do much good. Networks are by their very nature robust and resistant to attack. After all, while numerous high ranking Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed in the years since Sept. 11, the network still appears to be functioning. "If you shoot the C.E.O., they'll hire another one," Duncan Watts says. "The job will still get done."

Patrick Radden Keefe, a Century Foundation fellow, is the author of "Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping."

A little George Orwell to brighten your day...

This is from his well-known and often-anthologized essay, "Politics and the English Language. In a much earlier but not-so-different time, published in 1946.

Link: George Orwell: "Politics and the English Language,".

[...]

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

[...]

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow.

[...]

This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions.

[...]

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Orwell (bloggers might note, a pseudonym for Eric Blair), who published this in 1946, is actually more optimistic than I am. While the language of our current time holds little of the excess latin and floweryness that Orwell decries in this essay (due to the passage into history of somewhat more print literate Victorian Age, I'd guess), the simpler language of the press briefing or the press release doesn't gain truthfulness by its simple, declarative sentences, which can also obfuscate as much as the waterfall of words.

That would explain the rise of "truthiness" then, right?

Further, I think the secondary orality of the television age has led to much more concrete language, the language of easily visualized images, used to misdirect and deceive. President Reagan showed an early triumph of this technique which characterizes what we might call "television-speak," where a single compelling and visualizable anecdote can easily counter massively crunched but abstract social data. Not exactly the straw man fallacious argument presented in Nixon's "Checkers" speech, but perhaps a refinement of the technique.

Maybe I'd call it "oppression by synecdoche." Synecdoche is a literary and rhetorical figure where the part is seen to represent the whole. But as with the imperfection of metaphor, parts cannot completely and perfectly represent wholes. Reagan's story of the welfare mother driving a Cadillac was allowed to become emblematic by those who would benefit from such an emblem (and racist-subtext trigger, code words for underground bigots), in the face of masses of data to the contrary.

Other examples of how this happens: constant television coverage of shark attacks at the same time as statistics show the number of shark attacks is actually in major decline.

What would Orwell do, to find his good advice for simplifying language twisted into another tool for deception?

Meanwhile, I do have a few words to toss into the dustbin, words I'd rather not hear spoken on television or radio ever again:

So and so "vows" to do something about the hurricane damage. No more "vowing," for ANYONE!

"wreak havoc"

"went missing"

"give us a sense of ..."

"took to the streets"

I could think of more, but these are just a few that pop readily into my head. Feel free to make your own nominations to the dustbin in the comments below.

Some good news for a change: Quake survivors beat the winter

I didn't have a lot of hope back when I posted this news item (The world is about to become a much darker place very soon) at the beginning of the winter. So many people had "disaster fatigue" after Katrina and the tsunami. I honestly thought we'd see another massive disaster of a scope that was just hard to imagine (Hey, 87,000 people lost their lives in the earthquake. That's awful enough, but the numbers I was hearing that would die in a harsh winter, they were just unimaginable).

Link: Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Quake survivors beat the winter.

Quake survivors beat the winter

Declan Walsh in Islamabad
Thursday  March 9, 2006
The Guardian

The race to save hundreds of thousands of Pakistani earthquake survivors from the harsh Himalayan winter has been won, the United Nations said yesterday.

"There has been no second wave of deaths, no massive population movement down the mountains, no severe malnutrition, and no outbreak of epidemics," said Jamie McGoldrick, the deputy humanitarian aid coordinator in Islamabad.

Five months ago yesterday about 87,000 people died when a 7.6 magnitude quake shook Kashmir and North-West Frontier province. Another 1,300 died in Indian-occupied Kashmir.

But fears of a second wave of deaths were averted by a milder than expected winter and a helicopter-led aid effort. By this week an international air fleet, including US and British military helicopters, had flown more than 27,400 trips ferrying food, tents and medicine.

Aid officials admit that, behind the back-patting, many thorny legal and social problems lie ahead as government and aid officials concentrate on helping the 2.6 million survivors. A year-long recovery plan, funded by $6.2bn (£3.5bn) pledged by international donors last November, will be launched next month.

[...]

   

Article continues

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I'm going nutso for Rocketboom!

It is just bizarre how much I love Rocketboom. Did I mention I love Rocketboom? Amanda Congdon is the it-girl Yah. This is just so goofy, I'm dying. I could just watch hours and hours of nothing but Rocketboom. Rocketboom rules!  Amanda Congdon don't ever change a thing. No teleprompter, no fancy effects. I love you Rocketboom, stay just the way you are. xxooxxoo

Link: Rocketboom.