Chris Boese's Weblog

My favorite quotation today...

Link: Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier.

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

Gee, and here I thought Jaron Lanier was a film director... [grin]

This is a fun link. Here's another teaser.

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

DIGITAL MAOISM:

The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

By Jaron Lanier

An Edge Original Essay

Introduction

In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous".

[...]

                                                           

Kevin Kelly: Scan This Book! - New York Times

Venerable Wired dude Kevin Kelly has a fun article that is near and dear to my heart in the New York Times, and I just can't pass up calling attention to it (although I think it is Most Emailed, so I'm hardly the only one).

I'm just so easy. All you have to do is mention Alexandria and I get all a-quiver. I have my own theories about grand libraries, which I'll probably mention below, but suffice it here to say that a Library of Everything is one massive part of the reason I jumped into cyberspace with both feet in 1990 and never looked back. And for the record, that was long before I read about Neal Stephenson's Librarian in "Snow Crash."

What would Borges say? What would Confucius say?

I think Confucius would say "It is written... "

But the bigger question, I think, is "Will this Tower of Babel reach to the heavens?"

Link: Scan This Book! - New York Times.

May 14, 2006

Scan This Book!

By KEVIN KELLY

In several dozen nondescript office buildings around the world, thousands of hourly workers bend over table-top scanners and haul dusty books into high-tech scanning booths. They are assembling the universal library page by page.

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

[You know, if they were going to build such a great library in Alexandria with all that very precious stuff, why did they have to put it in such a precarious location?! I've been mad about this as long as I've known about it, and I'm still mad about it. I WANT to go to Alexandria and I'm pissed off that I can't, dammit!]

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

Brewster Kahle, an archivist overseeing another scanning project, says that the universal library is now within reach. "This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!" he shouts. "It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon." And unlike the libraries of old, which were restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person.

[And we an build this wonderful Tower that will reach to the Heavens! We will all speak the same language and nothing we plan to do will be impossible for us!

Until you look at the appropriate Tarot card, the Lightning-Struck Tower.

You say hey, it's a web, not a tower. Why are you going on and on about a tower? It's my theory, you see, a theory of the Web. In the Platonic sense, or Neoplatonic, if you will, this idea of a Library of Everything is technically an imitation, and perhaps a very pale imitation at that. The original "Library of Everything" supposedly exists as a great Ideal in the sky, in the Heavens, on some energy plane, or in Nirvana. It is called "The Akashic Records," or, to Hebrews, Muslims, I think, and Christians, it is called "The Book of Life."

It's the source of that "This Is Your Life" movie that St. Peter plays for you when you get to the Pearly Gates, before you get your harp and cloud and graduate to a New Yorker cartoon.

Edgar Cayce supposedly went to visit this library when he was asleep and found out all kinds of mysterious and secret stuff. I bet he's got a lot of overdue books by now, too. I usually think it is this library that Borges wrote of in his "Library of Babel" short story in the "Labyrinths" collection. His version is pretty twisted, though.

So what does this "Book of Life" have that our longed for Library of Everything doesn't have?

Some people imagine it as a Tapestry, with a thread for every life and a full record of each and all its intersections. This would be where the Three Fates of Greek mythology would hang out, the Three Norns of Norse mythology.

So the Akashic records would have not only every book, every image, an instantly searchable movie of every life, IT WOULD ALSO HAVE A FULL RECORD OF EVERY THOUGHT.

Stream of consciousness personal diary bloggers are working on uploading this part into the Web, but we're still stuck with a pale imitation of that panoptic record that Santa Claus clearly has access to as well, for checking to see if we've been naughty or nice. I bet the NSA is envious of HIM. Oddly enough, the Panoptic Eye appears to be just as much a part of the Neoplatonic imitation of the Akashic as it is in the "real" Akashic.

New Agers and others believe the Akashic Records are not confined to matter, but also include a record of all energy, which makes sense if matter and energy are conserved. Perhaps the Akashic is where all that dark matter goes that no one can account for. These people believe "Thoughts are Things" that send energy out in to the universe, whether in the form of prayers, wishes, curses (a panoptic and authoritarian god keeps track of sins of thought, word, and deed: God as Universal Accountant), lust in your heart, coveting, or the off-key internal singing of your soul.

So the Akashic Tapestry Record spreads out across the ethers like a giant web, just as our Internet weaves invisibly around our planet. You could make an argument that the Akashic Records are the Mind of God, and all of us (and our atoms and animating energy) make up that godhead at an atomic level as well, microcosm, macrocosm, as above, so below, or is that as below, so above? Ergo, the Akashic Records ARE GOD?

And what does that make our Platonic Imitation of an Imitation of the Akashic, the World Wide Web? The etchings of the Mind of Humanity? Humanity trying to make Itself God?

Interestingly, when you use a Kabala system of numerology (not the "Americanized" one), WWW=666. Those odd literalists, the fundamentalist Christian dispensational pre-millenialists, see three as the number of God, and six as the number of humanity, so they interpret this very famous and ominous symbol 666 (the movie previews are making such a big deal about an "Omen" remake coming out on 6/6/06, so maybe my ramble here is in honor of that) as three times six, or man trying to make himself god, repeated without question in pulpits across the U.S. I don't know if it is really an accurate interpretation, as some Hebrew sites also list six as a holy or "god" number, instead of seven, which I had always heard.

My Neoplatonic argument isn't really that compelling, if you look at the actual text that mentions it, because it is a WEB, not a man, unless the Web is the Mind of Man.

In the New International Version Bible, Revelation 13:18 reads:

This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.

And here's a neat tidbit, care of Wikipedia: The fear of the number 666 is known as "Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia". Say that three times fast.

Now about that Tower of Babel, reaching to the heavens, is the Web another instance of man trying to make himself like the gods, to reach into the heavens? The cautionary tale here is the lightning-struck tower, the blow to the head, a fall from a high place. The Tower is a nearly universal cultural symbol of hubris, of pride going before a fall.

Something to look forward to! Anyway, let's get back to Kevin... (grin)]

But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them. The universal library and its "books" will be unlike any library or books we have known. Pushing us rapidly toward that Eden of everything, and away from the paradigm of the physical paper tome, is the hot technology of the search engine.

1. Scanning the Library of Libraries

Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

This is a very big library. But because of digital technology, you'll be able to reach inside it from almost any device that sports a screen. From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all fit onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet — if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

[Kevin! You of all people know we won't need that white cord into our heads, iPod reference not withstanding. The library of all libraries will of course either be transmitted wirelessly, or hell, it'll probably be implanted into our heads directly! Instantaneous interfacing, always on, ubiquitous. Neal Stephenson's Librarian, beamed directly to gargoyles everywhere.

Surely Plato has reincarnated around here somewhere at this time. He pre-dates Alexandria (Aristotle was Alexander's tutor, so I imagine Plato had been dead a while) but he actually wanted Greeks to keep things in their amazing big Greek memories. Plato had his toga in a twist because this new thing, WRITING, was creating cheat sheets, so to speak (cheat scrolls?). If you could write something down, your brain, your big-Greek-reciting-Homer memory didn't have to work so hard, and you started keeping fewer things INSIDE your head, storing them so much more effectively in written form, which could then be assembled into a library.

Just as most of our math skills have withered in this age of the calculator, poor Plato was watching the decline of Greek oratorical skills based on memory. Was the trade-off worth it, Plato? Could Alexandria be the consolation prize?

And now, if we can have a Library of Everything implanted in our heads, does that mean we're returning to the days when people will be able to recite Homer without a teleprompter or PowerPoint? Will we get those big Greek memories back, augmented and more complete with access to everything that was ever written? Would Plato reincarnated feel redeemed at long last, or would it be the final betrayal?]

[...]

But because of copyright issues and the physical fact of the need to turn pages, the digitization of books has proceeded at a relative crawl. At most, one book in 20 has moved from analog to digital. So far, the universal library is a library without many books.

But that is changing very fast. Corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books per year. Amazon has digitized several hundred thousand contemporary books. In the heart of Silicon Valley, Stanford University (one of the five libraries collaborating with Google) is scanning its eight-million-book collection using a state-of-the art robot from the Swiss company 4DigitalBooks. This machine, the size of a small S.U.V., automatically turns the pages of each book as it scans it, at the rate of 1,000 pages per hour. A human operator places a book in a flat carriage, and then pneumatic robot fingers flip the pages — delicately enough to handle rare volumes — under the scanning eyes of digital cameras.

[Boggles your mind, doesn't it? All those texts, all those words, keyword-searchable, context-searchable. But still, not enough of those texts in the public domain.]

[...]

The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available texts. Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it's a cheap way for a library to increase its collection. Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's e-publishing business, says: "Some of us have thousands of books at home, can walk to wonderful big-box bookstores and well-stocked libraries and can get Amazon.com to deliver next day. The most dramatic effect of digital libraries will be not on us, the well-booked, but on the billions of people worldwide who are underserved by ordinary paper books." It is these underbooked — students in Mali, scientists in Kazakhstan, elderly people in Peru — whose lives will be transformed when even the simplest unadorned version of the universal library is placed in their hands.

[Democratizing, yes, I suppose, if people are still reading these books. If they one day become inert material, like the quartz crystals New Agers think are embedded storage devices holding the wisdom and all the knowledge of Atlantis, about as useful to us as that funky vinyl record the post-apocalyptic kids spin on the end of a forked stick in "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome." Gotta watch out for the Pocky Clips, or your giant Atlantis pyramid shaped quartz crystal Library of Everything gets as wrecked as Alexandria, and then where are you? Standing in front of a frame of branches and "telling the tell" through a memory of television?

I'm still chuckling at the idea of lesser university libraries getting to make huge leaps in how many "volumes" they supposedly have, simply by downloading a big old mess of these public domain texts from those famously massive major university libraries. Will they use the new numbers to adjust their budget requests? Will university administrators realize they don't have increased heating and lighting costs for all these new "volumes?"]

[...]

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island.

[Aha! Decontextualized Library of Congress notation, The Dewey Decimal System, arbitrary shelving, or even mis-shelving, a black hole that books sometimes disappear into in some libraries, even the venerable card catalog, will they all become irrelevant? Remember those dreary library classes where you were drilled in when to use the Author's name, when to use the Subject Index, when to try to find the Title? And even early databases used in libraries preserved this quaint eccentricity long after it was necessary, in some cases, is present still, although I have no idea why we need separate fields for Author, Subject, and Title, when Keyword ought to catch everything just fine.

I remember an argument I had with a librarian once, and I remember the exact year: 1990. I was bringing my research paper classes to the library for their regular library orientation sessions. After class, I questioned the librarian about the new InfoTrax database system for periodicals that she was happily touting. It was pretty neat, and I was ready to go to town with it, but as a usual dyslexic, I was frustrated when it couldn't find things I didn't type precisely, or in the correct Subject, Title, or Author field.

Why can't it all be keywords I asked her? Oh, that's coming soon, she said, and went on to explain what it would do. But no, I wanted keyword searching of ENTIRE TEXTS, just of magazine, journal, and periodical articles, which I thought was perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn't it do that? I wanted to be able to run Boolean combinations through this jackpot, just to see what would turn up. The librarian's eyes went wide, and then she got angry. How dare I even expect such an impossible thing! The absurdity of it. THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, she pronounced. Don't even think about it.

Meanwhile, I got to graduate school three years later and eventually encountered my future dissertation adviser, a hypertext theorist who imagined a world where EACH AND EVERY WORD is a hypertextual link to somewhere else. Even "a" "an" and "the." Ted Nelson's "docuverse" indeed!]

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic amateurs have written and cross-referenced an entire online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. Buoyed by this success, many nerds believe that a billion readers can reliably weave together the pages of old books, one hyperlink at a time. Those with a passion for a special subject, obscure author or favorite book will, over time, link up its important parts. Multiply that simple generous act by millions of readers, and the universal library can be integrated in full, by fans for fans.

[I just can't wait. Not only will the future be hyperlinked, but it will also spin out into recombinant document DNA, and we don't even need plagiarizing Harvard sophomore novelists to start us off on the right/wrong foot.

Imagine recombinant Faulker and parody Faulker, the novelistic version of "filksongs."

Interweave Emily Dickinson's 1,775 quatrain-driven poems with 1,000 "Centuries" of Nostradamus quatrains! Ooh oh! Hold me back, hold me back! Audio track them all over the midi-tune of Gilligan's Island.]

Comparing Prides and their Prejudices

So I've been on a Jane Austen film binge, and add to that another installment of the time-traveling PBS reality shows, this time "Manor House." I must be living in a time warp.

Kiera Knightly is so lovely, and I've liked her in so many films, even the fun "Bend it Like Beckham." And she was nominated for best actress for this most recent "Pride and Prejudice," but I can't help myself, there's just no comparison to the wonderful wonderful BBC "Pride and Prejudice" miniseries, even tho it does start slow. But the 2005 version just missteps too many times.

It is not Dame Judi Dench who missteps, but the costume design and writing that puts her in the Bennett household in the middle of the night.

Donald Sutherland, whom I've loved for years in just about anything, just sleepwalks here. There is no core of his character, just the classic voice reading his lines, just as he does car commercial voice-overs.

Nobody, but nobody, is Colin Firth, and I will never look at him again without seeing the definitive Darcy. That's all there is to it. Which makes his casting in Bridget Jones's Diary a stroke of brilliance (as was the casting of Hugh Grant as the scoundrel seducer. Neither of the two Mr. Wickhams seduces me as well as Hugh Grant, because he channels Miss Jane Hathaway).

I could go on, but I'd just belabor the point, when I could be watching the BBC mini-series again.

Just to register one last complaint: the buildings were too rustic, too earthy, the dances too rousing with beer stein's visible, in the 2005 version. That pig walking through packing his load just broke through the whole story and made me laugh out loud. When you're talking Jane AUSTEN, you are talking about gentle people of impeccable manners (but for the loud younger sisters and the awful mother, played so well). But see, when the background of all those drawing room manners provides the ground, then the sisters and the mother just GRATE on your nerves against that backdrop, and you cringe with Mr Darcy.

And to heap one final bit of praise on the BBC version: The father does sardonic distance remarkably well, and then humbles himself beneath it to make himself eminently like able. Firth unfolds haughty to hottie until just a look from him would melt butter, would melt many things. That awful untalented sister who dominates the piano (while it appears Lizzie both plays and sings better). The casting and writing on the BBC version is spot on and nuanced, and yet it is hard not to be upstaged by such stunning sets and scenic views, not the least of which is Firth swimming, or wet and dripping, depending on what you prefer. Mr. Collins is played to cloying perfection as the obsequious parson cousin-come-courting. He's like something straight out of Chaucer, crossed with Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

Maybe I'm odd, but as sweet as the oldest sister Jane is, Lizzie is far prettier, despite the family's deference to fair Jane. Maybe I just have a thing for darker and feisty or haughty.

So, to cap off my bender (I'm rewatching the BBC version again right now, cleansing my palette of all but Keira Knightly from the newer, younger, older setting, and more compressed version), I've got Bridget Jones I coming up again in my Netflix queue, not to mention Bride and Prejudice, and... what else? Flavor it up with some Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility? I think so... I'm a little afraid to go back and pick up the Maureen O'Hara Pride and Prejudice.

And Manor House! I have to get Manor House and start from the beginning. I have no clue why I'm on this kick, when I could be reading... oh, Middlemarch?

My Postal worker is the one who alerted me to the Netflix theft...

Someone named Mike posted this to TechDirt, but I was immediately struck by the coincidence with what happened to me this January as I was relocating back to Atlanta from Montana.

Link: Techdirt:Through Rain, Sleet Or Snow, The Postal Serice May Steal Your Netflix DVDs.

Through Rain, Sleet Or Snow, The Postal Serice May Steal Your Netflix DVDs

Contributed by Mike                 on Monday, January 9th, 2006 @ 02:14AM
from the that's-a-lot-of-movies dept.
Netflix's (patented) red DVD envelopes are quite distinct and easy to spot in a mailbox. That's good for marketing purposes... but apparently also good for unscrupulous postal service workers. Apparently, police have arrested one postal worker and are investigating another for over 500 missing Netflix DVDs. Of course, it makes you wonder what these postal workers were thinking. With so many DVDs missing in one particular area, it wouldn't take a genius to figure out exactly where the problem is occurring.

                               

The comments on this particular post are instructive, especially the two people who make direct defense of postal workers. I live in a big apartment complex, and it was my very sharp postal worker who told me of identity and mail thieves in the complex, and some other tenants who were ripped off, either by people putting unforwarded mail up above the locking mailboxes, or by the apartment management not changing the locks diligently enough as the postal boxes change hands.

I'm getting a new mail key tomorrow, but I think the three Netflix movies that were delivered here before I arrived in state are simply gone, and I'm trying to figure out how to report the theft to Netflix. I'm still a big fan of the program, but the locking boxes had lulled me into a false sense of security, I guess. Doesn't do much good to have locking boxes if people are regularly recycling old keys and trying old boxes.

The good news is that I had not officially forwarded most of my bill mail to this address yet, knowing it would take me a while in transit to get back to town.

I'm still not sure about getting a PO box yet, or even one of those commercial mail boxes. I like getting my mail where I live, and our locking boxes don't have our apartment numbers on them or anything.

Hugh Grant and Miss Jane Hathaway... twins separated at birth?

OK, so that just occured to me while watching the sequel to Bridget Jones Diary, um, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. I'm not necessarily recommending it, unless you have a thing for watching Hugh Grant movies.

It is pathetic that I have this guilty pleasure thing, watching Hugh Grant movies. I can never figure out the appeal of it, and I hate how good looking he is. Oh, I'd have far less resolve than poor old Bridget.

But then I saw the resemblance with Miss Jane Hathaway, from the Beverly Hillbillies. Normally that would put me right off old Hugh, but you know what?! That just makes it worse!

I shoulda read Wuthering Heights instead. Poor Mr Darcy.

I'll be looking for this "Wal-Mart" film, from the director of "Outfoxed"

"Outfoxed" used the visual mediuum and clips to SHOW how, without the visible evidence, issues of perception around Fox News always appear to be open for argument on both sides. Yet academic communication scholars could do persuasive work that is even more dramatic, quantitative content analysis. I wonder why we aren't hearing about those kinds of communications and media studies?

I'm interested to see how this "Wal-Mart" film plays out. If it is able to use the visual medium to dramatize and illustrate the logical inconsistencies between the company's marketing image and public perceptions, vs the reality, then it will be very interesting indeed.

It is disconcerting to me that ordinary argumentative proofs have less force in reaching ordinary people and their sense of reasoning, but again, it is the signal-to-noise issue, perhaps created by Fox News, and perhaps also by blogs, that cause so much argumentative "noise" that many people, my mother for instance, just throw up their hands and retreat into relativism, saying "nobody knows what the truth is."

I believe that verifiable truths about overt propaganda campaigns at Fox News can be parsed out and discerned, with criteria, critical thinking, verification, etc. But so many people get lost in the noise, and they don't have epistemological tools to do the work inside their own heads.

Journalism bears some responsiblity for this, because it (with good motives) tried to say, in the U.S. at least, "We know it is confusing, so we'll do your thinking for you and TELL YOU what the truth is." TRUST US." Which was the beginning of the end, I think, whenever ANYONE asks an independent thinker and agent to give up their native authority to some one or entity in blind faith.

I love the planned grassroots distribution of this film, and Wal-Mart's rather toothless attempts to fight it.

This is from the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle.

Link: Wal-Mart hit twice: critical film, activism / 6,800 sites to host DVD premiere by 'Outfoxed' director.

Wal-Mart hit twice: critical film, activism

6,800 sites to host DVD premiere by 'Outfoxed' director

- Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Most of the 4 million people who saw director Robert Greenwald's last movie, a critique of Fox News called "Outfoxed," caught it at a house party. The independent film ignited liberal audiences last year without the benefit of a Hollywood distributor, major studio or much of a theatrical release.

Labor and faith groups are shooting higher with this week's premiere of Greenwald's "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price": They hope to use the film to coalesce a social movement around criticism of the world's largest retailer.

Wal-Mart is countering with a campaign worthy of the final days before an election  --  circulating a review panning Greenwald's directorial efforts in a 1980 Olivia Newton-John vehicle.

And Wal-Mart officials haven't even seen the new film yet. That will change after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom presides over Wednesday's West Coast premiere at a Fort Mason benefit screening.

"Wal-Mart" DVDs will screen at more than 6,800 locales, including house parties, churches and labor halls. There will be plenty of opportunities to see the film in politically blue parts of the country such as New York and San Francisco, a city with no Wal-Marts but 11 scheduled screenings. However, there will also be a dozen showings in both deep-red Kansas and Georgia, and others in rural areas where Wal-Marts dominate the landscape.

Many of the screenings will happen during a "Wal-Mart Week of Action" starting Nov. 13. More than 400 groups, including the Sierra Club and Service Employees International Union, will use the film's premiere to publicize their anger at the nation's largest private employer. 

Their grievances are the ones labor and liberal groups have been pushing for several years  --  that nearly half Wal-Mart's employees have no private health insurance or are on Medicaid, that most of its stock is produced by cheap overseas labor, and that by building stores on the fringes of towns, it contributes to sprawl and destruction of the environment.

The SEIU is also one of the main financial backers of WalmartWatch.com, a 6-month-old organizing hub for the chain's critics that has posted leaked company documents and coordinates protests and legislation aimed at Wal-Mart.

The movement-wrapped-around-a-movie that WalmartWatch.com is organizing with Greenwald is a new strategy. 

[...]

Wal-Mart is swatting back criticism with what it calls an "aggressive" public relations campaign.

"We've got a lot of things planned," said Bob McAdam, vice president of corporate affairs. "Anything is possible."

Five days before the movie's scheduled premiere in New York on Tuesday, Wal-Mart released a 10-page press release criticizing it as "propaganda video." The missive dusted off three pages of negative reviews of Greenwald's nonpolitical films, including a 25-year-old Newsweek thumbs-down for the Newton-John dud "Xanadu," which said, "Robert Greenwald, the director, should look into another line of work."

[...]

It's been a public week of soul-searching for the retailer, not all of it intentional. A leaked internal memo from Wal-Mart's executive vice president of benefits, Susan Chambers, conceded that nearly half its workforce is uninsured or on Medicaid and noted that overall, its workers spend double the national average on health care. The memo was a rare admission that criticism is affecting the company, whose stock price has fallen 21 percent in the past year.

The leak followed several we're-going-to-do-better announcements from Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, who promised to improve health benefits and cut energy use at stores. On Friday in Washington, D.C., Wal-Mart plans to hold an academic conference on its economic impact, both locally and nationally.

The "Wal-Mart" DVD isn't the only dart being aimed at the chain, however. The next month will bring a wave of Wal-Mart analysis from liberal publications, which, in an unusual example of cooperation, are timing their stories for the release of the "Wal-Mart" movie.

The Nation, the American Prospect, In These Times and the San Francisco-based online site Alternet are all scheduled to run stories examining everything from Wal-Mart's opposition to union organizing to the philanthropy of its founders, the Walton family.

In his previous house-party film, Greenwald took a swing at Fox News for aping Republican talking points and contributing to a conservative echo chamber. Alternet Executive Editor Don Hazen, who coordinated the timed pieces, insisted this is different.

"This is not everybody saying the same thing," said Hazen, whose site is selling the "Wal-Mart" DVD. "Everybody has their own take.

[...]

Borrowing a page from the conservative playbook's reliance on the religious right, the film's accompanying campaign is being anchored by faith leaders.

"It is about creating a moral economy," said the Rev. Ron Stief, a Washington-based leader for United Church of Christ, whose churches are hosting dozens of screenings. "Fifty percent of our congregations are rural, and these communities are seeing the impact of Wal-Mart every day," in the demise of mom-and-pop businesses, he said.

The film's backers face a challenge, however  --  many communities have welcomed Wal-Mart. More than 11,000 people filed applications to work at the chain's new store in East Oakland, a job-starved area that other retailers have shunned. The store has been bustling since it opened in August, and the neighborhood has 400 new jobs.

[...]

Odd coincidence

It just occurred to me as I was watching the movie, that for some peculiar reason I just happened to have here at home from Netflix "Judgment at Nuremberg" with Spencer Tracy, which I was watching tonight, and then I realized what the first story was I saw on the morning news programs today, the passing of Simon Wiesenthal, the relentless Nazi war criminal hunter.

The odd thing is that this isn't the first time I've had Netflix serendipity. I'm blanking on the exact film names (maybe I'll remember in the night and come back and add it to this post), but on at least two other occaisions, the films I just happened to have at home off my Netflix queue exactly matched something that happened that day.

Oh, I remember one. I had a documentary (I'm a geek, I love documentaries) on the Alaska earthquake and tsunami of Good Friday 1964, and since I'm from Alaska, I always watch that stuff with a strange intensity, having heard the earthquake stories while growing up. But I was watching that film on Christmas, and at work at CNN Headline News through the entire holiday, including that Sunday December 26, when the massive quake and tsunami hit south Asia.

(I wasn't the only one having weird vibes then, my mom woke up in Alaska at 3 am that night and for some reason turned the TV on. When she called me at the time I'd be up, 4 time zones ahead of her, she told me she'd been watching tsunami stories all night and couldn't get back to sleep. Odd, because that early we had no idea it would be that bad, on the a.m. of the day it actually hit. By the time I got to work that afternoon, I was certain we hadn't seen anywhere near the scope of what was happening, but that's just from looking at the magnitude climb upward, and having just stared at all those pictures of how Seward, Alaska had been wiped off the map in 1964 just the night before.

Link: Simon Wiesenthal Is Dead at 96; Tirelessly Pursued Nazi Fugitives - New York Times.

Simon Wiesenthal Is Dead at 96; Tirelessly Pursued Nazi Fugitives

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL Published: September 21, 2005

Simon Wiesenthal, the death camp survivor who dedicated the rest of his life to tracking down fugitive Nazi war criminals, died yesterday at his home in Vienna. He was 96.

[...]

After hairbreadth escapes from death, two suicide attempts and his liberation by American forces in Austria in 1945, Mr. Wiesenthal abandoned his profession as an architectural engineer and took on a new calling: memorializing the six million of his fellow Jews and perhaps five million other noncombatants who were systematically murdered by the Nazis, and bringing their killers to justice.

His results were checkered: claims that he had flushed out nearly 1,100 war criminals were disputed.

But his role as a stubborn sleuth on the trail of history's archfiends helped keep the spotlight on a hideous past that he said too much of the world was disposed to forget.

"To young people here, I am the last," he told an interviewer in Vienna in 1993. "I'm the one who can still speak. After me, it's history."

[...]

With a grave and tenacious manner, undercurrents of humor and a flair for gaining attention, he was lionized in 1989 in an HBO movie "Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story," based on his memoirs and starring Ben Kingsley.

A character modeled on him was played by Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1978 film "The Boys From Brazil" (though Mr. Wiesenthal was mortified by his depiction as a bumbler).

He served as a consultant for yet another thriller, "The Odessa File."

Dozens of nations and institutions honored him: the list of his awards, typed single-space, takes up nearly an entire dense page. But one prize that eluded him, to his great disappointment, was the Nobel Peace Prize.

[...]

Calling himself "the bad conscience of the Nazis," he vowed to continue his efforts "until the day I die." His goal, he said, was not vengeance but ensuring that Nazi crimes "are brought to light so the new generation knows about them, so it should not happen again."

It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87th birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to Simon Wiesenthal.

He wrote grippingly of the German killing industry, cataloging at one point a list of property sent to Berlin from the Treblinka death camp between October 1942 and August 1943: "Twenty-five freight cars of women's hair, 248 freight cars of clothing, 100 freight cars of shoes," along with 400,000 gold watches, 320,000 pounds of gold wedding rings and 4,000 carats of diamonds "over 2 carats."

[...]

"Judgment at Nuremberg" isn't an easy film to watch repeatedly, but like "Triumph of the Will," which I own and watch once a year, I may have to buy this one too. I don't know why I remain drawn to these stories, like the tremendous French documentary "Night and Fog," which also must not be missed. It strikes me every time I watch this Spencer Tracy trial how much it hinges on the showing of the films. All the arguments and witnesses cannot face down one way or another the visual impact of film in this instance.

Burt Lancaster really gives an amazing performance here too. He's just so intense, even when he isn't saying a word.

PBS's Frontline Rocks & Rolls

Link: frontline: faith and doubt at ground zero | PBS.

Is this not the smartest, I mean, purely BRAINIEST show on television, or what?!

Every time I watch Frontline, I am struck by how terrific the show is (and the web site rocks even more than the show, if that is possible. The Frontline web site demonstrates in what an informative and investigative web site can be).

The impact is even stronger for me when Frontline touches on subjects that I've researched in some depth myself. It is one thing to learn stuff about things I know little about. That involves some trust, especially for someone as critical as I try to be.

But when they take an aspect of an issue and really probe the experts on it, and the issue happens to be something I've studied, I am struck speechless, because I've NEVER seen a TV show represent nuances of scholarship so carefully, presenting the different camps in different disciplines, giving the finely delineated viewpoints their due, yet doing it in a way that the lay audience might not even be aware of the threads, the invisible footnotes, the schools of thought behind the different positions, an erudition that never makes a lay audience feel dumb or stupid, yet the advanced students and researchers still can recognize and smile at the influence of this book or that theory.

Wow. I just have to stop and reflect for a second on HOW HARD that is to do, as a writer, as a journalist, and as a bit of a wonk myself.

You'd have to be relentless in pursuit of that goal, just to even get close to pulling it off. After all, these are the days of conflating finer points, the erasure of deep thinking.

OK, so I'll quit gushing now and point up the show that set off my admiration: "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero."

What would you expect from a show like that for a four-year anniversary? Rehashing old video, old first person accounts, glorifying the heros, demonizing the villains? Tropes must be starting to get overworn by now. Still far from how cliche'd the average Beatles documentaries are (they all sound alike, right down to the rhythms of video editing).

Would you expect a sophisticated review of the nature of evil, the role of religion, fanaticism and belief, extremism, and even ethical and meta-ethical systems of thought? Would you expect a TV show to look behind the surfaces of the polarized extremes and TRY TO FIGURE OUT, honestly try to figure out the complicated motivations, to give them their due?

Wow.

There's a woman narrating for some parts, and I don't like her voice. There's a reason for that. I don't know the woman's name, but she is a frequent voice-over person for a lot of poorly-written Discovery Channel and History Channel religious documentaries, the kind that show up around the times of Christian holidays. When she does those VOs (not this one), she often gets the LAMEST lines or Biblical quotes, after which she gives a pregnant pause and over-reverently utters the Biblical footnote reference, as if she were sitting in church instead of reading a documentary script. Drives me bonkers. There, I got my one dissenting point out of the way.

OK, I gotta go finish reading through every bit of the web site on this program. I was too deep in Katrina stuff to be aware of this program when it was first aired. I'll let you know, but for right now, I think this may become my second or third favorite Frontline program ever. I have to check their archives and list out some of my other favorites.

Here's a bit of the New York Times review of this show by Caryn James:

... "The anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is more than a week away, but the harsh truth is that many viewers are already feeling overwhelmed and resistant, wondering, How much more do we need to see?

"There are some surprising answers in the first wave of anniversary documentaries. ... They include one extraordinary work on 'Frontline' called 'Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.' It is an elegantly made, unsentimental look at the widely varied ways in which the terror attacks affected religious beliefs, an important issue no other program has dealt with so thoroughly or thoughtfully. ...

"The opening segment, with images of people tumbling to their deaths, is graphic enough to make some viewers turn the program off, but that would be a mistake; it quickly becomes less horrifyingly familiar and more philosophical. It raises the unanswerable question -- what is the nature of evil? -- and approaches it with tough-mindedness, clarity, and respect for every response. The answers come from clergymen and artists, from survivors of the attacks and families of its victims, shown against simple but visually graceful backdrops of churches and offices. ...

Here's Newsday's Diane Werts:

"'Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero' spends two hours tonight joining that inner conversation, not as a 'Frontline' news report but as another individual voice -- one distinct enough to speak plainly, elucidate familiar questions, raise new perspectives, and provoke private contemplation. You've heard talk of interactive television? Forget those technical bells and whistles. This is interactive TV, at its most elementally intimate.

"Victims, widows, bereaved parents, witnesses, priests, rabbis and Islamic scholars pour out their spiritual sorrows, fears and anger to producer Helen Whitney, with raw sincerity. ...

"Two hours may seem a long time to involve yourself in such visceral viewing (and indeed it can start feeling draggy three-quarters of the way through). But that duration also provides each person interviewed with an unhurried chance to say his or her piece. ...

"These are no sound bites. They're living, breathing, evolving perspectives whose humanity weaves its way into the spiritual fabric inside ourselves. 'Faith and Doubt' presents one personal confession after another that begs to be measured against your own. ...

"With compassion (and subtle artistry in music and visual images), Whitney tries to open our eyes to the personal, palpable impact of the religious convictions that direct so many lives in such meaningful yet starkly different ways." ...

Oddly, my ALL-TIME favorite Frontline piece ever, I mean literally to this day, is also related to the Sept 11th attacks, is "John O'Neill: the Man Who Knew."

Link: frontline: the man who knew | PBS.

Link: frontline: the man who knew: what if...: an update: john o'neill and the 9/11 commission | PBS.

I have read every page and every link on that John O'Neill program, it so blew my mind. (I see now it's been updated with the findings of the 9/11 Commission). I can't even begin to say how much I learned from that one, about 9/11, about the mystery that was John O'Neill (some massively bizarre karma there), AND what I learned about what a web site can be and do. Go read it right now!

I'm trying to remember what that other favorite was... I think it was the deep report on the credit card industry in the U.S., a Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino character in "The Insider") project, I believe.

Here it is, the Secret History of the Credit Card Industry.

Link: frontline: secret history of the credit card: more to explore: the ascendancy of the credit card industry | PBS.

Link: frontline: secret history of the credit card: watch online | PBS.

OK, I'll shut up now and go root around some more on the Frontline web site.

Chris

One of the great mysteries of my lifetime is solved

W. Mark Felt says that he is Woodward and Bernstein's "Deep Throat."

The guy who said "Follow the money." The person who was instrumental in exposing former president Richard Nixon as corrupt and a crook.

He reportedly comes out of the closet in a Vanity Fair interview. He's 91 years old and decided it was time.

The odd thing is that last night I was going through a old file cabinet, the scrapbook drawer in it. I found the old grade school artwork, the graded math papers, early attempts at writing cursive (dyslexia messed that up... I stopped even trying by eighth grade). But the funniest thing I found was a letter I wrote to my congressman on my 11th birthday in 1973, on thin onion skin airmail paper. Spidery script, offering my solution to the gas crisis. I suggested adding some kind of substance to gasoline, to make it last longer.

And today I also remember that I was such an odd kid, I followed the Watergate story obsessively. Not the original break-in, cuz that didn't penetrate my 11-year-old world.  For the 1972 presidential election, our school held a mock election and I styled myself some kind of grade school pollster, but those independent Wisconsin kids wouldn't tell me how they were going to vote, so I'd been quite disappointed at that failed occupation. Oh, the setbacks of fifth grade!

But the scandal that came after propelled me all the way through secondary school, to becoming a correspondent and photographer for the local paper at age 16, and heading straight for J-school after high school graduation.

Maybe I should thank or blame Mark Felt.

Chris

Ex-FBI man claims to be "Deep Throat" -US magazine

WASHINGTON, May 31 (Reuters) - Vanity Fair magazine said on
Tuesday that Mark Felt, a former FBI official, had revealed
himself to be "Deep Throat," the legendary source who leaked
Watergate scandal secrets to the Washington Post and brought
down President Richard Nixon.

Unmasking the identity of "Deep Throat," a key source for
Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would solve one
of the greatest political and journalistic mysteries of recent
history.

The magazine said Felt, now a retiree living in Santa Rosa,
California, had admitted his role in the scandal to his family
and had cooperated with the story. It is the first time a major
potential source has claimed to be "Deep Throat."

OK, so I'm a big goober...

The trailer just went up (yesterday? today? I'm not sure exactly when... that's beside the point) for HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE.

I''m such a nutcase, watching it (see it here) gave me chills. Hey Apple, why don't we have a choice of three different sizes or something! I want to see it bigger! [UPDATE: when you open the link on a Mac, it launches iTunes and that gives four different resolution sizes]

The link below is to a cool Goblet of Fire page, but there's not much up there yet.

Link: Harry Potter: The Goblet of Fire.

If you haven't read the book yet, do. This is one of my favorites. I became enchanted while doing the audio book while driving cross country. The guy who does the Harry Potter audio book voices is better than any I've ever heard, and the voices on Goblet of Fire are just SO cool!

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire