Hate Sites Bash Lieberman. Not being a devotee of hate sites, I was waiting with curiosity for someone to look into the extent of their reaction. It was a good bet that Sen. Liebeman’s selection would draw the recrement out into the open. Not that anti-Semites’ bias will affect the election, as it’s likely they wouldn’t’ve voted for the Gore ticket no matter who held the second spot…although a reader points out that the Democrats will have to contend not only with the brand of anti-Semitism espoused by ultra-right-wing crazies but the more significant issue of black anti-Semitism, which seems never to go away. For example, Dallas NAACP President Lee Alcorn’s reactions to the vice-presidential selection recently earned him a suspension and repudiation by national NAACP leadership. Wired, Washington Post

Death Row Roll Call has a calendar of the executions scheduled for the current month. Death penalty opponents or those concerned about a particular death sentence can click on the name of a condemned prisoner to send letters to the pertinent governor requesting a stay of execution. The Nation

Boom Box. Buy TiVo or ReplayTV (the set-top “black boxes” with hard drives that promise the ultimate in TV-viewing convenience) and destroy the mass-marketing economy, the author begins by saying, because they perfect the promise of the VCR to allow time-shifting and skipping commercials. (By the way, if you’re buying one of these, Replay has a true instantaneous 30-second skip button, the length of a typical commercial, while TiVo just has fast-, faster- and fastest-forward so you still waste your time being exposed to a subliminal version of the advertising content. The mass marketers got to TiVo in time, but not to Replay.) But then he goes wrong and focuses for the rest of the article on the way these boxes spy on you, collecting a precise profile of your viewing tastes — not hour-by-hour so much as second-by-second. In fact, the set-top boxes themselves are being sold at an enormous loss with the real profit coming from TiVO’s and Replay’s data-mining. And he doesn’t bat an eye at the privacy implications of this; his point is that it will destroy the mass-market economy, both promising and requiring true targeted niche advertising and “boutique” marketing.

Here’s where I think the yarn he spins is built on a specious premise. It’s likely you won’t be able to opt out of having your demographics reported back, and certainly most Americans are not concerned enough (about their privacy and the battle for their minds waged by advertisers and the commercial concerns they represent) to resist buying these things if they make TV viewing so much more convenient. So predictions of their massive penetration into viewers’ households over the next decade are probably accurate. (I won’t be buying one — unless someone figures a way to opt out iof, or hack out, the bidirectionality — because (a) my family and I are just not that interested in convenient TV viewing, and we don’t believe there’s ever going to be worthwhile content as long as the point of programming remains selling advertising time; (b) we won’t collaborate so readily in becoming passive consumer pawns (hell, we won’t even use a supermarket discount card because we realize that it’s not the savings, stupid, the real point of them is to track your buying habits); and (c) we can effectively program a VCR.) However, why count on the fact that a viewer will wait around looking at a commercial interruption to their favorite show long enough to even find out it targets their interests? Data indicate that 88% of commercials are killed right now by current users of these boxes, and I wouldn’t expect that to change. And there doesn’t appear to be anything about the technology that requires a bidirectional connection; sooner or later someone will begin selling a passive equivalent that connects downstream of your cable box and doesn’t upload data, just to make a good old-fashioned hardware profit as a new improved successor to the VCR. Finally, if mass-advertising on TV is dead in the water in the absence of perfect targeted niche advertising, it won’t mean the end of mass-marketing and the mass marketers as much as just a shift in their advertising media, much as big tobacco has survived after the ban on TV ads. This technology, if it kills anything, is more likely to be the death knell of the networks than the mass marketing economy. Sunday New York Times Magazine

‘Clueless’ at Sea… Again

Dead in the water. Catastrophic die-offs of native lobsters after New York began insecticide spraying to prevent West Nile virus outbreak. New Scientist

San Franciscans fight plan for glitzy museum. “…a kitschy, Las Vegas-style tourist trap…”

Visitors. New York artists salivate over the London art scene, by comparison.

“In a twist of ethical irony, media

custodian Steven Brill’s Web venture

Contentville has repelled many writers,

editors and academics since it debuted

July 5. Writers are claiming that Brill is

selling their copyrighted articles by

licensing them through little-known

library archiving companies that now

want a piece of the e-commerce booty.

The e-commerce site — also funded by

Microsoft, NBC, CBS and Primedia —

promises that readers will rejoice at its

menu of books, articles, TV transcripts

and old speeches, for sale starting at $2.95

each. But creators and publishers are

accusing Brill of turning a blind eye as

partners EBSCO (magazine articles) and

Bell & Howell (dissertations) seemingly

stretched the terms of licensing clauses…” Feed

First draft of McCain’s R2K speech:

“Dick, I remember after your second — maybe your third —

heart attack, I remember visiting you in the convalescent

center. You looked so sickly my friend, like you weren’t

going to make it, and I remember we had a real

heart-to-heart. In addition to talking with you about your

DUI conviction, your five military deferments during the

Vietnam War, and your votes against outlawing cop-killer

bullets and plastic guns, we talked about how much you

love your country, and in particular how much you love its

oil.

America, Dick, needs you.” Salon

Review: The many meanings of ‘Nymphomania’. A social history of the concept. Have we managed to immprove on Kinsey’s quip: “A nymphomaniac is someone who has more sex

than you do” ? CNN.com

Rights for People, Not for Cultures. Should cultures have an intrinsic right to survive? What does cultural survival mean, in fact?

Play about my life is stupid, says Hawking. The cosmologist has attacked the forthcoming

play God and Stephen Hawking as “deeply offensive,

stupid and worthless.”

Rethinking the Dancing Mania. Thoughtful essay by Australian sociologist on the dancing frenzies that swept Europe during the Middle Ages. Psychopathology? Mass hysteria? Deviant religious sects? Ergot poisoning? Skeptical Inquirer

Self-destruct: Many difficult diseases with which modern medicine grapples are autoimmune. It’s been fruitful to seek infections that may precipitate the autoimmune attack on a body’s organs. Now it appears that “infection with a rotavirus, the commonest cause of

gastro-enteritis in children, may lead to childhood diabetes.

Although this suggests that rotavirus vaccines could help

prevent diabetes, it also raises fears that the vaccines

themselves could trigger the disease.” New Scientist

A game of polo with a headless goat, kiss-the-girl-or-get-horsewhipped, and other excitements. The Sunday Times of London

Give It Away. “…while the U.S. media

represent France as silly, U.S. academics seek out

those French thinkers who seem to fit the bill.

As a result, some of the most interesting scholars

in France today you never hear about at all.” David Graeber, a Yale anthropologist, profiles the Maussians. In These Times

Decline and Fall (cont’d.): The Taste of Fear. Village Voice profile of the new phenomenon of “surfing” atop New York City subway trains. So far in 2000, three deaths and two critically injuries are identified with the practice.

Ripples and Puddles (Hans Moravec): “Like little ripples on the surface of a deep,

turbulent pool, calculation and other kinds of

procedural thought are possible only when the

turbulence is quelled. Humans achieve quiescence

imperfectly by intense concentration. Much easier

to discard the pesky abyss altogether: ripples are

safer in a shallow pan. Numbers are better

manipulated as calculus stones or abacus beads

than in human memory.” Edge

The Jedediahs vs. the Daves: Does Irony Illuminate Or Corrupt? Stop me if I get too ironic; I agree with this essayist that most irony-mongers use it to convey an insupportable superiority, an attempt at a wink of the eye at an audience only too happy to share in the knowing joke. New York Times

“The police are everywhere,” said one Los Angeles resident.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the LAPD walking the beat.” Reuters

Peruvian Plant Extracts Active Against TB, Other Diseases. A medical research team from Washington University, two Peruvian universities, and the GD Searle pharmaceutical company collaborating wiht the Aguaruna, an indigenous people of Peru, have found that extracts from more than 40% of plants identified by the Aguaruna as having healing properties were active in pharmacological assays. Searle will develop drugs from the medicinal plants under study.

Man Given Wish to Die When Eye Blink Fails

A British judge has granted a 19 y.o. man severely

disabled with motor neuron disease his wish to die when he loses his final means of

communicating by blinking his left eye, newspapers said Friday. Reuters

‘Clueless’ at Sea… Again