Get Your War On.  [Boing Boing Blog] [t e c h n o c u l t u r e]

SplashPower’s mat charges your gizmos

“You could soon be saying goodbye to having several different chargers for all your handheld gadgets like your mobile phone or MP3 player,” says the BBC. Plug SpashPower’s mat into the mains, plonk down your gizmos and they are charged by magnetic induction. [onlineblog.com]

CNN and the denial of death: more from Scott Rosenberg
This most humane of US journalists writes…

“I just haven’t had it in me to go bonkers posting war links — links wondering about whether that was Saddam or a double, links wondering why shock and awe hasn’t started yet, shocked and awed links now that it has, and so on. Mostly I’m pitching in with my colleagues here, where we keep asking ourselves what stories should be covered that others haven’t already over-covered.

During times like this the onslaught of pure informational noise is so overwhelming that one feels reluctant to contribute to it.

TV is the worst. On the one hand, I feel obligated to tune in, because these are the images the whole nation is taking in as representations of this conflict, and I better know them. On the other, I could only bear about a half hour of CNN this afternoon before having to turn it off.

A correspondent had cornered the leader of a bomber sortie on the deck of an aircraft carrier; the flier had just landed, we were told, just gotten out of his plane, and here was CNN’s embeddee, buttonholing him with a microphone. Oh, he was game, smiling, still soaring on adrenaline, no doubt thrilled to be back and alive and with all of his men. But — and I say this as a charge against the medium, not against the man in uniform, who I’m sure if he had a choice in the matter would not have picked Mr. CNN as his first stop out of the cockpit — there was something obscene about the whole thing. Nothing in that carrier-deck exchange acknowledged the gravity of the moment, the fact that this man had just returned from dropping massive explosives on the ground, weapons that had quite possibly left people — enemy soldiers, civilians; human beings — dead.

War kills people. Whether you feel that this war is justified or not, whether you agree with Bush’s decision to invade or not, you cannot truly “support our soldiers” without acknowledging the skull beneath the skin of battle — without staying conscious of the fact that everyone involved, on both sides, is in mortal jeopardy as long as this war proceeds.

For all the whizzbang 3D maps and crawling newsblip texts and live satellite feeds and pyrotechnic skyline shots, the hyperactive screens of the cable news channels have no room for this one truth. And to me that makes the whole medium feel like a lie.” [Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

The fug of war

One of the things that infuriates me about Bush-style warfare is the way it turns grown journalists into zombies. Witness the way they have breathlessly repeated the ludicrous phrase “shock and awe”. Apart from the fact that it represents the lexicon of the kindergarten, it has an interesting racist overtone. What it really says is this: “We are going to show these primitive folks some of our technological magic so that they can be impressed by our power and sophistication”. White man have big flying machine hit bullseye heap good. One expects this kind of bullshit from military jargonauts. But why do adult journalists have to repeat it verbatim? The explanation is, of course, that they are themselves overawed. In my experience, very few journalists are actually immune to the halo-effect of great power or great wealth.

Wonderful piece by Scott Rosenberg about Bush and the war

He was invited by Dave Winer to publish it via DaveNet in the hope of giving it an even wider audience. It deserves it.

Really useful advice from Her Majesty’s Government

What to do in the event of a chemical or biological attack? Why, “go indoors and listen for specific instructions which will be broadcast on the radio”. We should also take “sensible precautions” such as having battery powered torches, radio, ready to eat food, bottled water and blankets close to hand. However, the government says there is no need at present to take further measures such as stockpiling food or buying a gasmask.

Phew! I feel better already.

Larry Lessig on Michael Powell and the FCC’s attitude towards spectrum

Larry thinks that Michael (son of Colin) Powell may, in the long run, come to be more famous than his father. Why? Because the FCC Chairman is beginning to flirt with the idea that maybe the electromagnetic spectrum should be a commons rather than a monopoly resource to be allocated or sold by government. This links with my earlier pointer to David Reed’s conjecture that the notion of finite spectrum is based on a fundamental misconception.

Chris Patten gets a proper job at last

Chris Patten, former Cabinet Minister, former Governor of Hong Kong, and current EU Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, has been elected Chancellor of Oxford University. One of my colleagues was an undergraduate at Balliol with him and remembers sprawling on a lawn with the great man after Finals ended. The conversation turned to what they were going to do after university. “I’m going into politics”, Patten said. “Oh really”, said my colleague, “which party?”. “Don’t know yet”, replied Patten, “I’ve written to both”. I liked what Patten said recently when a journalist asked him whether the EU would contribute to the rebuilding of Iraq after the Anglo-American invasion. He replied that he thought the appropriate rule would be what china and porcelain shops all over the world say to browsing customers: “If you break it, you own it”.

The White House press corps quote game

From Scott Rosenberg of Salon: Readers of the letters page on Jim Romenesko’s media news blog were treated this week to a remarkable admission about how the White House news operation cooks quotes — and how the press plays along. Washington Post economics correspondent Jonathan Weisman told the sorry tale, in detail that makes any conscientious reporter cringe. Weisman wanted to interview a particular administration economist; the White House press office insisted not only that the interview be considered off the record, but also that all quotes from the interview be run by the press office before publication. (I’m finding this confusing already since I’ve always understood “off the record” to mean no quotes at all — “Not for attribution” is when you’re okay with being quoted but don’t want your names on the quote.)

Weisman’s source actually said, “This is probably the most academic proposal ever to come out of an administration,” but upon reviewing his quote, the press office said, the official wanted it to read, instead, “This is probably the purest, most far reaching economic proposal ever to come out of an administration.” Gee, I wonder why?

Weisman assented to this whole process but later had second thoughts: “The notion that reporters are routinely submitting quotations for approval, and allowing those quotes to be manipulated to get that approval, strikes me as a step beyond business as usual.”

Uh, yeah. It’s more than a step beyond business as usual. It’s insane, outrageous, unconscionable. This is Journalism 101; it’s basic. You don’t let people review their quotes after they talk to you because they always have second thoughts about the most revealing things that they say. In the situation Weisman describes, of course, we don’t even know whether it was the original speaker who had second thoughts, or whether the quote-doctoring was being stage-managed by a press office enforcing a party line.

I empathize with the reporter whose tough assignment is to write stories about any White House — particularly one, like Bush’s, that is determined to close ranks and let no truth trickle out to the press. If your job is to get quotes from the White House and the White House says you don’t get quotes unless you play by our rules, maybe you have no choice.

What you do have a choice about is what you reveal about the process by which you got your quotes. And so, while I’m grateful that Weisman chose to blow the whistle via his letter to Romenesko, the place he should have done this was in his story. Just as a good newspaper will alert its readers to the fact that a report from the front has been reviewed by military censors, a quote from the White House that the White House got to doctor should come with, in essence, a consumer warning.

What I’d really love to know, now that Weisman has opened the door on this abuse a crack, is just how widespread it is. Weisman says it’s “fairly standard.” If newspaper editors told their reporters to tell readers every time a quote had been pre-reviewed by the White House, how frequently would the columns of the Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the other pillars of our journalistic establishment have to stop to note such a betrayal of their own ethics? And how soon would the insidious practice end?

[Source: Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

George Soros on American over-confidence
He was writing in the Straits Times but its archives are for subscribers only, so I can’t point to the online source, but here’s an excerpt:

“I see parallels between the Bush administration’s pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not arise out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but misconception distorts reality. Here, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of American supremacy the misconception. For a while, reality reinforces the misconception, but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable.”

It’s not the war itself we should worry about, but the aftermath, Soros argues: “Rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. Oil prices could fall, stock markets could celebrate, consumers could resume spending, and business could step up capital expenditures. America would end its dependency on Saudi oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations could start with North Korea without loss of face. That is what Mr Bush counts on. But military victory in Iraq is the easy part. It is what comes after that gives pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception which gave rise to it. That is to be feared here.”