Answer, write a blog about Gawker - do it well, show that you can write and it will end up on their radar.

Which after all is a repeat of Gawkers' method itself: Write a gossip column where the initial subjects are other gossip columnists, hacks and flacks, then it will get noticed by the people who promote stuff. Down right PReditorial!

Flattery will get you everywhere.

Chris Mohney did just that, with arguably the longest ever resume:
Gawkerist: Nick Denton Finally Pays Us to Stop Blogging

I overheard someone today use the cliché that Money is the root of all evil, the popular misquotation of 'love of money is the root of all evil'.

Its an expression that is often accepted as a truism, and yet from forced collectivization to people flying planes into buildings, people who live for ideas seem to have a worse track record.

Capitalism actually has a fairly good record with regards to corruption and intolerance, compared to strongly ideological cultures based upon extreme secularism such as Stalinist Communism or extreme religion, such as Wahabism particularly within multi-cultural societies where any one ideology would necessarily conflict with some other people's beliefs.

From the deforestation of the Amazon to the Slave trade to Tobacco sales plenty of evil is done for pure profit.

But there is a difference - many of the cynical abuses for profit have been ended without major conflict, precisely because there is no bogus ideological justification. In the last century alone, which was defined by secular rather than religious ideology, Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin accounted for more than 100 million deaths.

Obviously there are exceptions, the US Slave Trade did play a role in the Civil War, but was not its only cause, in the rest of the world it was dismantled relatively peacefully - actually by early evangelicals. In China the Opium war was purely driven by commercial interests.

More generally, wars over resources such as the current and, no doubt, future oil wars are the norm - but they are the catalyst rather than the fuel of conflict.

Societies which allow people to buy and sell what people want, to make the movies people want, write the books that people want seem to become places where all sorts of ideas jostle together and evolve. Money is a numeric abstraction that facilitates the trade of ideas and goods. It would be nice if all of this could happen without money, but that does not seem practical outside of Club Med or Burning Man.

One of the things about capitalism, the doctrine of money, is that of all the isms it is arguably the least ideological, it operates at the lowest level of all, that of numbers. There is no ancient text or teaching that it is based on. If cultures do need a ism as a foundation, best to choose the one that is empty.

Money is not a moral framework for society; it is amoral but not immoral. Its moral emptiness allows it to underpin a culture which allows for multiple ideologies to compete, with no overriding doctrine.

- sorry bad post, am ranting.

Salman Rushdie attacks an article in the Guardian by Dylan Evans which proposes a moderate atheist stance.

The problem with the moderate stance is that there is no compromise between belief and non-belief in the context of religion – if you say: I believe what there is evidence for then you don’t have faith.

Evans’ proposal is that religion be treated as “kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false”. This is a description of fiction and no self-respecting believer would accept that.

Salman Rushdie knows all about fiction and faith, he was sentenced to death, without trial for publishing a work of fiction which was incompatible with the Koran. And, as people have recently died in protests over allegations that the Koran was desecrated in Guantanamo, a man was beheaded in Saudi Arabia for owning a Bible. This week, R. Albert Mohler for the Christian Post writes: “One of the most venerable and valuable axioms of warfare is this: "Know your enemy." Naturalistic evolution and the materialist worldview represent the most threatening enemies Christianity now faces in the Western world.” In India, right-wing Hindus have resurrected the outlawed tradition of burning widows.

There are, as Rushdie points out, dead religions, whose texts live on as fiction, due their artistic merit, such as Greek or Norse mythology.

In between are the texts which are frozen and unmaleable, but still hold enough relevance to be venerated. At our point in history, the most militant of these (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are variations of the monotheistic Abrahamic sect and contain a morality based on a world view, which, although anachronistic, has enough overlap with today to seem superficially believable.

Then there are the texts that are being written, through debate and scientific and cultural interpretation.

At the point where these texts are frozen and no longer open to challenge, compromise or debate, cease to be science or art and often become the focal point for nascent religions or cults. The problem is that a compromise view of religion would mean adopting the unfrozen, adaptable texts and people are prepared to murder each other over the hair-splitting differences of various existing texts rather than adopt new ones, let alone the obvious problems with challenging the 'word of God'.

You cannot be both a Muslim and a Christian, but to define yourself as one or the other means that you are taking a stance that is far more extreme and specific than adopting something as radically different as a view of the world that is open to ideas outside of any existing religious text.

The way essentially good and moderate people deal with this is of course - to not think too hard about it, to have faith and not to question. Unfortunately in this instance, the extremists and the stupid will always win, they will see independent thought as a threat which provokes an intellectual inferiority complex and this will harden the resolve to pass the buck for reason, empathy and guidance to an abstract authority - God.

In a world governed by both God and the second law of thermodynamics, extremists will always do more damage than good people. Religion is the framework that allows the extremists to win over the moderates.

Byron LaMasters reports on the Stem Cell debate in Congress.

Bush has threatened to Veto on the grounds that:

He opposes that which "destroys life in order to save life".

By logical extension, this means that Bush is opposed to most defense spending.

Great account by David Corn of his Fox news confrontation with the Family Research Council, an Unchristian Wrong lobby group: Fighting the Family Research Council in the Religious War.

It includes a tragi-comic description of government funded contraception group that not only believes that sex is dirty but that you can only practice abstinence if you believe in Jesus - otherwise you will, apparently, burn in hell, forever. (Off Fuck and Die?)

The FRC are one of the main lobby groups pushing for no compromise in the 1.5% of judicial nominations that couldn't get through, thus causing the current constitutional mess.

It is easy to blame the standoff on the executive branch and Jeff blames it on the Senate, but the real problem is that the marginal extremists are throwing such a hissy fit that the government is being bullied by them. Moderate Republicans are being bitch slapped by the Right.

You might reasonably ask what the hell a Brit cares about all this anyway - well, it seems to me that a lot of what I really like about America, principally that it is modern, is really at stake here, just because a minority of people seem to have boundless energy and blinkered vision.

I didn't move to the States to live like the Amish or the Seventh Day Adventists or the People's Liberation Front of Judea or the Stepford Wives love Falwell Association.

I like the bright lights and neon and the science, cullture and understanding that made progress possible.

Having finally got to meet my all time favorite tech writer, Jon Udell at the Syndicate conference last week, I said how much I enjoyed his screencast tutorials. In light of that am putting together a some screencasts of how to use Wists. This one is the most simple, showing how to add a bookmark while browsing. (A trick overlooked by most people is being able to highlight and drag text from the page being bookmarked to the bookmarklet description field).
I'll post more screencasts to the Wists blog, although we are working on redoing the Wists UI, so more on that shortly.

One of the things that the unchristian wrong are good at is making sure that a significant portion of safe surfing products for children also block out sites which promote science or political thinking that doesn't tally with their own medieval sense of morality. By providing free software they tailor the web to their own ideology. Hmm, time to fight back.

I'd personally rather have any child of mine be able to learn about things on the web as well as block porn - so I'd be interested in creating an alternative family filter for people who want their kids to be educated.

For example it could block sites such as WorldNetDaily, Jerry Falwell properties, Creationist drivel etc. etc.

"...hundreds of thousands of young Americans are now patrolling and guarding hazardous frontiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is there a single thinking person who does not hope that secular forces arise in both countries, and who does not realize that the success of our cause depends on a wall of separation, in Islamic society, between church and state? How can we maintain this cause abroad and subvert it at home?"

The piece is by Hitchens who skillfully tears a bunch of arseholes a new bunch of arseholes. While I sometimes wonder about Hitchen's integrity - he does seem to now be digging himself out of the pit he has created for himself over the last 2 years, by supporting secular libertarianism, which is surely the future for US politics.

Hitchens is a good writer, his pen as dangerous a weapon when he was on the left as on the right. Hopefully he is finding a middle ground that will be constructive.

OpinionJournal - Extra

What we are seeing is a very interesting form of meme, a meme that is propagated in the exact same form, unmutated, by hosts who both support and oppose the idea coveyed by the meme itself.

Republicans have tried to refer to filibuster amendment as the 'Byrd option' or the 'constitutional option'. Josh Marshall points to a memo urging Republicans not to use the 'nuclear option' epithet.

What is interesting is that both sides cannot help but use the term, despite the fact that it looks like a purely pejorative phrase.

This is an unusually viral phrase because of its dual appeal. It appeals to Republicans because of its viscerally combative stance and to Democrats because of its alarmist quality.

If one looks at memes such as religious ideas, they obviously transfer from one believer to another. Imagine an entire idea system as perfectly symmetrical as the 'nuclear option' phrase that infected both believers and non-believers. This would be like an end-game meme - one that spread far more quickly than normal but at the expense of a lower mutation rate.

The spin:
On the face of it, it looks like it is the Democrats that are being stubborn by threatening to filibuster judicial nominees.

The reality:
The numbers show something different, the Senate agreed to approve all but 1.5% of judicial nominees, and the Republicans are threatening to change one of the fundamental checks and balances on government to have things 100% instead of 98.5% their own way.

"Since Bush took office, he has made 218 judicial nominations and the Senate has confirmed 208 of them. Ten, including Owen, failed to win confirmation because of Democratic filibusters. Seven of those 10 were renominated at the start of this year. Of those seven, Democrats have indicated that they would be willing to confirm as many as four to avoid the showdown."

Neither side blinks as Senate starts debate on judicial nominees

It seems that everything is topsy turvy:
Everything that is bad for you is good for you and everything that is old is new again.

Irony aside, this is something of a web 2.0 reboot, with some lessons learned by coming full circle with technologies that are right for the web.
SOAP vs CORBA, RSS vs ICE, PHP vs Some weirdo proprietary stuff.

The changes:

RSS hits the mainstream and is built into consumer portals - 10 years after it was a by-product of, er, a consumer portal, MyNetscape.

Scripting interfaces to enterprise aps - the first web enabled version of enterprise aps were scripting language based e.g. Sybase was Perl based.

Ajax, or DHTML as Flickr mercifully put it. In 94 you could navigate a 3d world on the web, in realtime with talking Avatars that made absolutely no money (The is nothing comparable to Onlive Traveller even today). Then everything went all Craigslist and Google, now Google did maps with javascript and minimalism is out again. (although this time perhaps some lessons will have been learned).

"The upped commitment to PHP from Oracle is the latest of several moves by large software vendors, including IBM, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, to capitalize on the growing popularity of scripting, or "dynamic" languages."

Grassroots computing languages hit the big time

The real reason that I wanted to build Wists, was to re-enact a long time fantasy where I would be asked to appear on Desert Island Disks, a long running radio show in the UK where you had to imagine you were stranded on a desert island with your favorite songs and had to explain why you chose them and what they meant to you.

So, being a list geek, I have put together my Desert Island Wists, tagging my favorite books, movies, albums and, of course, buildings with the tags topten=buildings etc. (Desert Island Disks only allows you 8 songs and 1 book - but this is the web and I want 10 of everything).

Here they are:

My Top Ten Buildings

My Top Ten Movies

My Top Ten Books

My Top Ten Albums

No axe to grind here, was just curious, so dug around the web for some data:

Cost of Iraq/Afghan war so far: $300 billion
(From end 2001 till end of this year)

Cost per year: $75 billion

Number of tax payers in the US: 130 million

Average cost of campaign per taxpayer: $2300

Average cost per year per taxpayer: $575

Average cut for Bush's 2003 tax cuts, per person: $1,083
(Median, i.e. most likely tax cut per person was $227)

Half way through Kingdom of Heaven our hero is given a choice: Marry the good king's, beautiful, nice daughter, who he is in love with and she is in love with him, and become king of Jerusalem, rule it wisely and keep the peace. In exchange, the corrupt guy who is going out with said daughter, who is trying to provoke war and murders people periodically and who wants to murder our hero, will be arrested and executed.

Sounded like a no-brainer to me.

However, our hero, does not want to sell his soul, to have his enemy arrested on a trumped up charge.

At this point I switched off and enjoyed the cinematography.

The good king dies, the corrupt guy marries the beautiful princess and provokes a war where thousands of people die and he is captured.

The hero takes over and manages to kill enough of the enemy that they agree a truce where the citizens of Jerusalem will not be slaughtered.

So thousands of innocent deaths later, the hero, soul presumably intact, gets the girl and peace.

It could have been so much simpler.

The BBC have a very moving picture of an old, old man crying at a VE day remembrance service in Europe.

WWII is refered to as a 'just war' to allude to the idea that a declaration of war can be on morally solid ground. But even if that were the case, justification is not the same as success.

If 40 million deaths and many more injuries, homes lost and lives ruined and half of an entire race wiped out in genocide is not an unprecedented disaster then what the hell is? The allied victory in the Second World War was entirely Pyrrhic.

For me, remembrance is second hand, of the lessons I learned from my grandparents' generation who lived through WWI and WWII. Remembrance of a 16 year old boy with shell shock, shot for desertion to the allied refusal to bomb the railroad to Auschwitz.

Because of the fact that what has later been sited as one of the justifications for war was later ignored, I find it immoral when people refer to the second world war as a 'just' war.

Even if a war could ever be justified, all wars are clearly shit, and the war-weary wisdom of a generation that knows this first hand is dying out.

Europe honours war dead on VE Day

Om Malik points out that today is 05.05.05.

I can remember exactly where I was at 12:34 on the 5th June 78. 12345678 - (If you were in the US, and not in the army or government, perhaps, May the 6th would have been the day).

I was in a Math(s) class, at St. John's School in Northwood, in North London. In the dusty creaky floored classroom to the right of the headmaster's study. It was a sunny day and you could smell newly mown grass from outside the whitewashed sash windows, I was 12 years old.

(Unfortunately the Math(s) teacher resigned and the headmaster, who looked like Oswald Moseley and had similar political leanings, lined the whole school up and blamed it on me being annoying.)

Now I can remember that I remembered 12:34 5/6/78 on 05/05/05, or next year on the 6th June.

Dave Winer on ads in RSS

"The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate."

here here.

There are only three possibilities for ads in RSS:

1. where the feed is an aggregated feed or search result from many sources, then the ad is similar to what the search engines do (but this is a volume game - the individual ad revenue is less than at the destination site).

2. where MOST of the RSS ad revenue is given back to the publisher - so that the publisher can decide whether the ad revenue outweights the potential revenue from the added traffic.

3. Where the RSS feed is full content - although to be honest most people can make more revenue off fancy advertising at the site where the headline links to.

But as Dave points out, if you really think it makes sense for 2. then people aren't really reading your stuff anyway.

I disabled comments a while back because of the spam issues from gambling and porn sites, but noticed that 10% of my traffic was to inbound links to some poker site comments that I hadn't deleted.

The inbound linking is to game Google into indirectly boosting pagerank for the eventual destination using clustered keyword terms, a more sophisticated variant of placing outbound links in comments.

The traffic came from what appear to be affiliates of a CPA affiliate program site, 888.com, which in turn linked to poker sites that were owned by the same company as 888.com, operating out of the UK's Gibraltar.

These companies are owned by Cassava Enterprises, who, one might imagine, are a small, shady company, operating offshore.

However, it turns out that Cassava Enterprises are in the process of going public in the UK for an estimated $1.5 billion, underwritten by Credit Suisse First Boston.

See the Sunday Times article below:

Poker firm float flushed out - Sunday Times - Times Online

"Similarly, Cassava Enterprises, owner of the 888.com site, has hired CSFB to advise it on a possible flotation. It is reported to be considering a listing that would value the business at more than £800m."

There are a number of reputable betting sites about to go public, but it seems odd that the illegal (since it costs me time and money) practice of spamming leads to companies planning to go public alongside a bunch of sketchy porn sites.

Since Cassava own the affiliate program that may have clients who are doing the spamming, if or when they have knowledge of it they will be obligated to act.

If, in turn, a significant number of 888.com affiliates are using pagerank gaming techniques via site spamming, then wiping out those affiliates could dramatically affect their revenues and hence the IPO price.

Imagine if Amazon, planning to IPO, had been involved directly or even indirectly with using mass spamming for its marketing, or if a significant portion of their revenues was based upon affiliates that were operating fraudulently, without them knowing. Is that what is happening here?

What is acceptable on TV:

a.) A nipple - not actually visible, but it's shape visible through clothing.
b.) Two people re-enacting creating life in a loving manner - fictionally.
c.) Minor swearwords.
d.) Encouraging violence and hatred. Racism, homophobia, misrepresentation and extortion.

Answer d.)

And for this madness, Max Blumenthal encourages people to complain to the FCC about a specifically odious example.

At the moment 90% of FCC complaints come from one organization on the lunatic fringe. If Max can encourage enough bloggers to write to the FCC, at the very least it will help redress the balance.

It may even help the FCC re-address how they deal with the fact that their complaints currently come from a minority group and therefore their guidelines do not reflect the 'true moral majority', the mainstream of America which is largely benign and moderate.

Here is where you file complaints. Complaints can be via email

via Jeff