Yes And No

A discussion of a new book by Andrew Keen appears in today's Sunday Times. The subject of Keen's book is the dumbing down of the world as a result of the "Cult of the Amateur" he sees as permeating the internet in general and blogs in particular.  

Before the internet it seemed like a joke: if you provide an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters one of them will eventually come up with a masterpiece. But with the web now firmly established in its second evolutionary phase – in which users create the content on blogs, podcasts and streamed video – the infinite monkey theory doesn’t seem so funny any more.

“Today’s technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters,” argues Andrew Keen, who believes that “web 2.0” is killing our culture, assaulting our economy and destroying time-honoured codes of conduct.

An Englishman who moved from north London to California in the 1990s and swapped university lecturing for internet entrepreneur-ship, Keen has turned against the thoughtless barbarism of his Silicon Valley peers. In an alarming new book The Cult of the Amateur he argues that many of the ideas promoted by champions of web 2.0 are gravely flawed. Instead of creating masterpieces, the millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.

Worse still, the supposed “democratisation” of the web has been a sham. “Despite its lofty idealisation it’s undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent,” he says. Take the much vaunted “wisdom of crowds”, which has led to the astonishing growth of the free online reference work Wikipedia. The English site alone boasts 1.8m articles freely contributed by ordinary web users and more are created every minute.

But as the sum of what we all know and agree, the wisdom of crowds has no greater value than Trivial Pursuit. Wikipedia is full of mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings. What happens if you try to do something about it? William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and an expert on global warming, disagreed with a Wikipedia editor over a particular entry on the site. After trying to correct inaccuracies Connolley was accused of trying to remove “any point of view which does not match his own”. Eventually he was limited to making just one edit a day.

From one of the apparently much-despised blogging set that Mr. Keen abhors all I can say is that Keen is both right and wrong in his analysis. He laments the rise of the amateur over the "expert" who has contacts and an established track record on whatever subject. I tend to agree with him that any Wikipedia entry needs to be taken with a grain of salt. (Yes, I cite Wikipedia, but note what I call from there is not usually technical in nature.) Yes, the abuse by some of the "democratization of knowledge" folks is pretty bad (they'll shout you down in a heartbeat, regardless of the facts). But there actually is a certain amount of wisdom in the crowd about a lot of subjects. Not all, by any means, but some.

Where he is glaringly wrong here is his contention that the media set has some special, irreplaceable fount of knowledge that trumps everyone else. Most reporters are no exactly what you would consider experts in whatever they report on.

At a working breakfast in 2004 Keen was alarmed to be told the new democratic internet would overthrow the “dictatorship of expertise”. And that’s happening already. Wikipedia, with its millions of amateur editors and unreliable content, is the 17th most trafficked site on the net. Britannica.com, a subscription-based service with 100 Nobel prize-winning contributors and more than 4,000 other experts is ranked 5,128. As a result, Britannica has had to make painful cuts in staffing and editorial.

These cutbacks don’t only affect the individuals laid off. They affect us all – because if Britannica and publications like it should disappear we’ll be obliged to rely on the unreliable patchwork of information parcelled out on Wikipedia by people who often don’t even reveal their identity.

“Instead of a dictatorship of experts, we’ll have a dictatorship of idiots,” says Keen, who finds classic signs of totalitarianism in Silicon Valley. “Anyone who disagrees is wrong. These people manifest some of the symptoms of 19th century Russian idealists and utopians, who think that their vision of the world is going to change everything for the better.”

I take it Keen isn't real interested in selling his book since he is insulting the online community so badly.

May You Never

Back around 1974, I moved in for a while with my best friend from my grade school years, Rick, and his mother back in Rochester, New York. Rick and I had been inseparable (with the usual ups and downs) from the second grade until I moved away to attend high school in Central New York. I graduated mid-year and moved back to Rochester, but did not - most emphatically - want to live with my mother. (Loved her dearly, but could not get along with her in close quarters. Actually, the whole family is like that - we get along better in inverse proportion to proximity). Rick had started playing the guitar in the years we had been apart and he got me interested in learning, too. So I bought one - a not very good one - and proceeded to try to learn from Rick.

I spent a lot of time practicing and actually started picking it up pretty quickly. Rick was actually a good teacher; very patient. Naturally, he taught me things he knew and loved first. A lot of Beatles songs (Rick had been a huge fan since we watched them together on Ed Sullivan - yeah, we'd been friends that long). Also a lot of songs I was not familiar with by artists I had never heard of. We agreed to disagree on some of them but he got me interested in a lot of artists. I shared some of my favorites with him and we figured out how to play them together. When it was time to move up to a better guitar we both went and bought our new ones from a little shop in a really bad neighborhood from a man named Eldon Stutzman. He was an amazing guy, kind of cranky as I recall, but he knew how to voice a guitar like nobody I have ever known since. I still have the Takamine F-360S he sold me that day. He carved away the struts inside to make it sound even better than it did "off the rack" so to speak. (A professional session player once offered me three times what I paid for that guitar, cash on the spot. He loved that guitar. Obviously, I refused - I loved it more.)

Anyway, one of the artists that Rick introduced me to, on vinyl at least, was a guy by the name of John Martyn. Maybe you've heard of him, maybe not. You may remember one of his songs that was covered by a more household name, Eric Clapton. That song, May You Never, is probably John Martyn's best known general circulation song, but he's done a lot more, for a lot of years. The album I heard it on - and still own on vinyl - was Solid Air. The title song of that album was written for John Martyn's friend and fellow Island Records artist, Nick Drake, about a year before Drake took his own life. So, here's a fine John Martyn performance of May You Never. (Link to Solid Air here. With some unbelievable bass playing from Danny Thompson. Seriously.)

“Private Jets For Climate Change.”

The words of Matt Bellamy, front man of the rock band Muse describing Al Gore's "Live Earth" concerts meant to "raise awareness" about global warming. You see, Al wanted Britain to turn all the lights off as a gesture to global warming. But there's a wee problem with that idea: Britain's national power grid operator says that the resulting surge when everyone turned their lights back on could very well kill patients in hospitals that rely on life support. (Speaking from my background in the utility field, it sounds like Britain is running at close to max capacity and has little headroom in its electrical system.)

So, to raise awareness about all those carbon emissions, many thousands of vehicles will be driven to the concert sites, huge amounts of electricity will be consumed in the concert itself and then the happy concert-goers will pile back into their SUVs to drive home. All the while patting themselves on the back over the good they just did for the planet. And the power surges after he gets everyone to symbolically turn off the lights will potentially kill people.

And the true believers do not see the rank hypocrisy in Gore's little project. Some musicians are smart enough to see it, though (not everyone is Sheryl Crow):

IT WAS intended to be the symbolic gesture at a global series of rock concerts next month to alert people to climate change. Al Gore, the former US presidential candidate turned climate doomsayer, had wanted a massive switch-off of lights by television audiences, but the National Grid has vetoed the idea.

The inconvenient truth, it says, is that the power surge when people switched their lights back on could cause disruptions in supply and even endanger hospital patients on life support machines.

Live Earth will be a series of concerts, modelled on Live Aid and and Live 8, aimed at raising awareness about the threat from global warming.

As many as 12 concerts across seven continents featuring the likes of Madonna and Genesis and 100 other acts are planned over 24 hours, including one at a research station in Antarctica.

The organisers have so far struggled to find a clear-cut way of conveying their main message. Even rock performers have criticised the concept.

Roger Daltrey, of the Who, said another concert would simply waste fuel; Bob Geldof, who helped to organise Live Aid and Live 8, said people were already aware of the greenhouse effect; while Matt Bellamy, front man of the rock band Muse, labelled it “private jets for climate change”. (Emphasis added)

But there is actually a kicker to this story, believe it or not. Al Gore has admitted that the concerts will waste vast amounts of energy. So he's going to do something about that:

Gore has admitted that the concerts will consume a vast amount of electricity. To combat criticism of their own damaging effect on the environment, the organisers will pay at least £1m in carbon credits and supply acts with hybrid cars, partly run on electricity, to ferry stars to venues as well as fuel-efficient Smart cars to run around backstage.

And who, pray tell, is in the business of selling indulgences - er - carbon offsets? Why none other than Al Gore. How much money is flowing to Gore's company as a result of this little clambake? Inquiring minds want to know. Seriously.

By the way, Matt Bellamy gets best phrase of the month award. That one is simply a thing of beauty. "Private jets for climate change". Well, thank heaven we have cheating offsets.

A Little Fraud, A Lot Of Waste

The folks in Britain are being dragooned, like it or not, into recycling because the governing elite has decreed it is the earth-friendly thing to do. So average people are being fined if they don't put their recyclables out, properly sorted (I'll look for that link, but I remember a flurry of stories about that not long ago.) All to meet central government plans to recycle 40% of trash by 2010. So, what do the local councils do with all the recyclables they force the residents to turn in - by threat?

Send them to landfills.

PAPER, bottles and plastic that millions of householders are being forced to recycle are routinely being dumped in landfill sites.

Recycling companies say they are receiving tens of thousands of tons of materials from councils which are so contaminated or badly sorted that they have to be rejected or dumped.

Many councils are cutting corners to meet targets for recycling up to 40% of their residents’ waste by 2010. Instead of being properly separated, the waste is poorly sorted and sent to specialist recycling companies that cannot then reprocess it.

Dick Searle, chief executive of the Packaging Federation, said: “The recycling infrastructure in this country is disgraceful. We’ve got a situation where the collection methods – particularly where householders are being told to chuck everything [paper, cans and plastic] in together – means we are now seriously in danger of recycling going backwards.”

But they'll meet the bureaucratic targets. Because the rubbish will be sent to recyclers. Which appears to be all that is required to meet the dictates laid down by those on high.

Imagine Waking Up

Only to find that the whole world had changed. A Polish man did just that. He went into a coma following an accident 19 years ago. When he woke from the coma recently, communism had fallen and Poland had become a market-based economy.

WARSAW (Reuters) - A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday.

Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, whom doctors had given only two or three years to live following his 1988 accident, credited his caring wife Gertruda with his revival.

"It was Gertruda that saved me, and I'll never forget it," Grzebski told news channel TVN24.

"For 19 years Mrs Grzebska did the job of an experienced intensive care team, changing her comatose husband's position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections," Super Express reported Dr Boguslaw Poniatowski as saying.

"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system's economic collapse.

"Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

Well, Mr. Grzebski at least you got a better surprise than the fictional Rip Van Winkle did after his 20 year nap:

It was with some difficulty he found the way to his own house, which he approached with silent awe, expecting every moment to hear the shrill voice of Dame Van Winkle. He found the house gone to decay—the roof fallen in, the windows shattered, and the doors off the hinges. A half-starved dog, that looked like Wolf, was skulking about it. Rip called him by name, but the cur snarled, showed his teeth, and passed on. This was an unkind cut indeed—“My very dog,” sighed poor Rip, “has forgotten me!”  
 
He entered the house, which, to tell the truth, Dame Van Winkle had always kept in neat order. It was empty, forlorn, and apparently abandoned. This desolateness overcame all his connubial fears—he called loudly for his wife and children—the lonely chambers rung for a moment with his voice, and then all again was silence.

The Law Of Unintended Consequences, Part 235,131

Britain, well on its way to a Big Brother society where everyone is watched all the time, has gone in big for speed trap cameras, red light cameras, London's congestion relief scheme (using cameras) and other road use pricing plans using, you guessed it, cameras. And as a result something odd is happening. People are figuring out how to beat the cameras.

By stealing or cloning car license plates.

Police chiefs want a radical overhaul of the car number-plate system - because so many vehicles are being 'cloned' by motorists trying to beat speed cameras, the London congestion charge and other road-pricing schemes.

They want a clampdown on shops and internet sites selling registration plates and new rules forcing motorists to fit tamper-proof plates which shatter if removed.

They are also calling for the plates to be fitted with electronic chips linked to ANPR (automatic number-plate recognition) systems so that a vehicle's identity can be confirmed against a computerised national register. (Emphasis added)

Senior officers refuse to criticise the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) openly, but claim the system has changed little since the Thirties.

Superintendent John Wake, of the Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service, said: "It's too easy to clone or steal car registration plates, which in turn makes it easy to commit crime using an innocent person's identity.

"It means innocent motorists have to prove they did not commit crimes in which their vehicles were supposedly involved.

"The vehicle is a crime-enabler and we want to reduce the opportunity for it to be exploited. I am not criticising the DVLA. The number plate in its present form has had its time."

And once all these changes are made (and paid for by the citizens), someone will figure out a way to beat them. Whereupon they will have to go to the next logical step. Implanting identification chips directly into the citizens.

And do not think for one second that someone won't suggest it.

Absolutely Perfect

An absolutely perfectly done parody website that illustrates the absurdity of the entire global ponzi scheme that is being touted as the way to control carbon emissions. That would be the indulgence racket - er - sale of carbon offsets - by the like of Al "Gorezilla" Gore. Yes, indeed, you can live a cheating neutral lifestyle for only pennies a day. It's not to much to ask to line their pockets save the planet, is it?

Offset your cheating

Jealousy and heartbreak are a natural part of modern life. And sometimes, no matter how hard we try, it's just not possible to be faithful.

At Cheatneutral, we believe that we should all try to reduce the amount we cheat on our partners, but we also realise that fidelity isn't always possible.

That's why we help you neutralise your cheating. Your actions are offset by a global network of fidelity, developed by us. By paying Cheatneutral, you're funding monogamy-boosting offset projects - we simply invest the money you give us in monogamous, faithful or just plain single people, to encourage them to stay that way.

When you use Cheatneutral, we'll email you a Cheatneutral Offset Certificate, so you can prove to your loved one that your playing away has been successfully offset. Then, you and your partner are both happy, a broken heart is mended, and you can feel good about yourself again, all thanks to Cheatneutral.

And when you need to cheat again, we'll be here for you.

Absolutely brilliant. Many thanks to Jan Haugland at Secular Blasphemy for finding this gem. Spot on perfect.

Hijacking Plot Fails

A young woman from Northern Michigan helped avert a bus hijacking by bravely blocking the attacker with her own body. The hijacking deer was killed in the mêlée. (For the record, we do not encourage beating off an attacking deer with your face.)

BEULAH — Three deer interrupted Shannon Hebert's bus ride to work and left her with a bloody face and a strange animal tale.

"A lot of people have told me that most people wouldn't believe that three deer tried jumping over a bus,” Hebert said.

Hebert, 16, was on a Benzie Bus at about 8 a.m. Friday and headed to her job at a golf course when three deer attempted to cross U.S. 31 east of Honor. One of the deer crashed into the bus.

"I didn't even know that the deer hit me,” Hebert said. "We were going up the hill and all of a sudden I just heard a big crash.”

The next thing Hebert knew, she was covered in blood and glass and a witness told her about the deer. One of the deer crashed through two passenger windows and struck Hebert in the face.

The deer-bus crash was a freak occurrence, said Benzie County Undersheriff Rory Heckman. Collisions between vehicles and deer aren't uncommon, but injuries rarely result and deer rarely attempt to jump a vehicle as large as a bus.

Heckman said the deer was a small, young buck. It hit the windshield and then ricocheted into the side of the bus and was killed.

Longtime readers of Blue Crab Boulevard know the truth, of course. The deer was not trying to jump over the bus, it was trying to hijack it for the Animal Uprising™. And worst of all, when authorities examined the remains, they found that the deer did not have exact change.

Selective Distortion

Rich Lowry takes a hard look at Hillary! Clinton's tin-eared speech promoting collectivism over individuality. He pays particular attention to the distortions in that speech.

Hillary Clinton has identified a grievous flaw in the contemporary American economy: It leaves "it all up to the individual." This hateful individualism is allegedly driving income inequality and destroying the American Dream.

Clinton calls it "the 'on your own' society," displaying a liberal Democrat's curious aversion to people doing things on their own. In contrast, she offers a collectivist vision of "shared responsibility for shared prosperity," making the case for it based on a farrago of mistruths about the state of the economy. She actually is not interested in sharing anything, but instead hogging all the credit for economic growth in the 1990s for her husband and, by extension, herself.

Clinton cites figures to paint a picture of an immiserated middle class, but avoids the main event. As Democratic economist Stephen Rose notes in his new book, Social Stratification in the United States, once people outside their prime working years are excluded — the elderly and the young — the median income for an American family is $63,000. Which, in the words of the Washington Post, "in most parts of the country buys a pretty comfortable middle-class lifestyle."

She maintains that corporations are taking more and more of national income for themselves, leaving workers in the cold. But according to Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, labor's share of national income was a nearly constant 64.9 percent from 1960 to 2006. She says "the percentage of taxes paid by corporations have fallen," when the percentage of taxes paid by corporations was 11.5 percent in 2006, higher than it was in 2000, at 8.2 percent.

Read the whole thing. Hillary! wants it both ways: a longing for the 1990s to return but an abandonment of those very policies that made the 1990s economy grow like free trade and growing globalization. Lowry points out all those inconvenient little facts that Clinton has to either ignore or distort to support her growing list to port. (Though if she lists any further she risks capsizing and turning turtle.) Lowry rightfully closes by pointing out that if you long for a return to the 1990s, the worst thing you could do is vote for Hillary!

Everyone’s A Critic

But some critics are worse than others. Some write brutal reviews that kill a show. Others simply kill the performer. Literally.

Romy Baligula, 29, was halfway through his song on Tuesday night in a bar in San Mateo town, east of Manila, when 43-year-old security guard Robilito Ortega yelled that he was out of tune.

As Baligula ignored his comments and continued singing, Ortega pulled out his revolver and shot him in the chest.

Senior Superintendent Felipe Rojas said Baligula died instantly.

The security guard was detained by an off-duty policeman shortly after the shooting.

Deaths and violence are not uncommon in Philippine karaoke bars.

My wife and I witnessed one of the worst karaoke duet performances in world history while on the cruise we took. This couple was absolutely hideous, out of tune, out of time and apparently unable to read the lyrics on the prompter as well. Nobody in the crowded bar tried to kill them, though. There was a lot of discussion about throwing them overboard, however.

Global Warming Ponzi Scheme

When even the well-over-to-the-left Guardian is ringing loud alarms over the schemes that are supposed to help control global warming, you know there is a major problem. Guess what? There is a major fraud going on and this is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

A Guardian investigation has found evidence of serious irregularities at the heart of the process the world is relying on to control global warming.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which is supposed to offset greenhouse gases emitted in the developed world by selling carbon credits from elsewhere, has been contaminated by gross incompetence, rule-breaking and possible fraud by companies in the developing world, according to UN paperwork, an unpublished expert report and alarming feedback from projects on the ground.

One senior figure suggested there may be faults with up to 20% of the carbon credits - known as certified emissions reductions - already sold. Since these are used by European governments and corporations to justify increases in emissions, the effect is that in some cases malpractice at the CDM has added to the net amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.

The problems focus on the specialist companies that validate and verify the projects in the developing world which produce the certified emission reductions. Three of those companies have failed spot checks, which revealed a catalogue of weakness.

Separately, one of the CDM's experts calculates that as many as one third of the projects registered in India are commercial ventures which do not produce any additional cut in greenhouse gases and were wrongly approved. (Emphasis added)

The great global Ponzi scheme unfolds. Only now the "investments" pay fraudulent carbon benefits rather than cash dividends. This report comes right on the heels of revelations that there is rampant misrepresentation - and questionable usefulness - in the so-called carbon offset schemes that folks like Al "Gorezilla" Gore are peddling. That report came from the Associated Press.

Radio Free Venezuela

Fred Thompson asks why the American government has not been trying to spread freedom in the same way we did during the Cold War: by broadcasting the truth.

Well, he's done it. Hugo Chavez was already systematically silencing criticism of his autocratic rule through threats and intimidation. Journalists have been threatened, beaten and even killed. Now he's shut down the last opposition television networks in Venezuela and arrested nearly 200 protesters – mostly students. It’s a monumental tragedy and the Venezuelan people will pay the price for decades to come. Americans are also at risk as he funds anti-American candidates and radicals all over Latin America.

It’s equally tragic that the U.S. is in no position to provide the victims of this emerging dictator with the truth. There was a time, though, when Americans were on the front lines of pro-freedom movements all over the world. I'm talking about the “surrogate” broadcast network that included Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, often called "the Radios."

When Ronald Reagan was elected, he greatly empowered the private, congressionally funded effort and handpicked the Radios’ top staff to bring freedom to the Soviet Union. Steve Forbes led the group.

Cynics still say that the USSR fell of its own weight, and that President Reagan’s efforts to bring it down were irrelevant, but Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev say differently. Both have said that, without the Radios, the USSR wouldn't have fallen. The Radios were not some bland public relations effort, attracting audiences only with American pop music. They engaged the intellectual and influential populations behind the Iron Curtain with accurate news and smart programming about freedom and democracy. They had sources and networks within those countries that sometimes outperformed the CIA. When Soviet hardliners and reformers were facing off, and crowds and tanks were on the streets of Moscow and Bucharest, the radios were sending real-time information to the people, including the military, and reminding them of what was at stake.

He says we have missed a great opportunity to engage people in Latin America and in the Middle East. I don't disagree that this is something we should be doing. Counteracting the information offensive the al Qaeda and their fellow travelers are engaged in is, in and of itself, a good idea. Thompson does not mention Radio Marti, however. That operation, launched in 1985, has continuously attempted to send the truth into Cuba ever since. It has not had a noticeable impact on Cuba, unfortunately. (On the other hand, they have wasted a lot of money trying to jam those signals.) So it doesn't always work. But planting the seeds of freedom is a good thing. I rather like his closing lines:

I do know, though, that it's time for a new generation of Americans to stand up for freedom — like others before us. And this time, we’ll have a whole new set of media technologies.

Thompson has an enormous amount of media savvy. It will be interesting to see what detailed proposals he comes out with. (Incidentally, the television network Chavez silenced, RCTV, is not taking it quietly. They have jumped onto YouTube and a Colombian station is broadcasting RCTV programming into Chavez's benighted proto-police state.)