NY Times Op-Ed "The Bush Revolution"

I should be nicer to the New York Times. Nicholas D. Kristof, writing for the Op-Ed page had a very worthwhile article today entitled The Bush Revolution. It covers much of the same ideas that I tried to address in my post yesterday but he so much more concisely puts the matter:

The central question of President Bush's second term is this: Will he shaft his Christian-right supporters, since he doesn't need them any more, and try to secure his legacy with moderate policies that might unite the country? Or, with no re-election to worry about, will he pursue revolutionary changes on the right? To me, it looks increasingly like the latter.

The piece is also worth reading for his predictions on various international issues during the second Bush term and ends with the frightening "litmus test" for deciding to leave the country -- "A litmus test of foreign policy prospects will be whether John Bolton, a genial raptor among the doves at State, is promoted to be its deputy secretary. For liberals who have been wavering on whether to move to New Zealand, that would be a sign to head for the airport."

Christian Theocracy

For me, the most worrying aspect of the recent Presidential election is the idea that Karl Rove's four million evangelical Christians (Pat Buchanan on the subject) missing from the 2000 election came out to vote in 2004, helped Bush win the election, and now will have a greater voice in our country's politics and policies. Before Dan points out that the four million may be a myth let me quickly point out that it is more important that the Bush Presidency believes that evangelical Christians made the difference in this election than whether or not they actually did make the difference.

I was raised to believe in an America that is tolerant of differences in religious, social, and cultural belief and practice. I was raised to believe that "tolerance" means "embrace diversity" not "put up with differences." And as a result I have friends that are from every religion (or none) and from many cultural backgrounds and who have made many different choices in their social behaviors.

MSNBC reports that the "electorate (is) deeply divided...", citing exit polls that show that "moral values" became a critical issue for voters in reelecting President Bush -- "...white evangelicals — a crucial voting bloc for the president — represented about a fifth of all voters. Their top issue was moral values." The Arizona Daily Star reports that:

"Moral values" is a catchphrase for conservative, religious voters who oppose abortion, stem-cell research and gay marriage, said Steven Waldman, editor and CEO of BeliefNet, a multifaith Web site for religious and spiritual issues.

The problem I have with this definition of the issue is that it inaccurately places the locus of the voter's interest on the values instead of on a desire to IMPOSE those values on the rest of the nation's citizens. Many people, on both sides of the election, hold the same beliefs on these three issues. John Kerry expressed his personal belief that marriage is between a man and a woman and his personal belief that abortion is immoral. But he did so while saying that it was not the job of government to impose the personal religious beliefs of a President on the citizens of the nation. So when we talk about Bush winning on "moral values" we should be clear -- he won based on an electorate determined to impose their moral values onto others.

I heard Pat Buchanan on the radio a few weeks ago (on NPR - archive here) making the seemingly reasonable suggestion that local electorates should be able to make decisions on behalf of themselves when it comes to public resources -- for example, if a local school district wants to have prayer in their schools, why shouldn't there be a democratic process to decide? Why not let the citizens of that district simply vote on the matter?

One of the other things that I was raised to believe about our democracy is that there is an important balance that must be struck in protecting minorities. The problem with allowing a majority vote to provide the only guidepost for our civic decisions is the risk of a "tyranny of democracy" in which a majority imposes its views on a minority.

While still a vast majority, the percentage of Americans calling themselves Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 76% in 2001 (American Religious Identification Survey at The Graduate Center, City University of New York) Almost 1/4 of our population is Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, agnositic, atheist (or one of a handful of others). This trend is expected to continue. Another interesting statistic from this study,

"In 1990, ninety percent of the adult population identified with one or another religion group. In 2001, such identification has dropped to eighty-one percent."

"No religion" is a staggering 13.1% of the total US adult population - staggering because it is the second largest category. Evangelical Christians might look at these statistics and see 27 million people that used to be Christians that could be brought back into the fold. And voting for public money to be spent on Christian schools might help with that agenda...

But should a democracy impose the will of the majority on that 13% of its citizens who chose to be "areligious" (no religion but not agnostic or atheist) much less on the 11% that are Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Wiccan... ?? How can a great nation like ours decide on belief-based issue like gay marriage, abortion, stem-cell research, prayer in school based on one groups beliefs?

The right has often cited that the phrase "separation of church and state" cannot be found in the constitution. Instead it is contained in a letter by Thomas Jefferson. But perhaps it is time in this great nation to suggest a 28th Constitutional Amendment, certainly more important to the nation's well being than the 27th in which we formally introduce these words and protect the minorities of our country now and in the future from the imposition of the majority's views. After all, in the future Christians may become the minority.

Third Term

While we are likely to hear many arguments from the right about why we should elect George W. Bush to a third term as President of the United States, I thought I would jump in early with an argument from the democratic side of the aisle on why we should modify the Constitution to allow him to run a third time. Don't think it is reasonable to talk about changing the US Constitution to allow a person to run for President? Tell Governer Arnold...

The partisan Fox News ran a survey this past summer that declares "Most Oppose Allowing President Third Term." The survey spoke of opposition to Clinton being allowed to run against Bush and was largely the kind of negative hit piece on liberal political candidates that we have come to love Fox News for... But there it is, the idea of a 3rd term for a President being floated publically.

And the Republican arguments for electing Bush to a third term will come, at least from the extreme right. We will hear that we should "stick with our wartime president" and that we need to keep up the fight on terrorism, and that his reforms of the tax code and social security are not yet complete...

But here is an argument for the left to consider. The problem with second terms is that the President is now a lame duck. He no longer need consider public opinion as he will not face the voters in 2008. So when will he feel the need to compromise? Or even sound like he is reaching out to all of the voters?

If we allow Bush to run for a third term in office, on the other hand, he will have a motivation to appear in front of voters, talk to reporters, provide some transparency on advisory panels for proposed energy or environmental bills... in short have some measure of accountability to the American people.

Of course, if re-elected, the same argument might be made again -- allow Bush to run for a fourth term in office... Given the possibility of President Bush for life perhaps we should be supporting a constitutional change to allow Schwarzenegger to run for President in '08 instead...

If this Election was Stolen

If this election was stolen, the mechanisms were primarily two simple activities - (1) suppression of democratic votes through inefficient polling operations with insufficient voting machines causing hours long waits at the polls and (2) the misalignment of touch screens so that votes for John Kerry would actually register as votes for George Bush. More on this second item in a moment. It is striking that the exit polls called for a Kerry win by over 3%, as even Fox News reports:

By midnight, Bush was declared the winner in Florida, though throughout the day the state had been predicted a winner for Kerry. Similar predictions in Ohio were also found to be wrong as the state was put in Bush's column.

Miami-Dade county, for example, reported 45.7% of the vote for George Bush. Does this match exit polls in the county? Or even the distribution of expected voters?

Regarding the allegation of incorrect alignment of voting machine functionality, again Fox News reports:

Twenty-one touch-screen voting machines in Broward County were replaced because of technical problems, said Gisela Salas, the county's deputy supervisor of elections. At least one of the machines had shown votes cast for the wrong candidates.

This article replaces an earlier one (now unavailable) on Fox which explained the problem -- it was impossible to select John Kerry on the touch screen -- every attempt made selected George Bush instead. This was only discovered when some (24 individual and separate reports) voters checked their own results at the end of the session with the voting machine and noticed that George had been selected instead of John. One voter made 14 attempts to change the vote to John Kerry before calling over a poll worker to report the malfunction. Ultimately the poll worker had to use the eraser end of a pencil to carefully select the small area of the touch screen that was active for registering a vote for John Kerry. In Broward county the vote was reported as 34.5% for Bush.

Bush would need 190,000 more votes in Florida to have won the election there - that is, 190,000 votes taken from the Bush column and added to the Kerry column. This is just 3% of the total votes cast. In just Broward and Miami-Dade counties, 561,731 votes were totalled for George Bush -- so the swing would amount to just one-third of votes that George reportedly received in those two counties.

Obviously I am NOT alleging that this election was stolen. Just pointing out how it could have been done. It is unfortunate that we have allowed a voting system to be put in place in this country where such possibilities exist.

Who turned off the Ads?

Is it just me? Or is it a concerted attack on the advertising infrastructure that feeds Internet Capitalism? I have been catching up on news and strangely every page I pull up, the ad servers (typically third party companies) are down... So I get the page but no ad content! For Wired its the server view.atdmt.com that is not responding and for techdirt its ads.adsonar.com. NetworkingPipeline's ads from the server pbid.pro-market.net seem to be failing as well as from the venerable ad.doubleclick.net...

Surely I am not the only one to have noticed?

Jerry Brown at Silicon Forum

Jerry Brown at Silicon Forum,
originally uploaded by Ted Shelton.

It was quite interesting to hear Jerry Brown sounding quite conservative as he spoke about the work he has done to turn around Oakland, CA today at the Silicon Forum's monthly luncheon. Afterwards I asked him what the Mayor's office is doing to plan for the future given that California expects the population of the state to double by 2050. Nothing, he said. No one is thinking about the future, we are too busy solving today's problems... Seems like that is where today's problems come from.

Visual Thesaurus

I don't know how I ever lived without the Visual Thesaurus. Go use it (there is a demo mode) and you'll be instantly hooked as well. Type in a word and there is a visual constellation of related terms surrounding your word. Click on any of those other words and it becomes the center of the conceptual map, with new terms growing around it. Is this the first application of Ray Kurzweil's visual "mind mapping" tools? Or was it independently developed? Check out The Brain for an open ended version of the visual thesaurus, into which you can pour your own conceptual relationships...

Am I terribly rude?

A reader of my blog wrote in response to my previous post regarding George Bush and his religiousity:

That comment is really below you. I have been reading you since your early days of blogging, but that was terribly rude.

As I do not intent rudeness, let me respond. First, I repeated the report in the New Republic because I was genuinely amazed at the allegation. By the way, I came across the article in The Week a terrific summary of news from the right, left, middle, and international press.

What was amazing to me is that the Bush campaign has made an enormous effort to get evangelical Christians to the voting booth in support of his presidency. Aside from Bush's own religious convictions or his commitment to a particular congregation, it would seem like a relatively easy thing to attend church every Sunday when regular church goers are a key part of your constituency. I found it remarkable that he hasn't bothered to do this.

Perhaps my ironic rhetorical question "...does Bush really believe in God after all?" was the portion of my post that this reader found rude. I could have perhaps found a better way to pose this question, but I think the question is valid and important -- and frankly applicable to both candidates. How much is the religious positioning of the candidates a genuine reflection of their own views and how much of it is just packaging for the voters? Religion has clearly been a crucial litmus test for a candidates. Will this always be the case? In past elections, service in the military might have been a test, or drug use (the lack of drug use)... will each of these fall over time? Are we becoming cynical about these pillars of our society? Especially when these pillars become merely planks in a candidate's packaging.

Bush Doesn't Go To Church

It seems unbelievable. The President who constantly speaks of his religious convictions doesn't belong to a congregation and rarely goes to church. In her article Empty Pew (subscription) Amy Sullivan of The New Republic writes:

Bush's supporters say "it's bad form" to point this out, arguing that you don't have to go to church to be religious... They also say that it's logistically difficult for a President to attend church. But that didn't stop Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who were regular Sunday worshippers during their presidencies."

I guess the big question is, does Bush really believe in God after all? Or is this just part of the packaging that has been used to sell him to the Christian right?

How to Throw the Election

Ed Felten, of the incredibly interesting and useful blog called Freedom to Tinker provides details on how Diebold has completely screwed up the electronic voting machines that will be used both here in California and in a number of states across the country.

Want to vote more than once? Here are instructions posted on Wednesday

Want to shut down the voting booth? Here are instructions posted yesterday

In both cases, a $50 smart card programming kit will give you the power to disrupt our national elections. Don't think it will happen?

Indymedia Update

In an Indymedia press release, the alternative media outlet reports that "on Wednesday, October 13th, Indymedia's seized hardware was mysteriously returned in the same way it disappeared -- without any information provided as to who took it or why, and on whose orders."

While Indymedia itself is on the political fringe, serious mainstream jornalism organizations are questioning the seizure of Indymedia's servers. The online website journalism.co.uk reports that

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) is lobbying MPs to find out why the FBI ordered the UK government to confiscate web servers belonging to independent news network Indymedia. The seizure, which happened last week, brought down 21 of the group's regional sites including the UK, Brasil and Poland.

The article goes on to repeat a number of interesting allegations that Indymedia has made about why the FBI might be trying to disrupt their operations. One issue was the previously reported photos of Swiss undercover police said to be posted on one of Indymedia's web sites. Given that the FBI has confirmed that they were acting on behalf of Switzerland, this seems to be the most likely explanation. Other issues raised were more machiavellian. From the article:

The IFJ has stated that the seizure may also be related to information published by Indymedia San Francisco that claimed to reveal problems with electronic voting systems scheduled to be used in next month's Presidential election. The manufacturers, Diebold Election Systems, applied to the Californian courts to have the documents removed but Indymedia successfully opposed the application.

Indymedia's news is produced by volunteer political activists and campaigners around the world and the network's strong anti-corporate agenda has been highly critical of the invasion of Iraq.

In August 2004, IndyMedia claimed that the FBI and US Secret Service had been trying to disrupt the relationship with its hosting provider Calyx Internet Access.

The FBI had issued a subpoena for log information and contact details that would identify anyone who had posted a list of delegates attending the Republican National Convention.

Hopefully the professional journalism associations will continue to apply pressure to the UK and US governments for an explanation of how the FBI could have used the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT), (an agreement that allows countries to co-ordinate investigations into international terrorism, money laundering and kidnapping) to seize this media company's publishing and distribution apparatus.

US Government Shuts Down Independent Media?

BBC News is reporting today that a US court order has forced a UK based ISP to turn over servers owned by an "alternative media network known as Indymedia: in this article: US seizes independent media sites.

PC Pro writes

Last week, the FBI obtained a court order involving Rackspace, demanding that the company hand over two Indymedia web servers. Rackspace, which provides hosting services for more that 20 Indymedia sites at its London facility was forced to comply and hand over the requested servers, effectively removing those sites from the Internet.

The full article is available here: Feds seize Indymedia servers in London

I don't know who the heck Indymedia is, but the EFF is already involved, offering legal assistance to Indymedia. Could it be true that our government is shutting down legitimate discourse? According to the PC Pro article "In August the US government attempted to subpoena server logs from the organisation's ISP in the US and the Netherlands before the Republican convention." Perhaps the government thinks that readers of these publications are terrorists?

The Register offers one possible explanation in their article on the matter, Feds seize Indymedia servers.

While Indymedia is not exactly sure what prompted the action, the group does have one strong idea. A French Indymedia site last month posted photos of what it believed to be undercover Swiss police officers photographing protesters at a French event. Indymedia received a request from the FBI to pull those photos down, as they "revealed personal information" about the undercover police, said Indymedia press officer Hep Sano.

According to more information in this story, "Indymedia (AKA Independent Media Center) was set up in 1999 to provide grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle." While these opinions may not be popular amongst the majority of US citizens, doesn't our constitution protect these people's right to free speech? Are we witnessing the beginning of a new era of censorship? Is this being done in the name of the "War on Terrorism?" So far, the American authorities have failed to comment. Hopefully tomorrow will bring clarification of the crime that Indymedia is accused of committing.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" -- Thomas Jefferson

SpikePost - Polese's New Business

Kim's presentation:

Kim Polese says that strange things are happening in IT. Brazilthrows out Microsoft. So do regions of Spain, Germany, Belgium. China does its own Linux distro. Kim says "this is a revolution." And its happening "from the bottom up."

She contrasts this with the way that things used to work -- power was concentrated at the top, "the industrial egosystem." And this has worked in IT -- "monolithic vendors mad monolithic systems."

But then the Net came along and everything changed. A whole new software habitat now exists. A home on the range for developers. "Soon the ecosystem as opposed to the egosystem was filled with a whole new breed of software."

Open source adoption is exploding. This is a movement. This is a revolution. 70% web server share of Apache. 33% CAGR for Linux. 30% of all new apps using mySQL. And it is deployed at bug companies - Cisco, Goldman Sachs, ...

Web 2.0 arrived when demand began to supply itself. First it happened to programmers. Now it is spreading out to the rest of the world.

"The IT guy is the unsung hero of the economy."

The Net and Open Source were both built on principles that will change the world forever.

When anybody can improve software, it gets better.

The software industry IS maturing and commodifying -- but this is a GOOD thing.

But there is a whole new world of software business opportunities,, because innovation is moving to a whole new level.

Process innovation is becoming the new innovation in the software industry.

SpikeSource is leading this innovation

Muragan Pal and Ray Lane founded and incubated the company at KPCB

Kim joined 2 months ago as CEO

This is a "new breed of open source IT services company"

Peter Norvig talking at Web 2.0

Peter Norvig talking at Web 2.0,
originally uploaded by Ted Shelton.

Peter Norvig is going deep into the science of search. It is intersting following the research person from IBM who talked about how they have research labs all over the world. Peter started his talk saying "Google doesn't have beautiful real estate all over the world, Google Labs is more about a state of mind..."

He is demonstrating semantic clustering -- very impressive to be able to see how documents are clustered by relationships between terms.

He demonstrates using the terms "george bush" and "john kerry" and everyone laughs when there are document clusters around George Bush that include "stupid" and "idiot" but these terms do not occur around John Kerry... Peter comments "this isn't what I think, this is what the web says..."

Web 2.0 Observations

Having written critically about the Blogon conference earlier this year, I am happy to report that Web 2.0 has been a GREAT conference, especially in contrast... Terrific speakers, really interesting topics, and (like Blogon) great attendees to interact with. And there is an enormous amount of buzz about the Internet -- a "resurgence" said one speaker.

What has Web 2.0 done right? Unfortunately for the future of conferences, they have returned to the model of the past -- key speakers or panels, narrowly focused on specific topics, and speaking TO the attendees not WITH the attendees. Now, the fact is that this model works and we haven't figured out the new model of the conference.

But it is worth mentioning that the two things that Web 2.0 tried to do toward a conferences 2.0 have failed:

(1) The idea of workshops is good (the first day of the conference) but the execution was poor. One problem was simply that the conference has been TOO successful -- a lot of people have shown up to participate. It is tough to run a participatory workshop in a standing-room-only meeting room. But the other failure was that no attempt was made to utilize a back channel for managing and directing the interaction. See my earlier post on this or Martin Tobias' post made after supernova.

(2) A Wiki for a conference COULD be a great tool, and the folks at Socialtext did a great job of creating a shell for a compelling online place for Web 2.0 attendees to interact with each other online. HOWEVER - organizers please take note! If your speakers do not engage on the Wiki and post info about their talks, and interact with attendees, and post their presentations, then you will not achieve a critical mass of value in the Wiki to attract attendees to participate. Thus the Web 2.0 Wiki is an eerily empty and silent place, rather than a vibrant interactive community.

Nonetheless, kudos to the organizers for creating a conference that hit a lot of the right topics, with great speakers, and an energized industry that is ready to leave here and make the Web 2.0 happen!

Mitch Kapor at Web 2.0

Mitch Kapor at Web 2.0,
originally uploaded by Ted Shelton.

Mitch Kapor tells us that:

Democracy is broken

Technology is (partly) to blame -- in the form of broadcast media

Technology will be the way to fix democracy

Primary issue: citizens opting out of the process. Secondary issue: transparancy (or the lack thereof)

Line that got applause - "If Thomas Paine was writing 'Common Sense' today, he would be doing so on a Linux laptop"

The politicians took the wrong message from the Dean campaign -- they heard that the Net was a way to raise money. They missed the way in which the Net became a way to engage citizens in the political process.

Bloggers are holding politicians accountable, the Net can create greater transparency and involvement, and - though there are challenges - we can fix democracy.

Cory Doctorow at Web 2.0

Cory Doctorow at Web 2.0,
originally uploaded by Ted Shelton.

Cory Doctorow speaking eloquently on the topic of digital rights management, how Intel amongst others are, in Cory's words, "selling out the tech industry" and how EFF is fighting for fair use and a healthy industry. Send money, call your senator, march on Washington.

Music is a Platform

Hank Barry starts out his panel with an impassioned plea to contact your legislative representatives to fight the INDUCE act, which he says is moving forward in private negotiations under the leadership of Senator Hatch.

Panelists inlude Mike Caren of Atlantic Records, Eddy Cue of Apple, Danger Mouse - the "hottest hip-hop producer in the world", Michael Weiss of Morpheus

Mike -- my job is to find new music and new talent, and then developoing that talent. The Internet is now part of everything I do. I have to look in ever nook and crany which used to be scouts and local shows but is now also reading blogs and looking online for favorite play lists and individual reviews. On the developing talent side, we are recording almost 100% directly to digital which reduces costs and facilitates distributed collaboration.

Hank - can you give me an example of a band that has broken out on the Internet?

Mike - not a perfect example. The Internet has been useful as an indicator of say that a video will be a hit video. But I can't say that there was one artist that has truly been an Internet artist.

Eddy - I think this is going to happen in the next year, where there will be an artist that really emerges from the Internet. We have more and more artists that have direct deals with iTunes.

Danger Mouse - Talks about how he created the "Grey Album" background from his web site --

Danger Mouse raised the bar on hip hop experimentalism by dropping the infamous Grey Album, which used the full vocal content of Jay-Z's Black Album, recorded over new beats and production created using the Beatles White Album as it';s sole source material. The resulting record is a unique hybrid of work, a re-interpretation being touted as the one of greatest remix albums of all time. With one million downloads in a week and ensuing battle between major record companies, the media, Internet and copyright advocates, the release of the Grey Album has been nothing less than a watershed moment for music.

Michael - Neonet is the next generation of peer to peer search technology which is going to drive people crazy in the intellectual property business.

Interesting, though wandering conversation about intellectual property rights, the use of the Internet to promote vs. steal music... But nothing really new here.

Lessons Learned, Future Predicted

Who doesn't want to know the future? But I sort of expect that Marc Andressen and Dan Rosensweig are more likely to have useful comments on the first half of this panel's topic.

BROWSERS:
Marc predicts that Microsoft will come back and attack Firefox and Opera and the other browsers that are emerging with a revitalized IE strategy and one that "screws with people's business models, leveraging the monopoly that they control..."

Dan believes that Yahoo's direction is to become more and more open. He does believe that there are things that can be done with a client application and pointed out that Yahoo already has a number of rich clients, including a browser.

WALLED GARDENS:

Marc observes that we live in a world where software is more and more open - this is not the world of web 1.0 where the experience is a walled garden, but he believes that data is the new walled garden -- data lock in. You can't get your reputation out of eBay, for example -- "the plantation owner - sharecropper relationship"

Dan agrees that data is absolutely essential. But Dan thinks the walled garden of data leaves companies vulnerable -- if you lock up data, you just create a world in which companies and people are all trying to extract that data. So if you build your business on the premise of controlling that data, your business will unravel. So the important thing is to create a compelling user experience around data. That user experience will provide a lasting business model.

WEB OS

Marc -- Google is being lead willingly and unwillingly by press, wall street, users, into a direct confrontation with Microsoft. And I've seen this before. (Dan - how did it turn out? (Marc - you're going to find out!). They are being lead because everyone is spoiling for a fight. The result of that is that you have Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer on stage taking it personally and saying we will have to kill Google. It will be very interesting to see and it is still very unclear how it will line up. Google on your browser is one way, but there are other ways that they can screw with Microsoft's business model. (John Battelle (moderating) - but John Doer said that Google isn't going to do a browser -- Marc - the day that Google listens to John Doer is the day that they don't do a dutch auction...)

Dan -- Yahoo focuses on the user. What is the long term value for users. Long term value for users creates long term value for investors and employees. Its important not to get caught up in the issue of the moment and to stay focused on that long term value. "At the end of the day we are all going to end up surrendering to what the user wants to do."

Mary Meeker at Web 2.0

Mary Meeker at Web 2.0,
originally uploaded by Ted Shelton.

Talking about China -- points out that in 1850, China was 33% of the world's GDP. Today they are only back up to 4% but they are the fastest growing.

59 million Chinese Internet users

24 million Chinese broadband subscribers

15 million online gamers

The economic picture is enormously different in China --

GDP per capita -- $619 China $37,000 for US


Huge labor surplus still in China:

Opex per employee $6.5K in China vs $73K in the US and $333K for Microsoft

"In the middle of most towns in Europe is a church. In China it is a Kentucky Fried Chicken or a McDonalds or both -- pointing to the enormous commercialization of China."