Larry Craig and Abuse of Power--By the Media

The Larry Craig kerfuffle has led to some interesting reversals. Many have argued that Craig was hypocritical for being gay (though he denies it) and voting for the Defense of Marriage Act which made it so that gay marriage in one state would not have to mean gay marriage in another. I don't think that's a persuasive argument since there are plenty of openly gay people who do not support gay marriage.

Unquestionably one group of people has been hypocritical here. Not the Republicans or the Democrats. The most hypocritical group in all this has been the self-described mainstream (actually liberal) media. In her column today, Linda Chavez is right on the money:

There is something more than a little bizarre with the latest Washington feeding frenzy over Sen. Larry Craig. Don't get me wrong. I think what Sen. Craig did in the men's bathroom in Minneapolis was gross and sleazy. But is it really worthy of the press attention it has received this week? I just can't imagine a Democratic member of Congress being subjected to the same treatment if the facts, as we know them so far, were identical. [...]

If Democratic Sen. X's hypothetical arrest ever made it into the papers — doubtful, unless the senator chose to make it public — I suspect the tone of the coverage would be rather different than Sen. Craig's treatment.

I can just imagine the Washington Post inveighing against police entrapment and homophobia and demanding that the private sex lives of politicians remain private unless their behavior involved an abuse of their official duties.

Of course, it isn't just the media who are going after Sen. Craig. His fellow Republicans are piling on, calling for ethics investigations and, understandably, trying to distance themselves from him. Some are even asking him to resign. This has been a disaster for Republicans, whose base is far more concerned about morality and traditional values than are most Democrats. But this is all the more reason you might expect the press to be calling for a little perspective here. [...]

On the one hand, the media generally regards sexual orientation as a private matter, moreover one that is morally neutral. But because Sen. Craig is a conservative, although not someone who has had a history of gay-bashing, the media have had no qualms about violating his privacy. Indeed, Craig's home newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, spent five months delving into the senator's sex life.

Sen. Craig's political career is probably over. The abuse of power, however, was not Sen. Craig's but the media's, who pick and choose whose privacy they will violate on a partisan basis.

This is not merely a hypothetical. The same liberal elite who are today denouncing the "deviant" Larry Craig were also the same ones who excused the aberrant sexual behavior of former president Bill Clinton. How many times were we subjected to self-righteous harangues about how investigations into whether Clinton solicited sex from subordinates (thereby cheating on his wife) were intrusions into his "personal life?"

Where were today's guardians of moral and political rectitude back in 1969 when Democrat Ted Kennedy drove a car off a bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne in it? Where were the liberal media outcries to kick Democrat Barney Frank out of the Congress when he solicited a gay prostitute who in turn set up shop in his apartment?

This litany could go on and on. The point remains: Democratic sexual indiscretions are OK while Republicans' are not. This double standard should not exist in a media that is as fair as it pretends to be.

Surge Success Causes Democrats to Recalibrate Iraq Strategy

If you've been wondering lately why defeatist media outlets like the New York Times have suddenly been bullish on Iraq, here's the payoff: Democrats have begun to shift their political strategy in light of the success of the surge. While I have to give the Washington Post credit for reporting on the Democrats' failure to spin reality into defeat, I have to note that the following article came on page A4 of today's edition:

Democratic leaders in Congress had planned to use August recess to raise the heat on Republicans to break with President Bush on the Iraq war. Instead, Democrats have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front, increasingly focusing their criticisms on what those military gains have not achieved: reconciliation among Iraq's diverse political factions.

And now the Democrats, along with wavering Republicans, will face an advertising blitz from Bush supporters determined to remain on offense. A new pressure group, Freedom's Watch, will unveil a month-long, $15 million television, radio and grass-roots campaign today designed to shore up support for Bush's policies before the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, lays out a White House assessment of the war's progress. The first installment of Petraeus's testimony is scheduled to be delivered before the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a fact both the administration and congressional Democrats say is simply a scheduling coincidence.

The leading Democratic candidates for the White House have fallen into line with the campaign to praise military progress while excoriating Iraqi leaders for their unwillingness to reach political accommodations that could end the sectarian warfare.

"We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Anbar province, it's working," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Monday.

"My assessment is that if we put an additional 30,000 of our troops into Baghdad, that's going to quell some of the violence in the short term," Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) echoed in a conference call with reporters Tuesday. "I don't think there's any doubt that as long as U.S. troops are present that they are going to be doing outstanding work."

Advisers to both said theirs were political as well as substantive statements, part of a broader Democratic effort to frame Petraeus's report before it is released next month by preemptively acknowledging some military success in the region. Aides to several Senate Democrats said they expect that to be a recurring theme in the coming weeks, as lawmakers return to hear Petraeus's testimony and to possibly take up a defense authorization bill and related amendments on the war.

NewsBusters Featured on 'ABC World News'

And since NewsBusters is conservative, the treatment was hardly fair. I couldn't help but notice that in the segment which compared NB to the left-wing Media Matters (a really bad comparison considering they want to eradicated all conservatism from the airwaves whereas we just want balance), ABC didn't bother talking to me or any of the other NB staff.

Mark Finkelstein has more details and a video.

NYT's Linda Greenhouse Bans Cameras from Public Appearance

Notoriously left-wing New York Times court reporter Linda Greenhouse, famous for her 2006 rant against Republicans, "religious fundamentalism," and illegal immigration opponents has apparently learned from her mistake.

No, she hasn't decided that someone with such fervently liberal positions needs a conservative counterpart on the beat. Instead, she decided that television cameras need to be banned from her public appearances:

For Supreme Court buffs who watch C-SPAN, yesterday morning was one of disappointment. A promising panel discussion, “Covering the Court(s): Reporters on the Supreme Court Beat,” that included a bevy of court reporting superstars -- like Charles Lane from The Washington Post and Dahlia Lithwick from Slate -- was to be televised. But, at the last minute, the plug was pulled on the C-SPAN cameras because the queen bee of Supreme Court reporters, Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times refused to join the panel if the event was going to be covered by the wonky news channel.

According to people who were there, Greenhouse walked in, took one look at the lights and the camera equipment, and, “became infuriated,” said one person who was standing near her. As Greenhouse herself told me yesterday following the event, she then gave the organizer of the panel an ultimatum. “I told her she had a choice, either she could have me on the panel speaking candidly or she could have C-SPAN there.”

Greenhouse said that she had come prepared to speak to a “room of academics.” She added, “I didn’t want to have to modulate my comments for a national audience.” [...]

Sending a C-SPAN crew is a big outlay for the low-budget network. The Vice-President of programming at C-SPAN, Terence Murphy, fired off an angry letter yesterday evening at the organization that put on the discussion, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. “I must say, it’s perplexing as to why Ms. Greenhouse didn’t want to permit C-SPAN to cover her remarks, since our program archive lists 51 different events where we’ve covered her over the years,” wrote Murphy. “But the larger concern is why AEJMC organizers allowed Ms. Greenhouse’s view to prevail. If professors of journalism and working journalists taking part in a journalism education conference don’t stand up for open media access to public policy discussions, who will?”

Perhaps the longtime Times reporter has grown wary of too much public attention because of the bad press she received last summer after a speech she gave at Radcliffe College. Critiquing the actions of the Bush administration, she seemed to declare herself anti-war and against the pro-life movement, lamenting, among other things, the “hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.”

C-SPAN's Murphy is right on the money. As the self-appointed "fourth branch" of government ostensibly entrusted by the public with exposing the activities of the other branches, journalists should never ban others from covering their own activities. Then again, we should hardly expect professional behavior from a SCOTUS reporter who marched in a pro-choice protest while covering abortion for her paper.

Beat the Press: Google to Allow People Mentioned in News to Respond

An interesting development from Google today. Starting now, the search engine is going to allow people who are mentioned in a news story to respond to it and have their responses posted within Google News (h/t Brian Clark):

Here's how the new system will work: people or organizations that are mentioned in news stories can submit comments to the Google News team, which will then display those comments—unedited—alongside the Google News links to those stories.

The new system will at first be deployed only within the U.S., but Google is open to expanding it to other regions if the trial goes well.

This raises a number of questions that the announcement does not attempt to answer, such as how Google will vet the comments to ensure they come from the claimed source (watch this space for the first "Google News punked!" stories in the following weeks). Google is also a backer of algorithm-driven solutions as opposed to those which require human interaction and don't scale as well. Vetting comments and verifying identities doesn't sound like the sort of thing which lends itself to an algorithm, but we'll assume Google has thought this through and has some sort of plan. Let's turn instead to the most interesting implication.

Once the new system is in place, Google News will feature something it has never had before: original content. There's a certain amount of "originality" in aggregating news sources from around the world and organizing them into easy-to-click topics, of course, but the content has all been owned by others, and some of those others have been less than happy about their inclusion in Google News.

If the new comments feature takes off and Google News becomes a central clearinghouse for those who want to respond to pieces in which they appear, the site's popularity would no doubt skyrocket. News junkies would have to visit Google News—and not any particular newspaper—to find out if, say, Barry Bonds objected to a characterization of him on the USA Today sports page.

Facebook Not Useful for Advertisers?

Filed away this earlier today:

Facebook is the website du jour, but in Reach Students’ experience it delivers appalling ad clickthroughs.

We’ve run four targeted campaigns this year using its flyer ads, and each time the results have been disappointing.

Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.

When we first experienced poor results earlier this year we looked carefully at creative and planning. Further experimentation saw a variety of quite different offers and creative approaches. What kept us going was the fact that others had anecdotally mentioned good returns from Facebook ads.

Yet our results did not improve.

Baffled, we did some research and discovered that actually we are not alone.

Valleywag finds that 0.04% is pretty much the average when it comes Facebook clickthroughs - note that they are talking about banners as well as flyers.

There is varied speculation as to why the clickthroughs are so shockingly poor on Facebook. Some have cited the fact the site is essentially messaging orientated – rather than content orientated - meaning that therefore users are in no frame of mind to slope off down trails.

The linked site disagrees with that thesis but I believe it is correct. The value in social network sites like Facebook for an advertiser is in the permanence of their presence. Unlike a normal web site where you will occasionally get something interesting enough that popular sites will link in, Facebook cannot be accessed without a login, immediately limiting popular sites from linking.

That's why consistency and quality matter more for an organization trying hard to use Facebook for promotion.

Jihad, The Musical

Been super busy of late but couldn't help but post this:

A satirical musical about Islamist terrorism and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has sparked protests in Britain, with critics blasting it as tasteless.

"Jihad: The Musical," which features songs including "I wanna be like Osama" and is described as "a madcap gallop through the wacky world of international terrorism," is on at the Edinburgh Fringe festival this month.

But a petition has been launched on Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Downing Street website.

"We the undersigned petition the prime minister to condemn the tasteless portrayal of terrorism and its victims in 'Jihad The Musical,' says the online protest.

The musical, by the Silk Circle Production company, had its world premier this week in the Scottish capital's Fringe festival, famous for satirical and off-the-wall shows.

It tells the story of a young Afghan peasant, Sayid, who dreams of making it as a flower farmer selling poppies to the West.

But his plans are thwarted by a jihadi cell seeking to blow up Western targets, in particular one known as the "Unidentified, Very Prestigious Landmark."

The story comes to a head on the night of the attack, when Sayid has to decide whose side he is on.

Producer James Lawler sought to downplay the protest. "We have no intention of causing offence or insult with this show. It is simply a musical comedy," he said.

The next "Producers?"

Microsoft Converts Works Suite to Ad-supported Freeware

Looks like Microsoft is feeling the profusion of open-source and online office software. It's set to release the next version of Microsoft Works as ad-supported freeware:

Microsoft’s next version of its small-business/home productivity suite, due imminently, will be free and ad-funded.

Microsoft Works 9.0 — which will be the new product’s name, if Microsoft opts to stick with its current nomenclature — might also debut at some point as Microsoft-hosted low-end productivity service, as many have been speculating. A hosted version of Works would give Microsoft a head-to-head competitor with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and other consumer- and small-business focused services, analysts have said.

For the time being, however, the new version of Works will be ad-funded, according to Satya Nadella, the newly minted Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Search & Advertising Platform Group. Nadella told me during an interview on July 27 that Microsoft recently released the new ad-funded version of Microsoft Works.

If Works 9.0 is out, I haven’t found it yet — other than a couple download links on torrents and other sharing sites. Anyone else seen it?

(I’ve asked Microsoft for more information on the new ad-funded Works suite. No word back yet. Update: Even though Microsoft’s own vice president discussed the product, no one will talk. The official comment, via a Microsoft spokeswoman: “We’re always looking at innovative ways to provide the best productivity tools to our customers, but have nothing to announce at this time.”)

I Thought Only Red State People Do This!

At least that's what the liberal stereotype tells me:

A Sherborn teen was charged yesterday with having sex with sheep at a farm near his home, and police reports suggest the encounters may have gone on for nearly a year.

Roger Henderson II, 18, was arraigned yesterday in Natick District Court on charges of bestiality, cruelty to animals and breaking and entering in connection with an incident police say took place at Boggastow Farm on June 27.

According to a police report, the farm's barn had been the target of at least a dozen break-ins between August 2006 and June 2007, prompting the property owner to install surveillance cameras.

Between 3 and 4 a.m. on June 27, according to police, the camera captured and filmed a person identified as Roger Henderson II.

The man grabbed a sheep by its hind legs and dragged it to the corner of the stall, according to police. The man removed his clothes and appeared to have sexual relations with the sheep. After finishing, the man put his pants back on and left the barn with his shirt in his hand, according to the report.

Following his arraignment yesterday, Henderson was released to the custody of his parents, on the condition he stay at least 30 yards away from the farm, and animals in general.

Watching Democrats Debate

Courtesy of the Media Bloggers Association, I will be attending tonight's Democratic presidential debate sponsored by PBS. Should be an interesting affair.

You can catch my postings over at Ace of Spades HQ.

Struggle Against Islam, Winnable Only by a Democrat?

Glenn Reynolds:

Frankly, I think the best argument for electing a Democrat as President is that as long as a Republican is in office the media powers-that-be will refuse to condemn even the worst atrocities on the part of Islamists, for fear of helping the real enemy in the White House

I'd have to agree. Democrats have been blinded by partisanship so much that they really have lost site of the very real fact that Islamic terrorism will be a world-wide force regardless of which party has the White House. It is the height of stupidity and arrogance to even suggest that Iraq or George Bush have made violent Islamists hate America. Osama bin Laden and his ilk despise the West because we're not Muslim. He feels similarly about Muslims who do not share his particular brand of Wahhabi Islam.

It's arguable whether America's political leadership ought to be stating this fact on a regular basis; it's essential that they operate with this assumption, however.

Just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a Democrat can defeat radical Islam. At this point, Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson are the only Democratic candidates who realize this.

Matt TV: Fox and Friends

Last week, I was on FNC's "Fox and Friends" to discuss the fired CNN reporter Jeff Koinange. He was accused (and apparently fired for although CNN hasn't officially commented) of staging a news story and also using company resources to conduct an affair with a woman who was supposed to be a story source.

Here's the video:

Journalism's Faulty Paradigm

Yesterday, OpinionJournal featured an fantastic essay (found via Ace) from critic James Bowman about the faulty paradigm that modern journalism has embraced, the idea that "getting the facts right" ought to be the foremost goal of government.

It's a ridiculous premise, Bowman argues, because that isn't what government is supposed to do. In an imperfect world populated by imperfect humans, mistakes and errors are inevitable. What ought to matter most is how governments learn from miscalculations and their will to pursue the important tasks we expect them to.

This odd prejudice may be partly owing to the huge social premium we put on intelligence in the era of the cognitive elite. People who have no idea on earth what to do about the war or any of the problems we face as a nation think it is some kind of program to ridicule the intelligence of the President. Even the political opposition has fallen into this trap by making mere perspicacity in the anticipation of evils rather than the determined effort to combat them its test of political success. Thus in Sen. Jim Webb's reply to the president's State of the Union Address in January, he had no alternative to suggest to the measures for dealing with Iraq that had been proposed, but he was full of indignation on the grounds that the mistakes of the administration had been foreseeable. He knew that they were foreseeable because he himself had foreseen them. The implication was that he was much cleverer than President Bush--as if that was all that need be said to the credit of the former and the discredit of the latter.

The fact that the opposition and the media frame the debate in this way means that much of the administration's energies have to be expended in defending itself against endless second-guessing, which in turn means that it is even less inclined to recognize and correct mistakes. This is infantile politics. Meanwhile, on the question of what is now to be done about the mistakes, no one seems to know any better than Sen. Webb, whose policy amounts to saying that we ought not to have made them in the first place. This is also the view of much of the Democratic Party, and almost all of the media, who repeat mechanically that we need a "change of course" in Iraq but never get around to telling us what they would change--short of surrendering, which is now becoming the default option.

This problem has its roots in that the press has flip-flopped on how it views war. Before the 20th century, war was something that was glossed over and even glorified by the press. That changed with the Vietnam War. Bowman writes:

There is also a paradox involved in the romance of exposing falsehood, for romance is itself a kind of falsehood. It may be a hopeful and a benign sort of falsehood, but it is still ineluctably false. By its very nature romance amounts to an exaggeration or glorification of what, looked at more closely, is at best mundane and at worst ugly or disreputable. Journalists, like novelists and filmmakers, used to romanticize warfare by closing their eyes to much of the horror of it; now they romanticize the victims of war and so undermine war's foundations by looking at nothing but its horrors. In the media's reporting of war, honor and glory have become at least as invisible as the ghastly flow of blood and viscera once were to their predecessors. Nowadays, any journalist who wants to succeed knows he is in the business not of celebrating honor or trust or heroism but of exposing whatever sordid realities may be found (or invented) beneath the appearances of those things. And if the romantic prize is now awarded to those who tell tales of war's evils, why should we not suppose that the supply of those evils will rise to meet the journalistic demand, just as the supply of heroes rose when the demand was for tales of heroism?

No fearless truth-teller that I know of has ever troubled to ask this question, let alone to answer it, for to do so would be to call into question the one unquestionable article of faith in the journalist's credo, namely his own "objectivity." Never mind the philosophical crudeness of this model of the media as a mirror in which realities are merely reflected. The transparency of the process, the neutrality of the observer in mediating for us the things he has observed must be insisted upon--barring occasional slips like the use of the word "romantic" above--at all costs if the journalist is to retain the authority he needs to be able to say with David Halberstam to the mighty of the earth: "You lie." Without that authority, what hope of joining Halberstam in the Pantheon of celebrity along with Gable and Hepburn? Yet that objectivity and that authority are themselves lies whose foundational nature preserves them from scrutiny even when the part the media play in shaping events--see, for instance, "Biased Sensationalism" in The New Criterion of December 2006--or being manipulated by others to shape events is obvious to anyone without a stake in the pursuit of journalistic glory.

Halberstam's old employer, the New York Times, took the occasion of his death to run a piece by Dexter Filkins, who writes for the paper from Iraq, comparing now with then. "During four years of war in Iraq, American reporters on the ground in Baghdad have often found themselves coming under criticism remarkably similar to that which Mr. Halberstam endured: those journalists in Baghdad, so said the Bush administration and its supporters, only reported the bad news. They were dupes of the insurgents. They were cowardly and unpatriotic." Small wonder then that, before he died, Halberstam himself "did not hesitate to compare America's predicament in Iraq to its defeat in Vietnam. And he was not afraid to admit that his views on Iraq had been influenced by his experience in the earlier war. 'I just never thought it was going to work at all,' Mr. Halberstam said of Iraq during a public appearance in New York in January." Yet neither Halberstam nor Mr. Filkins mentions one crucial difference between Vietnam and Iraq. In Vietnam, the enemy was militarily formidable even without any assistance from the media. In Iraq, the enemy is militarily weak and can hope to win only by exploiting the media's negativity--and the continuing romance of their role in Vietnam--to make the war seem unwinnable. The role of fearless truth-teller is no longer available, if it ever was. Like it or not, the media are already involved in the action and must pick a side.

Excactly right.

Incidentally, Bowman's piece was originally printed in the New Criterion, a lesser-known but superb conservative journal that is one of my favorite intellectual magazines. Their blog Armavirumque is also an excellent resource and well worth a visit.

Major Developments in Search War

Two interesting search war developments today, one regarding Microsoft and Google:

Microsoft Corp. has agreed to modify its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint that its computer search function put Google Inc. and other potential rivals at a disadvantage, the Justice Department and Microsoft said on Tuesday.

Under an agreement with the department and 17 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia, will build into Vista an option to let users select a default desktop search program on personal computers running Windows.

The function, known as "Instant Search," allows Windows users to enter a search query and get a list of results from their hard drive that contain the search term.

The agreement was made public as part of a joint report that the Justice Department and Microsoft filed late on Tuesday with the court overseeing Microsoft's compliance with a 2002 antitrust consent decree.

As part of the deal, a Microsoft official said the company also had pledged to place links inside the Internet Explorer window and the "Start" navigation menu to make it easier for people to access that default desktop search service.

The changes will be introduced in a service pack, or updated version of Windows Vista software. Microsoft said it anticipates a test version of the Vista Service Pack 1 to be ready by the year-end. [...]

The changes stem from a complaint Google filed with the Justice Department in December, in which it argued that a feature built into Vista that allows users to search a computer's hard drive did not leave room for competition from other desktop search applications.

The second involves Yahoo, Myspace and News Corp:

News Corporation has discussed swapping MySpace, its internet social networking unit, with Yahoo! in return for a 30 per cent stake in the enlarged group.

The discussions remain tentative and could collapse after the departure of Terry Semel as Yahoo!’s chief executive and his replacement by Jerry Yang this week. Mr Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! and incoming chief executive, yesterday pledged to “dig in” to his new role, and acknowledged the difficult task he faces to arrest the decline in the internet portal’s shares.

News Corp, the parent company of The Times, is interested in a deal even if it means losing some control of MySpace because it would give the media group exposure to a far larger internet-based business.

Other News Corp digital assets, including the games network IGN, bought in 2005 for $650 million (£326 million), are also thought to have been offered to Yahoo!.

Ethics Without God

Since leaving Mormonism and religion in general (I am not an atheist however), the topic of morality has been one I've often thought about. Where does morality come from? Why should someone be moral? All questions eminently worth asking.

Back when I was a Mormon, I couldn't grasp the idea that a person could be ethical without a belief in the divine. I was very much a believer in Dostoevsky's idea that removing God from the moral equation would make it completely unsolveable.

I was wrong. God is not an integral variable because morality and ethics are actually fully natural phenomena that have developed over millenia. All animals who are gregarious engage in it to varying degrees.

Not stealing the other animal's piece of the kill is an act of morality within the community, as is leaving another member of the pack alone when it is sleeping. Protecting the pack from violent outside force is also an act of morality.

When you are a solitary animal, there is no morality. When there is no society, anything you can do is permissible since you cannot possibly offend or harm anyone who matters to you. Making someone you like sad or wasting someone's time are impossible when there are no other someones.

There are many advantages of being an amoral, solitary being. However, there are also many disadvantages. Two heads are usually better than one and two clubs fighting an animal trying to kill you are certainly better. That is why natural selection has favored those organisms who are social. Morality is merely the rule book that a particular society agrees to play by, both collectively and individually.

As time has gone by, morality has followed its evolutionary impulse. In other words, humankind has continued to develop more optimal forms of morality. This has led to greater greater altruism and better allocation of scarce resources. All of these things are what people generally term "progress." Others call it the "marketplace of ideas."

Once our lower order needs of safety, food, and reproduction were sufficiently men, eventually, human morality evolved to a point where ideas like universal humanity, ethics, compassion, and justice emerged. These ideas are non-religious although in most societies, their development was associated with the emergence of religion.

Ethically speaking, we as humans generally are operating on a paradigm of ethical increase. The longer we're around and the more advanced we become, the more we have turned our attention to refining what we consider to be moral. Examples of this process has been the emergence of secularism, equality for women, and the destigmatization of homosexuality. In terms of moral progress, some people are objectively more advanced than others just as some societies are similarly more evolved.

In the end, though, there is no absolute reason that you "must" be more moral than the minimum required to keep yourself out of jail; that is because we are all self-directed moral agents. Nonetheless, being what modern societies consider a "good person" has many advantages such as friendship, stability in life, love, self-esteem, sex, and reproduction to name a few. People who have trouble grasping or behaving morally always lack one or more of these things.

Then, of course, there is a certain value in moral behavior itself. To always examine one's life and to think often on what it means to do good can be very inspiring and uplifting.

Google, Paper Tiger?

Interesting news:

There was encouraging news for the growing army of Google-haters yesterday when a leading internet advertising researcher suggested that the search engine’s stranglehold on online promotions was looser than he had expected.

Bill Tancer, a research analyst at Hitwise, the internet research firm, said that eBay’s decision to pull all its advertising from Google in the US had had only a small impact on the “traffic” flowing from the search engine to the online auctioneer’s site.

Some 9.6 per cent of eBay visitors came from Google on Tuesday, the first full day that the boycott was in effect, compared with 10.6 per cent on the previous Tuesday, Mr Tancer said.

“Before I pulled the data, I was expecting a bigger drop given the drastic removal of sponsored listing ads by eBay,” he said.

He added that that the impact of eBay’s advertising withdrawal was reduced by the fact that 25 per cent of users visiting the internet auctioneer from Google do so after searching for eBay, rather than by clicking on one of the “sponsored links” that appear next to other search results.

The data suggests that Google may be less powerful than people thought, at a time when the search engine is seeking to widen its empire – and drawing fresh criticism almost every day as a result of its perceived growing dominance.

Overstated somewhat I believe. eBay's traffic from Google comes not from its ads, but from search queries. Were Google to boycott eBay in its search listings by reconfiguring its algorithms to demote eBay listings (in opposite fashion to what it does to promote Wikipedia entries), the auction site's traffic would decrease markedly.

Obama's Gender Gap

I wonder to what extent Hillary Clinton's female advantage over Barack Obama will last in the general election:

The consistent lead that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has maintained over Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and others in the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination is due largely to one factor: her support from women.

In the most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, Clinton led Obama by a 2 to 1 margin among female voters. Her 15-point lead in the poll is entirely attributable to that margin. Clinton drew support from 51 percent of the women surveyed, compared with 24 percent who said they supported Obama and 11 percent who said they backed former senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Clinton is drawing especially strong support from lower-income, lesser-educated women -- voters her campaign strategists describe as "women with needs." Obama, by contrast, is faring better among highly educated women, who his campaign says are interested in elevating the political discourse.

Campaign advisers say they expect Obama to pick up support from all categories of voters once they get to know him better, and that could change the structure of the race. But for now, women appear to be playing an outsized role in shaping it and could tip the scale toward the winner.

In 2004, women made up a majority of the Democratic primary electorate, including between 54 and 59 percent in the early-voting states of New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina.

Wireless Electricity

Mark June 2007 on your calendar as a milestone in technology. It will be remembered as the month when wireless electricity, the holy grail of mobile technology finally started to become a reality:

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) lit a 60 watt light bulb from a power source two meters away and with no physical connections between the source and the appliance.

The "WiTricity" device--the term coined by the MIT team to describe the wireless power phenomenon--uses magnetic fields to deliver power to the gadgets remotely.

The charger sends power to the gadget using magnetic induction, which is the ability to change a magnetic field to produce an electrical current.

Various methods of transmitting power wirelessly have been known for some time, such as radio waves or Wi-Fi.

But while such examples are excellent for the wireless transmission of information, it is not feasible for substantial power transmissions because radio waves and Wi-Fi radiation spread in all directions and vast amounts of power end up being wasted into free space.

In contrast, WiTricity synchronizes the charger and gadget to exchange energy efficiently without leaking much power to other objects.

WiTricity does this by getting the charger and power-hungry device to connect using magnetic fields at 'coupled resonant frequencies'.

Further geeky details at this link.

In Search of Porn 2.0

Ars Technica has an interesting article on how the pornography industry, one of the prime technological innovators in the recent years, is having trouble keeping up with the latest technology:

The industry often credited with being the driving force behind (no pun intended) new technologies is now suffering from them. The pornography industry, which has long been growing alongside the Internet since the early days, has hit a wall in recent years. DVD sales and rentals have dropped by 15 to 25 percent in the last year, according to industry estimates, and some believe that it could fall further if the industry doesn't catch up with new online trends.

What's the driving force behind this change? As more and more of the general public comes online, they are finding newer and cheaper ways to get their adult content fix. Just like the masses have flocked to sites like YouTube to watch professional clips from their favorite TV shows, video blogs, crazy stunts, and amateur movies, the adult audience has ditched DVDs and pay-per-view television to flock to similar sites. For example, PornoTube is a user-submitted video site of growing popularity that functions in the same way that YouTube does, complete with free, streaming videos.

Not just that, but increasing broadband speeds and wider adoption means that folks who once merely watched adult content are now able to create and upload it easily to sites like PornoTube for a fraction—or none—of the cost that it takes to make a professional video. "People are making movies in their houses and dragging and dropping them," CEO of adult payment processing site GoGoBill.com Harvey Kaplan told the New York Times. "It's killing the marketplace."

While online revenue for the professional adult industry has never been something to sneeze at, AVN Media Network's Paul Fishbein added that growth in the online space isn't happening quickly enough to make up for the drop in video sales—USA Today reports that Internet-based pornography sales grew by only 14 percent in the last year. Professional studios told both publications that they are attempting to catch up with the shift in public consumption trends by selling more online downloads and revamping their web sites to be more useable and professional. Some are hoping that the "quality" of their professional videos will win out with the public over those produced by amateurs. "We use good-quality lighting and very good sound," Red Light District president David Joseph told the New York Times, yet the company reports a sales drop of 30 percent over the last two years.

The Murdoch Strawman

As the negotiations about whether to sell the Wall Street Journal's parent company appear to be moving along between Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and the Bancroft family, owners of a special class of stock which gives them control over Dow Jones.

Whenever Murdoch is going hard for a media asset, it inevitably sets off concerns among those on the left (such as the employee unions at Dow Jones) that the purchase of an outlet by News Corp. will somehow comprimise its editorial integrity since Murdoch is a very active manager in his properties. Those concerns seem to be less about editorial process and more about political considerations since Murdoch is far from the only active media mogul.

In an editorial today, the Journal pointed out that Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger is heavily involved in managing the New York Times:

[T]he Bancrofts are unique in their hands-off ownership. They are often compared as family newspaper proprietors to the Grahams at the Washington Post or the Sulzbergers at the New York Times. But members of those families run those newspapers, exerting influence over the news and opinion operations. In that sense, those newspapers are hardly "independent" of those families.

Everyone knows that the influence of Times Publisher and CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr. extends to selecting not merely the editorial page editor but columnists, political endorsements and, as far as we can tell, even news coverage priorities. We don't see how this differs from most of what Mr. Murdoch is accused of doing with his newspapers. The same lack of independence also applies to most non-family media companies such as Gannett, a newspaper owner whose make-no-waves corporate ethic turns nearly all of its editorial pages into mush.

Of course, the fact that Pinch deliberately steers his paper in a leftward direction is what makes his corporate control a non-issue in the eyes of the left. The fact is the Bancrofts have been unique in the newspaper business in keeping a hands-off policy for media empire. It's also why I have refrained from criticizing their similarly cushy stock arrangement which gives them control of Dow Jones.