Creepiest kid ever? Of course, many parents won't agree, and will be jealous. And American Junior Idols is on my only tv channel tonight again I think. Little performing robots. Consumer bots being bred for a life of driving and eating...

Foreign distrust of America has increased dramatically over the past year according to a new survey of 20 countries by the Pew Research Centre. The proportion of people with a favourable attitude towards the United States has dropped from 61% to 45% in Germany, 63% to 43% in France, 61% to 15% in Indonesia and 25% to just 1% in Jordan. (From the Economist)

Mark Morford's column about the relaxing of the FCC regulations - yay yay go go ViacomDisneyAOLMicrosoft NewsCorpExxonWalMartSatan!

"You wouldn't believe the things I've hauled off," Ciszek said. "Fully functional air conditioners, entire record collections, VCRs, unopened boxes of cereal and canned goods, like-new chairs, desks with barely a scratch, stereo components, computers--you name it. I don't know how many pairs of shoes still in the box, never been worn, I've tossed in the back of the truck. I must have junked 50 miles of extension cords, and I'm guessing 95 percent of those still worked."

Funny, yes... Less funny, though, when you think of the truth of it.

I ponder sometimes about all the spam that I get--in fact also about the amount of spam that everyone receives--and it makes me think... Spammers are a type of bottom-feeder within the information economy. Not only are they email marketers, which are bottom-feeders already, but they are the lowest type of email marketers, often using deceptive techniques in an attempt to separate one from his or her money. Then I look at my Popfile history, and it's buckets tell me that only 16.5% of the email I receive is legitimate (non-spam). Then, you know, naturally, I start to get a little upset. But I consider: Perhaps these bottom-feeders have a true place in our internet-economy…indeed, in our economy as a whole. They have always been around, after all, in one form or another. Could it possibly be that the snake-oil salesman serves a legitimate purpose? The most important thing: Bottom feeders exist in nature, in ecosystems…and they comprise important parts of those ecosystems. Bottom feeders are part of the cycle in nature--are they simply a part of the cycle in economics as well? Is it misguided and futile to try to get rid of them? That said, what purpose do they serve? Is it to punish naive customers for being so naive? Is it a “survival of the fittest” kind of thing? Is it the economic-ecological way of ridding the weak and uninformed economic agents from the game?

Media ownership is a war and the independent public is losing: F.C.C. Votes to Relax Rules Limiting Media Ownership (NYT: opensewer; iswatching).

Nevermind believing half of what you hear and none of what you read. It will be hard to believe anything anymore.

This one is for Rose: The new tax bill quadruples the deduction available on small-business equipment purchases, which include trucks. The catch? You've got to buy a big one. New tax breaks for SUVs is what it means!

If there's one thing we've learned from the internet...it's this: distributed systems work. In any sort of goods or services production, we're always trying to achieve economies of scale--ever since Henry Ford taught us that lesson. But economies of scale can blaze a trail of destruction in their wake, because they have such massive levels of inputs (often natural resources) and outputs (what is produced PLUS whatever the waste product may be). Distributed systems have small point inputs and outputs of whatever they're producing-distributing-using, and aren't as destructive. I'm speaking in the most general terms possible here--it doesn't matter what the distributed system is "carrying".

Back to our example. The internet, and similarly P2P networks, rely on small scale, interconnected, redundant "pieces" to achieve their power. We should have learned by now that the network, not the central plant, is the key to our future. Actually, I believe we have already learned this lesson (nature of course taught us first), but there is much in this world that is highly dependent on the old ways of thinking, and fearful of losing economies of scale (because what would we do then?), so it will take a long time for things to change.

US PLANS DEATH CAMP IN CUBA - I have seen this headline a couple places, and it seems to not be coming under fire. So when does it hit the major press?

Researchers are reporting today that first-person-shooter video games — the kind that require players to kill or maim enemies or monsters that pop out of nowhere — sharply improve visual attention skills. I don't find this so surprising. It seems to me like it's tied to some evolutionary hunting and survival core in us, from back when we had to be on the look out in an eat or be eaten world. (ny times again! holy cow, what's going on here...)

It's the details, really, that make this administration so awful. (NYTimes article, you know the drill; login: opensewer; password: iswatching.)

Who pays for U.S. government propaganda dressed up as primetime entertainment? Canadian taxpayers, that's who!

Who writes it? Canadians living in Hollywood, of course!

Who thinks up these almost military exercises in spin? That you can blame on a Texan.

Oh man. Trust in the Military Heightens Among Baby Boomers' Children in today's NY Times... Look at this : 'A poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics, based on interviews with 1,200 college undergraduates last month, found that 75 percent said they trusted the military "to do the right thing" either "all of the time" or 'most of the time.'

Holy cow. Young kids so ready to trust an organization that did this. (NYTimes; login: opensewer; password: iswatching.)

'The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum.' So wrote the normally staid Financial Times, traditionally the voice of solid British business opinion, when surveying last week's tax bill. ... Paul Krugman relentlessly exposing the evil of the Bush economic policy. (NYTimes; login:opensewer; password: iswatching.)

This is one of the most powerful, most amazing stories I've ever heard. (From the archives of This American Life, Real Audio Player Required.)

Ladies and gentlemen, it's another day, another blog. That's all. Maybe more. Maybe not. It's a grey, not so sunny day here, but I wouldn't know, I am stuck inside for most all of it. In world news, governments abused their power, people starved to death all over the world, pockets of resistance and hope rose up from places far and near, and the earth kept flying through space at thousands of miles per hour without throwing anyone off. Cheers!

Given all the coverage bestowed today on last night's final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I probably don't need to write this blog. Publications as diverse as The New York Times, Slate, Salon, and The Washington Post have weighed in. Who knew the Chosen One had so many friends? I haven't much to add -- I'm still too overcome by emotion to analyze the show's passing -- except that, dammit, I'm gonna miss her and him and her and him and him.

Report from Canada: a new series of surveys shows that the gap between U.S. and Canadian cultures has been widening for decades, and, contrary to popular opinion, has not closed since 9/11. U.S. of Americans continue to attend church, defer to authority, and evince a patriotic fervor more than their northern neighbors. Those three trends, developing together during a vague but constant "war on terrorism," seem doomed to erode the liberties the U.S. is so admired for. But this nice, informative article is ruined when it concludes with the usual grotesque, cliched implication: "Canadians responded to 9/11 with heartfelt sympathy and outrage, but also with many questions. They asked why young Muslims would do what they did in New York and Washington." It's an intellectually stimulating query to ask, but morally and ethically it misses the point by two enormous skyscrapers.

"An unarmed Haitian father of two children is shot by a seedy-looking undercover narcotics officer after angrily refusing to help the cop buy drugs. (It was intended to be a "buy-bust" operation.) Ironically, the victim worked as a uniformed security guard and had told his family that he hoped one day to become a police officer."
Details can be found here, similar stories are here... (thanks to the agitator)

WHAT!!?? You mean white suburban kids columbine sometimes do genuinely columbine bad things? That goes against everything columbine my pure and sacred core values columbine tell me!

Follow up from 5/6 - Salon.com talks to Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, about his new book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, and has a review here. salon.com - click through ads to get article but no reg. required.

Some people want you to have a healthier diet, and some people are nuts (is "Nabisco Nazi" the appropriate term for these wackos?)

With this president, having federal agents in high schools (interrogating students) is becoming a regular practice.

Great…I can see it coming: The uninformed are going to use Friday’s hostage situation at CWRU in Cleveland as an example of why not to build unconventional, progressive architecture. (“How can we catch terrorists if we don’t have right angles?”) You watch, someone will extrapolate this argument to the design of the WTC very soon.

The future of interactive tv - a future where you are watched as much as the shows? No, it's not reality television, it's the companies learning everything about your viewing habbits. The home is sacred no more. salon.com article - click though ads but no reg required

Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation has a new book out, and he talks to the Village Voice about the history of the last thirty years.

A graphic comparing the relationship between workers and bosses in the U.S.A. to that of other countries (via mefi). Further investigation asked for on this one...

Fuel Economy Hit 22-Year Low. The technological and engineering leaps of the last two decades have been poured into everything but fuel economy... Since 1981, the average vehicle has 93 percent more horsepower and is 29 percent faster in going from 0 to 60 miles an hour. It is also 24 percent heavier, reflecting surging sales of sport utility vehicles. ... over the same period, fuel economy has stagnated, contributing heavily to the nation's rising oil consumption. Cars and light trucks — S.U.V.'s, pickups and minivans — account for about 40 percent of the nation's oil consumption and a fifth of its carbon dioxide emissions, which many scientists see as the leading contributor to global warming. (NYT; user name: opensewer; password: iswatching.)

Following up - I got a nice tip on the strange convergence of Loyalty Day and May Day and a reminder of what May Day meant/s in communist countries - state mandated loyalty celebrations. A very brief history on Loyalty Day here and here (worth noting that I found these web sites while googling for " 'may day' communist loyalty ").
May 1st has other meanings, too, with labor connotations. Its even older pagan origins were stamped out in the US by those damned puritains. So did anyone have a Maypole yesterday? (pop-up ads warning)
Whatever the roots, I find the notion of a "Loyalty Day" pretty damn repulsive. Was I supposed to celebrate by attacking anti-war demonstraters with buckets of water?

In case you missed it, yesterday was officially Loyalty Day in the U.S. Next year, expect participation to be mandatory.