Chipster passes along the following:

The Bush White House has an “opinion” line for you to call. So call and give your opinion of the proposed war in Iraq. The line only accepts calls from 9-5 EST., Monday thru Friday. Just call the White House at 202-456-1111. A machine will detain you for only a moment and then a pleasant live operator will thank you for saying “I oppose” or “I approve.” It will only take minutes. Note that the weekends are closed for calls. The president has said that he wants to know what the American people are thinking. Let him know. Time is running out.. Then please forward this e-mail to at least five people right away.

Tell them what you think: 1 PHONE CALL EQUALS 10-20 PEOPLE WHO DIDN’T CALL,

PLEASE PASS ON TO FRIENDS
Deborah Marie, OP
Dominican Sisters

I haven’t been able to get through because the line has been busy all afternoon (yay!), but Google confirms that that is the White House comment line.

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The infuriatingly smug and specious television ads from the Office of National Drug Control Policy have an obvious subtext. In the ads, which you can view here, we see a young-ish businessman having a meal in a fancy restaurant with another businessman in the next generation up. The young man thinks the relationship between drugs and terrorism is “very complex.” The older man sighs Gore-ishly and lowers his eyelids in exasperation, as if he’s talking to a slow-witted child. He patiently explains in one-syllable words how drugs and terrorism are connected. The younger man gets a Jeff Spicoli look as he processes the information and then concedes defeat.

Let us choke down the bile arising from the administration’s despicable attempt to use September 11 to manipulate opinion on unrelated issues and instead just look at the pictures:

Rich, callow, shallow, stupid, drug-using young businessman? Hmm, I wonder who that could be. And he’s being advised by a man his father’s age who patiently explains what his position should be? Lemme think, lemme think! And the young man changes his mind on an issue of international importance within 5 seconds?

The George character’s facial expressions are too close to Bush’s to be accidental. The older man looks and sounds too much like a combination of Rumsfeld and Cheney for it to be accidental. The only question is whether the ad agency did this because their research showed it would be more effective or because they were taking a backhanded swipe at their clients.

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The official collection of 26 anti-drug print ads from the Office of National Drug Control Policy is here.

Interesting reading. The arguments are of three sorts:

1. Marijuana interferes with what you want to achieve in real life

2. Marijuana is dangerous: you’ll get arrested, you’ll crash into a truck, etc.

3. Buying marijuana gives money to gangsters who kill people [which is actually an argument for legalization]

In addition, some tell parents that they can prevent their kids from smoking dope through (1) Love (spend time with your kids) or (2) Discipline (lay down the law). The photos of the Love ‘Em group show people of color, particularly Latino and Native American. The photos in the Discipline ‘Em group are of white kids. Does the research show that white parents are too soft and non-whites are too neglectful? Is this conscious or unconscious racism?

None of the photos in any of the 26 ads show an African American. Apparently the War on Drugs has been won in that particularly demographic. Congratulations, America!

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Event Set #1: The Bush Doctrine of preemptive attacks is announced. The buildup against Iraq shows that we’re serious, even eager, to act on it. North Korea, an oppressive and delusional state, is included in the Axis of Evil.

Event Set #2: North Korea escalates its nuclear threat dramatically.

Gee, do you think there might be a relationship between these two sets? Nah, I’m sure it’s just coincidence. After all, when the world’s only super power announces its new policy is to threaten and then invade countries that worry it, those other countries would just give up, right? After all, that’s what Americans would do if we were threatened with attack.

Policy, meet Reaction. Reaction, meet Policy.

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Gary Stock is funny and telling on Senator Bill Frist’s past as a torturer of cats. It’s Reality Based Comedy, unfortunately.

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David Isenberg’s SMART letter alerts us to some seemingly irrational behavior by the FCC:

The FCC is planning to eliminate wholesale rate rules, called UNE-P, that make it possible for companies that do not yet own their own last mile to enter the local telephone service marketplace. The UNE-P rules were established to make local competition possible. (For a good overview [too technical for me – dw] of the current UNE-P debate see here .)

This is such a reversal and such a bad idea that it’s hard to fathom Chairman Powell’s reasoning. It gives the incumbent telcos more money, but it ends competition and shuts down the market.

Now Howard Greenstein suggests an explanation: Suppose limiting the number of telco providers is a requirement for John “The Felon” Pointdexter’s Total Information Awareness plan?

I’m reluctant to get all paranoid about this, but does anyone have a better explanation?

Kevin Werbach, ex-FCC wonk and all-around good guy, says: Nah. (I’ve boiled down his email while I await permission from him to run it.)

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In support of Marek’s campaign to brand Jack Valenti as the Gollum of Content:

Jack Gollenti

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U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher (D-VA), John Doolittle (R-CA), Spencer Bachus (R-AL) and Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) introduced on Tuesday the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act. Boucher said:

“The fair use doctrine is threatened today as never before. Historically, the nation’s copyright laws have reflected a carefully calibrated balanced between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the users of copyrighted material. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the Fair Use rights of the users of copyrighted material,” Boucher said. “The re-introduced legislation will assure that consumers who purchase digital media can enjoy a broad range of uses of the media for their own convenience in a way which does not infringe the copyright in the work,” Boucher explained.

Let us not only praise these reps, let us reward them. Cash? Cuban cigars? Hookers? Just let us know, boys!

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Adina writes about some informal research done by Valdis Krebs that resulted in this diagram, which you can see full size by clicking here or on this gargantuan thumbnail:

This is a rough-and-ready map of the reading preferences of the political left and the right. Valdis, who does superb maps of complex information, looked at some books easily identifiable as lefty or righty (e.g., Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Ann Coulter’s Slander) and then looked at each book’s “buddy list” (“People who bought this book also bought…”). He followed those links and mapped the results.

Given that Valdis is not pretending to have done thorough, systematic search, the results are nevertheless interesting if not surprising: We’re not reading one another’s books. In fact, Valdis found only one book that both “sides” are reading: Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response.

Valdis puts this diagram forward as the result of some back-of-the-envelope research and nothing more. It leaves me with two questions: Is this clustering getting tighter or looser? And where would we find common ground outside of books about politics? Are lefties and righties both reading Harry Potter, About a Boy or Amsterdam? Are we all keeping up with The Sopranos? And surely concerned citizens of all political persuasions set aside an hour on Tuesday night to watch Buffy!

I hope Valdis approaches Amazon and suggests that they use his tool to let us all see the emergent patterns…

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Where is the organized civil disobedience against the DMCA? Am I missing it?

I’m up for something. For example, suppose we made up two “ribbons” like these:

Look at the ALT tag. Each contains half of a DeCSS perl hack … sort of. To get it to work as an ALT tag, I had to encode some of the PERL operators into HTML character codes, so even put back together these two code fragments are not actually a working DeCSS hack. No, first you’d have to alter it so that “<“=&lt;, etc.

Don’t like this? Who could blame you? So come up with something better, braver and catchier. I’ll probably be up for it.

The first ranking on Google for “DeCSS” goes to a site that has created innocuous software called “DeCSS” precisely to make life a little harder for those trying to enforce the anti-DeCSS effort (aka The Bad Guys).

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