Hey, Buddy, Can You Spare A Gallon?

My English (actually expat) cousin wrote today that the price of "petrol" in the north of England was in the neighborhood of $10 US per gallon. If that's not gloomy enough for you, Daniel Gross tells us that we are in a hole. And everyone—from top to bottomn—just keeps digging. "We're toast" is the mantra of these times. If this is (fair & balanced) weltschmerz, so be it.

[x Newsweek]
Gilded Highways
By Daniel Gross

(Summary: Why the government is spending $100 billion a year to get you to drive more.)

The Transportation Department reported that Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer miles in May 2008 than in May 2007, a 3.7 percent drop. The result: rising demand for mass transit and declining revenues for the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by gas taxes. The Bush administration's counterintuitive policy response, as the New York Times reported, has been for the Highway Trust Fund to borrow funds from the department's mass-transit account.

Naturally, many urban-dwelling, car-hating socialists (as well as suburban-dwelling, Jeep-driving moderates like me) believe this is precisely the time to put more government funds—not less—into alternate modes of transportation: natural-gas powered buses, bicycle-sharing programs, trains, light-rail systems, subways, ferries, and rickshaws. The notion that the government should invest more in mass-transit infrastructure has always raised conservative hackles. As they sit on the Amtrak Acela, or ride the New York City subway or Washington, D.C., Metro, to their think-tank jobs or to the Wall Street Journal's offices, free-market types frequently fulminate against the systems that ferry them around. (New York Times house libertarian John Tierney's "Amtrak Must Die" from 2002 is a classic in the genre.) To such critics, money spent on mass transit, such as the $1.3 billion 2007 appropriation for Amtrak (here's Amtrak's 2007 annual report) represents an unconscionable waste of taxpayer funds. With their top-down bureaucracies and public ownership, they argue, mass-transit systems can never hope to compete economically with the private-sector alternative—driving gasoline-powered cars. They can't compete culturally and socially, either, since rugged American individualists prefer sitting by themselves in traffic to rubbing shoulders with strangers. And for those few areas where it does make sense to have mass transit, the market will step in and provide.

This is one of the oldest political arguments in America. For a good chunk of the 19th century, the prospect of the federal government supporting "internal improvements"—i.e., canals, ports, roads—was a major source of partisan contention. Ultimately, the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians (and their heirs) lost out to the Whigs (and their heirs). Whether it was the Erie Canal, the first transcontinental railroad, or the interstate highway system, state and federal resources have repeatedly been deployed to build new types of transportation infrastructure that the private sector couldn't, or wouldn't, fund. Over time, these investments paid huge economic, social, and national-security dividends to the country.

What hasn't been acknowledged is that the automobile is supported by a government subsidy that dwarfs anything provided to mass transit. How big is the subsidy? By my (admittedly extremely crude) calculations, it could total nearly $100 billion per year. Americans can drive so much because there is an extremely extensive system of (largely free) roads for us to use. Despite some private-sector efforts, maintaining and building the nation's roads remains almost exclusively the preserve of government. Data from the Census Bureau on construction spending shows that this year, public spending on highways and streets is running at an annual rate of about $75 billion.

But that's not all. Tax credits and breaks for particular types of economic activity constitute a public subsidy of that activity. Taxpayers effectively subsidize home ownership through the mortgage interest deduction. They subsidize the use of mass transit through programs that permit people to purchase mass-transit tickets with pretax money. And taxpayers subsidize the purchase and operation of gas-powered automobiles in at least two big ways.

First, just as they can with other types of equipment, businesses and self-employed individuals can write down the cost of cars and trucks they own against their taxable income. This decade, the relevant portion of the tax code dealing with the issue, Section 179, was changed to provide extra taxpayer support for the purchase of very large cars. In 2003, as part of an effort to stimulate business investment, the law was changed to significantly increase the amount of deductions businesses could take on equipment, including vehicles that weighed more than 3 tons. (In the past, that category would have been limited to commercial vehicles, such as pickup trucks and moving vans. But in SUV-crazy America, that also means Hummers and Escalades.) So if a Realtor bought a $75,000 Hummer and used it mostly for business, she could take a $25,000 deduction from her taxable income in the first year of ownership. The stimulus package passed earlier this year included provisions that boosted the amount of total deductions businesses could take on equipment. But taxpayers aren't just subsidizing the purchase of gas-guzzlers by businesses. Thanks to tax credits for hybrids, they're also subsidizing the purchase of gas-sippers by individuals.

Self-employed individuals and businesses can also deduct the costs of operating a car for business purposes from their taxable income. In light of higher gas prices, the Internal Revenue Service this year boosted the mileage allowance to 58.5 cents per mile. A self-employed salesperson who drives 5,000 miles a year and is in the 33 percent tax bracket can thus save about $1,000 in tax payments. (The language of the allowance suggests that it applies only to cars—not to bicycles, scooters, or motorcycles.)

[Daniel Gross writes the “Moneybox” column for Slate and contributes to the “Economic View” column of the New York Times. He joined the staff of Newsweek in early July 2008. Gross has appeared on CNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, C-SPAN, and on more than 35 radio programs, including NPR’s "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" (no relation). In 2001, he was a fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author of three books: Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time (1996); Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance (2000), and Generations of Corning: 150 Years in the Life of a Global Corporation, 1851-2001 (2001), co-authored with Davis Dyer. A graduate of Cornell University, Gross holds an A.M. in American history from Harvard University.]

Copyright © 2008 Newsweek, Inc.

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ET, Call Home" Doesn't Mean Extra-Terrerstrials & ABSOLUTELY Not You, Senator Gramm

The Flatster nails the Dumbos for their "offshore drilling" mantra and he offers a caution on The Hopester's strategic vision of Afghanistan. The Flatster is dead right in his call for an ET—Energy Technology—Revolution that would mirror the preceding (and receding?) IT—Information Technology—Revolution in transforming our world. We need real change: not swapping Afghanistan for Iraq and certainly not more offshore drilling. If this is (fair & balanced) punditry, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Drilling in Afghanistan
By Thomas L. Friedman

Sometimes in politics, particularly in campaigns, parties get wedded to slogans — so wedded that no one stops to think about what they’re saying, whether the reality has changed and what the implications would be if their bumper stickers really guided policy when they took office. Today, we have two examples of that: “Democrats for Afghanistan” and “Republicans for offshore drilling.”

Republicans have become so obsessed with the notion that we can drill our way out of our current energy crisis that re-opening our coastal waters to offshore drilling has become their answer for every energy question.

Anyone who looks at the growth of middle classes around the world and their rising demands for natural resources, plus the dangers of climate change driven by our addiction to fossil fuels, can see that clean renewable energy — wind, solar, nuclear and stuff we haven’t yet invented — is going to be the next great global industry. It has to be if we are going to grow in a stable way.

Therefore, the country that most owns the clean power industry is going to most own the next great technology breakthrough — the ET revolution, the energy technology revolution — and create millions of jobs and thousands of new businesses, just like the IT revolution did.

Republicans, by mindlessly repeating their offshore-drilling mantra, focusing on a 19th-century fuel, remind me of someone back in 1980 arguing that we should be putting all our money into making more and cheaper IBM Selectric typewriters — and forget about these things called the “PC” and “the Internet.” It is a strategy for making America a second-rate power and economy.

But Democrats have their analog. For many Democrats, Afghanistan was always the “good war,” as opposed to Iraq. I think Barack Obama needs to ask himself honestly: “Am I for sending more troops to Afghanistan because I really think we can win there, because I really think that that will bring an end to terrorism, or am I just doing it because to get elected in America, post-9/11, I have to be for winning some war?”

The truth is that Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Pakistan are just different fronts in the same war. The core problem is that the Arab-Muslim world in too many places has been failing at modernity, and were it not for $120-a-barrel oil, that failure would be even more obvious. For far too long, this region has been dominated by authoritarian politics, massive youth unemployment, outdated education systems, a religious establishment resisting reform and now a death cult that glorifies young people committing suicide, often against other Muslims.

The humiliation this cocktail produces is the real source of terrorism. Saddam exploited it. Al Qaeda exploits it. Pakistan’s intelligence services exploit it. Hezbollah exploits it. The Taliban exploit it.

The only way to address it is by changing the politics. Producing islands of decent and consensual government in Baghdad or Kabul or Islamabad would be a much more meaningful and lasting contribution to the war on terrorism than even killing bin Laden in his cave. But it needs local partners. The reason the surge helped in Iraq is because Iraqis took the lead in confronting their own extremists — the Shiites in their areas, the Sunnis in theirs. That is very good news — although it is still not clear that they can come together in a single functioning government.

The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want.

Take 20 minutes and read the stunning article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine by Thomas Schweich, a former top Bush counternarcotics official focused on Afghanistan, and dwell on his paragraph on Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

“Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009, he would be elected to a new term.”

Then read the Afghan expert Rory Stewart’s July 17 Time magazine cover story from Kabul: “A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining ... The more responsibility we take in Afghanistan, the more we undermine the credibility and responsibility of the Afghan government and encourage it to act irresponsibly. Our claims that Afghanistan is the ‘front line in the war on terror’ and that ‘failure is not an option’ have convinced the Afghan government that we need it more than it needs us. The worse things become, the more assistance it seems to receive. This is not an incentive to reform.”

Before Democrats adopt “More Troops to Afghanistan” as their bumper sticker, they need to make sure it’s a strategy for winning a war — not an election.

[Thomas L. Friedman won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third Pulitzer for The New York Times. Friedman was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Lebanon) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Israel). Friedman became the paper's foreign-affairs columnist in 1995. Previously, he served as chief economic correspondent in the Washington bureau and before that he was the chief White House correspondent. In 2005, Tom Friedman was elected as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Friedman's latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, was released in April 2005 and won the inaugural Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. Friedman received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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The Big Bobo Gets It Right (This Time)

Of all of the token Righties on the NY Fishwrap Op-Ed page, THe Big Bobo (David Brooks) is the best. In today's assessment of the world from the right side of the aisle, Brooks has uncovered The Issue of the 2008 Campaign. It ain't drillin' offshore and it ain't wearin' a flag pin on a lapel. It's back to school, boys and girls. The prognosis isn't very appealing. The United States peaked educationally in 1970. We have been in decline educationally (as a nation) for nearly four decades. The climate scientist, James E. Hansen, has declared that we're "toast" today as a result of ignoring his climate change (global warming) warnings two decades ago. There is the distinct possiblity that our schoolchildren (and the rest of us) are "toast" because we focus on the important things life lapel pins and offshore drilling. Instead, as Neil Postman said in 1985, "We're amusing ourselves to death." We focus on "American Idol" and all of the celebrity nonsense while our schools have gone to Hell in a handbasket. If this is a (fair & balanced) cultural indictment, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Biggest Issue
By David Brooks

Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.

Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.

As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, The Race Between Education and Technology, America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.

America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

This threatens the country’s long-term prospects. It also widens the gap between rich and poor. Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

The meticulous research of Goldin and Katz is complemented by a report from James Heckman of the University of Chicago. Using his own research, Heckman also concludes that high school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

In Schools, Skills and Synapses, Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists.

I point to these two research projects because the skills slowdown is the biggest issue facing the country. Rising gas prices are bound to dominate the election because voters are slapped in the face with them every time they visit the pump. But this slow-moving problem, more than any other, will shape the destiny of the nation.

Second, there is a big debate under way over the sources of middle-class economic anxiety. Some populists emphasize the destructive forces of globalization, outsourcing and predatory capitalism. These people say we need radical labor market reforms to give the working class a chance. But the populists are going to have to grapple with the Goldin, Katz and Heckman research, which powerfully buttresses the arguments of those who emphasize human capital policies. It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

Third, it’s worth noting that both sides of this debate exist within the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant. If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals — especially his emphasis on early childhood — you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research. (It probably helps that Obama and Heckman are nearly neighbors in Chicago). McCain’s policies seem largely oblivious to these findings. There’s some vague talk about school choice, but Republicans are inept when talking about human capital policies.

America rose because it got more out of its own people than other nations. That stopped in 1970. Now, other issues grab headlines and campaign attention. But this tectonic plate is still relentlessly and menacingly shifting beneath our feet.

[David Brooks's column has appeared on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times since September 2003. He is also currently a commentator on "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer." Mr. Brooks is the author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004). Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Roll Over, Adam Smith?

Adam Smith (1723-1790) coined the metaphor of "the invisible hand" in his greatest work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). In The Wealth of Nations and his other writings, Smith suggested that a free market promotes the good of the community as a whole through a principle that Adam Smith called “the invisible hand”. Thanks to Tom Tomorrow, "the invisible hand" becomes a visible character in "This Modern World." Sparky The Penguin becomes "Sparky T. Penguin, Private Eye" in this noir version of Tom Tomorrow's alternate universe. "The Invisible Hand" can be seen in "This Modern World" thanks to the magic of the marketplace. If this is a (fair & balanced) critique of economic mumbo-jumbo, so be it.

[x Salon]
This Modern World: Farewell, My Lovely Economy
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Click on image to enlarge.

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Hyperpeople? Hyperpolitics? Hyperhope?

In July 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published Vannevar Bush's essay, "How We May Think." In this article, Bush — then serving as President Harry Truman's Science Advisor — predicted many kinds of technology not yet invented, including hypertext, personal computers, the Internet, the World Wide Web, speech recognition, and online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them...." Now, we live in a hypersociety. If this is (fair & balanced) augury, so be it.

[x Edge]
Hyperpolitics (American Style)
By Mark Pesce

Introduction

In his well-received talk at this year's Personal Democracy Forum (organized by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry), "digital ethnologist" Mark Pesce makes the point that "we have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the 'hyperconnectivity' engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

In presenting his ideas on "the human network" Pesce references the work of archeologist Colin Renfrew, that "we may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it"; and Jared Diamond's ideas in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that "where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet".

In the 21st century, it's time to "Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes' "war of all against all." A hyperconnected polity—whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand—has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war."

To understand this new kind of mob rule, it's necessary to realize that "Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing. A photo taken on a mobile now becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible on Flickr or other sharing websites. This act of sharing voids "any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power".

Pesce concludes that "the power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him."

Part One: Hyperconnected

We have been human beings for perhaps sixty thousand years. In all that time, our genome, the twenty-five thousand genes and three billion base pairs which comprise the source code for Homo Sapiens Sapiens has hardly changed.

For at least three thousand generations, we've had big brains to think with, a descended larynx to speak with, and opposable thumbs to grasp with. Yet, for almost ninety percent of that enormous span of time, humanity remained a static presence.

Our ancestors entered the world and passed on from it, but the patterns of culture remained remarkably stable, persistent and conservative. This posed a conundrum for paleoanthropologists, long known as 'the sapient paradox': if we had the "kit" for it, why did civilization take so long to arise?

Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew (more formally, Baron Renfrew of Kamisthorn) recently proposed an answer. We may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it.

We had to pass through symbolization, investing the outer world with inner meaning (in the process, creating some great art), before we could begin to develop the highly symbolic processes of cities, culture, law, and government.

About ten thousand years ago, the hidden interiority of humanity, passed down through myths and teachings and dreamings, built up a cultural reservoir of social capacity which overtopped the dam of the conservative patterns of humanity. We booted up (as it were) into a culture now so familiar we rarely take notice of it.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, evolutionary biologist and geographer Jared Diamond presented a model which elegantly explains how various peoples crossed the gap into civilization.

Cultures located along similar climatic regions on the planet's surface could and did share innovations, most significantly along the broad swath of land from the Yangtze to the Rhine. This sharing accelerated the development of each of the populations connected together through the material flow of plants and animals and the immaterial flow of ideas and symbols. Where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet. Cities emerged in Anatolia, Palestine and the Fertile Crescent, and civilization spread out, over the next five hundred generations, to cover all of Eurasia.

Civilization proved another conservative force in human culture; despite the huge increases in population, the social order of Jericho looks little different from those of Imperial Rome or the Qin Dynasty or Medieval France.

But when Gutenberg (borrowing from the Chinese) perfected moveable type, he led the way to another and even broader form of cultural sharing; literacy became widespread in the aftermath of the printing press, and savants throughout the Europe published their insights, sharing their own expertise, producing the Enlightenment and igniting the Scientific Revolution. Peer-review, although portrayed today as a conservative force, initially acted as a radical intellectual accelerant, a mental hormone which again amplified the engines of human culture, leading directly to the Industrial Age.

The conservative empires fell, replaced by demos, the people: the cogs and wheels of a new system of the world which allowed for massive cities, massive markets, mass media, massive growth in human knowledge, and a new type of radicalism, known as Liberalism, which asserted the freedom of capital, labor, and people. That Liberalism, after two hundred and fifty years of ascendancy, has become the conservative order of culture, and faces its own existential threat, the result of another innovation in sharing.

Last month, The Economist, that fountainhead of Ur-Liberalism, proclaimed humanity "halfway there." Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade's time we've gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile.

It took nearly a decade to get to the first billion, four years to the second, eighteen months to the third, and—sometime during 2011—over five billion of us will be connected. Mobile handsets will soon be in the hands of everyone except the billion and a half extremely poor; microfinance organizations like Bangladesh's Grameen Bank work hard to ensure that even this destitute minority have access to mobiles. Why? Mobiles may be the most potent tool yet invented for the elimination of poverty.

To those of us in the developed word this seems a questionable assertion. For us, mobiles are mainly social accelerants: no one is ever late anymore, just delayed. But, for entire populations who have never had access to instantaneous global communication, the mobile unleashes the innate, inherent and inalienable capabilities of sociability. Sociability has always been the cornerstone to human effectiveness. Being social has always been the best way to get ahead.

Until recently, we'd seen little to correlate mobiles with human economic development. But, here again, we see the gap between raw hardware capabilities and their expression in cultural software. Handing someone a mobile is not the end of the story, but the beginning. Nor is this purely a phenomenon of the developing world, or of the poor. We had the Web for almost a decade before we really started to work it toward its potential. Wikis were invented in 1995, marking it as an early web technology; the idea of Wikipedia took another six years.

Even SMS, the true carrier of the Human Network, had been dismissed by the telecommunications giants as uninteresting, a sideshow. Last year we sent forty three billion text messages.

We have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the 'hyperconnectivity' engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

This is coming as a bit of a shock.

Part Two: Hypermimesis

I have two nephews, Alexander and Andrew, born in 2001, and 2002. Alexander watched his mother mousing around on her laptop, and—from about 18 months—reached out to play with the mouse, imitating her actions. By age three Alex had a fair degree of control over the mouse; his younger brother watched him at play, and copied his actions. Soon, both wrestled for control of a mouse that both had mastered. Children are experts in mimesis—learning by imitation. It's been shown that young chimpanzees regularly outscore human toddlers on cognitive tasks, while the children far surpass the chimps in their ability to "ape" behavior. We are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers.

Our peers now number three and a half billion.

Whenever any one of us displays a new behavior in a hyperconnected context, that behavior is inherently transparent, visible and observed. If that behavior is successful, it is immediately copied by those who witnessed the behavior, then copied by those who witness that behavior, and those who witnessed that behavior, and so on. Very quickly, that behavior becomes part of the global behavioral kit. As its first-order emergent quality, hyperconnectivity produces hypermimesis, the unprecedented acceleration of the natural processes of observational learning, where each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously.

Only a decade ago the network was all hardware and raw potential, but we are learning fast, and this learning is pervasive. Behaviors, once slowly copied from generation to generation, then, still slowly, from location to location, now 'hyperdistribute' themselves via the Human Network. We all learn from each other with every text we send, and each new insight becomes part of the new software of a new civilization.

We still do not know much about this nascent cultural form, even as its pieces pop out of the ether all around us. We know that it is fluid, flexible, mobile, pervasive and inexorable. We know that it does not allow for the neat proprieties of privacy and secrecy and ownership which define the fundamental ground of Liberal civilization. We know that, even as it grows, it encounters conservative forces intent on moderating its impact. Yet every assault, every tariff, every law designed to constrain this Human Network has failed.

The Chinese, who gave it fair go, have conceded the failure of their "Great Firewall," relying now on self-censorship, situating the policeman within the mind of the dissident netizen.

Record companies and movie studios try to block distribution channels they can not control and can not tariff; every attempt to control distribution only results in an ever-more-pervasive and ever-more-difficult to detect "Darknet."

A band of reporters and bloggers (some of whom are in this room today) took down the Attorney General of the United States, despite the best attempts of Washington's political machinery to obfuscate then overload the processes of transparency and oversight. Each of these singular examples would have been literally unthinkable a decade ago, but today they are the facts on the ground, unmistakable signs of the potency of this new cultural order.

It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a post-modern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone else. We can send out a call to "find the others," for any cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule.

This shows up, at its most complete, in Wikipedia, which (warts and all) represents the first attempt to survey and capture the knowledge of the entire human race, rather than only its scientific and academic elites. A project of the mob, for the mob, and by the mob, Wikipedia is the mob rule of factual knowledge. Its phenomenal success demonstrates beyond all doubt how the calculus of civilization has shifted away from its Liberal basis. In Liberalism, knowledge is a scarce resource, managed by elites: the more scarce knowledge is, the more highly valued that knowledge, and the elites which conserve it. Wikipedia turns that assertion inside out: the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes. These newly disproportionate returns on the investment in altruism now trump the 'virtue of selfishness.'

Paradoxically, Wikipedia is not at all democratic, nor is it actually transparent, though it gives the appearance of both. Investigations conducted by The Register in the UK and other media outlets have shown that the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" is, in fact, tightly regulated by a close network of hyperconnected peers, the "Wikipedians."

This premise is borne out by the unpleasant fact that article submissions to Wikipedia are being rejected at an ever-increasing rate. Wikipedia's growth has slowed, and may someday grind to a halt, not because it has somehow encompassed the totality of human knowledge, but because it is the front line of a new kind of warfare, a battle both semantic and civilizational. In this battle, we can see the tracings of hyperpolitics, the politics of era of hyperconnectivity.

To outsiders like myself, who critique their increasingly draconian behavior, Wikipedians have a simple response: "We are holding the line against chaos." Wikipedians honestly believe that, in keeping Wikipedia from such effluvia as endless articles on anime characters, or biographies of living persons deemed "insufficiently notable," they keep their resource "pure." This is an essentially conservative impulse, as befits the temperament of a community of individuals who are, at heart, librarians and archivists.

The mechanisms through which this purity is maintained, however, are hardly conservative.

Hyperconnected, the Wikipedians create "sock puppet" personae to argue their points on discussion pages, using back-channel, non-transparent communications with other Wikipedians to amass the support (both numerically and rhetorically) to enforce their dictates. Those who attempt to counter the fixed opinion of any network of Wikipedians encounter a buzz-saw of defiance, and, almost invariably, withdraw in defeat.

Now that this 'Great Game' has been exposed, hypermimesis comes into play. The next time an individual or community gets knocked back, they have an option: they can choose to "go nuclear" on Wikipedia, using the tools of hyperconnectivity to generate such a storm of protest, from so many angles of attack, that the Wikipedians find themselves overwhelmed, backed into the buzz-saw of their own creation.

This will probably engender even more conservative reaction from the Wikipedians, until, in fairly short order, the most vital center of human knowledge creation in the history of our species becomes entirely fossilized.

Or, just possibly, Wikipedians will bow to the inevitable, embrace the chaos, and find a way to make it work.

That choice, writ large, is the same that confronts us in every aspect of our lives. The entire human social sphere faces the increasing pressures of hyperconnectivity, which arrive hand-in-hand with an increasing empowerment ('hyperempowerment') by means of hypermimesis. All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw.

Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.

Part Three: No Governor

Last Monday, as I waited at San Francisco International for a flight to Logan, I used my mobile to snap some photos of the status board (cheerfully informing me of my delayed departure), which I immediately uploaded to Flickr. As I waited at the gate, I engaged in a playful banter with two women d'un certain age, that clever sort of casual conversation one has with fellow travelers. After we boarded the flight, one of the women approached me. "I just wanted you to know, that other woman, she works for the Treasury Department. And you were making her nervous when you took those photos."

Now here's the thing: I wanted to share the frustrations of my journey with my many friends, both in Australia and America, who track my comings and goings on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. Sharing makes the unpleasant endurable. In that moment of confrontation, I found myself thrust into a realization that had been building over the last four years: Sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of the thing.

A photo snapped on my mobile becomes instantaneously and pervasively visible. No wonder she's nervous: in my simple, honest and entirely human act of sharing, it becomes immediately apparent that any pretensions to control, or limitation, or the exercise of power have already collapsed into shell-shocked impotence.

We are asked to believe that hyperconnectivity can be embraced by political campaigns, and by politicians in power. We are asked to believe that everything we already know to be true about the accelerating disintegration of hierarchies of all kinds—economic, academic, cultural—will somehow magically suspend itself for the political process. That, somehow, politics will be different.

Bullshit. Ladies and gentlemen, don't believe a word of it. It's whistling past the graveyard. It's clapping for Tinkerbelle. Obama may be the best thing since sliced bread, but this isn't a crisis of leadership. This is not an emergency. And my amateur photography did not bring down the curtain on the Republic.

For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned, human techniques), then activated it to compete in the primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the Democratic nomination. That network is being activated again to win the general election.

Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to an Obama field organizer. He paused, as if he'd never given the question any thought, before answering, "I don't know. I don't believe anyone's thought that far ahead." There are now some statements from candidate Obama about what he'd like to see this network become. They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion warrants, but he can not control. Not with all the King's horses and all the King's men.

And yes, that's scary.

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the Bellum omnia contra omnes,, Thomas Hobbes' "war of all against all." A hyperconnected polity—whether composed of a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand—has resources at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities. Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.

Conserved across nearly four thousand generations, the social fabric will warp and convulse as various polities actualize their hyperempowerment in the cultural equivalent of nuclear exchanges. Eventually (one hopes, with hypermimesis, rather quickly) we will learn to contain these most explosive forces. We will learn that even though we can push the button, we're far better off refraining. At that point, as in the era of superpower Realpolitik, the action will shift to a few tens of thousands of 'little' conflicts, the hyperconnected equivalents of the endless civil wars which plagued Asia, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War.

Naturally, governments will seek to control and mediate these emerging conflicts. This will only result in the guns being trained upon them. The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously pronounced that we should "Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world." Mead spoke truthfully, and prophetically. We are all committed, we are all passionate. We merely lacked the lever to effectively translate the force of our commitment and passion into power. That lever has arrived, in my hand and yours.

And now, the world's going to move — for all of us.

[Mark Pesce briefly attended MIT. He dropped out in 1982, working at various software engineering jobs, before he joined Shiva Corporation, which pioneered and popularized dial-up networking. Pesce's role in the company was to develop user-interfaces. His research in this area would lead him deeper into the questions posed by virtual reality, and in 1991 he founded the Ono-Sendai Corporation, named for a fictitious company in the William Gibson novel Neuromancer. The company's R&D included the development of a key technology for the emerging industry, and earned Pesce his first patent for a "Sourceless Orientation Sensor," which is used to track the motion of persons in virtual environments.

This development springboarded Pesce into the development of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which his name has been synonymous with ever since, and into a career which has included extensive writings for both the popular and scientific press, teaching and lecturing at universities and conferences around the globe, performances, presentations, and films. He is currently an Honorary Lecturer at the University of Sydney, and is a judge on The New Inventors, a nationally televised television program in Australia. He is currently developing a new project called Hyperpeople.]

Copyright © 2008 Edge Foundation, Inc.

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The Butcher Slices & Dices The Geezer (Again)

The Butcher of Broadway does not suffer fools gladly. Woe to The Geezer because the faculty of the U.S. Naval Academy knew what it was doing when The Geezer finished 5th from the bottom of the Class of 1958. The Geezer is stupid and cranky. Cranky is a charitable way to describe a bat guano temper. When the phone rings at 3:00 AM, do we really want The Geezer to answer the call? The Dumbos don't really give a damn about the Land of The Free and The Home of The Brave. After all, they gave us eight loooooooong years of The Dubster. Put The Dubster and The Geezer in a box, shake it, and pull out either one. You get stupid no matter what. If this is (fair & balanced) political reality, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]

Copyright © 2008 Barry Blitt (He of The New Yorker cover.)

How Obama Became Acting President
By Frank Rich

It almost seems like a gag worthy of “Borat”: A smooth-talking rookie senator with an exotic name passes himself off as the incumbent American president to credulous foreigners. But to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind.

He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings. (Even “Access Hollywood” mustered a 20 percent audience jump by hosting the Obama family.) Power begets more power, absolutely.

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”

Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq’s $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That’s the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The “change” that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality — sometimes through Mr. Obama’s instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not.

Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.

On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran “appeasement,” would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obama’s, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page: “Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran.”

Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a “general time horizon.” In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obama’s, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nation’s troops by early 2009.

But it’s not merely the foreign policy consensus that is shifting Obama-ward. The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has now joined another high-profile McCain supporter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in knocking the McCain nostrum that America can drill its way out of its energy crisis. Mr. Pickens, who financed the Swift-boat campaign smearing John Kerry in 2004, was thought to be a sugar daddy for similar assaults against the Democrats this year. Instead, he is underwriting nonpartisan ads promoting wind power and speaks of how he would welcome Al Gore as energy czar if there’s an Obama administration.

The Obama stampede is forcing Mr. McCain to surrender on other domestic fronts. After the Democrat ran ads in 14 states berating chief executives who are “making more in 10 minutes” than many workers do in a year, a newly populist Mr. McCain began railing against “corporate greed” — much as he also followed Mr. Obama’s example and belatedly endorsed a homeowners’ bailout he had at first opposed. Given that Mr. McCain has already used a refitted, hand-me-down Obama campaign slogan (“A Leader You Can Believe In”), it can’t be long before he takes up fist bumps. They’ve become the rage among young (nonterrorist) American businessmen, according to USA Today.

“We have one president at a time,” Mr. Obama is careful to say. True, but the sitting president, a lame duck despised by voters and shunned by his own party’s candidates, now has all the gravitas of Mr. Cellophane in “Chicago.” The opening for a successor arrived prematurely, and the vacuum had been waiting to be filled. What was most striking about the Obama speech in Berlin was not anything he said so much as the alternative reality it fostered: many American children have never before seen huge crowds turn out abroad to wave American flags instead of burn them.

Mr. McCain could also have stepped into the leadership gap left by Mr. Bush’s de facto abdication. His inability to even make a stab at doing so is troubling. While drama-queen commentators on television last week were busy building up false suspense about the Obama trip — will he make a world-class gaffe? will he have too large an audience in Germany? — few focused on the alarms that Mr. McCain’s behavior at home raise about his fitness to be president.

Once again the candidate was making factual errors about the only subject he cares about, imagining an Iraq-Pakistan border and garbling the chronology of the Anbar Awakening. Once again he displayed a tantrum-prone temperament ill-suited to a high-pressure 21st-century presidency. His grim-faced crusade to brand his opponent as a traitor who wants to “lose a war” isn’t even a competent impersonation of Joe McCarthy. Mr. McCain comes off instead like the ineffectual Mr. Wilson, the retired neighbor perpetually busting a gasket at the antics of pesky little Dennis the Menace.

The week’s most revealing incident occurred on Wednesday when the new, supposedly improved McCain campaign management finalized its grand plan to counter Mr. Obama’s Berlin speech with a “Mission Accomplished”-like helicopter landing on an oil rig off Louisiana’s coast. The announcement was posted on politico.com even as any American with a television could see that Hurricane Dolly was imminent. Needless to say, this bit of theater was almost immediately “postponed” but not before raising the question of whether a McCain administration would be just as hapless in anticipating the next Katrina as the Bush-Brownie storm watch.

When not plotting such stunts, the McCain campaign whines about its lack of press attention like a lover jilted for a younger guy. The McCain camp should be careful what it wishes for. As its relentless goading of Mr. Obama to visit Iraq only ratcheted up anticipation for the Democrat’s triumphant trip, so its insistent demand for joint town-hall meetings with Mr. Obama and for more televised chronicling of Mr. McCain’s wanderings could be self-inflicted disasters in the making.

Mr. McCain may be most comfortable at town-hall meetings before largely friendly crowds, but his performance under pressure at this year’s G.O.P. primary debates was erratic. His sound-bite-deep knowledge of the country’s No. 1 issue, the economy, is a Gerald Ford train wreck waiting to happen in any matchup with Mr. Obama that requires focused, time-limited answers rather than rambling.

During Mr. McCain’s last two tours of the Middle East — conducted without the invasive scrutiny of network anchors — the only news he generated was his confusion of Sunni with Shia and his embarrassing stroll through a “safe” Baghdad market with helicopter cover. He should thank his stars that few TV viewers saw that he was even less at home when walking through a chaotic Pennsylvania supermarket last week. He inveighed against the price of milk while reading from a note card and felt the pain of a shopper planted by the local Republican Party.

The election remains Mr. Obama’s to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what we’ve learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. That’s some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nation’s big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.

[Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1500-word essay on the intersection of culture and news helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005. From 2003-2005, Rich had been the front page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section's redesign and expansion. He also serves as senior adviser to The Times's culture editor on the paper's overall cultural news report. Frank Rich has been at the paper since 1980, when he was named chief theater critic. Beginning in 1994, he became an Op-Ed columnist, and in 1999 he became the first Times columnist to write a regular double-length column for the Op-Ed page. Rich earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman of The Harvard Crimson, an honorary Harvard College scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the recipient of a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Avast Me Hearties! Buy Your Textbooks From The Guy With The Hook And Eyepatch

Two C-notes for an organic chemistry textbook? What kind of bat guano world is that? The poor student tries to sell the book that cost 2 C-notes at the end of the semester and the friendly proprietor of the campus bookstore offers to buy the book back for seventy-five bucks. Helluva deal; Tony Soprano would have loved it. The bookstore sells the used organic chemistry text the following term for a C-note. The buy-back rate at the end of that term is forty bucks. And so it goes. Tony Soprano would love that kind of action: loansharking with textbooks. The poor student can never catch up on the equivalent of the vig on a mob loan. If this is (fair & balanced) economic exploitation, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.
By Randall Stross

After scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. (The contributor’s message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John E. McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry.” A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it’s about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free.

But many people outside of the students’ enclosed world would call that plain theft.

Compared with music publishers, textbook publishers have been relatively protected from piracy by the considerable trouble entailed in digitizing a printed textbook. Converting the roughly 1,300 pages of “Organic Chemistry” into a digital file requires much more time than ripping a CD.

Time flies, however, if you’re having a good time plotting righteous revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about the price of textbooks. More students are choosing used books over new; sales of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of revenue — and the demand for used books goes up all the more.

Used book sales return nothing to publishers and authors. Digital publishing, however, offers textbook publishers a way to effectively destroy the secondary market for textbooks: they now can shift the entire business model away from selling objects toward renting access to a site with a time-defined subscription, a different thing entirely.

The transition has already begun, even while publishers continue to sell print editions. They are pitching ancillary services that instructors can require students to purchase, just like textbooks, but which are available only online on a subscription basis. Cengage Learning, the publisher of Professor McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry,” packages the new book with a two-semester “access card” to a Cengage site that provides instructors with canned quizzes and students with interactive tutorials.

Ronald G. Dunn, chief executive of Cengage Learning, says he believes the printed book is not about to disappear, because it presents a large amount of material conveniently. Mr. Dunn predicted that textbook publishers were “headed for a hybrid market: print will do what it does best, and digital will do what it does best.”

Whether students will view online subscriptions as a helpful adjunct to the printed textbook or as a self-aggrandizing ploy by publishers remains to be seen.

As textbook publishers try to shift to an online subscription model, they must also stem the threat posed by the sharing of scanned copies of their textbooks by students who use online publishing tools for different purposes. The students who create and give away digital copies are motivated not by financial self-interest but by something more powerful: the sweet satisfaction of revenge.

Mr. Dunn says that online piracy is “a significant issue for us.” His company assigns employees to monitor file-sharing sites, and they find in any given month 200 to 300 Cengage textbook titles being shared. The company sends notices to the sites, demanding that the files be removed and threatening legal action.

Textbook Torrents, a site that opened last year and was wholly dedicated to arranging peer-to-peer sharing of textbook files, closed without explanation this month. But other sites continue to rely upon similar technology for disseminating unauthorized copies of textbooks, facilitating the piece-by-piece movement of copies of files found on the computers of participants.

The Pirate Bay, which is based in Sweden, presents a devilishly fearless challenge to American textbook publishers. It describes itself as an “anticopyright organization” and offers music, movies, television shows and software, as well as e-books like textbooks — not a single item of which, it boasts, has ever been removed at the request of a copyright owner.

When a copyright holder sends the Pirate Bay a removal request, the letter is posted on the site with a sarcastic response, like inquiring where an invoice should be sent for the costs of “Web publishing and hosting services” that Pirate Bay incurred when it posted the notice. I corresponded last week with Peter Sunde, a Pirate Bay founder, asking about evidence of greater interest in textbook titles. He said his site does not collect statistics about downloads because of privacy concerns, but generally, he said, the volume of e-book downloads had increased.

The textbook publishers have abundantly good reasons to promote e-books. When Cengage sells an e-book version of “Organic Chemistry” directly to students, for $109.99, it not only cuts out the middleman but also reduces the supply of used books at the end of the semester.

THE e-book is wrapped with digital rights management, which, history indicates, will be broken sooner or later. But as long as it does work, digital publishing with a subscription model is a much fairer basis for the business. Such an arrangement spreads revenue across multiple semesters, so it isn’t the unfortunate few students in the first semester with a new edition who shoulder the bulk of the burden.

A one-semester e-book subscription does require a change in expectations. Students cannot sell their texts at the end of a course, so buying one can’t be viewed as a short-term investment to be cashed out. But as students show no attachment to textbooks in any case, the loss of access after semester’s end seems likely to go unlamented.

[Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley (The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World [2007]) and a professor of business history at San Jose State University. Stross holds a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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The (Unknown And Grouchy) Geezer

Fitness to be Commander-in-Chief is the anti-Obama mantra of the Dumbos as a substitute for their deepest instincts that a nigger (used among Dumbos in private) is unfit to be anything in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Thanks to the NY Fishwrap's Bob Herbert (Disclosure: Herbert is an African American.), we have a glimpse of The (Inner) Geezer. Since The Geezer attended the Naval Academy before racial integration was given a shot in the arm by the Chief of Naval Operations — Admiral Elmo Zumwalt — in the early 1970s, The Geezer probably has some interesting racial attitudes. His apology to the NAACP notwithstanding, The Geezer probably has told his share of racist "jokes." The man who can tell a "joke" about Chelsea Clinton's physical appearance can probably "joke" about anything, even race. After all, he The Geezer found the rape of a woman by a gorilla in a "joke" funny enough to repeat that "joke" at a political event. (It is common among racists to equate black people and gorillas.) Now, Bob Herbert has given us The (Unknown) Geezer. Dumbos ought to be careful what they wish for, they might get it. If this is (fair & balanced) psychoanalytic theory, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Getting To Know You
By Bob Herbert

The conventional wisdom in this radically unconventional presidential race is that the voters have to get to know Barack Obama better. That’s what this week’s overseas trip was about: to showcase the senator as a potential commander in chief and leader of U.S. foreign policy.

According to this way of thinking, as voters see more of Mr. Obama and become more comfortable with him (assuming no major foul-ups along the way), his chances of getting elected will be enhanced.

Maybe so. But what about the other guy? How much do voters really know about John McCain?

Senator McCain crossed a line that he shouldn’t have this week when he said that Mr. Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” It was a lousy comment, tantamount to calling Mr. Obama a traitor, and Senator McCain should apologize for it.

But what we’ve learned over the years is that Mr. McCain is one of those guys who never has to pay much of a price for his missteps and foul-ups and bad behavior. Can you imagine the firestorm of outrage and criticism that would have descended on Senator Obama if he had made the kind of factual mistakes that John McCain has repeatedly made in this campaign?

(Or if Senator Obama had had the temerity to even remotely suggest that John McCain would consider being disloyal to his country for political reasons?)

We have a monumental double standard here. Mr. McCain has had trouble in his public comments distinguishing Sunnis from Shiites and had to be corrected in one stunningly embarrassing moment by his good friend Joe Lieberman. He has referred to a Iraq-Pakistan border when the two countries do not share a border.

He declared on CBS that Iraq was the first major conflict after 9/11, apparently forgetting — at least for the moment — about the war in Afghanistan. In that same interview, he credited the so-called surge of U.S. forces in Iraq with bringing about the Anbar Awakening, a movement in which thousands of Sunnis turned on insurgents. He was wrong. The awakening preceded the surge.

More important than these endless gaffes are matters that give us glimpses of the fundamental makeup of the man. A celebrated warrior as a young man, he has always believed that the war in Iraq can (and must) be won. As the author Elizabeth Drew has written: “He didn’t seem to seriously consider the huge costs of the war: financial, personal, diplomatic and to the reputation of the United States around the world.”

He also felt we could have, and should have, won the war in Vietnam. “We lost in Vietnam,” said Mr. McCain in 2003, “because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting and because we limited the tools at our disposal.”

The spirit of the warrior was on display in the famous incident in which Mr. McCain, with the insouciance of a veteran bomber pilot, sang “Bomb-bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” by the Beach Boys.

No big deal. Just John being John.

But then, we are already bogged down in two wars. And John is running for president. It’s hardly crazy to wonder.

Part of the makeup of the man — apparently a significant part, according to many close observers — is his outsized temper. Mr. McCain’s temperament has long been a subject of fascination in Washington, and for some a matter of concern. He can be a nasty piece of work. (Truly nasty. He once told an extremely cruel joke about Chelsea Clinton — too cruel to repeat here.)

If the McCain gaffes seem endless, so do the tales about his angry, profanity-laced eruptions. Senator Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican, said of Mr. McCain: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine.”

Senator Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, told Newsweek in 2000: “I decided I didn’t want this guy anywhere near a trigger.”

Both senators have since endorsed Senator McCain’s presidential bid, but their initial complaints were part of a much larger constellation of concerns about the way Mr. McCain tends to treat people with whom he disagrees, and his frequently belligerent my-way-or-the-highway attitude.

Senator McCain has acknowledged on various occasions that he has a short fuse and has at times made jokes about it. He told Larry King in 2006: “My anger did not help my campaign ... People don’t like angry candidates very much.”

My guess is that most voters don’t see John McCain as an angry candidate, despite several very public lapses. The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy.

Barack Obama is not the only candidate the voters need to know more about.

[Bob Herbert joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in 1993. His column comments on politics, urban affairs and social trends. Herbert received a B.S. degree in journalism from the State University of New York (Empire State College) in 1988. He has taught journalism at Brooklyn College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.]

Copyright &$269; 2008 The New York Times Company

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Stanley Kubrick Knew His Names: "Colonel Bat Guano" In "Dr. Strangelove"

The two greatest pulpit names in colonial Massachusetts were Increase Mather and his son, Cotton Mather. Increase? Cotton? What kind of bat guano names were those? Of course, as I delved further in New England history during the colonial era, more bat guano names emerged: Hope or Joy were mundane, but how about If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned — usually called Damned-Barebone? The devout Protestants in New England wanted the names of their children to reflect the great focus of their lives: their religious faith. It seems that naming children in our time reflects the great focus of our lives. So, Bat Guano is an appropriate name for our times. If this is (fair & balanced) denomination, so be it.

[x Salon]
Broadsheet: What's In A Bat-Crap-Crazy Name?
By Kate Harding

Everyone loves a good ludicrous baby name. Half the reason the culture goes so nuts over celebrity pregnancies is because we can't wait to see if the new parents can top Moxie Crimefighter, Audio Science and Pilot Inspektor. The problem is, actual children have to grow up with these names, and when those actual children are not blessed with preternaturally beautiful parents and/or gobs of money, that's a hell of a cross to bear. Hence a New Zealand family court judge's decision to make a 9-year-old girl a ward of the court long enough to change her birth name of — wait for it -- Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii.

Under New Zealand law, names that might "cause offense to a reasonable person" can be blocked before they make it onto a birth certificate, which has saved some kids from "creative" names like Yeah Detroit, Cinderella Beauty Blossom, Sex Fruit and Hitler. But Talula Does the Hula made it through that first check on parental judgment, as did Benson and Hedges (twins), Violence and — wait for it — Number 16 Bus Shelter. That right there is the problem with such a law: Whether a name is offensive is almost entirely subjective.

Personally, I wouldn't name my kids anything on the list of banned or permitted names, but I certainly don't understand why Midnight Chardonnay got through and Cinderella Beauty Blossom didn't. (At least the latter could go by Cindy or Ella.) People naming their kids after a brand of cigarettes is indeed disturbing, but the individual names Benson and Hedges actually fit right in with the whole trend toward WASP-y surnames as first names. And although Talula (or any variant spelling thereof) has never been a popular name, according to the Baby Name Wizard, Talia has been skyrocketing in the U.S. in recent years, and Lula was quite popular in the late 19th century, which makes it ripe for a revival. (Check out the graphs for "Emma," "Grace" and any permutation of "Lil" if that trend isn't obvious to you.) If she went by Tallie or Lula and never, ever told anyone her middle names, I dare say that child would have an easier time of it than poor little Number 16 Bus Shelter.

I'm glad for her sake that Talula Does the Hula got a less embarrassing name, and frankly, I think her parents deserved the swift kick. But I don't know how I feel about government intervention into baby naming — especially when the government OKs "Violence." Readers, how about it? Are bully-magnet names a form of child abuse? Should the state step in? Let us know what you think — and tell us the worst baby names you've heard — in comments. (Note: Oranjello and Lemonjello, Chlamydia, Eczema, Vagina, etc. are racist and classist urban legends. Don't even bother.)

UPDATE, WE HAVE A WINNER: A terrific comments thread included such excellent questions as, why "don't we see more little girls and teens named Oprah?," a father who accidentally named his child Brittany Spears (ooops! He did it five years before she hit), gripes about kr8tive spellyng, and several votes in favor of out-of-the ordinary names. But we wanted to choose a winner. And Leeandra Nolting, you get points for volume AND style. Please email broadsheet@salon.com so we can send you a special prize. Below, LN's entry for the worst baby names she's heard gets props as our letter of the day:

Dejoneria — This was the unfortunate name of a very nice girl in one of my freshman comp. classes. It was pronounced de-zhan-AIR-e-a, but at first glance the girl appeared to be named after a cross between mustard and VD.

Tequila Yeager — a little girl in one of my mother's preschool classes. "Yeager" is a very common last name in my hometown and there's not much you can do about that, but it is still a bad idea to name your child after what you were drinking when she was conceived.

Strawberri — This is the name of the very nice girl behind the counter at the McDonald's on Canal and Royal in New Orleans.

Quo Vadis — There were several students at the University of New Orleans named misspelled variations of this.

Beatle — The unfortunate name of a little girl in a friend's third grade class. Yes, her parents were Beatles fans. Apparently, Paula/Pauline/Paulette, Georgia/Georgine/Georgette, the many female variations of "John," and Eleanor, Pam, Penny, Julia, Martha, Rita, Prudence, Lucy, etc. were all considered unsuitable tributes to the Fab Four. /s/ Leeandra Nolting

[Kate Harding (by her own description) is a Chicago-based writer, editor, crazy dog person, humorless feminist, aspiring yoga teacher, recovering grad student, and blonde. She also a contributor to Fatshionista, Shakesville, and Salon’s Broadsheet.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Texas Bar-B-Q Al-Hajj Continued: After Mecca, Try Medina (aka Hamilton, TX)

The real true believers in Islam don't stop with counterclockwise circling seven times of the black rock at Mecca. The true believers also make a stop at Medina, second only to Mecca as a holy place. I made the pilgrimage to the holy places of Texas Bar-B-Q last month and earlier this week, the bird-and-bunny writer for the Austin Fishwrap touted a different variety of Texas meat: pulled pork butt in Hamilton, Texas. Devout Bar-B-Q pilgrim that I am, I moved 'em up and headed 'em out in time to make the 10:30 AM opening of the Wenzel LoneStar Meat Company in Hamilton. Slightly more than 100 miles north and west of Austin, Hamilton recorded just over 2,200 souls in the 2000 Census. By driving north on U.S. 183 and staying north on U.S. 291, I was the third customer in Wenzel's this morning and I made off with two (one for lunch and one to take home) Pork Butt sandwiches. After all, it was (Pork Butt) Friday morning in the seat of Hamilton County. Pulled pork, as opposed to traditional Texas pork ribs or chops, is a shoulder cut that is slow cooked over low heat so that it can be shredded easily (not chopped) by hand. Wenzel's Pork Butt sandwich is closer to Memphis, TN than it is to Lockhart. Pulled pork is the Bar-B-Q haute cuisine from NC to GA and west to AL and TN. Serving only pulled pork sandwiches on Fridays certainly gives Wenzel's a cachet that rivals Snow's Saturday-only Bar-B-Q in Lexington. In any event, I have been there and done that (on both Friday in Hamilton and Saturday in Lexington). Like its Lone Star Bar-B-Q brethren: Lexington, Lockhart, and Luling, Wenzel's doesn't like plastic: tableware or credit cards. I've discovered what must be the Texas Bar-B-Q mantra: "In God we trust, all others pay cash." Exception (common to Texas): Louis Mueller Barbecue in Taylor (my #1 in 2008) defies conventional wisdom and provides plastic tableware and accepts credit cards. If this is (air & balanced) carnitas Americanas, so be it.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
Do Mess With Pork Butt Fridays
By Mike Leggett

(Summary: The small-town sandwiches in Hamilton, Texas are big and drippy and delicious.)

If you're ever in this small town on U.S 281 late in the week, stop just off the square at Wenzel's and celebrate Pork Butt Friday with the folks working there.

What you'll get is a great big old juicy dripping loose meat sandwich that I would advise you eat at one of the little tables out front. Try to eat it in the car like I did the first time and you'll either have to pull over and stuff it in before your clothes get soaked or risk getting the truck seat ruined by the juice that runs out.

Take along your sweetheart to eat half the thing because it's definitely a hungry man kind of sandwich. You'll see signs along the highway going into Hamilton (about halfway between Marble Falls and Fort Worth) directing you a block off the square to the market. Buy a glass of tea and some chips, and ask for the spicy sauce poured over the top. You won't regret the $6.

Wenzel LoneStar Meat Co. is a meat market, sausage maker, deer processor and mini-restaurant. It is an old-fashioned kind of place, though their operation is upscale and modern. They take deer in the back door during deer season and churn out great jalapeño and cheese summer sausage, along with several other recipes for German and Polish-style deer sausage. They'll even let you taste some of the different mixes so you'll know you're getting what you want before you order it.

But people come from all over for the pork butt sandwiches, served on what Wenzel's calls Pork Butt Fridays. Pork butt isn't any kind of butt, you understand. It's actually the shoulder of the hog, prized for its tender, juicy qualities as either a roast or carnitas or barbecue or, in this case, roasted and pulled apart to make pork butt sandwiches.

My wife and I stopped there on a Friday afternoon this spring. We parked out front and walked into the storefront and up to the counter. Half a dozen guys, local ranching types I figured, were finishing up their lunches, half hosing down after knocking back pork butt sandwiches.

I noticed that one of the daily specials was a Reuben sandwich, which Rana loves. This was Pork Butt Friday, but a Reuben trumps pork for her most of the time. "Maybe you'd like to get the Reuben and I'll have the pork sandwich," I said.

But the lady behind the counter cut me off. "No Reubens," she said. "Pork butt. It's Pork Butt Friday." Oookay. We'll have one sandwich cut in half, chips and two teas. I knew how big they were and that one would do us both for lunch.

A second woman in back of the old counter dipped up a big ladle of pork and was squeezing some of the juice back into the electric roaster it came from, just to make it presentable, while we sat and sort of smirked about the soup-Nazi approach to customer relations. It's so typically small-town Texas and it's one of those things husbands and wives just know, after 30 years of marriage, is going to make the other laugh.

While we were waiting on our sandwich, another customer came to the counter. "I'd like two baked potatoes to go," he said. "Pork butt," the counter lady said. "Huh?" he asked. "It's Pork Butt Friday. We only have pork butt today," she said.

"Well, I guess I'll have two pork butt sandwiches," he said, but I could tell he and his wife wouldn't be able to finish them. He didn't have the right look about him and he obviously didn't know the pork butt protocol.

Rana and I were enjoying the pork butt pronouncements when our sandwich came. Before we could get started, another guy walked through the front door and stopped to scan the lighted menu behind the counter. "Pork butt today," the lady said, a pre-emptive strike before he could waste his time and hers asking for something else.

He ordered the pork butt.

"I love this place," Rana said after we were in the truck. "Pork butt. It's Pork Butt Friday. I can't wait to come back."


Wenzel LoneStar Meat Co.
209 North Bell St.
Hamilton, TX
(254) 386-8242

Pork butt sandwiches are served beginning at 10:30 a.m. Fridays and are sold until the market runs out.

[Mike Leggett has covered hunting, fishing, and wildlife matters for the Austin American-Statesman since 1985. Prior to that he was a news editor at the Houston Post. He has also been managing editor at the Huntsville Item and Marshall News Messenger and has received numerous awards including Associated Press Managing Editors and Sports Editors awards for column writing, environmental stories on endangered species and canned hunting, and Dallas Press Club awards for stories on Texas Parks and Wildlife.]

Copyright © 2008 Austin American-Statesman

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T-Bonehead & His Snakeoil Campaign

The films in the Batman saga specialize in wacko villains: The Joker, The Penguin, The Riddler, and the rest of the denizens of the dark side. Here's another archfiend for the Caped Crusader (and every man, woman, and child in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave): The Oil Man (aka T-Bonehead Pickens). Guest NY Fishwrap Op-Ed columnist (batting today for The Krait) Timothy Egan provides yet more ego-gratification for T-Bonehead. The old villain doesn't care what it is written about him, just so he gets the ink in media outlets like the NY Fishwrap. Timothy Egan doesn't go far enough: T-Bonehead not only wants to reap the wind, but he wants to suck the water out of the greatest aquifer in North America and sell it (at a modest profit) to water-starved cities in Texas. In T-Bonehead's scheme, he wins no matter whether the coin lands on heads or tails. Wind power for electrical generation will free up natural gas. Coincidentally, T-Bonehead controls the second-largest natural gas field in North America. Natural gas substitutes for gasoline or diesel fuel and T-Bonehead wins again! Wind, water, and natural gas: T-Bonehead just wants to he'p out. BTW, T-Bonehead's water wells also provide right-of-way for high-power electrical transmission towers from his windfarm. If this is (fair & balanced) mendacity, so be it.


[x NY Fishwrap]
The Oil Man Cometh
By Timothy Egan

There he is, the sound of money in a wizened Texas drawl, the tired realist looking a bit like the John Huston character from “Chinatown” as he warns in national television ads that we should just listen here and do as he says.

And what the 80-year-old T. Boone Pickens says, in a $58 million campaign, is that we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices. By implication, anybody who tells you otherwise — including the fellow Texan he helped put in the White House — is a fraud.

This is a political parable for the ages: the guy who was behind one of the knockout punches to John Kerry four years ago is now doing Democrats the biggest favor of the election by calling Republicans on their phony energy campaign.

“Totally misleading” is the way Pickens describes Republican attempts to convince the public that if we just opened up all these forbidden areas to oil drilling then gas prices would fall. He’s not against new drilling, but he is honest enough to say it wouldn’t do anything.

Republicans are furious at their longtime benefactor. Senator John McCain is currently running an ad in which he directly blames Barack Obama for $4-a-gallon gas at the pump — as bogus a claim as anything yet made in 2008.

Then along comes Pickens, Texas oilman and billionaire corporate raider, overwhelming the McCain attack with a saturation message that has the added value of being true, as Henry Kissinger once said about another matter.

Pickens was a geologist before he found a deep pool of money, so when he says “the geology just isn’t there” to reduce oil imports through new drilling in offshore areas, he has some cred.

But, more importantly, Pickens is betting $10 billion in constructing what he says will be the world’s largest wind farm in the gusts of West Texas. If the mighty winds of the American midsection were harnessed, it could free up plentiful natural gas for vehicles — a relatively quick step away from foreign oil.

Would it enrich him further? Yes. But perhaps it’s not about money. In “Chinatown,” the old man played by Huston was asked by Detective Jake Gittes what more he could possibly buy at his age.

“The future, Mr. Gittes. The future.”

But before T. Boone poses for his statue, he has to answer to his past. Pickens was the moneybags, to the tune of $3 million, behind the Swift Boat attacks that made Senator Kerry’s honorable service in Vietnam sound like Rambo tangled up in lies. He even promised to pay $1 million to anyone who could challenge the veracity of the claims.

After a group of veterans presented him with documents identifying 10 lies of the Swifties, Pickens broke his promise. The vets misunderstood the precise details of the $1 million offer, he said last month. Sorry, but thanks for your service, boys!

The old-fashioned term for this is welshing on a bet, which dishonors Wales.

Because so much is at stake in the energy debate, some are quick to embrace Pickens. An endorsement from Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, is prominently displayed on the Pickens Web site.

“To put it plainly,” Pope says, “T. Boone Pickens is out to save America.” I asked Pope why he lent his words to someone who had so much to do with giving us another four years of the oil intransigence of the Bush administration.

“Ten billion dollars gets my attention,” he said.

No doubt, the Pickens plan makes sense. Just last week, Texas state officials gave preliminary approval to the biggest investment in clean energy in American history, backing a $4.9 billion plan to build transmission lines for wind energy.

Meanwhile, looking bravely to the past, Bush and McCain are trying to convince us that more oil drilling will save us from $5-a-gallon gas. History says otherwise. The number of oil and gas permits on federal land doubled in the last five years, with no effect on price or supply. And Bush’s own Energy Information Administration says increased drilling wouldn’t move the market in the short term.

McCain knows this, despite the brazen lie in his Obama gas ad. He now says drilling offshore would have “a psychological impact.” Just like that “mental recession” his former chief economic adviser Phil Gramm spoke of. These guys need to get off the couch.

It’s sad to see McCain go down this path, an easy sell for a fast-food nation. Straight talk distress.

Winning the argument may depend on who has the bigger megaphone. Advantage Pickens. Which means advantage Obama. Unless, of course, McCain wants to Swift Boat him, and then he knows who to turn to.

[Timothy Egan, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes the weekly "Outposts" column on the American West. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his writings on the land.]

Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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Versus Redux: "Baghdad"

The greatest words ever spoken during the Vietnam agony were those of Senator George Aiken (R-VT): "Declare victory and get the Hell out." Unfortunately, Aiken was not heeded and 58,178 of our best people died before we got the Hell out. All of the babble about The Surge and whether Iraq has been transformed into a land of milk and honey does not change the reality of Iraq. The Geezer (or other high poo bahs) must wear Kevlar vests while the gunships hover over the Green Zone. Iraq is Hell in a very small place. Declare victory and get the Hell out. If this is (fair & balanced) military wisdom, so be it.

[x Versus]
"Baghdad" (October 2007)
By Marcy Shaffer

A musical parody of the Amy Winehouse song "Rehab," about the Iraq war.

("REHAB" WORDS AND MUSIC BY AMY WINEHOUSE)
PARODY LYRICS BY MARCY SHAFFER

THEY TRIED TO MAKE ME GO TO BAGHDAD.
I SAY:
NO.
NO.
NO.
I JUST GOT BACK.
BACK FROM IRAQ.
OH.
OH.
OH.
I HAVE DONE MY TIME.
WE HAVEN'T WON.
AIN'T THAT A CRIME.
THEY'RE TRYIN' TO MAKE ME GO TO BAGHDAD.
I WON'T GO.
GO.
GO.

I DID IT ALL FOR UNCLE SAM.
DOES HE EVEN GIVE A DAMN?
ON THIS THIRD TOUR:
AN AMBUSH.
LOW AMMUNITION.
THE WHAM AND BAM
WITHOUT THE THANK YOU, MA'AM.
SO NOW I'M NOT SURE ANYMORE:
WHO AND WHAT I BORE
ENDURIN' WAR FOR.

THEY CRIED TO MAKE ME GO TO BAGHDAD.
I SAY:
NO.
NO.
NO.
I JUST GOT BACK.
BACK FROM IRAQ.
OH.
OH.
OH.
I HAVE DONE MY TIME.
RUN IN THE SUN
AND TUNNELED GRIME.
THEY'RE CRYIN' TO MAKE ME TO GO TO BAGHDAD.
I WON'T GO.
GO.
GO.

THE SUIT SAID:
WHY DO YOU THINK WE'RE THERE?
IT'S MOOT:
DON'T KNOW AND DON'T CARE.
LEADERS.
I'M THROUGH WITH THEIR DELUSIONS.
AND IT'S FAIR
THAT OTHERS BEAR A SHARE.
HE GLARED:
ARE YOU JUST SCARED TO BLEED?
I SAID:
I'M JUST SCARED OF WALTER REED.

THEY LIED TO MAKE ME GO TO BAGHDAD.
I SAY:
NO.
NO.
NO.
I JUST GOT BACK.
BACK FROM IRAQ.
OH.
OH.
OH.

THEY SAY:
THIS IS NO MORASS!
THEY SAY:
WE ARE KICKIN' ASS!
THEY SAY:
STILL FORAYIN' ON!
I SAY:
WILL I END UP IN TEHRAN?

THEY TRIED TO MAKE ME GO TO BAGHDAD.
I SAY:
NO.
NO.
NO.
I JUST GOT BACK.
BACK FROM IRAQ.
OH.
OH.
OH.
I HAVE DONE MY TIME.
WE HAVEN'T WON.
AIN'T THAT A CRIME.
THEY'RE TRYIN' TO MAKE ME GO TO BAGHDAD.
I WON'T GO.
GO.
GO.

[Janis Liebhart - Lead Vocal; Background Vocals
Greg Hilfman - Music Director

The co-producers of VERSUS wrote:

So many wrongs. So little time.

Thus the genesis of VERSUS. Born of the conviction that musical parody is mightier than PowerPoint, VERSUS is an equal opportunity skewer-er of the ruthless, the truthless, the reckless, the feckless.

VERSUS parodies are written by Marcy Shaffer, whose professional writing experience includes television, film, lyrics, verse and … musical parody. The parody lyrics on the page become the audio of VERSUS courtesy of some of the best musical talent in the business.

VERSUS is co-produced by Russ Meyer, a private equity veteran whose industry expertise includes financial services as well as entertainment.]

℗ © 2007 RMSWorks LLC. Lyrics © 2007 RMSWorks LLC.

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