@VTKountry - State of The Blogging

Looks like it's been nearly two months since I've written a legitimate blog post - one that wasn't a self- promoting repost from Obe Lincoln or a cop-out video post. No wonder my numbers are dwindling. That or maybe the blogosphere is just slipping into obsolescence with the rise of microblogging. I've done the twitter. I do the twitter. But I'm still not really grasping what it is that people love about it. Which is fine. I don't really "get" acrylics either. Why wouldn't you just use oils. But, whatever. Different strokes for different folks. Microblogging probably doesn't really appeal to me because I'm a rambler at heart and 140 characters is just not long enough for me. I understand how sometimes things require only brief mention and not a full blog post. For instance, today I was flipping through this month's Esquire magazine, which I get courtesy of my father's yearly Christmas subscription gift, and I noticed that a full page ad for viagra was opposite an article entitled "The Golden Age of American Meat". Kinda funny. A chuckle. A giggle. Maybe worthy of a brief mention to my efriends, but at 247 characters, it's nearly double the maximum character limit of a twitter tweet. Yet, it also might not be worthy of a whole blog post. If this were a three times daily blog it might fit, but for a 6.5 posts per month blog, it's less fitting. I think microblogging makes sense when it's part of a larger whole, like the facebook status update, or if it's a tool for people to get updates about the progress of a wildfire or something; but twitter on its own - for random webtainment or webformation - just doesn't do much for me. Or maybe I just need to get a cellphone and experience it that way. Maybe it's a side phenomenon of the texting world from which I've abstained. For now, it's back to old-school blogging for me. And it's about time for rusty old VTK. What'll it be, VTKountry? Sports? Politics? A mid-season LOST review? A frank discussion about how much Jimmy Fallon's new show sucks? How about some documentary recommendations? Alright, I'll be back in a bit with some doc recs. Stand by for my next bleet...


[UPDATE: I just microblogged about this blog about microblogging. But you already knew that. You've always known it. Eternal recurrence of the same?]

Obama Cabinet Report Card - Part One

Thought I was going to bag it, didn't you? Honestly, I considered it. I've been putting it off because, as I said in the last post, there are over 30 cabinet selections and I'm really not that familiar with many of them. For some reason, I felt like this had to be an exhaustive, definitive statement on Obama's cabinet - one that would lead to a specific conclusion about his political orientation at this moment in time and a prediction of what we can expect from his first four years. I guess I thought that would be the sexy vtkesque thing to do. But the reality is that I don't have a degree in economics, I don't work in public policy, foreign policy, environmental or constitutional law. I don't have a highly educated understanding of health care, education, or transportation or energy policy. And I really don't know anything about Agriculture, the GAO, or Small Business Administration (Except what I know about the administration of my small business, which is so small that it can hardly be classified as a business. I'm a step above a Junior Achievement corporation selling knick knacks door to door). Another thing I'm not: a journalist. (ah, the amateur blogger's journalism complex...)

Further weighing down the anticipated (by some, at least) report card post is the fact that the term hasn't started yet so we can't really judge the performances of the cabinet. Beyond being a rhetorical point, this is significant because we don't know what impact the players will have on the team captain and the team's performance. We don't know who will have the ear of the president, who will drive policy, in what direction, or what events will happen that will force changes or realignments of policy. Elucidating these points, Harvard University's Stephen Walt presents a reasonable case for witholding judgement on Obama's foreign policy picks. The question before us is this - if we can't yet judge the individuals' performance, can we judge the individual who chose the individuals?

In answering this, I'm casting aside a few arguments: Forget about the beltway etiquette that says that a president should be afforded the courtesy of his cabinet selections; that etiquette saw the Democrats approve Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Bolton, etc, each of which was a shameful confirmation with regrettable consequences (understatement). Forget about the benefit of the doubt - these are the big leagues and I doubt everyone who has risen to this level of political power. Forget about the politics of the picks which explain that certain selections were token picks to allow the Administration to present a diverse face, and forget about the politics of picking people in order to guard against future political attacks. At what point do we move beyond the politics? ever?

So discarding these obstructions to judgment on cabinet selections, I see no reason why we shouldn't look at all Barack Obama's selections and criticize or praise him for them. He may not have been sworn in yet, but his presidency is well under way, and therefore open to debate - open even to lefty, hack bloggers like me who haven't done enough research. I'm inspired by John Nichols' article for The Progressive, How to Push Obama, which reviews Obama's progressive roots and his migration to the center, and suggests a strategy for pushing him leftward through reasoned, proactive opposition:

The way to influence Obama and his Administration is to speak not so much to him as to America. Get out ahead of the new President, and of his spin-drive communications team. Highlight the right appointees and the right responses to deal with the challenges that matter most. Don’t just critique, but rather propose. Advance big ideas and organize on their behalf; identify allies in federal agencies, especially in Congress, and work with them to dial up the pressure for progress. Don’t expect Obama or his aides to do the left thing. Indeed, take a lesson from rightwing pressure groups in their dealings with Republican administrations and recognize that it is always better to build the bandwagon than to jump on board one that is crafted with the tools of compromise.

I may not live up to this (particularly in the proposing alternatives department), but I reserve my right to hack away (and hopefully open a forum for the readers of this blog).

OK, let's get going. This is a long one. Keep in mind that this is a report card of Obama's cabinet selection choices, not a report card on the performances of the cabinet members - they all get incompletes so far. This also shouldn't be read as a prediction about how Obama is going to rate as a president; it's just an honest taking-to-task of the team with whom he has chosen to surround himself, and unless he turns out to be the greatest micro-manager of all time, they're going to have a big impact. To start you out, here is a mostly-commentary-free biographical breakdown of the team from Huffington Post. And without further ado, here's your VTK Team of Rivals Report Card:

• VP: Joe Biden - B+ - (not sure if VP is cabinet or cabinet-level, but Huff puts him here so I'll follow suit) - clearly a good pick by Obama insofar as Biden helped him to get elected (which is a good thing). Joe had more Joe Sixpack cred than the Hockey Mom or the Joe the Plumber in the end. Am I the biggest Joe fan in the world? No, but I'm not a hater either. It was a smart, effective pick by Obama and I think Biden will sensibly scale back the role of the VP in US governance, which will further highlight Cheney's criminal power usurpation. I wish he were a little less hawkish.


• Sec. of State: Hillary Clinton - C- - readers of this blog know where I stand on Hillary. I think she's a hawk, I think her foreign policy experience has been greatly exaggerated, and I think there were better people for this prestigious post. How about the junior senator from MA, John Kerry? This is a purely political pick and as such, it's irritating to me. But she's far from incompetent. Time will tell how she does.


• Sec. of the Treasury: Timothy Geithner - C? - Here's where my ignorance comes into play. I don't really know anything about Geithner. I know even less about what the right diagnosis for what the country's economic illness is. So I'm about to hit the internet and search my favorite radical lefty sites for an unbiased assessment that will surely leave me outraged. Please hold [insert elevator music]. Ok, I'm back. And still unsure what to think. I found an informative discussion on DemocracyNow!, in which Naomi Klein calls the selections of Geithner and Larry Summers (director of National Economic Council) "a profound disappointment". She calls Obama hypocritical for picking them after all his campaign criticism of deregulation: they "played key roles during very important economic crises in other countries, in Russia, during the Asian financial crisis, during the Mexican peso crisis. And when these countries were suffering a profound economic crisis created by deregulation, they preached more deregulation, more privatization and—this is key—they preached economic austerity to disastrous results."
  
  The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner agrees but is less pessimistic: "I can point to a couple of silver linings here. Number one, in Obama’s own speeches on the subject, he’s been very much on the side of stringent re-regulation of financial institutions as the price of recapitalizing them and also as the necessary policy. There’s a very good person who is going to be in charge of the specifics of what banking regulation should be going forward. That’s Dan Tarullo, who’s one of the two or three real progressives at fairly senior levels inside the Obama administration ... I do think Geithner is a competent technocrat. He’s not an investment banker himself. He’s been a civil servant for almost all of his career. And secondly, when he was pursuing these failed policies, he was doing so as part of a threesome that included Bernanke and Paulson. And of the three, Geithner was the most inclined to tough regulation as the price of bailout."
  
  Amy Goodman hedges Kuttner's optimism by reading a piece from William Greider in The Nation, with which Kuttner agrees: "Geithner was busy executing the government’s massive rescue of Citicorp--the very banking behemoth that Geithner and Summers helped to create back in the Clinton years, along with Federal Reserve [chairman] Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, Clinton’s economics guru. Now Rubin is himself a Citicorp executive and his bank is now being saved by his old protégé (Geithner) with the taxpayers’ money ... Geithner has been a central player in the deal-making, from Bear Stearns to AIG to Citi. The strategy has not only failed, it has arguably made things worse as savvy market players saw through the contradictions and rushed out to dump more bank stocks.”
  
  Read (or listen to) the whole discussion here, but it seems that they're more concerned about Summers than Geithner. Lastly, is it notable that stocks soared when the news broke about his appointment as Treasury Secretary? Should we trust the market? Fuck if I know. William Greider provides his opinion in the aforementioned article: "[Geithner has] been seen as a weak and compliant regulator of Wall Street firms, someone who did not seem [sic] the storm coming. Occasionally, Geithner would anguish publicly about the accumulating time bombs like credit derivatives and urge bankers to do something, but he did not use his supervisory powers to compel action. In bailout negotiations with Wall Street titans, Geithner and the Federal Reserve were spun around like a top more than once. No wonder the stock markets rallied explosively when they heard Geithner would be their new boss in Washington. They think he is their guy." So, what should we expect? As I said - fuck if I know.


• Sec. of Defense: Robert Gates - D+ - My biggest problem here is that Obama ran as the change candidate on a consistent message of opposition to the Iraq War and consistent criticism of Bush and his foreign policy, and then he decides to invite the Republican (served under both Bushes) Secretary of War (of two wars) to continue on as the head of the Pentagon. I don't want to hear about the politics of this pick, the wisdom of ensuring a smooth transition, the success of the surge, or the relative moderation of Gates compared to his predecessor. The change here shouldn't have been the decision not to change. There must have been capable, qualified candidates who would have signaled a decisive change in the bellicose direction of this country. I don't accept that this is a "defensive" move to prevent Republicans from criticising whatever happens in Iraq while waxing nostalgic about the success of the surge. Frankly, I'm a little sick of hearing about the success of the Surge. So too, I imagine, are the friends and family of the 40 people killed in a suicide bomb in Iraq on Sunday or the friends and family of the 23 people killed in a suicide bomb in Iraq on Friday. So too, I imagine, is former US-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi who recently described the Bush Administration's policies as an "utter failure".


• Attorney General: Eric Holder - B - Let's not let the fact that the Republicans have chosen him to be the subject of their token nomination fight define him as a leftist. He may be, but the fight in the Senate is about the GOP fighting Obama, not Holder. And it's on. Holder's a former Clintonista. On the basis of that alone, I'm tempted to label him a centrist, but I'm wary of assigning guilt by association. The conservative US News and World Report calls him part of the cabinet's liberal core and writes that Democratic officials are saying that he will "serve as a liberal advocate on social issues important to minorities, feminists, abortion-rights advocates, organized labor, and gay-rights activists." Clearly, it's relative, but let's hope they're right. Was there a better pick available? Don't know.


• Sec. of the Interior: Ken Salazar - F - In case you didn't know what the Secretary of Interior did, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, "As the overseer of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Minerals Management Services, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Endangered Species Act, the Secretary of the Interior is [the] most important position in the protection of America's lands, waters, and endangered species." Here are a few bullets from the CBD about Salazar:
  
  - voted against increased fuel efficiency standards for the U.S. automobile fleet.
  - voted to allow offshore oil drilling along Florida's coast.
  - voted to allow the Army Corps of Engineers to ignore global warming impacts in their water development projects.
  - voted against the repeal of tax breaks for Exxon-Mobil.
  - voted to support subsidies to ranchers and other users of public forest and range lands.
  - threatened to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when its scientists determined the black-tailed prairie dog may be endangered.
  - fought efforts to increase protection for endangered species and the environment in the Farm Bill.
  
  Some would describe the Environmental community's response as mixed. DemocracyNow! hosted a debate between CBD's Kieran Suckling and the National Audubon Society's Brian Moore. Salazar sounds like a fox in the henhouse to me. As far as Obama picking him? Politics - "thanks for voting for me, Colorado; thanks for your support, West." Crappy pick for a crappy reason.


• Sec. of Agriculture: Tom Vilsack - D+ - I don't know much about Agriculture or Vilsack, so I'm going back to the internet. Ronnie Cummins writes for Counterpunch that this pick "sent a chill through the sustainable food and farming community" DemocracyNow! hosted a debate between Cummins and Moore. You decide. Counterpunch points out that this is part of larger divisions within the environmental community. The Vilsack pick also notably drew the criticism of food writer/activist Michael Pollan. I dislike Pollan. But only because he's usually right. And I want to eat cheeseburgers all day.


• Sec. of Commerce: Bill Richardson - INC - He recently withdrew himself from nomination due to untimely questions about some of his contributors. Too bad. This may have gotten a decent grade from me.


• Sec. of Labor: Hilda Solis - A - This from John Nichols of the Nation in his 2008 superlatives list: MOST VALUABLE CABINET PICK Hilda Solis: It has been a long time since the United States had a Secretary of Labor who had a record of walking picket lines. That's what makes California Congresswoman Hilda Solis, Obama's pick to fill this Cabinet post, so remarkable. ... She is the right person for this job, and her selection serves as the single best signal from Obama that he intends to serve as a pro-worker president. Let's hope that Solis is allowed to renew a Labor Department that has been neglected – and disempowered -- by Democratic and Republican presidents.


• Sec. of Health & Human Services: Tom Daschle - A - I'm hopeful about this pick and Daschle's desire and ability to push progressive change in American health care. Perhaps the best way to highlight Daschle's liberal credibility is to point out the vitriolic reaction of the Christian Conservative Right: Daschle has a consistent pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, pro-judicial activist voting record. While in the Senate, Daschle voted against schools requiring voluntary prayer; voted no on banning human cloning; voted no to prohibit flag burning; voted no on school vouchers in Washington, DC; voted no on permitting drilling in ANWR and much more ... Daschle was a key leader in blocking Bush’s judicial nominees. During the 2003-2004 session, Daschle and his liberal cronies blocked 10 of Bush’s nominees from getting up or down votes in the Senate ... Daschle was honored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) for being the “architect of the defeat of the Federal Marriage Amendment” in the Senate ... “Daschle can be expected to gut any pro-life, pro-family policies in HHS and will aggressively push his pro-abortion, pro-homosexual agenda,” said TVC Executive Director Andrea Lafferty.


• Sec. of Housing & Urban Development: Shaun Donovan - B? - I haven't found much reaction online worth quoting. I don't know anything about him, but he hasn't sparked any outrage so far as I can tell and there are a lot of people on the internet looking to be outraged at something. I'll give it an ignorant "B".


• Sec. of Transportation: Ray LaHood - C - WTF do I know (or care) about Transportation or Ray LaHood. Well I do take the subway frequently and drive on the Pike and I95 occasionally. And I do know that LaHood is a Republican from Illinois - from the same district Lincoln was from. Sounds like Obama killed two birds with one stone: a political pick (allowing him to present himself as bi-partisan) and another Lincoln connection to remind people that he's the next Lincoln. Didn't you hear? Obama's the next Lincoln. Anyways, environmental advocates Friends of the Earth had this to say: While his overall record on energy and environment issues is poor, LaHood has in recent years broken with many in his party to support crucial investments in passenger rail and public transportation, and he is a member of the Congressional Bike Caucus. These are reasons to hope that he may be open to the visionary transportation policy that is needed to move our country forward.


• Sec. of Energy: Steven Chu - A - Alright, I'll give Obama one benefit of the doubt pick. I don't know Chu but he sounds alright. He won the Nobel Prize in physics. Andrew Revkin, award-winning science reporter with the New York Times, had this to say on DemocracyNow!: [Chu] knows the science, and he knows it pretty deeply, and he knows how hard it is to get sometimes an idea from a laboratory and to become the new norm for energy ... in the last five years or so, Dr. Chu went to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to create—and he came there with this—his mandate for that lab was that energy is our new frontier. And he started to develop programs there that are very much aimed at trying to sort of have big breakthroughs on non-polluting forms of energy that we’ll need as the world heads toward nine billion people, more or less, with everyone wanting a decent life. We need more energy than we have now, even if you set aside the climate problem. But when you add the climate challenge with these building greenhouse gases, that creates this even bigger imperative. So he’s got the—he clearly has the grounding in both the science and how the science has to translate into products. You know, how do you interface with private sector? How do you make this all happen? So I think the combination shows some possibility of breaking through.


• Sec. of Education: Arne Duncan - C+? - I don't have kids and haven't been involved in any type of organized education for about 14 years. I don't know who Arne Duncan is. Here's another DemocracyNow! debate (which seems more like a tepid conversation really). Lefty Fireballer Greg Palast "slams" the pick.


• Sec. of Veterans' Affairs: Eric Shinseki - A - because he was right. From DemocracyNow!: Shinseki made headlines in February 2003 when he testified before Congress that the US would need several hundred thousand soldiers to stabilize Iraq after the invasion. At the time, Shinseki was Army chief of staff. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking Pentagon officials publicly rebuked him, while insisting that Iraqis would welcome the Americans as liberators.


• Sec. of Homeland Security: Janet Napolitano - C - Napolitano appears to be drawing an array of reviews from all sides. This liberal calls it a "terrific choice" and this conservative rag doesn't like it. This liberal academic is concerned about her, saying "on the state level, she pushed some of the most right-wing agendas on immigration enforcement. She went full speed ahead with the Bush agenda to move immigration enforcement from federal to local hands." And this conservative Arizona blogger finds a silver lining in that her nomination virtually assures that AZ's 2 senators will remain Republican for another 7 years (not to mention that her replacement as governor will be chosen by AZ GOP Secretary of State). And of course, centrist PA governor Ed Rendell said she'd be perfect for the job because she has no life. So, is she a hawk? Relativity strikes again. I'm thinking I would have preferred a less hawkish person - with a life - to head security of my homeland. But then again, do we even know what Obama has in store for the Homeland Security Department?


• United Nations Ambassador: Susan Rice - C - According to DN!: She opposed the US invasion of Iraq but has advocated for military action in case of humanitarian crisis. Two years ago, Rice co-authored an article advocating for US attacks against Sudan. She wrote that the United States should consider unilaterally striking Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. Rice wrote, “If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it.” Is that really the best Obama could have done in selecting his ambassador to the UN? Really? Maybe not as bad as Bush picking Bolton, but not great.


• Environmental Protection Agency: Lisa P. Jackson - C? - I know nothing about Jackson but it appears that she's getting mixed reviews from "the left" - mixed between wary and negative. This isn't exactly a glowing report from the Huffington Post. Nor is this from dailykos.

And roughly 3200 words later, there's your report card, Part One. Coming soon: Part Two - Cabinet Rank Members & Top Officials. Find out the VTK take on such fantastic/outrageous selections as Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, National Security Adviser James Jones, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, and National Economic Council Larry Summers.

Teaser: Dennis Blair aided the perpetrators of 1999 church killings in East Timor. (part 2 of that report)

Running on Fumes?

I got nothing, VTKids. Nothing to write about right now. Too early for season or playoff previews for the Yankees or Celtics; nothing big to report about the Hammers; sick of hating on Hillary; Not much to report on the progress of Business Casual Stag Devil Death Boy (doing the final touch-ups); Haven't been particularly creeped out to the point of inspiration by anything lately; Nothing original to say about the Oscars (Bardem was genius level creepy in No Country For Old Men) -- Hey, there's something right there. How bout that Javier Bardem. He's come a long way since that farcical Spanish phone sex movie, hasn't he.



That performance was creepy enough to warrant mention here.

The Ball, Dropped

Eight days since my last post = shameful. What kind of mickey mouse operation am I running here at VTK? My apologies to all 5 of my remaining readers for dropping the ball. I have a good excuse for not posting during 1/2 of that span - I was in Michigan, ie on my dad's dinosaur machine. After several frozen screens, crashes, mini memory dumps, spyware and cookie cleaning sessions, etc, I asked him exactly how old it was and he said about 10 years. (*pulling non-existent hair out*) I told him that it's unconscionable to be working on a machine that far past its life span and that he needed to buy a mac laptop. C'mon. I think all non-technical people and all people over the age of 60 (is that redundant?) should have to buy macs. That should be a law. But the point is that I wasn't going to attempt to do anything other than a 60 second check of my email on that piece of dung. So posting was out of the question.

Long time VTK readers know what a visit to Michigan means: Costingo! Newer readers can familiarize yourselves here and here. With myself, lil bro, and MAC on site, Costingo was on again. Unfortunately, the absence of lc and the undesirable scheduling made for a somewhat muddled affair. I suppose it was folly to think that we could recreate the phenomenon that was Costingo.06, but we had to try, right? Due to an adults cocktail party on Friday night, a kids High School Musical 2 party on Saturday night, and a scheduled departure of lil bro and MAC on Sunday afternoon, Costingo.07 got slotted for 11:30 AM on Sunday morning. And I have to tell you, I think I speak for everyone when I say that Costingo is more of a 4:30 PM on Saturday affair. The late afternoon ramping up for Saturday night highballs gave way to the late morning hair of the dog Sunday bloody marys and coffee/bailey's. The afternoon of getting jacked up for the big event gave way to the harried morning hungover preparations and artificial excitement. You can see how the vibe might be affected. But it's still Costingo, so it kicked ass, naturally. The kids and the neighbors showed up in their assorted hodge podge outfits and, as was the case last year, everyone was a bit confused and uncertain as to what exactly was going on. Costumed bingo dance party with a cupcake frosting competition? what? But eventually lc's dance mix kicked in and we were off. The chicken cup craft session got everyone more confused/excited, a rousing game of bingo included a hungover UJ leaning back in his chair and breaking an expensive stained glass window, and tacos and hotdogs set off the bailey's heavy coffee nicely. Also, no one cried. So Costingo was a success.

Speaking of my ongoing blogging anxiety, I just realized that a google search of "Costingo" yields 3 links to VTK in the first 3 results. So I guess, welcome to VTK, everyone who is old enough to google "Costingo". Eat your vegetables, listen to your parents, do be happy, and disregard everything you read from/about your step-uncle here at VTK. It's all nonsense. And stay in school. And be nice to your siblings and cousins. And don't swear. And a special shout out to the newest costingita, baby C. She's probably not reading this yet, but she's so cute and well behaved that she gets a shout out anyways.

Rounding out the trip to MI was a flight delay for the NYC contingent which led to them staying an extra day. An extra day in which we watched a bunch of movies: Breach (sucked), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (cute/boring), The Interpreter (best of the bunch), and Bourne Ultimatum (good for what it is - 90 minutes of punching/crashing/smashing tension).

Rounding out the post, I'm listening to the "new" Modest Mouse right now, and I have to give it the thumbs up. Better than their last album, with which I was a little disappointed. It starts a little eh with the first few songs, but brings it around with the next few, and finishes up strong. I'm especially intrigued by track 11, Steam Engenius, which seems to be a bit of a mash-up of Third Uncle by Brian Eno and Learning to Fly by Pink Floyd. with a some Isaac and Johnny Marr thrown in. I'm not saying it's a ripoff, just recognizing influences. All in all, I'd say that the addition of Marr to the Mouse was a success.

Ray Allen Allan Ray

(Yeah, yeah, I know. This post was supposed to be about saving Darfur. What can I say. pick up a newspaper and read some alternative news websites. This is clearly more of a sports etc blog than it is a social justice blog. Oh well. I suck.)

I'm excited about the fact that the Celtics now have a backcourt consisting of a guy named Ray Allen and a guy named Allan Ray. That's pretty cool. Has that ever happened before? AR won't play much, but still. I like the trade, assuming (and this is a big assumption) that RA can come back from off-season double ankle surgery and be an effective 2 guard. We didn't get Oden, Durant, KG, O'Neal, Marion, or Amare, but we also didn't give up Big Al, Gerald Green, and Theo's expiring contract and we didn't gamble on young question mark that would take a few years to develop and would piss off our marquee player in his prime leading to him sulking and demanding a trade. Could have been worse and they can still pick up another decent player with their trade bait. Pierce/Allen/Jefferson is a pretty good scoring combo with Rondo feeding them all the ball. 6th or 7th seed in the East?

(And to the VTK reader who just subcontracted me for the summer to do some graphic design work, don't worry - my photoshop skills are better than that.)

AMFC and the Blogging Wall

Air to the Mu'Fuckin' Conditioning. It's gettin' hot in here, up in my 3rd floor perch in Central Square. Like 97 degrees hot. After suffering through another hot night, faced with the prospect of baking here all day with my toasty little laptop underneath my hands, I broke down and busted out the AC. Joy. Sweet delicious coolness. I'm enjoying it while I can because I'd say the odds on Area 4 getting a blackout this evening have to be at about 2 to 3. Fuck you, NStar, fuck you.

That's all there is to say about AC in my post about AC, which brings me to part II of this post: I think I'm hitting a blogging wall. There are plenty of things I can bitch about in the sports world, but the VTK is not strictly about sports and some of my readership gets a little testy when I get too sporty. I haven't had any good crackpot theories or epic stories of drunken debauchery lately. I pass funny little clips along when I find them and think they're VTKworthy, but a couple of my sources have dried up in that department (and one now has his own blog for his web finds) and I don't seem to have as much time to surf for pointlessness/creepiness as you would think a self-employed artist who gets up between 8:30 and 10:30 in the AM would have. I could post some art, but the website's right there to your right and I don't want to post too much on the BCSDDB (on page 134, btw). I saw an interesting sketchblog yesterday. Maybe I'll do some of that. One of the original ideas of this blog was to have a place to put stuff that I didn't necessarily want on the dannolan.com site. I was thinking about political cartooning back then and I did a couple but lost interest. Which is also why there haven't been too many posts of a political nature - I've been generally uninterested in politics recently. I was going to whip one up on savedarfur.org and FidelityOutofSudan about my former employer, but ... but what. why wouldn't I post about that? because I'm a privileged apathetic white american? I don't know why. But there are the links. Check them out and make your voice heard like I did. I guess I felt that in order to post, I would have to research more than I have and give an exhaustively succinct synopsis of the issues and apparently I'm a lazy privileged apathetic white american. Clearly now I'm going to have to do that since I've written it out loud and have chastised myself publicly. And clearly I can add asshole to that list of words describing myself since I'm whining about doing that. And now I'm going to have to erase all this out of embarrassment. But you haven't written a post about Darfur on your blog either, so I don't feel that bad.

anyway, point being: what to blog, what to blog...

Warnock's Dilemma

File Under Internet Neuroses:

I had been planning on writing a post on Warnock's Dilemma for a while, and then I came across this post from classy.dk, which summarizes it so nicely that I'm tempted to crib the whole thing. But I guess I should do my own work (or at least crib from the original perl post by Warnock). Warnock's Dilemma is basically the problem that bloggers, posters, internet chatters, etc, come upon when they receive no comments or reactions to their posts. It can be disturbing as a blogger, but it can be downright ego-shattering in other community posting situations. It was, in fact, the impetus for my first community creation in Orkut (the friendster/myspace-esque social networking website that Google created in response to the aforementioned sites and was actually much more entertaining - "was" because it gradually became a mere carbon imprint of a shell of itself). The community was called Thread Killers and the community description was "Do you find that your name/photo is the last in a thread a disproportionate amount of the time? You're a Thread Killer. Come practice your art here." The first six months of TK's existence were pretty glorious, with an assortment of oddball outcasts coming together to create some hilarious and bizarre threads. As all good things must come to an end though, TK eventually filled up with hundreds of truly boring people without a shred of comic sense. I wouldn't soil the VTK with examples of the type of drivel that passes for conversation on the TK these days. It's like watching your child grow up to become a child molester. or Tony Danza.

But I'm digressing. The point is that Warnock's Dilemma is a real phenomenon originally described by Bryan Warnock in this perl post, as follows:


The problem with no response is that there are five possible
interpretations:

1) The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There's nothing more to say except "Yeah, what he said."
2) The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out.
3) No one read the post, for whatever reason.
4) No one understood the post, but won't ask for clarification, for whatever reason.
5) No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.

Most of the time, there's not even a group consensus on the reason. It has to do more with the individual psyche than anything else. (For instance, I tend to take no replies to my posts as #5, #4, #2, or #3, in that order.)

The real issue is that the problem may not go away. Most of time, the #2s and #4s of the world don't realize why they're being stupidiotic, and how to best unhork themselves for all's concern.

To slightly contradict something Larry posted earlier, there is oftentimes help in a message as simple as, "No."


Wikipedia offers a few additional explanations for the non-response:


perhaps writing a good reply would require doing research that the reader lacks the time to undertake. Perhaps one has a mild interest in the topic raised but doesn't feel qualified to comment. Or perhaps an overly insightful reply would commit one to additional work (common on software development lists, where the people who display the most knowledge about a feature often find themselves volunteered to implement it) but the reader doesn't want to get involved.


The reason it's elevated to the level of a dilemma is that not knowing why no one is responding creates an unsettling and irrational insecurity. The lack of response could represent multiple and opposite realities and this fact causes a psychological dilemma for the poster. This insecurity of blogging is also analyzed nicely by the nonist, in the post Frailty, Thy Name is Blog, which I posted to VTK back when it was just a drooling infant. In it, the nonist discusses the broader problem of le raison d'etre du blogue, the nature of the relationship between blogger and blog readership, the nature of creativity, the legitimacy of blogging and "digital arts" within a perceived continuum between high and low arts. Some excerpts:


"blog-life crisis [is] different from [its] counterpart in a human life, the mid-life crisis, mainly because a blog’s life span is indeterminate, and so a blog-life crisis must present itself more frequently as not to miss it’s mark...

creating physical art leaves you with an object but guarantees no audience. creating a websites offer you an audience but guarantee no substance. if in fact as i believe “you create for no one but yourself” then one method seems much more straight forward and to the purpose wouldn’t you say? but then their is this to consider: i love the nonist somehow. why? to what purpose? i can’t say. is it a vast off-white and orange self portrait? i hope not. is it self absorption manifest? i certainly don’t want it to be. is it art? no fucking way...

an interesting fact about blogging- a blog is like a child. your own child. you pass your dna on to it. it has your strengths and your weaknesses. i’ve found that all the over analyzing i do in regards to my own function and purpose, i now do to the the nonist as well. i worry about it. i am disappointed by it. i admire it from across the room. the site is often depressive like it’s father. also as it gets older, as possibilities narrow each day and it becomes itself, i find it harder to control. as it has grown and brought in more readers i have had a harder time with it. a harder time understanding it. a harder time guiding it. i’ve always wanted it to strike out on its own, but it remains the strange, uncommunicative child who lives in the basement, drawing it’s allowance but rarely confiding in me.

...years of doing art in a vacuum have cured me of the pathological need for an audience. those same years in a vacuum though have fostered a desire for community. it’s a weakness i suppose, but there it is. the truth. if art is done for me alone, and a blog is not art, then it must have a different operating principle. and it must! because i certainly don’t see any value anymore in maintaining this sort of thing for no one but myself.

so there’s the source of the angst i suppose...

...i find myself wishing the site didn’t exist. wishing i weren’t so prideful as to keep it going just out of spite. wishing no one read the site at all so i could just update once a century. wishing it were better and brought people forth from the anonymous crevasses of the web to do more than look. wishing i had two lives to accomplish everything i’d like to. wishing i could paint and shoot and blog at the same time. wishing i lived in a shack on a mountain and never heard of the internet. wishing that my efforts to reach out were more successful. wishing any number of silly thing really..."


Now those are the cries of a blogger wracked by Warnock's Dilemma. Fortunately, VTK is not as big as the nonist, so I don't suffer to the same extent as this poor non ist. (should anyone else out there find themselves suffering from Blog Depression, you might take solace in the nonist's illustrated pamphlet, What Everyone Should Know About Blog Depression) I just can't allow myself to go that far down. I mean, it's just a blog fer chrissake. right? right? right? Answer me, damn it! oops. There I go again. So anyways, what is to be done about this Warnock's Dilemma? Thread Killer attempted to create community out of alienation, but that eventually collapsed under the weight of idiots. Or under the weight of it's own nothingness. The Dadaists abandoned Dada once they realized the true meaning of nothingness (Tzara at least). What about confronting WD? Well, classy.dk (and justblog) launched a grassroots campaign to stamp out Warnock's Dilemma back in 03, but as far as I can tell, it consists of commenting on their post and posting this image:



which I'm happy to do, though I don't really understand how this is supposed to stamp out the dilemma. It seems to me that the dilemma will exist so long as human insecurity exists. Because, it's not really a dilemma if you don't give a shit if anyone comments or not. The question of why no one commented lacks meaning if you don't ever get to the point of wondering why. But that I guess is another branch of the same dilemma. Figuring out how to not give a shit is probably as daunting a task as to figure out how to ascertain why no one responded. Warnock's Dilemma is truly an existential quagmire. Maybe Bob Pollard had it right:

When you clean out the hive
Does it make you want to cry?
Are you still being followed by the Teenage FBI?

Someone tell me why.