This delightful story, by Fred Vogelstein, about Microsoft from Wired magazine tells how the company has genuinely opened up and become much more transparent in the Internet Age. I see this process as part of the change from the 20th century media environment where broadcast and print media had a media monopoly to the new, [...]

Those of us a certain age value newspapers as a source stability, even comfort, in a period when broadcast media have pushed us and pulled us intellectually and emotionally with their set piece presentations that force us to experience the news their way. With a newspaper you can sit back and choose what to read [...]

No Post today – sick beyond even thinking about it. Wednesday I hope.

Baghdad resident, Mohammad Fadhil, gives his view of the state of the information war in a recent Pajamas Media post. When Arabs or westerners ask me about the situation and I answer that hope remains and that we’re looking forward to a better future most would say ‘Are you living in this world?’ I answer, [...]

A friend and I were chatting about the possibility of Bush having a blog. Next day she sent me this article from AustralianIT that says that the US presidential candidates now have MySpace pages and blogs. Visitors to the website are provided easy ways to copy candidates’ virtual election banners or badges to personal MySpace [...]

I remember the first time I protested against the war in Vietnam. It was 1962 and a young woman associated with the radical Roman Catholic newspaper The Catholic Worker had been jailed in an previous protest. Specifically, we were protesting her arrest. All five of us. I recall we were protesting near a woman’s jail [...]

Trust Lizard to remind us of those enervating Spring days that take the spring right out of our step. Thanks to ‘Heat Savings Time’ here in Western Australia we are still getting those enervating ‘Spring’ days deep into Autumn. A good friend told me today that the polls are running 75% against this wonderful idea [...]

When a president gets into trouble in a war – like Truman in Korea or Johnson in Vietnam – the electorate, naturally enough, turns to the other party. Hilary has an interview in the NY Times that I think foreshadows the kind of position any Democratic candidate will have to take if they are to [...]

While it is both understandable and natural for war to generate heated political emotions, I’ve find myself often disappointed when a commenter to a blog post about some aspect of the war starts down a promising line of criticism and then degenerates into statements like ‘biggest debacle,’ ‘unmitigated failure’, and the like. A lot of [...]

Norm Geras has a post Broken Lineages, that raises an interesting issue that has subliminally bothered me for some time – the apparent resemblance between the Stalinist left of the past and much of today’s left. Taking up this single point in response to a book review Norm says: I have my reservations about a [...]