WhirledView

Global Post

by Cheryl Rofer

We haven't had advertising at WhirledView because we didn't want to feel "bought," and we don't like most blog advertising. But we've changed that today. We have a link to headlines at GlobalPost.com in the right-hand sidebar.

GlobalPost is a new concept in internet news. It's becoming clear that the Web has radically changed the business model for news organizations, but the shape of a successful model is not yet clear.

We've complained about the MSM and their enmirement in the dead-tree past. So in linking to GlobalPost, we're trying out a new way to do news, hoping to be part of the solution.

This is a trial for both WhirledView and GlobalPost for a month, to see how the interaction works. Clicks are the currency of the internet, and this experiment is no different. So click away and check out the news at GlobalPost. You'll help us make a bit of money, and we think you'll find it worthwhile.

There's more about the GlobalPost in these articles:

Editor and Publisher (January 9)

New York Times (March 22)

Felix Salmon comments on the business model in response to the Times article.

Friday Diplomacy Blogging

by Cheryl Rofer

I was so pleased this morning with the news and op-eds that I think I’ll do a post in the spirit of Phila’s Friday Hope Blogging.

First, a warning to those who are determined to see no change in Barack Obama’s presidency from George Bush’s: this is not the post for you, particularly if you tend toward high blood pressure. It may even seem soppy to other readers.

I am delighted by the return of real diplomacy. I want to do some verbal leaping and singing here, but I will try to keep it down. For a while, I was baffled by George Bush’s bald-faced statements of his personal feelings about world leaders and the world situation, as well as his open threats. These were things that, as a middle manager, I had learned were counterproductive. There must be something I wasn’t seeing, there must be a pony in there somewhere… But I never did find that pony and gave up. There was very little followup on the threats, thank goodness, or the good things he said. I had learned not to do that, too: you fritter away your authority. Surely somewhere in his career the President of the United States had similar opportunities to learn, or advisors who knew better…?

Morbid Symptoms as the Old Dies

by Cheryl Rofer

The crisis consists precisely in the fact
that the old is dying and the new cannot
be born; in this interregnum a great
variety of morbid symptoms appears.
--Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Clay Shirky today has a deservedly much-linked article on what is happening to newspapers. Shirky analogizes the coming of the internet to the coming of Gutenberg's moveable type and suggests that we don't yet know the future of news but that, as things change, we can expect chaos.

So we also have, today, Michael Scherer proclaiming that Politico has found the future of news, to break it down into bite-size chunks. An answer, yes, of the kind that Shirky points to as a refusal to see that the change is more profound than any of us can easily assimilate just now. But, of course, Michael Scherer writes for another branch of the dead-tree media, Time Magazine. Very likely, when he was hired, he could see a brilliant future for himself writing those magisterial thousand-word essays telling us all what to think.

Ezra Klein points out one of the reasons that that sort of essay is dying: we all now have access to the transcripts of speeches, interviews, and both the performative and transcripted versions of Jon Stewart's takedown of Jim Cramer, itself an example of transcending the old, magisterial news model.

The old breaks before the new is fully formed, Shirky and Gramsci tell us. And the practitioners of the old will continue to try to point to what they sense will make it an easy transition for them. But it's more likely that the future of news will be different than anything any of us imagine right now. As Shirky points out,

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Update: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced today that it will be the first major paper to shift entirely to the Web. The staff is decreasing from 145 employees to 20.

A Foreign Policy Insurgency?

by Cheryl Rofer

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush, Thomas P. M. Barnett, Putnam, February 2009.

This is the second part of my review of this book. The first part is here.

What Tom Barnett is doing is at least as interesting as his book. The book describes some of it, but not all.

Connectivity, a central concept in Barnett’s thinking, is changing the world. The connectivity provided by fax machines and primitive e-mail helped to undercut the Soviet Union and got the Tianmen Square rebels’ story out in 1989. Now we get tweets as Mumbai is being attacked. We have hardly begun to exploit that connectivity.

Every day, enormous numbers of people discuss enormous numbers of topics on the Web. More people now get their news from the Web than from any other source. Can it be used to develop policy? David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, will tell you that it can be used to elect a president. Developing policy is harder.

Superempowerment?
I belong to a cluster of bloggers who discuss foreign policy and other topics. We read each other’s blogs and link among them. Barnett calls us, if I understand him correctly, superempowered individuals. I’m not entirely happy with the jargon aspect of that phrase or what Barnett seems to mean by it. I have access to a great many things through the internet, true; but there are limits to the power that gives me. One of thosee limits is being heard. If I write a blog and nobody reads it, does it really exist?

Bits and Pieces - Spring Flowers Edition

by Cheryl Rofer

My winter jasmine is blooming, and all sorts of other things are coming up or, if they were green over the winter, perking up. A couple of little cactuses that collapsed into small piles of spines over the winter are back to showing green between the spines, the iris are growing the shoots that stayed green, the daylilies are sprouting, and a few hapless tulips and daffodils that didn't do at all well are pushing green through the soil.

And an orchid is blooming indoors. As soon as the bloom I bought it for died, a new stem started vigorously. This is the result.

So many topics to blog about, so little time! Here are a few I've been thinking about lately.

The Smart Grid that President Obama has been talking about will be really important for the country. The Washington Post explains the energy-saving aspects of it pretty well, but I think that two other factors will be extremely important. One is that it will be much more robust to power failures, isolating them to where they happen, rather than propagating them, as the current grid tends to do. The other is that it will allow back-and-forth power trading. So if you build a windmill in the back yard and you don't use all the power, you'll be able to sell it to the power company. Of course, that last will require legislation as well, to require the power company to buy electricity from its customers. A few states have this, but not all.

Update: Much, much more about the smart grid at Knowledge Problem: Parts one, two, three, and four of a five-part series. The rest of the blog has even more about energy and economics. Check it out.

Save the Newspapers!

By Guest Contributor Carla Norton

Carla Norton has written two books of nonfiction, Disturbed Ground and the New York Times bestseller Perfect Victim. Her work has appeared in various publications, including California Lawyer, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times. She worked as an editor for the Japanese edition of Reader’s Digest and as a special sections editor for the San Jose Mercury News.

The Rocky Mountain News is folding. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a host of others are struggling to avoid the same fate. Thanks to the internet, newspaper readership is in decline while journalists have never reached such wide audiences, a sad irony.

Some debate whether we even need the Fourth Estate, whether “citizen journalists” could not fill the void. Read comments posted in response to any article and you have your answer. (This is not snobbish. You can also do your own plumbing or cut your own hair. But without watchdog journalists, the country would suffer more than just a bad hair day.)

Freedom of the press is the cornerstone of democracy for a reason. Let’s just agree that healthy newspapers are essential and move on to the deeper question: How can we keep journalists employed?

There are grumblings about billing readers, but the plans floated sound cumbersome, and might hurt readership more than help it.

Is the obvious answer taboo?

Just as advertisers pay for newsprint, so should they pay for screen time. And not just with the ads embedded in online news.

Consider: Yahoo! and Google and other such companies benefit directly from journalists’ content. We readers have it emailed, homepaged, linked and bookmarked. “My Yahoo!” gives access to articles written by journalists employed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, and a wide selection of other sources.

Many of us mainly go to our homepages to read the local news. Confess, fellow news junkies, you do it daily, and for long periods of time.

Who benefits? The host site and the advertisers that catch your attention (and then coax you to print coupons and mapquest addresses).

Psst! Yahoo! Google! Pass it on!

Can they actually calculate how much they benefit from journalists’ content? Sure, they do it constantly. Just as Amazon.com “recognizes” you and knows which books to suggest, websites everywhere collect so-called “click-stream data.” This technology follows where you surf and how long you stay there. It’s so widespread it’s invisible, like air.
What the host sites collect in revenue should be shared proportionally with the news sources that supply content. (Curious about revenue? Check this out.

Until then, readers must help support their favorite newspapers. The obvious thing is to subscribe, but there’s more you can do.

That’s right: Go ahead, click on an ad.

Diplomacy Is Not What Bush Did

by Cheryl Rofer

There’s a lot of really inept commentary and analysis on the Obama administration’s foreign policy lately. One statement from Hillary Clinton, one appointment, one action, and zip! The neocons are back! Hillary has given away human rights! The President is giving it all away in a deal with Russia!

I see it in the MSM, on the right, on the left, and I think I see a pattern.

We have had eight years of boneheaded, finger-wagging, hectoring, profoundly unsubtle foreign policy. For bloggers and reporters in their thirties, say, this is a huge part of their adult life. They’ve grown to believe that the “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev” moment is what foreign policy is about.

I Guess We Have To Say This Again...

by Cheryl Rofer

One of the things we discuss in our WhirledView editorial meetings is how much repetition is justifiable in our posts. By and large, we're not much for repetition. But given the discussion in the blogosphere last week about this trope in the MSM, and given that the MSM is right back there with their nuclear fantasies, I guess I'll repeat.

It is not possible to build a nuclear weapon with 3.49% enriched uranium, which is what Iran has.

It is not possible to enrich that reactor-grade uranium to weapons-grade without throwing the IAEA inspectors out of Natanz.

There is a bunch of other expertise beyond enrichment that is needed to build a bomb. We don't know if Iran has that expertise. [This is not a repetition of what I've written recently, but I thought it might be worth saying.]

Ergo, Iran does not have the capability of building a bomb, and is not close to building one. We will know if they want to do this when they throw the IAEA inspectors out, as North Korea did.

That's pretty much what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said on the Sunday Morning Talk, but Admiral Mike Mullen repeated the MSM line. And the MSM has featured Mullen's version, Gates's a second thought, if at all. (One tiresome example here.)

I'm really wondering now why the MSM is so stuck on the line that Iran has the capability to make a bomb, asap. Is it just that reportorial herd instinct? Is it a last-ditch effort to sell more dead trees? They're all card-carrying members of Likud?

I sent e-mails to the ombudsmans at the New York Times and Washington Post last week. No reply so far. Maybe I'll do it again today.

What I said earlier, and an addendum.

Here are other bloggers' takes:

Armchair Generalist

Juan Cole

Newshoggers

More About Iran's Uranium

by Cheryl Rofer

One of WhirledView's readers sent me a link to Ivan Oelrich's analysis of those misleading claims about Iran's uranium, which I looked at recently.

I haven't done all the arithmetic. If you're interested in that, look at the comments as well as the blog post itself.

Whoo-Hoo! Atoms of Fissionable Material Everywhere! - Updated 2/22/09

by Cheryl Rofer

As I put the tea water on to boil and turned on the tv this morning, I was assaulted by the claim that seems to be everywhere. Maybe you've seen it in the New York Times, or the Los Angeles Times, or heard the same CBS report that I did, or even read it on Kevin Drum.

It's a lie.

Much as I hate to do so, because psychology tells us that repetition will help to fix the erroneous message in our minds, I will quote the most egregious statement of this "news."

Iran has enriched sufficient uranium to amass a nuclear bomb – a third more than previously thought – the United Nations announced yesterday.

Ah yes. And if you live in Boulder, Colorado, or in Connecticut, or New York City, you have enough U-235 under your house (or perhaps block) to amass a nuclear bomb! Or, Kevin, all that sea water lapping up against the California coast has uranium in it too! I have a call in to the IAEA to inspect your homes!

The issue here is concentration. Mining uranium concentrates it from the ore. Purification and conversion to UF6 concentrates it further. The purpose of the enrichment centrifuges is to concentrate the fissionable U-235.

Concentration is not that hard to understand, but in our science-challenged society (yes, we all hated chemistry, where it was discussed in the first week), it seems not to be a consideration. See also this post from earlier this week.

The concentration of U-235 is 3.49% in the enriched uranium that the Natanz plant is turning out. The IAEA has found no evidence (Download Iran 0902) that any higher enrichment is being produced. 3.49% is not enough to make a bomb. Iran is not in a position to make a bomb, unless there is a bunch of hidden stuff that nobody has found, involving big buildings that can be seen by satellite surveillance.

It would take a reconfiguration of the Natanz facility that the inspectors would notice to produce bomb-grade uranium (concentration of U-235 of 90%). The inspectors also take environmental samples to verify the concentration of U-235. They would have to be kicked out of the facility and their video cameras taken down for Iran to do this.

There are a number of other things in that IAEA report that the media aren't bothering to report, like that the pace of enrichment has slowed. That doesn't support the idea that Iran is racing toward a bomb, so it's not relevant, I guess.

Bloggers who are trying to hold back this tsunami of misleading non-science:

Sean Paul Kelley

Cernig

Firedoglake

Wampum

Arms Control Wonk

Cocktail Party Physics

Update (2/22/09): Douglas Saunders of the Toronto Globe and Mail has asked me some questions and tells me he has used WhirledView as a source of material for this article.  Many thanks to Doug for quoting me.