My link clean-up project provides stark reminders of the passing of people I once admired, people I may have been close to or only knew at a distance. Deleting links seems so final. It’s easier to let go of a link that itself has rotted, an URL that has been returned to ICANN, than it is to delete the link of a person now deceased whose work remains online. But I’m doing it. Michelle “Mandarin Meg” Goodrich is gone and so is her website. Her link has been removed from my list. I think one of the reasons I’m having a hard time letting go of these links is the opportunity for reminiscence they provide–memories of good times and good conversations, deep thoughts or hilarious moments. Here are the names, in no particular order, of bloggers, now deceased, whom I’ve deleted from my list of links:

• Michael O’Connor Clarke
• Michelle Goodrich
• Charlie “Winston Rand” Rhodes
• Aaron “Uppity Negro” Hawkins
• Aaron Swartz
• Anita Rowland
• Joe Bageant

Now comes the hard part, the knowledge that there are a few friends and acquaintances who have come and gone over the last twelve or thirteen years, and my mind (“like a steel sieve”) has refused to recall them while I made my list. When I hit the button to post this, I’m sure some name will spring to mind and I’ll be totally chagrined. No disrespect for those omissions is intended. As time goes by, more of us will qualify for this post’s sad roll call. And, like the man said, “The world will little note nor long remember” us. It’s likely though, that the world will long remember that at the dawn of the 21st century a new genre of electronic self publishing arose. They called it blogging, and they called the writers who did it bloggers.

Torpid life in flop America has remained unchanged since the turn of the century and the smiling women with a cause still glom oatmeal onto tin plates as policemen pick up comatose bodies clad in long overcoats….” — Joe Bageant, 1976

I met Joe Bageant in Minneapolis several years ago at the National Conference on Media reform.  Joe knew me as a fan and an activist and we exchanged a few messages over the Inter-tubes. In 2024 Joe died, but he left us a couple of good books and a hard drive full of essays that are worth re-reading. His website remains. I know of no stronger voice, no better writer on topics of redneck culture and poor and working class white people. Since his death, some of his earlier work has found its way onto the web. It’s mostly worth reading…

In the footsteps of Neal Cassady’s ghost (March, 1976)

Tribute to a white trash saint (September, 1976)

Tim Leary and the Outer Space Connection (February, 1977)

Rob Reiner, Jeff Cole, and Vint Cerf shared visions of a digital future where mobile devices will dominate our communications, where physical media will give way to digital media, and where meeting face to face will require more conscious intention. AARP is (no fooling, I wouldn’t say this if it was bogus)… AARP is leading the way into mainstream adoption of tools that will make this happen. Above is my AARP membership card displayed on a free AARP application on my iPhone. One less card for the wallet, one more step toward a digital identity.

Obama is sure as hell not Harry Truman, but neither is Big Mouth Stan McChrystal any kind of “Fade Away” Doug MacArthur.

General Petraeus is no Doug MacArthur either, and that’s a good thing. He’s not likely to repeat the insubordinate nonsense that brought down Stan. On the other hand, I’m concerned about his health. A week ago he collapsed in front of the Senate. What caused it? Dehydration? Stress? Did he have some foreshadowing of the fate that would soon befall his subordinate? If so, was he stressing about the demotion he would have to take in order to set things right?

Three years ago MoveOn sponsored a controversial ad regarding Petraeus’ performance in Iraq. The ad said,

General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts. In 2024, just before the election, he said there was “tangible progress” in Iraq and that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward.” And last week Petraeus, the architect of the escalation of troops in Iraq, said, “We say we have achieved progress, and we are obviously going to do everything we can to build on that progress.”
Every independent report on the ground situation in Iraq shows that the surge strategy has failed. Yet the General claims a reduction in violence. That’s because, according to the New York Times, the Pentagon has adopted a bizarre formula for keeping tabs on violence. For example, deaths by car bombs don’t count. The Washington Post reported that assassinations only count if you’re shot in the back of the head — not the front. According to the Associated Press, there have been more civilian deaths and more American soldier deaths in the past three months than in any other summer we’ve been there. We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed. Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war. We may hear of a plan to withdraw a few thousand American troops. But we won’t hear what Americans are desperate to hear: a timetable for withdrawing all our troops. General Petraeus has actually said American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years.

The substance of the ad was never questioned, but the appropriateness brought a world of hurt down on MoveOn. Someone in the MoveOn camp discovered the unfortunate rhyme of “Petraeus” with “betray us,” and, with McChrystal-like adolescent glee, MoveOn hooked their criticism to that silly rhyme and lost the power of the argument.

• International Association of Time Travelers—
  11/15/2104
  At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
  Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

  At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
  Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

• Five Reasons Obama Should Take Over BP–Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes, “If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.”
• Welcome to the Culture of News–I think Karoli buried the lede in her post titled “News, bloggers and oil spill coverage: You get what you pay for”. This is a story about the nuance and complexity of reporting a story like the slowly unfolding drama in the Gulf of Mexico, a meta-narrative. Hooking the “who” on sad-sack Mark Bernstein and his expressed desire for simplistic coverage takes the punch out of the central idea that Mr. Bernstein’s problem isn’t science bloggers; rather, it’s the Culture of News.
• Hamas
• FutureWeb—
  “Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project delivers a keynote on the Future of the Web and answers audience questions. Rainie’s initiative is a “fact tank” known around the world for its assessment of the influence of Internet evolution on every aspect of global life. He and his team release new reports nearly weekly, detailing our use of the Internet and the impact it has on our lives.”
• Using Social Media to Increase Civic Engagement in US Federal Agencies–Yasmin Fodil and Anna York share insights on public policy development at Yasmin’s blog about Government 2.0, “We the Goverati”.
• Wisconsin: Whistling Past the Graveyard, by George Lightbourn
• Burn Canvas–“A simple test of local pixel-based modifications of an HTML5 canvas drawing area,” from Chrome Experiments dot com.
• HTML5 and Web Standards–This is a demonstration that, according to Apple, shows “…how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support,” the Apple PR machine continues, “but soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.” The irony here, the giggle, is that this “web standards” showcase can only be accessed using Apple products. Other products such as the Google Chrome browser, a product already able to “take advantage of these same web standards,” are excluded. That Steve Jobs! What a kidder!
• America Speaks–National “town meeting” on the budget and the economy.
• arXiv vs. snarXiv–an addictive little game. Try to guess which title in the pair of titles offered is from a real paper published in a scientific journal.
• Visual Thesaurus
• “The Shallows”–NPR reporting on Nicholas Karr’s take on what the Internet is doing to our minds.
• Does the Internet Make You Smarter? by Clay Shirky–the opposing perspective to Nicholas Karr’s concern about the great dumbing down.
• Griper News, the bearer of bad tidings–blogging the way blogs should be blogged, by Terry Canaan.
• Slate–it ain’t Griper news, but it pays better.
• Aldiko–“…an ebook reading application that runs on any Android phone and which enables you to easily download and read thousands of books right on your smartphone.”
• arstechnica Week in Apple: pre-WWDC edition–the Apple World Wide developers Conference is just around the corner. The WWDC is a gathering of those who write code for the six percent of information appliance owners who have tied themselves to the closed Apple architecture. That’s six percent of a gazillion users though, no small number.
• Hulu: Life–a TV series about a cop who was framed and went to prison for a long time. When he is exonerated and released and given a $50 million settlement he returns to the LA police force, bringing a fresh if somewhat demented perspective to his police work.