Democracy Now! | FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and Juan Gonzalez on the Color of Media Consolidation:
Michael Copps: "A little history, just to set the stage for our discussion. Three years ago, under then FCC Chairman Michael Powell and over the objections of my good friend Commissioner Adelstein and myself, the FCC severely cut back -- really “eviscerated” is a better word -- the rules that were meant to check big media’s seemingly endless appetite for more consolidation. It passed new rules, which have allowed a single media giant to own in a single market up to three television stations, eight radio stations, the cable system, the cable channels, even the internet portal, and the local newspaper, which in most cities in the United States of America is already a monopoly. And the agency did all of that behind closed doors and without seeking meaningful input from the American people. Can you imagine that? Authorizing a sea change in how news and entertainment are produced and presented over the people's airwaves, without even involving the people who own those airwaves and who depend so heavily upon them. It was a near disaster for America.

Thankfully, citizens rose up across the land. They sent nearly 3 million protests to the Federal Communications Commission. Congress rose up, too, and then a federal court sent those rules back to the FCC saying they were badly flawed and they needed to be reworked. That was good, and anybody that doesn’t believe that citizen action can have an effect should just revisit what happened there. We checked those rules. You checked those rules from going into effect. It was concerned citizens at work, and it was a citizen consumer victory.

But, here’s a reality check now. We’re right back at square one, and it’s all up for grabs again. And if we're going to have a better result this time around, doing something positive for media democracy, it’s going to be because of more citizen action and more input from folks like you. So, this time we need to make it an open public process, instead of hiding in our office in Washington like the majority did in 2003. This time, let all the commissioners come to New York City -- I wish they were all here tonight -- and let all the commissioners get out across America and find out what’s happening in the real world, beyond that Beltway that they bemoan so much but seem to love staying behind so much.

So, as we begin our discussion, then begin with that simple reminder: it’s all of us who own the airwaves. There is not a broadcaster, a business, a special interest, and any industry that owns one airwave in the United States of America. They belong to you, and they belong to me. And, my friends, now is the time to assert our ownership rights."

Juan Gonzalez:"if present trends of media concentration continue, and if our government loosens even further its regulation of broadcast ownership rules, media ownership by racial minorities in my opinion will virtually disappear in the United States. We are in real danger of waking up one day with a de facto apartheid system, one where a small group of giant firms, run almost exclusively by white investors and managers, control the production and distribution of news and information to a largely non-white population.

Is this overly alarmist? Not if you consider some of the facts we’ve heard this evening. The last report the Department of Commerce did tracking media ownership was in 2000. It stopped doing the reports. And at that time, it found that 3.8% of all full-power broadcast stations in the country were owned by people of color. Now, when an independent nonprofit group does the job that the federal government should be doing, we find that the actual ownership by minorities has decreased since 2000. So, while the minority population of the country is increasing, the minority ownership of radio and television is decreasing. So this is a troubling trend that we have been trying to get data on. The FCC has not been mining its own data. The Commerce Department has stopped doing the studies.

While the race or ethnic background of an owner is hardly a sure guarantee of more balanced news coverage, the FCC’s own studies several years ago, in response to the Adarand case, found a clear connection between minority ownership and more diversity in content and staffing.

For eleven years now, the NAHJ has produced its annual Network Brownout Report, as our executive director mentioned earlier. Each report examines coverage of Latinos on the evening news of the major networks. Every year, it shows the same depressing result: stories about Latinos have made up less than 1% of the more than 12,000 network news stories that air annually, even while the Latino population continues to explode. And this is going on year after year after year. When Latinos are covered, the two dominant themes are invariably undocumented immigration and crime. The harm done to our community and to the general society by this persistent marginalization of Hispanics and by the preponderance of stereotypical coverage cannot be overestimated."

Walead Beshty on problems in Bourriaud's positivist formulation of "relational aesthetics":

Texte zur Kunst Nr. 59 - Walead Beshty NEO-AVANTGARDE AND SERVICE INDUSTRY: "the relationships that occur in relational aesthetics are invisible to the material understanding of the institution, or physical locus of power, by their very imbeddedness. This revision of the city map foregrounds the relations between pockets of the city, privileging usage over topography, networks over space, all in service of 'the primary engine of urbanization: the market.' Bourriaud’s 'interstices' in 'the social corpus' are just such invisible points of communion where the market transcriptions of personal relations are the boundaries between people, no longer the physical walls, and the complete irrelevance of private vs. public space is realized. The proposed libratory conflation of domestic space and gallery space, and the real world progression of the art institution into entertainment complex, creates both a disturbing endpoint where domestic space become indistinguishable from commercial space, (for Bourriaud only considers the transition going one way, not the other) and masks the understanding that this is already happening. The new digital behaviorist topography of the city completely dissolves the symbolic divisions between personal and public. The city itself becomes an expression of interrelations, consciousness of material conditions evaporate, creating systems of control invisible to those who are placed inside it. With the onset of the satellite, the panopticon has become as ubiquitous as the sky itself.
Nan Ellis argues that this dematerialization is the foundation of a distinctly postmodern anxiety of the city, '[w]here modernist fear and the positivistic climate in which it occurred led to efforts to detect causes and effects...postmodern fear amid the refining anti-technocratic climate has incited a series of closely related and overlapping responses including retribalization, nostalgia, escapism, and spiritual return.' Or in Bourriaud’s words, '...we are hoping for a return to traditional aura...' The understanding, or reflection, of these evolutions of subjectivity and space are important to consider in reexamining the subjectivity of the viewer, and how control can be disrupted, but relational aesthetics seems to go only so far as recreate these systems, literalize their movements, without providing any moments of resistance. Instead it is staged t as an inevitable outcome, by reinscribing these existing structures of control as 'a realm of possibilities,' of a 'possible future,' as 'microtopias.' This is exactly the system of domination that Gilles Deleuze and F�lix Guattari describe in 'Mille Plateaux', writing, 'Attention has recently been focused on the fact that modern power is not reducible to the classical alternative 'repression or ideology' but implies a process of normalization, modulation, modeling, and information that bear on language, perception, desire, movement etc,, and which proceed by way of micro assemblages.'"

Debt Is Keeping Troops From Overseas Duty, Study Finds - New York Times: "SAN DIEGO, Oct. 21 (AP) — Thousands of American troops are being barred from overseas duty because they are so deep in debt that they are considered security risks, according to a review of military records by The Associated Press.

The number of troops held back has climbed sharply in the past few years. And while it appears to represent a small percentage of all military personnel, the increase is occurring at a time when the armed forces are stretched thin by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We are seeing an alarming trend in degrading financial health,” said Capt. Mark D. Patton, commander of Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego.

The Pentagon contends that financial problems can distract troops from their duties or make them vulnerable to bribery and treason. As a result, those who fall heavily into debt can be stripped of the security clearances they need to go overseas.

The number of revoked clearances has surged since the beginning of the Iraq war, but military officials say there is no evidence that troops are deliberately running up debts to stay out of harm’s way.

The problem is attributed to several factors, including a lack of financial acumen among young recruits; reckless spending among those exhilarated to make it home from a tour of duty; and the profusion of so-called payday lenders, businesses that allow military personnel to borrow against paychecks at extremely high interest rates.

The debt problems have persisted despite financial counseling offered to the troops by the Pentagon and crackdowns on payday lenders.

Data supplied by the Air Force, the Marines and the Navy show that the number of clearances revoked for financial reasons rose every year from 2002 to 2005, climbing to 2,654 last year from 284 at the start of the period. Partial numbers from this year suggest the trend is continuing.

About 6,300 troops in the three branches lost their clearances in that four-year period. Roughly 900,000 people are serving in the three branches, though not all need clearances.

The figures represent just a piece of the problem, because the Army — which employs an additional 500,000 people and accounts for the majority of the 160,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — rejected requests to supply its data, saying such information was confidential.

Security clearances are revoked when service members’ debt payments total 30 to 40 percent of their salary. The exact amount depends on the military branch.

Not all military jobs require security clearances. Marine infantryman does not, but some Marine specialties do. So do many jobs in the Navy and Air Force.

Financial problems are the overwhelming reason security clearances are revoked. Other reasons include criminal activity, questionable allegiance and ill health.

A primary reason the military revokes clearances on financial grounds is the fear that soldiers in debt may be tempted to sell secrets or equipment to the enemy.

In addition, “when they are over there fighting, we like them to have their heads in the game,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, commander of Marine bases in the Western United States.

Military officials also blame high interest rates at payday lending businesses, many of which are clustered outside bases around the country. Several states have cracked down on the lending practices. On Tuesday, President Bush signed legislation limiting how much these businesses could charge military personnel."

Debt Is Keeping Troops From Overseas Duty, Study Finds - New York Times: "SAN DIEGO, Oct. 21 (AP) — Thousands of American troops are being barred from overseas duty because they are so deep in debt that they are considered security risks, according to a review of military records by The Associated Press.

The number of troops held back has climbed sharply in the past few years. And while it appears to represent a small percentage of all military personnel, the increase is occurring at a time when the armed forces are stretched thin by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We are seeing an alarming trend in degrading financial health,” said Capt. Mark D. Patton, commander of Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego.

The Pentagon contends that financial problems can distract troops from their duties or make them vulnerable to bribery and treason. As a result, those who fall heavily into debt can be stripped of the security clearances they need to go overseas.

The number of revoked clearances has surged since the beginning of the Iraq war, but military officials say there is no evidence that troops are deliberately running up debts to stay out of harm’s way.

The problem is attributed to several factors, including a lack of financial acumen among young recruits; reckless spending among those exhilarated to make it home from a tour of duty; and the profusion of so-called payday lenders, businesses that allow military personnel to borrow against paychecks at extremely high interest rates.

The debt problems have persisted despite financial counseling offered to the troops by the Pentagon and crackdowns on payday lenders.

Data supplied by the Air Force, the Marines and the Navy show that the number of clearances revoked for financial reasons rose every year from 2002 to 2005, climbing to 2,654 last year from 284 at the start of the period. Partial numbers from this year suggest the trend is continuing.

About 6,300 troops in the three branches lost their clearances in that four-year period. Roughly 900,000 people are serving in the three branches, though not all need clearances.

The figures represent just a piece of the problem, because the Army — which employs an additional 500,000 people and accounts for the majority of the 160,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — rejected requests to supply its data, saying such information was confidential.

Security clearances are revoked when service members’ debt payments total 30 to 40 percent of their salary. The exact amount depends on the military branch.

Not all military jobs require security clearances. Marine infantryman does not, but some Marine specialties do. So do many jobs in the Navy and Air Force.

Financial problems are the overwhelming reason security clearances are revoked. Other reasons include criminal activity, questionable allegiance and ill health.

A primary reason the military revokes clearances on financial grounds is the fear that soldiers in debt may be tempted to sell secrets or equipment to the enemy.

In addition, “when they are over there fighting, we like them to have their heads in the game,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Lehnert, commander of Marine bases in the Western United States.

Military officials also blame high interest rates at payday lending businesses, many of which are clustered outside bases around the country. Several states have cracked down on the lending practices. On Tuesday, President Bush signed legislation limiting how much these businesses could charge military personnel."

Occupied Territory: "."

Tirtza Even Awarded Ginsberg Center Grant & Exhibits Work in Poland
A&D Assistant Professor Tirtza Even has been awarded a Ginsberg Center grant in support of a video workshop that brings students and incarcerated people together to write, direct, and produce short, collaborative, videos. Working with PCAP (the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project) and JMF (the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility) the workshop includes tutorials for both inmates and students on screen-writing, storyboarding, and editing concepts.

Democracy Now! | Iraqi Judge Sentences U.S. Citizen To Death After U.S. Military “Demanded” the Man Be Executed: "JONATHAN HAFETZ: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is a far-reaching and unprecedented grant of power to the President of the United States. It does a number of things quickly. It defines a term “enemy combatant” very broadly to allow essentially innocent people who unwittingly donate money to charities to be detained as enemy combatants, and it eliminates the --

AMY GOODMAN: In this country.

JONATHAN HAFETZ: In this country, anywhere. And it eliminates all –

AMY GOODMAN: American citizens and non-citizens.

JONATHAN HAFETZ: It allows anyone to be detained as an enemy combatant. It then denies all access to the courts for aliens, non-citizens, to challenge their detention, whether they’re located here or abroad, so any of the 15 million-plus non-citizens in the United States, including long-term permanent residents, could be taken away, sent to Guantanamo or disappeared without judicial review. It also eliminates protections against torture and provides a get-out-of-jail-free card for the abuses that have gone on in the past in CIA secret prisons.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean “get-out-of-jail-free”?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, under the War Crimes Act of 1996, any official, including CIA, or contractors who engage -- who violates the Geneva Conventions, including a provision known as Common Article 3, which provides the baseline of protections to individuals in U.S. custody, prohibits cruel treatment, torture and outrages on personal dignity. Under the War Crimes Act, if you violate Common Article 3 --

AMY GOODMAN: This is U.S. law, War Crimes Act?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Yes, this is U.S. It’s domestic. It’s a law passed by Congress. If you violate Common Article 3, you can be prosecuted for a war crime. What the Military Commissions Act does is to give immunity for past -- effectively give immunity for past violations of the War Crimes Act. We know that there’s been torture and other abuse at Guantanamo, as well as in Bagram Air Base and secret CIA-run prisons, where approximately 3,000 people have passed through, including individuals who we know are innocent.

AMY GOODMAN: And the military commissions, what are they? It’s called the Military Commissions Act.

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, that’s what’s ironic about this. The act was ostensibly passed as a response to the Supreme Court’s decision in June in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which struck down the military commissions, these trials that the President had set up outside of court-martial and civilian courts to try suspected terrorists, that the court found they were unfair, violated U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. So what the President did was to go back to Congress and said, “Authorize these commissions,” and in addition to grants him sweeping powers, the powers we just talked about: elimination of habeas corpus, a sweeping definition of “enemy combatant,” and elimination of checks on torture and other cruel treatment. So the Military Commissions Act creates a -- a military commission is a second-class system of justice for non-citizens, military trials where the defendant doesn’t get to be present and can be convicted on evidence obtained by torture and other coercion."

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Virtual economies attract real-world tax attention: "The increasing size and public profile of virtual economies, the largest of which have millions of users and gross domestic products that rival those of small countries, have made them increasingly difficult for lawmakers and regulators to ignore.

Second Life, for example, was specifically designed by San Francisco-based Linden Lab to have a free-flowing market economy. Its internal currency, the Linden dollar, can be converted into U.S. dollars through an open currency exchange, making it effectively 'real' money.

Inside Second Life, users can buy and sell virtual objects from T-shirts to helicopters, develop virtual real estate, or hire out services ranging from architecture to exotic dancing. Up to $500,000 in user-to-user transactions take place every day, and the Second Life economy is growing by 10 to 15 percent a month.

'Ownership, property rights, all that stuff needs to be decided. There's just too much money floating around,' said game designer Sam Lewis, who trained as an economist and has worked on games such as Star Wars Galaxies. He is currently lead designer for an upcoming game from Cartoon Network.

'The tax laws don't know how to behave because these are virtual items: ones and zeros on a database we're allowing you to play in,' he said."

Democracy Now! | Iraqi Judge Sentences U.S. Citizen To Death After U.S. Military “Demanded” the Man Be Executed: "JONATHAN HAFETZ: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 is a far-reaching and unprecedented grant of power to the President of the United States. It does a number of things quickly. It defines a term “enemy combatant” very broadly to allow essentially innocent people who unwittingly donate money to charities to be detained as enemy combatants, and it eliminates the --

AMY GOODMAN: In this country.

JONATHAN HAFETZ: In this country, anywhere. And it eliminates all –

AMY GOODMAN: American citizens and non-citizens.

JONATHAN HAFETZ: It allows anyone to be detained as an enemy combatant. It then denies all access to the courts for aliens, non-citizens, to challenge their detention, whether they’re located here or abroad, so any of the 15 million-plus non-citizens in the United States, including long-term permanent residents, could be taken away, sent to Guantanamo or disappeared without judicial review. It also eliminates protections against torture and provides a get-out-of-jail-free card for the abuses that have gone on in the past in CIA secret prisons.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean “get-out-of-jail-free”?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, under the War Crimes Act of 1996, any official, including CIA, or contractors who engage -- who violates the Geneva Conventions, including a provision known as Common Article 3, which provides the baseline of protections to individuals in U.S. custody, prohibits cruel treatment, torture and outrages on personal dignity. Under the War Crimes Act, if you violate Common Article 3 --

AMY GOODMAN: This is U.S. law, War Crimes Act?

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Yes, this is U.S. It’s domestic. It’s a law passed by Congress. If you violate Common Article 3, you can be prosecuted for a war crime. What the Military Commissions Act does is to give immunity for past -- effectively give immunity for past violations of the War Crimes Act. We know that there’s been torture and other abuse at Guantanamo, as well as in Bagram Air Base and secret CIA-run prisons, where approximately 3,000 people have passed through, including individuals who we know are innocent.

AMY GOODMAN: And the military commissions, what are they? It’s called the Military Commissions Act.

JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, that’s what’s ironic about this. The act was ostensibly passed as a response to the Supreme Court’s decision in June in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which struck down the military commissions, these trials that the President had set up outside of court-martial and civilian courts to try suspected terrorists, that the court found they were unfair, violated U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions. So what the President did was to go back to Congress and said, “Authorize these commissions,” and in addition to grants him sweeping powers, the powers we just talked about: elimination of habeas corpus, a sweeping definition of “enemy combatant,” and elimination of checks on torture and other cruel treatment. So the Military Commissions Act creates a -- a military commission is a second-class system of justice for non-citizens, military trials where the defendant doesn’t get to be present and can be convicted on evidence obtained by torture and other coercion."

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex - New York Times: "... That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism — to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.
Skip to next paragraph
David Royal

We can also expect to hear calls for more regulation and inspection of the produce industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for Science in the Public Interest have proposed that the government impose the sort of regulatory regime it imposes on the meat industry — something along the lines of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system (Haccp, pronounced HASS-ip) developed in response to the E. coli contamination of beef. At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are virtually unregulated. “Farmers can do pretty much as they please,” Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, said recently, “as long as they don’t make anyone sick.”

This sounds like an alarming lapse in governmental oversight until you realize there has never before been much reason to worry about food safety on farms. But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food, both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.

So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers’ market when the F.D.A. starts demanding a Haccp plan — daily testing of the irrigation water, say, or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology? When we start requiring that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in the first place. We end up putting our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue Heron Farms — in technologies rather than relationships.

It’s easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a new rule banning animals from farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent much the same sort of pre-problem solution — elegant, low-tech and redundant. But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives."

some interesting ideas concerning gaming, teaching, knowledge and entertainment...

The Long Zoom - New York Times: "Despite the fictions, many of the themes of Spore are immensely valuable ones, particularly in an age of environmental crisis: the fragility of life, the connection between micro- and macro- scales, the complex networks of ecosystems and food webs, the impact of new technology on social systems. Spore’s players will get to experience firsthand how choices made on a local scale — a single creature’s decision to, say, adopt an omnivorous lifestyle — can end up having global repercussions. They will detect similarities between one level of the game and another, the complex balancing act of global trade mirroring the complex balancing act of building a sustainable environment. And traveling through a simulated universe, from cells to constellations, will, ideally, make them more curious about the real-world universe they already inhabit — and show them that they have the power to shape that universe as well.

“What’s very interesting about games,” Eno said, “is that they let you begin thinking about possibilities when you’re young enough to incorporate them into your life. So I think a game that says to people, You can make things that then have independent lives, that’s already quite an amazing idea. And then these things can interact with other people’s objects — that’s quite a grown-up idea.”

It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day. When I mentioned this to Eno, he immediately chimed in agreement. “I thought the same thing,” he said. “If you really want to reinvent education, look at games. They fold everything in: history, sociology, anthropology, chemistry — you can piggyback everything on it.

“But my wife made a good point when I was talking about this the other day. She says it’s important for kids to do boring things too. Because if you can find excitement in something boring, then you’re set up for life. Whereas if you constantly need entertainment, you might have a problem, because life is full of things that aren’t entertaining. So I think I’d have three days of Spore and two days of obligatory Latin.” "

Always Already New - The MIT Press: "In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all--part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for 'humanities computing' while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history.

Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

Lisa Gitelman is Associate Professor and Director, Program in Media Studies, at Catholic University, Washington, D.C. She is the coeditor (with Geoffrey B. Pingree) of New Media, 1740-1915 (MIT Press, 2003) and the author of Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines. "

Democracy Now! | Headlines for October 5, 2006: "Paraguay Won't Renew US Military Cooperation Over Immunity Row
Paraguay has announced it won't be a renewing a military cooperation agreement with the US because it refuses to grant immunity to American troops. The Bush administration had been lobbying Paraguay to immunize US forces from prosecution by the International Criminal Court. Paraguay becomes the latest South American country to refuse the demand, following Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela."

the precious quote on the Bush administration's views on creating their own reality. from years ago, but i just found it again.

The New York Times > Magazine > In the Magazine: Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush: "The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

"

an elegant conclusion to Adam Cohen's essay in which he smartly likens the requirement to have an official government ID card to a poll tax:

American Elections and the Grand Old Tradition of Disenfranchisement - New York Times: "Abraham Lincoln understood this. In 1859, after Massachusetts Republicans pushed through a requirement that immigrants wait two years after becoming citizens to vote, a group of German-Americans asked Lincoln what he thought of the law — which mere partisanship should have led him to support. “I am against its adoption in Illinois, or in any other place, where I have a right to oppose it,” he responded. “Understanding the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them.”"

Anger Drives Property Rights Measures - New York Times: "This House Is My Home, a group based in Boise that is sponsoring the Idaho measure, Proposition 2, is among groups in several states that have received strong financial help from Fund for Democracy, headed by Howard S. Rich, the New York real estate investor who is chairman of the libertarian group Americans for Limited Government. As of late June, Fund for Democracy had given at least $237,000 to This House Is My Home, about two-thirds of the money raised by the group. The next filing deadline is Oct. 10.

“We are essentially a ‘networking station’ that brings together grass-roots activists, donors and community leaders who share a common interest,” John Tillman, president of Americans for Limited Government, said in an e-mail message. “In this case, that common interest is in restoring property rights for the average citizen.”

Affluent outsiders have been drawn to Idaho in recent decades, lured by technology jobs, mountain recreation and abundant sunshine. Boise, the capital, has boomed, as has Sun Valley, where newcomers from California build second homes not far from ranchers who herd sheep over the Sawtooth Mountains. About two-thirds of Idaho land is under federal control, and frustration runs deep in rural areas with newcomers who, after buying their piece of paradise, try to restrict land use further in the name of preservation and environmentalism."

Castro Foe Puts U.S. in an Awkward Spot - New York Times: "“Who would want him?” asked one lawyer close to the case, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because of the delicacy of the litigation. “Wherever he goes there will be intelligence agents from a variety of nations following him, not to mention hit squads.”

Two countries do want Mr. Posada: Venezuela, where he is wanted for blowing up the plane, and Cuba, where he is viewed as an enemy of the state who has repeatedly tried to assassinate Mr. Castro.

An immigration judge has ruled that Mr. Posada may be subject to torture in those two countries. But because no other country has stepped forward, and because he has not been officially deemed a terrorist by the American government, a federal judge recommended last month — coincidentally on Sept. 11 — that Mr. Posada be released.

The Bush administration is now invoking a law that bars the release of an illegal immigrant who poses adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. That tack has placed it in the awkward position of, in effect, having to call Mr. Posada a terrorist even as it refuses to charge him as one.

"

Tate Online | Net Art | The Art of Sleep: "Maybe the real point of The Art of Sleep is, to paraphrase Barnett Newman, that art critics are to artists as ornithologists are to birds, that art should not be taken too seriously, and that critics should find something better to do with their time."

Democracy Now! | Headlines for October 6, 2006: "Chemical Fire Forces 17,000 to Flee Homes in North Carolina
In North Carolina, 17,000 people have been ordered to evacuate their homes after a large chemical plant fire sent a dangerous chlorine cloud across the town of Apex. At least 18 people have already been hospitalized. Flames from the plant shot 150 feet in the air and burned throughout the night. The plant handled toxic waste including pesticides and PCBs. The plant is owned by the Detroit-based company Environmental Quality. The company was forced to shut down a hazardous waste recycling and treatment plant near Detroit in 2005 after an explosion sparked a fire."

Democracy Now! | "Classic Washington Pushoff" - Fmr. Counterrorism Advisor Rand Beers on Rice's Reported Dismissal of Pre-9/11 CIA Warnings:

Rand Beers on ideas and operation in the Pentagon: "We have had reports for the last two-and-a-half years of concerns, not just with individuals, but across the entire spectrum of military leadership, that the civilian leadership in the Pentagon pays little attention to professional views, seeks to ensure that their views prevail and then claims that those were all recommendations made by the military."