Your browser is not supported.

Since this afternoon, my local mix station has been playing Michael Jackson every hour, on the hour in memoriam. I can only imagine that popular radio stations all over the world are doing something similar. When I went out to dinner this evening, the jukebox at the restaurant played 4 or 5 of his songs in the mere hour and a half I was there.

If there was a way to keep track of these things, I’d be interested to know just how much play, radio and otherwise, Michael Jackson got today. The numbers have got to be insane.

Michael Jackson died this afternoon—he was hospitalized earlier today after going into cardiac arrest.

For as much of a moonbat as he was in his later years, he was responsible for some of the best, most timeless pop songs of our time—I was just listening to Billie Jean on my stereo yesterday and wondering why they don’t make songs like that anymore. Talent of his caliber will be missed.

a well-deserved spanking to the New York Times for their foot-stomping tantrum over getting scooped by the WSJ on the Steve Jobs liver transplant story. Ruthless and brilliant.

(via)

And speaking of poor journalism, here’s a piece from a couple of months ago where PressThink‘s Jay Rosen took the Times to task for more lameness.

1. Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Make sure to celebrate your Irish heritage today by eating sugar cookies with green sugar sprinkles and drinking green beer.
2. Check out the live coverage of Apple’s iPhone OS 3.0 preview event. The list of new features reads like a most wanted list:
   • Cut, copy and paste. Hallelujah! Also: about damn time.
   • MMS. Again: about damn time.
   • Search in all applications and also across the system. OMG, IFO.
   • This is more for developers, but a Maps API that lets you embed maps into your application. HUGE.

   And they’re not even done yet.

Update 2009/03/17 11:35—Oh, no! Looks like (a) the iPhone OS upgrade is not free for original iPhone owners (i.e. me), and (b) no MMS on the original iPhone. The latter is a huge disappointment. Huge.

John Edwards, no question. What a weasel. Why are there so many liars and adulterers in political power?

Stephen Green is a little bit angry with Governor Bobby Jindal (who majored in biology in college) and his support of the LSEA, the new Louisina bill allowing, in so many words, intelligent design to be taught in public school science classes:

Social sciences are, almost by definition, soft-skulled bullshit. So let the liberals teach it. Real science is supposed to mean something… and when it no longer does, then we’re all screwed.

So am I emotional on this issue? You bet your ass I am. And I’ll get emotional whether it’s a Kansas school board, or the legislature and governor of a state I’ve barely even visited.

In the churches, faith can and does sustain good people of every stripe — and in ways biology, physics, and math never could. But forcing our preachers to teach in the scientific method would ruin the religious experience. Just as surely, mixing faith and science would destroy those things science offers us.

And with that, I’ll step away from the pulpit for a while. I’d like to think that Governor Jindal would do likewise and get the hell out of our classrooms.

Read the whole thing, especially Green’s engagement with soft-skulled ignoramus hpb in the comments.

Now, the foundations of human knowledge, and science, are by no means sure things, and are open to reasoned, intelligent criticism^†. If you are going to teach criticism of modern scientific theories, as the bill states, you’d be much better off teaching applied epistemology^* than what the bill’s writers intend (hat tip).

Matters of faith have no place in our science classrooms.

^† And yeah, intelligent design ain’t it.

^* Ha, make sure to read their terms of service.

Regarding the AP/Drudge Retort contretemps:

• The Media Bloggers Association is “a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of “blogging” or “citizen journalism” as a distinct form of media; and helping to extend the power of the press, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails, to every citizen.” Basically an advocacy group available to bloggers and non-bloggers alike. They also offer legal advice and help to individual bloggers like Rogers Cadenhead of Retort when they are faced with legal action.
• Here’s the actual backstory of the issue from Robert Cox of the MBA, who has been involved in this affair from the beginning. Apparently prior to the 7 takedown notices filed last week (whose validity is indeed still up for debate), the website had gotten several perfectly valid takedown notices for clear violations of the DMCA.
• Cox’s reaction to some of the misinformation promulgated by bloggers and press alike.

Have you heard about this? It’s a doozy.

Last week, the Associated Press filed 7 DMCA takedown notices against the Drudge Retort^†, a Digg-style social news website, alleging that its users’ practice of linking AP articles and briefly quoting headlines and leads (never more than 79 words) was not fair use.

Now, apparently the AP’s official policy is that fair use of their content means use of 4 or less words. I am not kidding. Use 5 or more, and you owe them a minimum of $12.50.

The—big surprise—resulting uproar and fledgling PR nightmare has had the AP backpedaling, saying that their initial filings were “heavy-handed,” and planning to meet with representatives from a trade group (the Media Bloggers Association^*) to come up with “a more thoughtful standard.”

Sauce for the goose
Turnabout, however, is evidently fair play:

Now, in a slightly ironic twist, the AP is taking content from a blog site. Namely, mine.

In a news item about the e-mail from Judge Kozinski’s wife that I posted on this site, an AP article lifted numerous passages.

I counted 154 words quoted from my post. That’s almost twice the number of words contained in the most extensive quotation in the Drudge Retort.

Look. A huge portion of the blogosphere is all about news analysis and discussion. Hashing and rehashing, action and reaction. Take that away and all you’ve got is catblogging and what-I-ate-for-dinner-last-night—scintillating stuff indeed. Not to mention that if the purpose of quoting news articles is almost always to react to them, how is this legally any different from quoting a book in a book review, which is fair use under the DMCA?

Well, as embarrassing as this already is for the AP, it’s bound to get worse before it gets better. And they deserve it. (Via InstaPundit)

^† No, that is not a typo. I meant to type “retort” rather than “report.” The Drudge Retort started out as a left-wing parody of the conservative Drudge Report.

^* Who? Are these guys, whoever they are, really representative of the blogging community?

The Economist‘s cover story from this week’s print edition says that things are going better in Iraq.

Tell me if this makes sense to you:

“[I]n response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo,” Verizon (the ISP) has announced that it will bar its users from accessing nearly all of Usenet news groups (including the alt.* groups), because Cuomo and his team have found child pornography on 88 groups—out of roughly 100,000.

Groups which will be barred include mozilla.support.firefox, symantec.customerservice.general, us.military and microsoft.public.excel. Yeah, those are really dangerous. Got to protect our children from those. Because when you want to remove a brain tumor, the best way to go about it is to take a sledgehammer to the patient’s skull. (Via Slashdot)