Earth Futures

Viridian Pope-Emperor, Bruce Sterling is noted for saying that we have two potential futures to select from, the unimaginable or the unthinkable.

Worldchanging.org co-founder, Jamais Cascio posts this X-Y futures matrix.

Good Call

States Seek Limits on 'Robocalls' in Campaigns

State investigators here are still trying to figure out who sabotaged Scott Kleeb’s campaign for Congress last November with a barrage of automated telephone calls to voters. The unauthorized calls, officials said, distorted Mr. Kleeb’s views and even used a recording of his voice — sometimes arriving in the middle of the night — with the greeting: “Hi, this is Scott Kleeb!”

“Get rid of them,” said Stan Jordan, a Republican state representative in Jacksonville, Fla., who has sponsored a bill there. “When they first started, this wasn’t much of a nuisance. But it’s epidemic-level now.”

Some residents in Mr. Jordan’s district received 17 calls a day, he said. In the Third Congressional District of Nebraska, voters reported getting as many as 20 calls daily — many of them purportedly from Mr. Kleeb’s campaign — at all hours of the day and night.

The automated phone calls, have been popular with candidates for years because they are cheap, easy to make and often highly effective. The Federal Communications Commission has rules requiring the callers to state their identity at the beginning of the message. A spokesman, Clyde Ensslin, said the commission had taken action against violators, but it did not separate political calls from commercial ones.

State officials say the federal rules have been routinely ignored, and with the pitched battle for control of Congress in last year’s elections, complaints about the calls surged, particularly in many battleground states.

In Missouri, voters endured a blitz of automated calling during the tight Senate race between Jim Talent, the Republican incumbent, and Claire McCaskill, the Democrat who unseated him. The Missouri attorney general’s office received 664 complaints about the calls, more than any other issue in the past several years, officials said.
So far, only a few states, including Indiana, Minnesota and New Jersey, have laws restricting the calls, but more than 20 states have bills now pending. A tally compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures shows the proposals vary widely.

The Nebraska legislation would limit to two the number of automated political calls any household could receive in one day, restrict calling to 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., mandate disclosure at the outset of who was responsible for the call and indicate whether a candidate had approved the message.

In Missouri and Rhode Island, lawmakers want to establish a political no-call list. In Florida, the existing commercial no-call list would be extended to include the political calls. A bill in Michigan would prohibit early morning and late-night calls.

Too late now to get this in place for the caucuses, but we can still do this before the general election next year. Put this on your list of things to bug your legislator about this summer.

A Plea for Help and Iraq Quandry In a Nutshell

I feel really bad to not have been able to post in nearly two weeks. However, I really am just barely keeping my head above water between work, home and mom. So, seriously, if anyone knows a good, experienced networking and Windows server operating system tech, they should get in touch. If that person is not from the Clinton area, that's okay, I can sic the Clinton Area Development and Chamber People on him/her to give the hard sell on why living in Clinton is so great.

A ommenter on Andrew Sullivan's blog writes in with what I feel is the most forthright description of the horrible no-win situtation we are in in Iraq.

I just read your post comparing the tragedy at VT and the daily terror in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. This kind of observation seems to summarize a lot of my anxiety over the future of our involvement in Iraq. Along with many Americans I wish that we could extracate ourselves from Iraq and get our men out of the way of an inevitable civil war. At the same time I hear the words of men like John McCain and am forced to remember that the cost of leaving Iraq would be an increase in the chaos within Iraq. I also know that our absence from Iraq wouldn't remove our responsibility for the violence that we helped seed in 2003.

What if a Shia vs. Sunni civil war were to progress unchecked in our absence were to progress into genocide? One of America's great sins is its blind eye to the kind of terror that is occuring in Darfur today. Thoughts like these often lead me to think that the only morally right move in Iraq is to commit ourselves totally to the future peace of that nation. I want so much to wash my hands of Bush's war, but in a democracy all the people must take responsibility for the actions of our government. It is our responsibility to restore the peace that we stole from the children of Iraq, even if it costs us even more than it already has.

That, in a nutshell, is why I still can't fully get behind any of the let's-just-wrap-it-up-and-get-the-hell-out-of-there, plans being espoused (mostly) by Democrats. Because that would evade our responsibility for the monstrous fuckup that we have created there and surely condemn to death thousands of the people we allegedly went there to rescue from tyrrany.

Leaving now (or in six or nine months) even with the very persuasive logic that accompnies it -- e.g. the Iraqis don't want us there anymore, they really do need to work it out for themselves, still leaves us scot free and poor brown people on the other side of the world holding the bag for our mistakes.

And really, isn't that the sort of stuff that got us here in the first place?

None of this should in any way be construed as endorsement of any sort of the halfwitted policies of this Administration or it's lackeys. There isn't going to be a happy ending in Iraq. Americans need to learn to man up and swallow the bitter pill.

Iraq is just the first of many coming down the pike in the next few years.

Sunday Post and Run

Real life keeping me away from bloggin'. Gotta go help set up for Molly's 9th Birthday. Meantime, looks like Tom Friedman and the NY Times are pushing hard for the Green Growth agenda. Friedman inks a cover story in the Magazine .

Opening Day!! Pt. 3

You just can't beat fun at the old ball park. A fine time had at the Fire game last night. Logan Pause put in a goal in the fourth minute (while I was still in line buying beer) and then the Fire made it stick all night long to win 1-0. It was an uncompromising game, as they say in the biz with a lot of hard tackles. It is pretty clear these two teams don't like each other much, and why should they.

One of the great things about the soccer culture here is the camaraderie of the Section 8 fans. We showed up an hour and fifteen minutes or so before game time looking for the usual Barn Burners $20 all-you-can-eat feast and it was nowhere to be found. No worries though. Made new friends soon enough and we were feasting burgers and dogs courtesy of Tommy, Candy and Mickey, Grillmaster and Designated Driver. Thanks guys and see you soon.


One more soccer thing. For those of you who don't know who he is, Eric Wynalda is one of the great American players. The all time leading scorer for the US National team, European player, Fire player and until last week the vastly entertaining color man for ESPN's MLS broadcasts. For anyone who has watched a game on The Mouse Network in the last two or three years knows that Eric knows the game and isn't afraid to call 'em like he sees 'em.

So, last week he was interviewed for a web-based publication for fans of English Premiere League team, Fulham. One could call it Wynalda Unplugged. Waldo had a few beers and laid out his raw opinons.

CF: How about soccer in the U.S. promoting itself. What are your thoughts on that?

Eric Wynalda: My son plays little league for a team in California with Yankees style uniforms. He has the number 5 jersey. And he says “Dad, whose number 5 on the Yankees?” And I said, “Joe DiMaggio. The guy was so good, they retired his number. So only you and him have that number.” And my son is the biggest Yankees fan on the planet. Here is a California kid who has no reason to like the Yankees.

Now what happens if Sunil Gulati gets off his ***** pedestal, calls Don Garber and says, “That’s it. We now mandate that nobody is allowed to name their team the Butterflies or Grasshoppers or the Little ***** Litterbugs or whatever they want to call them. And some kid in Idaho is now the Fire, he’s number 8. What’s the first question he asks his Dad? “Whose number 8 on the Fire?” How ***** hard is this to figure out?

Why can’t we just take the Major League Baseball or NFL business model. NFL is the best, because they hit every home, and every game means something. Major League Baseball has hit every ***** household they could possibly hit, because they knew in the beginning if they took the hit, they provided the uniforms, and they say “welcome to the Astros”, then kids end up knowing who people like Terry Puhl are. But these people don’t get it! They don’t get soccer.


CF: I think I understood what you said. That your son has a hard time identifying with soccer because on his t-ball team, he gets to wear a Yankees jersey, but MLS does not allow the use of their teams’ names and uniforms. Not unrelated, but if your son wanted to grab a jersey of an MLS guy, what’s the difference between him doing that and grabbing, for instance, an Henry jersey for Arsenal? Or you want it to be MLS?

Eric Wynalda: No, Rapids, Revolution, it has to be MLS. It’s branding. It doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best way, but if you want to brand yourself, and you want to tell some Dad, who doesn’t know shit, how to teach his son soccer, one of the best ways to tell that kid is through the history of that jersey.

CF: Let’s switch gears. My buddy and I are 30+ years old. It seems like a lot of U.S. Soccer, MLS is focused towards kids, families and younger adults. However, globally, who are the people who have the disposable income, who can fly to different places to see their team in the different cups. Do you think domestically there could be a little more focus on getting the people who think baseball, basketball, American football are the “real” sports to come around to soccer?

Eric Wynalda: As complex as everything is, with the entities who own the shop so to speak, at the professional level, their misunderstanding of where there market is, is the issue. Their inability to be businessmen about the business of soccer, not the business of stadiums, not the business of ticket sales, because that is ***** marketing. Marketing is over here.

If you want to produce soccer, the soccer players, and a product, on the field, the wrong people are in charge. They don’t want to hear that. They are trying really hard to appease the people who need to listen to it, but they don’t know that they don’t know.

I worked for Major League Soccer for four ***** years. When I was on the air, I was censored. I was fired five times over things that I said that were considered counterproductive to things the league wanted to do. When I said, “Freddy Adu is playing so bad right now, he may really be 14 years old,” that got me fired. I am allowed now to have a big mouth, because the ESPN guys have paid me a lot of money for four years now. I can’t be censored anymore!

CF: If you could pick one name, besides yourself, who is going to be a big influence on soccer in the U.S., who would that be?

Eric Wynalda: I hope, I hope, it is ESPN. ESPN has the power, they are pulling the strings, they have the influence now to say, “You want to market this thing, let’s market this thing.”

You will never get a guy, in me, who is more of a believer in the American player. Jim Rome can suck my dick! And he should be very afraid, because I’m the kind of guy, if I get too many drinks in me, I will club his ass. I’ve been on with Jim Rome, and I said, “Let me get this straight, you’re more impressed with water polo???”

Where is the avenue that the real soccer people can [gravitate towards]? Where is it? You and others are sick and ***** tired of being told we are a sleeping giant. We can kick everybody’s ass, if we figure it out.

It’s guys like you and your buddies who are the real American soccer. I play in an over-30 league and say my name is Derek. Why? Because I enjoy playing.

Alright, let’s go take a piss and get another beer.

Wynalda was suspended from the broadcast booth for ESPN's MLS opening weekend games. He has apparently "apologized" to Rome and hopefully will be back in the broadcast booth soon. The Mouse and MLS needs Wynalda, he can be to soccer what Howard Cosell was to NFL. He is the kind of catalyzing figure that people will tune in to hear no matter if they love him or hate him. That's broadcast gold.

Besides, everyone knows Jim Rome is an ass who makes no secret that he loathes soccer. So, why should he expect any respect from ESPN's primary analyst, a genuine Hall of Famer who represents ESPN's ten year multimillion dollar investment in the game.

Opening Day!! Pt. 2

Well, the Cubs have started off playing .500 ball. From about 1991 to 2001 I didn't miss a single cold, windy, (often) rainy Opening Day at Wrigley. Well, Wrigley isn't in my budget any more. Toyota Park is, however. So, today I will venture into the South Side and pony up $15 to stand int eh cold and wind and (probably) snow and cheer on the Fire as they open their MLS season. How is this different from before?

Um, we sing White Stripes songs?

Clinton Cops Sue City Because they Failed to Read the Contract.

A recent article in the Clinton Herald caught my eye. Police Sue City Over Pay Scale.

The Clinton Police Bargaining Unit is suing the city of Clinton over the police department’s expired contract.

The contract was in effect from July 1, 2002 to June 30, 2006, and covered all sworn and non-sworn officers.

The bargaining unit contends that the pay matrix included in the contract was erroneous. The lawsuit alleges that neither the police nor the city were aware of the error when the contract was signed.

The collective bargaining agreement reflected in the contract was negotiated between the fall of 2001 and winter of 2002. Prior to the negotiations, officers were awarded a 4 percent pay increase for each promotion in rank and for each increase in “longevity.” “Longevity” is represented by incremental milestones for years of service (one, three, five, eight years, and so on).

During the negotiations, the bargaining unit and the city agreed on a 4.5 percent increase for each promotion in rank or increase in longevity. In addition, suit claims that the “negotiations that year revolved around a half percent increase to all rank and longevity positions.”

The suit alleges that the contract “fails to accurately relate or carry out the true intent or intended agreement of the parties.” It continues, “(The contract) as written fails to express the true agreement between the parties.”

The bargaining unit is asking the court to determine the true intent of the parties, and “reform the contract to reflect the true intent and agreement of the parties.”

The suit is also seeking “such other and further relief as is just and equitable in the premises.”

This story has caused soem strum and drang among both the CAVE dwellers and also among knucle-dragging conservatives who think that if unions are involved then the bedrock of liberty upon which our nation is founded is under existential threat.

Reading about the tortured nature of just performing the basics of self-governance in this city reminds me of Casey Stengal's famous lament from the dugout as manager of the 1962 Mets: "Can't anyone here play this game?"

Couple of things here. One, this has nothing to do with Fair Share. It is kind of sad how ignorant people are about how unions function -- I'm guilty of this myself, but then I can always ask a local Union Thug when I have a question. I say sad, considering that we owe most of the workplace related niceties that we take for granted to the hard work and suffering of union people in the past. Little things, like the 40-hour week, the minimum wage, workmen's compensation, basic workplace safety standards, stuff like that.

You know, it's funny but I've witnessed several occasions where one day a person would be all like, "Unions suck and are useless and drag down businesses and are good for nothing." Then a few weeks or days later that person gets a job that involves union membership -- and union wages -- and turns around and prays twice daily in the direction of the grave of John L. Lewis. Funny how a little cash and job security can change a guy's attitude, huh?

Secondly, it appears that this is a reasonable attempt to resolve a long-standing conflict between labor and management. The cops have been working without a contract for about nine months now. How long would people on this board prefer to work without a contract before taking steps to clarify things? If you were in the cops' place and could sue without loosing your job, would you? 'Vantage number two, said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake .

What this story fairly screams to me is the usual sort of slipshod, oh-just-do-it-it's-good-enough, attitude that plagues public affairs at every level in Clinton. Didn't know the pay matrix was wrong when they signed the contract? WTF? How could you miss that? Asking the court to "to determine the true intent of the parties, and 'reform the contract to reflect the true intent and agreement of the parties?' " Oh, that's rich. That should work out just fine then.

Here is something the local cops and City Management might want to try after the judge wipes away the tears of mirth and with Solmonic (sic?) dispatch slices the baby in twain: read the freakin' contract before you ratify it!

The Bush Doctrine, Explained.

Via Andrew Sullivan, my favorite cross-party intellectual, comes this example that explains at the level of even the meanest understanding why the policies of the Bush Administration, if not utterly repudiated in January, 2009 will result in disaster for the United States. The Logic of Cheney:

Reading the transcript from Limbaugh's show, one realizes what Cheney's vision of the future is: a Middle East permanently occupied by American forces, because any withdrawal anywhere means a victory for the terrorists everywhere. Money quote:

[The Democrats] seem to think that we can withdraw from Iraq and walk away from it. They ignore the lessons of the past. Remember what happened in Afghanistan. We'd been involved in Afghanistan in the eighties, supporting the Mujahideen against the Soviets and prevailed. We won. Everybody walked away, and in the nineties, Afghanistan became a safe haven for terrorists, an area for training camps where Al-Qaeda trained 20,000 terrorists in the late nineties, and the base from which they launched attacks on the United States on 9/11. So those are very real problems, and to advocate withdrawal from Iraq at this point, it seems to me, simply would play right into the hands of Al-Qaeda.

So what would be the feasible conditions for withdrawal? I see none. Even if we were to "win," as in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Cheney sees that as a reason to stay. If there is any chance of "losing," we also have to stay. The same logic applies to Pakistan were Musharraf to fall. And Saudi Arabia if that autocracy were to collapse. If the criterion is now space for Islamist terrorists to return, then we don;t so much have mission creep as mission explosion. We're talking empire here - for ever. At least that's the logical conclusion of Cheney's control-fixation. And, of course, as these occupations create more terrorists, Cheney uses that as more reason to keep fighting. There is no end to this strategy - just permanent war, occupation and terror.

Andrew Sullivan, you understand is a conservative, in the traditional sense of the word, not a raving lunatic as in the modern usage.

I also cannot resist a link to this Msmooth takedown of the Neocon blogshpere's latest attempts to deny their way away from accountability for Iraq. Do keep in mind, that if you go and look at this, the original Redstate.com post that led to the derision below, that thes exact type of people make up the talent pool of future Republican administrations. These are their up-and-coming political and intellectual foot soldiers.

We seem to have discovered a new stage in the traditional Kübler-Ross process:

1. Denial: “The media doesn’t show the good news in Iraq.”

2. Anger: “The treasonous far-left-liberals and their media lapdogs are making us lose in Iraq.”

3. Bargaining: “If we send x-thousand more troops to Iraq, victory will be ours.”

4. Depression: “Did you catch 300 yet? [munch-munch-burp] God, it made me hate liberals even more. [channels flipping] They wouldn’t last a day in ancient Sparta.”

5. Advanced Literary Theory: “The hegemonic binary of ’success’ and ‘failure’ traumatizes the (re)interpretive possibilities of an ethos of jouissance regarding the War in Iraq.”

Not to be phallogocentric here or anything, but we have to go with the non-fancy everyday definition of ‘mistake,’ meaning when you try to do something, like for instance apply aftershave to your face while your date waits in the hallway, but perform an action which thwarts your desired ends, like for instance mixing up your bottle of aftershave with the bottle of bobcat urine you bought to keep the deer out of the herb garden.

Maybe somebody could be all like, “But nobody knew it was bobcat urine, so how is that a mistake? How was it obvious that there was ever a correct set of decisions to be made, if nobody reasonably considered the chance of covering themselves with bobcat urine?

Dude smells of cat pee. That’s all I’m saying.

Technology of 21st Century Political Campaigns

I refuse to talk yet about "the race." I will however, dedicate some time to meta-campaign blogging. This started out as a quick reply to Mark Laggin's post on Technology and 21st Century Caucus Ops, over on Bleeding Heartland. It basically turned into a post in its own right.

The paradigm shift we are starting to see is in the decline of one-to-many "broadcast" communications methods as an effective voter contact and voter persuasion tool. Mark talked about phones. Phones are especially vulnerable for two reasons.

One, the proliferation of cell phones, Internet telephony and the lack of centralized directories for both begins to limit traditional phone campaign methods to the a diminishingly useful or relevant legacy PoTS (plain old telephone service) universe.

The second factor is linked to the first. The inability to reach additional voters outside the PoTS universe leads to more intense competition for those voters using the tried-and-true methods campaign staff know. This leads to what we saw in 2006 which is the almost complete alienation of voters to any phone contact and utterly diminishing returns on phone contacts.

I believe that by 2012 or so the traditional phone bank and telephone-based voter I.D. campaign techniques will be almost completely shunned by voters and practically useless to campaigns. To which my reaction as a voter is, "Hallelujah!"

I think that what begins to replace these phone-based methods (and other broadcast methods, see below) will be a lot more palatable to voters. In the place of the PUSH of traditional campaigns intruding on our lives will be more of a PULL by voters self-selecting a few campaigns that they would like to be contacted by or to investigate themselves. Campaigns are no more immune to the technoculture change being wroght on the rest of the business world, than any other idustry. They are however, very conservative and risk-averse institutions. I think we will see more Dean-like "break-from-the-back" incidents as insurgent campaigns embrace these models as front-runners/incumbents overlook or dismiss them. Although, it looks to me like both the Edwards and Obama campaign "get it."

What's to get? The hallmark of the new business and marketing paradigm is: decreasing relevance of one-to-many broadcast models of communication and increasing relevance for many-to-many "bazaar of conversations" models. In this case, we can think of a phone bank (or more, precisely the loathed robo-call) as crude broadcast methods. Think of a world where TV and Radio did not exist and phones were the primary means of communications.

This also affects conventional broadcast communications methods. As the TV and radio viewing and listening audiences splinters more and more, as more and more content consumers move away from the traditional one-to-many, time-specific model of TV and radio to time-shifted, commercial skipping recorded consumption, TV and radio advertising buys are, again going to become much less relevant. In fact, it is already starting to look like a lot of campaigns would get more attention from voters if they would just put all the cash they spend on TV and radion and just make a pile of $1 bills and burn it then post the video on YouTube.

We have seen how these trends are going to play out and what forms of campaign communications will replace the legacy methods. Website interactions in a social networking context (e.g. MySpace and MyCandidatename pages -- both the Obama and Edwards campaigns are executing this well. More advertising that is released straight to web. More varieties of advertising. A rising tide of small dollar donations will result in a sort of candidate futures market. Voters will give small amounts early to two, three or more candidates they think are worth seeing more of.

We will also see more reliance on affinity campaigning. Campaigns will encourage staffers and volunteers to spread the word among their affinity groups, be these churches, service clubs, community organizations, or just one's social circle. This begins to produce a large group of self-selected interested voters. Remember the old Breck commercial? "You tell two friends, and they tell two friends..."

What all of this means of course are that the financial barriers to entry get lower and the money race assumes less importance. We will see more and more break-from-the-back candidates-of-the-moment.

DRM House of Sand Begins to Fall

I'm in Cedar Rapids taking care of mom. But do check out the coverage of record label EMI's decision to drop digital rights management (aka DRM, aka "copy protection," aka crippleware) from all songs it sells through the iTunes Music Store.

This comes after Apple CEO, Steve Jobs' open letter to the music industry urging them to drop DRM because it does little or nothing to hinder piracy but does a lot to alienate customers.

This story follows the typical technoculture shift cycle of: enabling technology -> market disintermediation -> erosion of traditional business models. The kicker is that since the introduction of the enabling technologies (digital music, compression, broadband Internet) the traditional companies have been fighting their disintermediation tooth and nail, trying to use legislation to turn back the clock. Hence the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which makes it illegal to attempt to copy or to even try to figure out how the company goes about preventing copying of music (or videos, or ebooks) that you have paid for.

It has been obvious to everyone except the recording, TV and movie industries that these courses of action were unsustainable. Now, at last we have the first crack in what has heretofore been a solid wall in the entertainment industry with EMI being the first major to cave in. The others will stand on the sidelines and wait and see. But I think that their line will not be able to hold and we will be able to mark this as the beginning of the end of the old entertainment industry. What will replace it will be a new kind of market where customers are trusted and ala carte content becomes a commodity.

Opening Day!!

Hello darkness my old friend. The Tribune Corporation is sold for $34bn $8.2bn ($34/share) to a Chicago billionaire to make it the most heavily indebted media company in the world. Let us now celebrate then the last fling of the Tribune Co. in an attempt to buy a Championship for the soon-to-be-sold Cubs. Dead-End Street of Dreams:

1. Denial (May). This isn't happening. This season isn't going down like the previous 98 Saharan seasons. No sir. The sky is always blue. Everybody has perfect posture. We'll all live forever. Heidi Klum/Brad Pitt wants me.

2. Anger (June). What kind of benevolent God would allow the Cubs to do this to me again? This kind of benevolent God: The kind of benevolent God who gets his kicks out of using a magnifying glass to burn the wings off defenseless butterflies. Me mad? No. But if the popcorn vendor looks at me the wrong way, I'll rip his lungs out.

3. Bargaining (July). OK, there is a God, and if He just lets the Cubs win a World Series, I promise I'll go to church every day, be kind to attorneys and work for a cure for post-nasal drip.

4. Depression (August). The Cubs are 25 games out of first. I don't want to get out of bed. The ivy at Wrigley is poison, all games should be played under the cover of night and cotton candy is the handiwork of the devil. Just to sum up.

5. Acceptance (September). Hello darkness, my old friend. Well, if I'm going to die, I can't think of 3 million paying customers I'd rather die with. I want an umpire to sweep my ashes off home plate. Woo! Woo!

South of town (no, not THEM. We pretend they don't exist.) the Chicago Fire open up on Saturday with the visit of the Hated New England Revolution. Come sing along with Section 8:

To the tune of theme from "Bridge Over the River Kwai"
Twellman has only got one ball,
Johnsons are so very small,
Dempsey is just a pussy,
and Reis has no balls at all!

Sorry for the light posting. Work is murder. We are growing by leaps and bounds. If anyone knows a good IT person, drop me an email. We are hiring.