Glenn Hauman: View From Above

Everybody has their moment that tells them that the holiday season has
truly arrived. For some, it’s Santa going down Broadway on
Thanksgiving. For me, it’s the arrival of the David Mattingly
card.
David is one of the leading cover artists in the science fiction field,
and I used to live down the street from him and his lovely wife,
Cathleen Cogswell. He puts the same amount of work into his cards as he
does into his work… although he does put more or his cats into his
cards…
Anyway, go look at his web site. Tell him I sent you.

First it was Ann Coulter wishing that Timothy McVeigh had done it– and
now David Horowitz is saying, “Perhaps al-Qaeda should have bombed the New York Times“.

Good grief.

A while back, I made reference
to the Bush II penchant for secrecy and restrictions on the free flow
of information as one the big strikes against it, and that it bodes ill
for our country.
Dwight Meredith
has given us a fuller tally of Bush held secrets– Texas Governor
Records, Presidential Records, Public Domain Energy Report, Thimerosal
Litigation Records, The Cheney Energy Task Force, Health Records, The
9/11 Commission, SEC Bush/Harken File, Removal Of Information on
Government Web Sites, FOIA Requests, Los Alamos Investigators Fired,
Homeland Security, California Energy Crisis, FBI Abuses, Being Too
Candid, and Secret Trials– and of course, there’s even more he doesn’t
touch on, like that shadow government of ours or the exterior of the
hotel Dick Cheney is staying in.
And these are things we know we don’t know about. What about things we don’t know about at all?

Next weekend, I’ll be speaking at Philcon. I’m surprised to find that I’m supposed to be speaking on a panel with Robert Picardo, best known as the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager, about media tie-in books.

(Yes, he wrote one– a rather enjoyable romp called The Hologram’s Handbook.)

So if you have any questions I should try to ask, put them in the comments sections.

Tom Toles follows the same line of reasoning I did when I likened GWB to a wife beater… of course, he’s much funnier about it.

Bigfoot—
what a way to make an impression.
\\SEATTLE, Washington (AP) — The man who used 16-inch feet-shaped
carvings to create tracks that ignited the “Bigfoot” legend has died.
He was 84.
Ray L. Wallace’s family admitted his role in the creature myth after
his death November 26 from heart failure.
“The reality is, Bigfoot just died,” his son, Michael, said.\\

Over on the WWWAC list, there’s a bit
of discussion on Amazon ascendant, particularly now that they’ve taken
over CDNow.
You’ll forgive me for dissent, but they are not perfect. In fact,
there’s one section where they suck worms– electronic books. And this
is an area on I have no small amount of expertise, having been involved
in e-books longer than Amazon’s been in business.* I was doing a lot of
Christmas shopping on Amazon, picked up a few DVDs. As an impulse buy,
I decided to pick up an e-book as well, Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible—
it looked good, and I wanted to read it right then and there.
But after I placed the order, I wasn’t allowed to download the book.
Nor was I allowed to for nearly twelve hours.
And when I was allowed access, I wasn’t given the option of actually
downloading the book to my hard drive– it opened up the Acrobat viewer
in my browser, and I had to save it from there.
Horrible. For a company that prides itself on customer experience and
not wasting the customer’s time, this was completely inexplicable. Next
time, I’ll check with FictionWise
first.
* By the way, I had actually considered starting up a book business
like Amazon, but I figured that was an interim step that would be blown
away by e-publishing. Seems to be a heck of a business in interim
steps, eh?

This is purely anecdotal, I haven’t tested these numbers– but doesn’t
it seem that there are a lot more robberies this holiday season? More,
doesn’t it seem that the perpetrators are a lot more desperate this
year, injuring and killing
people in the rush to get away?
This isn’t anecdotal: NYC has a record number of homeless this year,
with a shortage of 16,000 beds. And I think that’s going to get worse,
too.

From a reference of TBogg’s, I see that he’s taking issue with Stephen den Beste’s take on both free speech issues and Star Trek in general.

The quote that seems to be the most inflammatory is: “It is fortunate that [the Rittenhouse Review]’s
gesture is empty and meaningless because if it were actually effective
it would be a serious threat to freedom of expression.”
I suppose this is the point where I whip out my credentials and point
out that I know what internet censorship really is, and I do something about it; and when I geek out about Star Trek, I get paid for it. Suffice it to say that he’s just plain wrong as to what censorship really entails. If I took his posts and deleted all the vowels, that would be censorship. LGF is just being ignored.

But heck, SdB has a problem with me already.

However, in the interest of being fair and balanced, I’ll take TBogg to task for not knowing that The Trouble with Tribbles was Episode 42, and Episode 49 was A Piece Of The Action. By pointing out this error, certain pundits can now invalidate everything he’s ever posted as a mendacious deception.

Eugene Volokh posts something so brilliant I’m probably going to grab more than fair use allows; you’ll visit, won’t you?

IDEOLOGICAL COCOONING: There’s been much speculation recently about
whether the Internet increase people’s predisposition to talk to and
listen to only those views that they generally agree with, and to
simply ignore other views. Some say yes. Some say no. Some say that at
least Weblogs diminish this tendency, because they often link to views
they disagree with, if only to rebut them.
Let me suggest a slightly different hypothesis: Most people have a particularly strong tendency to ignore views that they disagree with and are presented rudely.
I suspect that most people do prefer to read things that reinforce what
they already believe. But those people who are interested in ideas (who
are probably disproportionately represented among readers) realize that
they need to consider others’ viewpoints, and are often willing to do
so.
These readers, though, are extremely easy for a writer to lose. It’s
already a bit hard emotionally for people to consider other viewpoints
(sad, but that’s the reality of human psychology); invective and
insults make it still harder. What’s more, since rudeness is often a
proxy for substantive weaknesses in an argument, especially for the
failure to take opposing views seriously, readers think to themselves:
“This stuff is annoying to read, it’s probably not that good
substantively, why should I waste my time on it?”
This effect does indeed relate to ideology. Though quite a few people
have low tolerance for rudeness generally (for instance, because they
feel that rudeness by some of their allies reflects badly on the whole
movement), most people do have more tolerance for rudeness by their
ideological allies than by their ideological adversaries. Among other
reasons, hearing the other side insulted is less annoying than hearing
our side insulted. So as political invective increases, people’s
natural tendency to prefer listening to their friends is exacerbated.