Blasts in Bombay

May peace and answers be found soon.

One very interesting thing said by the Pakistani Foreign Minister. I wonder if he has been quoted out of context or if he means what he says

Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurseed Mehmood Kasuri told Reuters in Washington that the blasts underlined the need for Pakistan and India to resolve their disputes.

Does he mean to say that they should do so that they can combat terrorism together? Or does he intend to say that only then will Pakistan desist from carrying out (or sponsoring) such attacks?

Isn't it ironic?

The US says it will train its people in wartime ethics!

Haditha so far ...

The faithful and the the pseudo-secularists are at it again. Ban "The Da Vinci Code", they say. Some earlier created ruckus over the movie Sins.

If the idea hadn't itself been against freedom of speech, I would have advocated banning religion altogether from this world. For now, I shall stop by quoting Roger Waters

Moslem or Christian Mullah or Pope
Preacher or poet who was it wrote
Give any one species too much rope
And they'll fuck it up

Death sells

Or rather, beheading, slaughter and mayhem .. at less than a dollar apiece

Jihadi videos thrive on execution scenes

The intelligent bloggers have surpassed themselves

This one, for instance, wonders if blogging will ever go mainstream and this one doubts if it will ever happen anytime soon but will be glad if he is proven wrong.

Time then to make the second one glad and the first one, well, given his level of intelligence, I ain't sure what one can do with him but lets try to see why his statements are so intelligent.

(This post says some fairly obvious things but at times like these, one has to do what one has to do)

The obvious things to say are

1. There is a difference between "mainstream media" and "mass media"
2. There are "non-mainstream" print and radio channels (not so much in TVs as the cost of entering that arena is fairly huge and the alternate media doesn't have the resources). Just because a channel uses (now) conventional media routes does not make it mainstream
   
3. Blogging is very much a medium like print, radio and TV
4. The great advantages of blogs, vlogs and podcasts is that anyone can "air" (publish/print/broadcast) their views at a very low cost. That does not make it non-mainstream
   
5. There is a section of the blogosphere that IS completely mainstream.
   
6. It works on the kind of hierarchy our Intelligent Blogger #1 (IB1 for today) suggests it should work on.There are blogebrity lists and classifications, rankings, popularity measurements, etc, etc. The complete works.
   
7. There are CEOs blogging (1, 2, 3, ... ) and so are politicians (well, as far as I remember, she did run for Governor in California). Man, the CTO of Microsoft blogs for Chrissakes!
8. TV Ads for Blogs? Man! Who made this guy a manager? No one who does not have a basic understanding of economics should ever be made a manager! The day when blog ads appear on TV channels is, in fact, already here. Youtube is a TV station. So is Google Video. They have contextual ads. For blogs. Generated by Adsense. As does this dude's very own blog. There are radio (podcast) ads on blogs, blog ads on podcast sites. The whole mix.
   

Now, for the interesting part. Check out the interesting ideas of Umair Haque over at Bubble Generation. The ideas are interesting and yet, in my view, flawed.

Here is why.

Humans, which our intelligent bloggers (IB#1 and IB#2) most likely are (I know that there is a chance that I might be wrong but presuming that they are from earthly beings and given the level of intelligence they have shown, I'd be very surprised if they were, for instance, guinea pigs or dolphins), still look to derive their understanding from "authority figures". They have very little understanding of the world around them and only make a superficial attempt of even trying to understand.

Thus, they will always look to create celebrities and authorities and (in turn) hierarchies and pecking orders. Brands. We see this in the blogosphere. The blogebrity lists have no relevance as far as the quality of posts go. It is simply a measure of the amount of traffic one generates. This essentially translates to higher revenues from AdSense, etc which means more power. This leads to a phase wherein one sees a consolidation of power (this is what is currently taking shape). One would see closed circles at the top of the blogebrity lists. People in these lists will (mostly, >90% of the times) restrict themselves to linking to other people in this circle since this creates a non-linear loop (the amount of links pointing to them goes up, their pagerank goes up leading to higher traffic from search results leading to higher amount of links leading to, once again, higher pageranks and higher traffic).

The cost of producing content for those low down in the pecking order will eventually rise. How? URLs (and more importantly, meaningful URLs) will, at some time, become a scarce resource. At such a point, whoever will control the distribution of URLs will become the all-powerful controller of the WWW. The providers (yahoo, msn, google) will form the second level of the hierarchy by controlling who gets xyz.blogspot.com, spaces.msn.com/xyz, etc. They will have the power to censor and the power to shield. Take for example the bloggers in China outed by yahoo and msn. Soon, independent voices will be drowned out by the centralized agencies on the web. All Google, or any centralized agency, has to do to stop traffic from coming to your website is to take your name out of the search results or maybe put it on the fourth page of the search results where very few people have the patience and the tenacity to go. Why? Maybe because a rival paid more money to advertise their site.

This is, of course, how it is meant to be.

There are already central agencies - Google, Technorati, etc whose power is growing non-linearly. What IB#1 and IB#2 don't know is that these exist and that they should be careful of what they wish for.

Two cheers for cynicism

Times of India, those who have read my previous posts would know, is not exactly what I consider journalism. Its a tabloid pretending to be a newspaper. If ToI, the crap published on six days of the week is bad and terrible to digest, SToI, the Sunday avatar is even worse. Why? Well, because it has more pages than the usual, plain vanilla ToI and therefore more crap. It even has a regular colum by, of all people, Shoba De which, each time I have tried to read it (about twice in the last five years or so), has made me want to puke. Shoba De and Simi Garewal. The very sight of their faces is nauseating. But, as is my habit, I digress. This is not about them. Lets stick to ToI for now.

So why do I read ToI, you may ask? Because, I have to admit, ToI has its finger on the pulse of the nation. It is really the pulse of this nation that is sickening. Cheap sensationalism sells and there are those who cash in. ToI is numero uno. Tehelka tried a few years back and flopped miserably as they tried to make a change in the system. ToI understood that the system sucks because the people suck and stuck to its agenda of making profits. It knows that it is a tabloid and makes no bones about it. Thus, what it gives is the true state of the nation. An altogether more humble newspaper, one might say, as compared to the "Lets change the world" types.

There is also one more reason that I read SToI. It is because of a column called Swaminomics by one Mr. Aiyar. All you get is plainspeak. No hypocrisy, no pretensions. It is the one redeeming feature of SToI- bringing this column to us each week. Mr. Aiyar, at times, comes across as a cynic but then I have come to realize over the years- there are a lot of hypocrites who pose as liberals but the true libertarians, the ones who really value freedom, choose the cloak of cynicism. Mostly, I think, because revealing themselves as liberals (as they truly are) is fraught with the peril of being identified with the pseudo-liberal types. After all, as far as most of the readers of SToI go, Swaminomics and Shoba De are the same as they are, after all, published on the same page. Thus the charade of cynicism while underneath, the heart truly longs for a better, more honest world.

Three cheers, then, to the cynics of this world. It is altogether much better to pretend to not care where in truth one really cares than to pretend to care where in truth, one really doesn't give a crap. Three cheers to the cynics of the world for they are the only true liberals and libertarians left amongst us.

The greatest show of them all

I have an eye for drama, as previously mentioned here, here and here.

The greatest show of them all (thus far, for this too shall be surpassed some day) is playing out in the courtroom where Zacarias Moussaoui (henceforth ZM) is being tried for what have to be the most bizarre reasons of all. He is being tried because "his lies led to nearly 3,000 deaths in the September 11 attacks".

The lie? That he didn't tell the Feds that al Qaeda was planning the attacks on September 11 2001 when he was arrested in August 2001. Umm. Lemme gather this. FBI thinks that hard-core terrorists have a moral duty to tell them of possible terrorist attacks when they ask the terrorists? Or are they just trying to cover up their incompetence which seemingly knows no bounds?

US is a fascinating country filled with contradictions. And it is not just since W took over (though Dubya has done a lousy job of covering it up). Contradiction has been the American way of life since their War for Independence. This is one more instance when American hypocrisy is on public display. Why?

Consider the "Miranda Warning". Much glorified by the Pentagon propaganda machine called Hollywood, it is something the entire world has heard over and over in films and TV shows. It is something we have come to expect of the last outpost of freedom in the world (in the words of the other, orginal, pre-McCarthy Pentagon propaganda machine - Ayn Rand). The right to silence is present in different forms in different countries including surprise, surprise, the US.

So what is this trial about? A suspect was arrested. He was asked questions he didn't answer. Now he is on trial for not answering when he was fully well within his rights to do so? And what a trial it has been!

The accused has a court-appointed lawyer whom the accused is not interested in talking to. Instead, he makes deals with the prosecution. In return for his implicating himself, he wants a life of relative luxury in prison till his execution. Then he changes his statement to say that not only was he aware of the attacks, he was meant to take out the White House. The defence, much-hated by the guy it is trying to defend, is trying to discredit him in order to save him. Discrediting him should not be too difficult given the number of times this man has changed his statements. Saving him, is a different ball-game of course and given that the jurors and the judge are all Americans, one wouldnt be surprised if they laid the sole responsibility of 9/11 on ZM.

Americans are, after all, highly regarded for their intelligence by the world. The American intelligence was on display during the 2000 and 2004 elections (when they gave W close to 50 pc of the votes - whether he won the elections or not is a separate issue of course) and in the movie Forrest Gump, where the character of America is played by the character of Forrest Gump (which was played by Tom Hanks).

Whatever be the result of the case, one thing is for certain. No one produces dramas like the Americans do and the trial of ZM is not going to be surpassed in a hurry.