My wife has wanted a dog for as long as I’ve known her, and now that we actually own a house it was only a matter of time: “Lady” is a two year-old (we think) Staffordshire Terrier mix, rescued from an animal shelter that was hours away from putting her down; the shelter says she was a stray, but we find that hard to believe given her temperament — this dog has been indoors and around people all her life.
The shelter she came from was in eastern Washington state, so we suspect she may be one of several dozen dogs that were forced out of Moses Lake, WA after the city council passed an ordinance requiring pit bull1 owners to carry hundreds of thousands of dollars in liability insurance.
The American Staffordshire Terrier is a “bully” breed and is often lumped in with the pit bull as a dangerous breed; Lady is about as dangerous as a children’s plush toy, unless you’re the rug in our dining room. [↩]
Via Kevin Drum comes this report of once-habitable Pacific islands that aren’t anymore:
The evacuation of the Carteret Islands have begun. This morning I stood on black volcanic sand, pressed up right against the jungle, and watched a small white boat powered by a single outboard engine run in against the shore. On board were five men from the Islands, the fathers of five families, who have come to finish building houses and gardens already begun in a cleared patch of jungle at Tinputz, on the east coast of Bougainville. When these homes are ready the five will return to the Carterets, to fetch their wives and children back. Life, they hope, will be better for them here. On the Carterets, king tides have washed away their crops and rising sea levels poisoned those that remain with salt. The people have been forced to move.
As I recall there are parts of Australia which were once suitable for farming, but as irrigation drew down the subterranean water table, the sea came in to take its place — killing the crops with salt.
As John Gruber analyzes the latest iPhone rumors, I’ll build on his description of a “new, lower-priced, smaller, and more adorable iPhone” with some baseless speculation:
I think the iPhone Lite will simplify the iPhone’s overly complex one-button interface — it’ll have no buttons, and no microphone or speaker. It will require the use of a headset, and Apple will introduce a new Bluetooth headset with volume controls to accompany it.
Take an iPhone, remove the button on the front, the internal speaker, the microphone, the volume controls and maybe the camera, and you’re left with a device about the size of a credit card and the thickness of the new iPod Shuffle. The most popular carrying case doubles as a bifold wallet.
Too funny to pass up: A list, citing the relevant state and federal laws, of crimes committed by Ferris Bueller and friends during his joyride / truancy / impersonation of a police officer / and the list goes on.
I don’t do “what she said” posts often (actually never, come to think of it), but Hilzoy’s post on why we should prosecute war criminals, even if they were high-ranking members of the executive branch — especially if they were high-ranking members of the executive branch — pretty much covers it. This isn’t a partisan issue, unless you believe the rule of law shouldn’t apply to members of your own party.
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
I mentioned Clay Shirky in passing when I wrote about the imminent demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (now just days away), and now Clay himself has written a longer article discussing how newspapers solve a problem which no longer exists, economically speaking: The cost of distributing news is no longer tied to the physical printing press. How we cover the costs of collecting news, of performing investigative journalism, rooting out corruption, etc., is the interesting question going forward.
Seattle’s 43rd Legislative District Democrats hosted an interesting panel discussion last night about the imminent demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is due to close next month if no buyer steps forward. Panelists included the managing editor of the P-I, editors from the paper’s print rivals, the Seattle Times and alt-weekly The Stranger, a city councilman, and the chair of an organization trying to preserve Seattle’s status as a two-paper town.
As I listened to the panelists I was thinking about the writings of Clay Shirky, and about two ways in which the web has fundamentally undercut print journalism:
Craigslist has destroyed the financial foundation of the daily newspaper, by taking away the main source of advertising dollars: Classified ads. Nobody starts a job search these days by cracking open the local paper and skimming the want ads, and every year more people turn to the internet when shopping for cars, real estate and other goods that used to dominate print advertising.
Print newspapers require editors and fact-checkers to maintain the quality of their product; the printed page necessarily limits what gets published, and gatekeepers are required to filter out dreck and errata. The web allows anyone to publish anything, and makes no up-front effort to screen out nonsense; instead, it relies on an army of volunteers to find quality articles after the fact. People like Jason Kottke are the 21st century’s newspaper editors, trolling the web and linking to interesting or “newsworthy” stories, and the web makes that job both easier and less financially rewarding.
So the question isn’t really whether Seattle will become a one-paper town: It is, as the panelists agreed, what will happen when Seattle (and most other cities) become zero-paper towns within the next decade. The panel’s concern was that in-depth local reporting of, say, political corruption or city schools — stories that required months of legwork — would be lost; the web is ruthlessly efficient at wide-and-shallow reporting, on everything from sports scores to presidential campaigns, but no one has figured out how to make narrow-and-deep investigative journalism profitable in a post-newspaper world.
I think the answer, which probably won’t please the professional journalists on yesterday’s panel, is that we need to start making reducing the effort required to expose corruption or research the performance of city schools — that it’s time to bring tools like the Freedom of Information Act up to date, such that any information subject to a FOIA request is already online and available to armchair journalists. Publicly traded companies should be required to keep “live” financial reports online, instead of offering mere quarterly reports to under-informed investors — and a scam like Bernie Madoff’s should be impossible to pull off because everyone can see what he’s doing.
This is, unfortunately, not the best news for today’s professional journalists: The majority of them will be forced to find paying work in some other field. The market is unwilling to pay professionals for work that a swarm of amateurs will perform for free, whether it’s an opinions-page article on the city council meeting or an interview with the coach of the Seahawks — so it becomes a question of what amateurs aren’t doing for free, and how we can allow the amateurs to do those things cheaply and effectively.
The panel’s suggestion, in fits and starts, was to find ways for the public to fund investigative journalism as a public good — but I think that approach is a dead-end, and indeed one of the panelists was vocal about the dangers of allowing public officials to fund investigations of public corruption. It’s possible to imagine a PBS-like entity which performs the in-depth journalism functions of a city newspaper, but it’s also easy to imagine the conflicts of interest that would arise.
I’m also not thrilled with the right-wing Seattle Times being the only paper in town, but unless I come up with several hundred million dollars in the next thirty days, I don’t see how that’s going to be avoided. If I’m right, though, it’ll only be that way for a few more years.
Still on vacation in Australia. The above Aboriginal paintings are from Kakadu National Park, about three hours outside of Darwin, and depict Creation Ancestors Namondjok (top center), his wife Barrginj (center left, below Namondjok’s leg), and Namarrgon, the Lightning Man (top right).
Over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, a reader writes that he believes Obama is unlikely to prosecute former Bush Administration officials for war crimes, and cites Abraham Lincoln to make his case:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
This analysis bothers me, because it implies there could only be one motive — vengeance — for enforcing our nation’s laws.
I think Obama urgently needs to prosecute lawbreaking members of the Bush Administration: Not as payback, but as a critical step in restoring the rule of law. As a step toward preventing the next generation of Nixonistas from romping into the Oval Office and violating laws with impunity, relying on Obama’s precedent that “bipartisan outreach” means forgiving the other party’s crimes.
I don’t want vengeance. I want the law enforced without regard to party affiliation, which would be a welcome change from what the party of Rove and Gonzales has wrought these past eight years. Instead of heeding Lincoln’s call to forgiveness, Obama’s Justice Department should follow a more recent creed: There are no Republican criminals and no Democratic criminals. There are just criminals.
The evacuation of the Carteret Islands have begun. This morning I stood on black volcanic sand, pressed up right against the jungle, and watched a small white boat powered by a single outboard engine run in against the shore. On board were five men from the Islands, the fathers of five families, who have come to finish building houses and gardens already begun in a cleared patch of jungle at Tinputz, on the east coast of Bougainville. When these homes are ready the five will return to the Carterets, to fetch their wives and children back. Life, they hope, will be better for them here. On the Carterets, king tides have washed away their crops and rising sea levels poisoned those that remain with salt. The people have been forced to move.