HorsesAss.Org

No doubt the entertainment industry has a lot of trepidation about the recently announced Google TV (though it sounds to me like Google is just building Android and Chrome into TV’s and set-top boxes, much in the same way that everybody expects Apple to put iOS into its unannounced iTV… I mean, if you’ve played with the NetFlix or ABC apps on an iPad, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything really new here)… but what really struck me from the LA Times article reprinted in today’s Seattle Times was this particular toss-away:

The prospect of Google getting into television frightens many in Hollywood, who worry that Silicon Valley will upend the entertainment industry just as the Internet ravaged the music and newspaper industries.

Yeah, um, except… what happened to the music industry and what happened to the newspaper industry are two entirely different things.

Music sales, in both units and dollars, rose steadily and healthily for decades before plateauing in the late 1990’s at about $17 billion annually. That’s when digital piracy, particularly the widespread popularity of peer-to-peer file sharing networks, started to take the legs out from under the industry. The dollar value of music sales has pretty much shrunk nearly every year since, to about $10 billion annually today, though thanks in large part to Apple’s iTunes, unit sales in 2009 reached an all time high.

Total paid U.S. newspaper circulation on the other hand had been relatively flat since about 1960, despite huge increases in population, and has been on the decline since the mid-1980’s, well before the market penetration of broadband Internet could have much of an impact on its business. Indeed, if any medium is to blame for stealing away paid subscribers, it is television not the Internet. And while readership has shifted dramatically from print to digital over the past decade, unlike the music industry, it wasn’t digital pirates who put the newspapers’ content free online, but the newspapers themselves.

Furthermore, there’s another huge difference between the music and newspaper industries, and the respective woes they face sustaining themselves in this new medium. While it is true that music industry revenues have continued to slide even as unit sales reach record highs, so too have their unit costs. Thanks to new digital technologies, the cost of recording an album is now a fraction of what it was just 20 years ago, while the cost of distributing a digital track has shrunk to virtually nil. If the old labels can’t figure out a way to exploit these new efficiencies to remain relevant in the new online marketplace, well, that’s their problem, and no real loss to artists who now have multiple means of promoting themselves to new audiences.

But newspapers haven’t benefited nearly as much from new technologies, for while the cost of delivering an online paper is, likewise, virtually nil, they’re still locked into the expensive, capital-intensive medium of print, regardless of how many fewer customers now purchase the print edition. As I’ve previously argued, the whole notion of an “online newspaper” per se is oxymoronic, for the industry’s entire business model is one based on the physical need to print and distribute paper. Absent this medium, much of what a newspaper does as an institution becomes unnecessary, and its legacy print edition becomes a financial drag on the organization as a whole, making it less competitive to newer, totally online competitors.

Indeed, it is reasonable to question whether most dailies can survive the shift from print to digital in much more than name only… which suggests the biggest difference between the music and newspaper industries, at least from the consumer’s perspective. Music labels publish and distribute the collective work of independent artists, whereas newspapers mostly create their own content via staff reporters. Thus if the large music labels were to suddenly collapse and disappear, few consumers would notice, as the new distribution medium is already mature enough to allow independent artists access to the marketplace. But if newspapers were to suddenly disappear there would be an equally sudden collapse in the amount of local journalism being produced… with potentially dire consequences for our democracy.

All the more reason why newspaper executives should not be allowed to absolve themselves of their own mistakes, simply by blaming the bulk of their industry’s woes on external forces.

The winners of Tuesday’s top-two primary for the Washington state Senate race were Sen. Patty Murray (D) and real estate speculator (and perennial candidate) Dino Rossi (R). Little surprise there. Late last week, Washingtonians got a double dose of post-primary polls matching up Murry and Rossi.

Rasmussen released this poll on Thursday showing Murray leading Rossi 48% to 44% in a poll taken the day before (18 Aug). The sample of 750 is large for Rasmussen—their samples are typically 500 likely voters.

On Friday, Survey USA released a poll taken on the 18th and 19th of August, on a sample of 618 likely voters. The results? A stunning 52% to 45% lead for Rossi!

What is going on? First let me wander off-topic for a minute to point out that in my analyses of past elections, I have found both Rasmussen and Survey USA to be pretty good polling firms for head-to-head general elections. Rasmussen has a bad reputation among liberals, but that is mostly based on their presidential approval tracking poll that IS biased slightly in favor of Bush and against Obama (relative to comparable polls) for the seven years that I have been following it. But approval tracking polls are not the same type of poll as a head-to-head election poll, and Rasmussen does just fine with the latter. Survey USA is sometimes dissed as a liberal polling firm by conservatives. Whatever…their track record is pretty good. Going on just the numbers from state polls during to 2008 presidential, senatorial, and gubernatorial elections, I can’t really tell Survey USA and Rasmussen apart.

During the 2010 election season, some big differences I see is that Rasmussen has greatly increased the number of statewide polls they do; Survey USA has decreased the number of statewide races polled. I have no idea what to make of it. Anyway, onto the race.

Since these two polls were in the field simultaneously, I’ll simply combine them and do my usual Monte Carlo analysis to determine the relative probabilities of each candidate winning based on these polls. Of the combined 1,368 “votes”, Murray and Rossi got 1,289 of them; 46.6% went to Murray and 47.6% went to Rossi. When we normalize these so that they sum to 100%, Murray gets 49.5% and Rossi gets 50.5%. Even with this relatively large sample size, this is clearly a statistical tie.

After simulating a million elections using the observed frequencies and sample sizes, Murray wins 392,801 simulated elections and Rossi wins 599,396 simulated elections. In other words the two polls suggest Murray has a 39.6% probability of beating Rossi. Here is the distribution of wins:

Objectively, those are the results. But, as a Murray supporter, I am not overly daunted. This graph of the polling in this race shows why:

Notice anything odd?

Both of the Survey USA polls conducted for this race favor Rossi uncharacteristically strongly. Most other polls either tend to favor Murray, or show a very slight advantage to Rossi. That’s odd. In fact, when the first Survey USA poll came out, neither camp believed it. I wonder if the Rossi camp believes it now?

Personally, I’m skeptical about the poll. It seems like something is going wrong for Survey USA. And looking at the cross tabs doesn’t help. As N in Seattle points out in the Horses Ass comment threads:

If you take a look at the very last column in the survey’s crosstabs, you’ll see that they show Murray and Rossi tied in “Metro Seattle”.

Really? Murray and Rossi tied in Metro Seattle? I doubt it. N in Seattle shows why:

Based on the population proportion, I assume that means King/Pierce/Snohomish Counties.

We’re now counting a rather more comprehensive “survey”, the primary election. In those three counties, Patty has 53% of the vote to Dino’s 30%. SUSA is asking us to believe that in the general election:

a) about 10% of Patty’s primary voters will switch to Rossi, and

b) every primary voter who chose someone other than Patty will vote for Dino, and

c) the voters who sat out the primary but will vote in the general election (about 1/4 of the electorate, and more strongly Democratic than primary voters) will follow the same pattern as in a) and b)

All of the above would have to happen in “Metro Seattle” for Dino to tie Patty here. It ain’t gonna happen. In fact, it ain’t even gonna happen in the rest of Democratic western Washington either.

I suspect even Dino Rossi would agree with N’s analysis.

Notice that there are two other fairly recent polls on the graph. The earliest is another Rasmussen poll of 750 likely voters taken on 28th of July, and showed Murray up 49% to 47%. That is pretty close to tied. The second (in blue) is from Public Policy Polling (PPP) taken on 27th of July to the 1st of August on 1,204 registered voters. This poll showed Murray leading Rossi, 49% to 46%.

The PPP poll surveyed both the primary election and the general election, which gives us the chance to do a little accuracy-checking. For the primary, PPP found that Teabagger Clint Didier would get about 10% of the vote, Murray would get 47% and Rossi would get 33%. As of Sunday evening, Diddier is at 12.6%, Murray is 46.4% and Rossi is 33.3%. Pretty much spot on, considering it was taken about 18 days earlier.

One last exercise for your consideration. If we combine all four polls taken within the last month, and do the same Monte Carlo analysis, things turn around. There is a total of 3153 votes for either Murray or Rossi, Murray gets 50.6% of them,and Rossi gets 49.4%. Now, Murray wins 682,212 simulated elections, and Rossi wins 313,150 of them. In other words, these four polls give evidence that Murray would win with a 68.5% probability. And that includes the Survey USA poll! Here is the distribution…

The take-home message is that the contest, at this point, is pretty close. But I think the more interesting question that arises from all this is…what the hell happened to Survey USA?!?

(Cross-posted at Hominid Views.)

I have to say that I have newfound respect for Clint Didier and his campaign after reading spokeswoman Kathryn Serkes response to Dino Rossi’s predictably mealy-mouthed evasion of Didier’s prerequisites for endorsement:

“So is Dino saying, ‘Fuck you’ to those people [who supported Didier]? ‘Fuck you, I don’t need your votes? I can win with 33 percent.’”

Ah, I love a woman who talks dirty to me, especially about politics. The BIAW’s equally foul-mouthed Erin Shannon better look over her shoulders, as she may have new competition for my unwanted affections.

The truth is, Rossi’s response was a “fuck you” to Didier and his supporters, and Serkes should be applauded for using the most accurately descriptive term available. This is the way real people speak, and while there are certainly times and places that demand more formal language, politicians and their spokespeople make a mistake by abandoning the vernacular in favor of vague politenesses. Voters crave authenticity, even if that comes with the occasional F-bomb.

Of course, such rhetorical bluntness is not without its risks, especially in a media landscape where the boundaries of public discourse are still rigidly defined by the sticks shoved firmly up the asses of the editors at our once-dominant  “family newspapers.” Indeed, back in May of 2004, in my very first post, it was a risk I clearly anticipated when I warned readers what to expect from HA:

Now I know some might find this split between the politically prankish Goldy and the politically earnest David a little arbitrary… or even weird. So to those upstanding members of the political and media establishment who insist I cannot possibly expect to maintain my credibility as an activist while producing an irreverent and outrageous blog, the Goldy half of me respectfully says: “fuck you.”

And I’ve been saying “fuck you” ever since, despite frequent admonitions from critics and fans alike that I would be taken more seriously, and reach a wider audience, if I would only clean up my language. But… you know… if folks can’t tell the difference between being serious and being solemn, well, fuck that.

Ironically, I don’t actually swear all that much. Of my 5,732 posts since May 10, 2004, only 336 have contained some conjugation of the word “fuck.” That’s less than six percent of my posts… fewer than five per month on average. In fact, despite my reputation for foul-mouthed muckraking, the bulk of my posts are neither.

But sometimes a “fuck you” is a “fuck you,” and no other euphemism would be quite as honest, so if politicians, spokespeople and other public figures seem more willing to speak truthfully theses days when speaking truth to power — even when the truth involves, say, calling a sitting state senator a “pig fucker” — then I hope my example has served to help raise the level of public discourse to a more accurate, truthful and honest level.

Last week’s contest was won by Don Joe for the second week in a row. It was the area north of the Laredo, TX, where some wingnuts are still claiming that Mexican drug cartel The Zetas overtook some American ranches.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Deuteronomy 21:10-14
When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

Discuss.

I’m glad this article in Saturday’s New York Times got written.

Some counterterrorism experts say the anti-Muslim sentiment that has saturated the airwaves and blogs in the debate over plans for an Islamic center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan is playing into the hands of extremists by bolstering their claims that the United States is hostile to Islam.

Opposition to the center by prominent politicians and other public figures in the United States has been covered extensively by the news media in Muslim countries. At a time of concern about radicalization of young Muslims in the West, it risks adding new fuel to Al Qaeda’s claim that Islam is under attack by the West and must be defended with violence, some specialists on Islamic militancy say.

Interesting stuff. While I don’t think it’s the strongest reason to support the rights of Muslims to build cultural centers with prayer rooms, it is certainly worth noting.

So, while I don’t want to be too nit picky, there’s one word in a paragraph toward the end of the piece that really gets my goat.

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker and a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said in a Fox News interview that “Nazis don’t have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,” a comment that drew criticism for appearing to equate those proposing the Islamic center with Nazis.

Really? The style guide precludes you from just saying “drew criticism for equating the Islamic center with the Nazis”? You couldn’t make a declarative statement? That metaphor was too layered and complex?

– This weekend is Seattle Hempfest. During the festivities today, Sensible Washington is expected to announce their plans to try again in 2011 to get a marijuana legalization initiative on the ballot.

– Proposition 19 in California picked up another great endorsement this week, the National Black Police Association. At their conference in Sacramento, they pointed to the racial disparity in drug arrests and the overall negative impact on black communities in supporting the effort. However, not all police groups are supporting Proposition 19. Susan E. Manheimer, the president of the California Police Chiefs Association, throws down this whopper in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Prop. 19 allows a state and a workplace where any driver over the age of 21 can get on the road with marijuana in their system.

Proposition 19 does absolutely nothing to change the laws with respect to driving while intoxicated. Operating a motor vehicle under the influence of marijuana will still be illegal in California. Manheimer was very clever in how she constructed this sentence, talking about “marijuana in their system”, rather than being under the influence. If someone smokes pot today, they’ll still have marijuana in their system three days from now. At that point, to insist that they’re still incapable of driving is foolish, but Manheimer seems to indicate that she may actually believe that.

– Dominic Holden notes that the number of marijuana arrests in Seattle has shot up sharply this year. And this is despite the fact that City Attorney Pete Holmes refuses to prosecute any of those arrested. Every person who gets arrested solely for marijuana possession in this city is being arrested for no reason. It’s not clear whether the increase in arrests is the result of SPD being more aggressive towards marijuana enforcement, or if Seattle residents are less afraid of using marijuana openly in the city, but this is another good piece of evidence demonstrating that Mayor McGinn was absolutely correct for opposing additional hires for SPD. If they have time to do this (and enforce jaywalking), it’s really hard to argue that we should be hiring additional officers in the budget crisis we’re in.

– Also in The Stranger this week, Brendan Kiley has an interesting piece on how much of the cocaine making its way into this country is cut with levamisole, a drug that can do a lot of damage to your immune system. What’s odd about this is that illegal drugs generally aren’t cut with anything until they make it into the United States, but this appears to be an instance where the levamisole is being added closer to the source of production. One data point that Kiley neglected to collect was whether or not the same trend was being seen in Europe, where large amounts of South American cocaine are also consumed.

(And there are links to some 45 other media clips from the past week in politics at Hominid Views.)

The blow-up over the Burlington Coat Factory Islamic Center is quite possibly the most impressive display of American ignorance in my lifetime. From the inability to comprehend the actual purpose and location of the project to the completely inaccurate characterizations of the folks behind it, a majority of Americans are now opposing something that just about none of them seem to understand. After years of demanding that moderate Muslims speak out against terrorism, we encounter a moderate Muslim who’s spoken out against terrorism, and promptly call him a terrorist and tell him his religious freedom is conditional. We’ve become a nation that doesn’t deserve the great legacy of religious tolerance we’ve inherited from those before us.

If there’s one underlying truth to this sad episode, it’s that Americans don’t see a distinction between moderate and radical Islam. And I think one of the reasons that many Americans don’t make this distinction relates back to how Islam has grown as a faith in this country. African Americans often converted to the religion in what was seen as an act of defiance against a nation that long didn’t consider them equals. It was the religion of Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan. Throughout the years, Islam has become synonymous with black radicalism. Wealthy and moderate immigrants from places like Jordan, Iran, and Egypt – who co-exist happily with America’s cosmopolitan elite – don’t fit into that stereotype.

Obviously, 9/11 did much more to cement this view in the minds of Americans and broaden it to include more than just black Americans, but also those in the Middle East. And far too many now imagine that Islam is a religion premised upon a defiance of American values. The reality of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf would thoroughly shatter that illusion, so instead Americans end up believing that he’s someone he’s not (with a big assist from media personalities who are trained to never shatter the illusions of those whose comfortable loyalty comprise their ever-precious ratings).

And it’s this phenomenon that explains why a growing number of Americans claim to believe that the President himself is a Muslim. It’s rather obvious that Obama isn’t a Muslim. He doesn’t worship at a mosque or pray to Mecca five times a day. He drinks beer, he eats pork, and he’s certainly not fasting for Ramadan right now. Not to mention that he attended a Christian church in Chicago for most of his adult life. But when you internalize the belief that Islam is a religion based upon rejecting American values, another person’s religion isn’t about what they actually do, it’s about how you perceive their background and their motivations.

UDPATE: Another bizarre perspective on this topic comes from Franklin Graham:

“I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name,” Graham told John King. “Now it’s obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That’s what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn’t. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said.”

…

“Well, you know, you can be born a Muslim, you can be born a Jew, but you can’t be born a Christian,” said Graham.

All day, I’ve been wondering if people with a Jewish father and a Muslim mother are like seedless grapes. And what’s even sadder is that it appears that Franklin Graham believes that you can be born Muslim, but being gay is a choice.

Had I gone through middle school today, rather than during the dark ages of the 1970’s, there’s a good chance I would have been expelled, or quite possibly even imprisoned or institutionalized. Oh, not for anything I actually did, but for what I wrote.

By sixth grade I had left juvenile fiction behind, plunging headlong into the books that lined my parents shelves. I devoured authors and their oeuvres whole, starting with Kurt Vonnegut and moving on to J.P. Dunleavy, Philip Roth, and J.D. Salinger, before an astute clerk at a local bookstore directed me to the short stories of Harlan Ellison and a decade long passion for “speculative fiction.” I’m not sure I understood all of what I read — in fact, from subsequent re-readings, I know I didn’t — but there’s no doubt these authors had a huge impact on me and my writing, especially the numerous short stories I churned out between seventh and ninth grades, most of which remained unread by any eyes but my own.

I’d always had a taste for the absurd and the macabre, and inspired by the likes of Vonnegut and Ellison (not to mention the adolescent hormones running through my veins) my own stories sometimes tended toward the violent and the bizarre. While some stories were more mundane, others dwelled on murder, suicide and meticulously descriptive narrative of gruesome deaths, all juxtaposed against the banal routines of everyday life… in short, the ravings of an obviously disturbed child.

Except, I wasn’t disturbed. At least no more than your typical, suburban 14-year-old. No, in retrospect, what I was engaging in was a healthy cathartic outlet in which I could channel all my frustration, rage, depression, confusion, mania and whatever into brutal but harmless fiction.

But had my stories been discovered by school authorities in today’s paranoid climate — say, the one in which I imagined the intricate, Rube Goldberg-like demise of a hated teacher, or the one in which a seemingly happy and popular student unexpectedly lights fire to the locker room, with the football team locked inside — you can just imagine the response. Good chance the courts would be involved, as would the press, who would surely sensationalize the lucky prevention of another Columbine. Yet all I did — all I ever did — was imagine the worst, and put it down on paper. And in most cases, I wasn’t even imagining myself in the perpetrators’ shoes.

In his collection of short stories titled Shatterday, Ellison rails against the tendency of readers and critics to assume autobiographical hints, explaining that “writers take tours through other people’s lives.” Likewise, it wasn’t me who performed the horrific acts I chronicled, or who even wanted to perform them, it was my characters.

And in Roth’s The Ghost Writer, a character has tacked above his desk Gustave Flaubert’s advice to a young writer: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” This is advice that has stuck with me throughout my adult life, and which has been most fully realized in this blog, much to the consternation and confusion of my trolls and other readers who apparently lack the imagination and/or nuance to distinguish between the writer and his words.

At the time, I shared little of my most violent work, not because I feared how adults might react, but because I rightly feared that it wasn’t very good. (It wasn’t. I stumbled on one of my old notebooks a few years back, and found the stories to be overly ambitious and profoundly derivative.) But it never occurred to me that I might actually get in trouble for something I imagined; in fact I handed in the story about a teacher’s elaborate death to the teacher on which the main character was clearly based, and while he didn’t particularly like it, the only consequence I suffered was a rather middling grade.

Which brings me, convolutely, to the inspiration for this post, the news that Seattle Public Schools has established a new policy in which they can discipline students for content posted to public sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, “even if done at home on their private computers.”

“The safety of our students and the security of our students is our first concern,” said Teresa Wippel with Seattle Public Schools.

Wippel says the Seattle School Board voted yes for the measure so schools can respond to kids who may be planning something on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or by texting that will be disruptive.

But, what exactly is disruptive?

Wippel says, for example, a threat to fight another student after school, or bullying another student would be considered disruptive. But what if it’s a student saying something negative about a teacher? Is that free speech or is that disruptive?

“I think, again, that would be up to the principal to decide after he’s taken a look,” Wippel said.

So… is lovingly describing a teacher’s slow, excruciating death “disruptive”? I guess under the Seattle Schools new policy, that would be up to the principal to decide. In other words, hello Juvenile Detention.

But this new policy offends the child in me at a more fundamental, less paranoid level, for what is being presented as an anti-bullying measure is at it’s heart an assertion that children have no rights — no right to free speech, no right to free expression — even when exercised off campus. And since the determination of what is offensive, inappropriate or disruptive is somewhat subjective, individual principals will surely enforce this policy in a somewhat subjective and arbitrary manner… a particularly disturbing development in a world where so much speech now takes place online.

Take, for example, my own 13-year-old daughter, who has recently become an obsessive writer of fan fiction on a particularly bloody series of Japanese manga. She spends hours upon hours writing and rewriting new chapters before posting her work to FanFiction.net, where she is instantly rewarded with numerous comments and critiques. It is a medium that is as educational as it is gratifying, permitting her to hone her craft via constant and immediate feedback. I wish I had that opportunity when I was her age.

But what if a school official were to stumble upon her work and be shocked or offended by the violence she portrays, or the foul language that is common in the genre but totally inappropriate at school? What if the principal discovered that other students were joining in, writing reviews of my daughter’s fan fiction, and adding equally violent and foul-mouthed chapters of their own? What if the principal feared this activity was disruptive?

Fan fiction, like blogging, is an online, participatory medium… one in which you cannot engage without making your writing public. Surely I cannot warn my daughter to think twice before posting, out of fear of how teachers and principals might overreact, for how can any artist learn her craft while constantly looking over her shoulders? Of course, she can’t.

But that is the message the Seattle School Board is sending to all its students in enunciating its new, intrusive policy. It is one thing to develop policies to patrol and discourage bullying, but nobody benefits when these same policies are inevitably used to discourage free expression.

Yes, I know, the Supreme Court has repeatedly weighed in on this issue and determined that minors do not enjoy the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, and that yes, School officials can discipline students for expression that occurs off campus. But that doesn’t mean they should.

I’ve got an appointment this morning (apparently, it takes both parents these days, in person, to renew your child’s passport), so don’t expect much from me until after noon. So in the meanwhile, here’s your daily Daily Show.

Responding to an email query, King County Elections Communications Director Kim van Ekstrom reports that 9,300 new ballots were received at their Tukwila headquarters today, but only about 1,900 had postmarks that indicated they were mailed on time.

That strikes me as a pretty big number of late postmarks, and while they won’t be counted in the final results, they are useful when considering turnout as a reflection on voter enthusiasm, which looks to have been not all that bad. In fact, in both percentage and raw numbers, this primary looks to be second in turnout only to the 2004 primary, at least over the 12 years for which the county provides data online.

As for who is turning out in King County, it’s hard to say, but given the numbers in Eastside legislative races, it certainly looks to be skewing a bit more Republican than it has in recent years. That said, the best apples-to-apples comparison I can think of is 2008’s top two primary, which had only slightly lower turnout numbers, and in which Gov. Gregoire led Dino Rossi 60 to 31 percent. Patty Murray currently leads Rossi here 58 to 28 percent.

Gregoire went on to beat Rossi in November by a 64 to 36 point margin amongst King County voters. Make of that what you will.

Given the proper motivation — and I guess, lack of moral compass — I’ve always felt that I’d make an excellent terrorist. I’m both devious and technically minded, giving me the skills to mastermind an audacious attack, and have a flair for the dramatic that would surely be useful in extracting the maximum emotional impact.

Just call me by my new nom de guerre: Goldy al-Ḩmār.

And so in the spirit of computer hackers who expose security flaws in an effort to make our devices and networks more secure, I’ve decided to offer my own services to the Transportation Security Administration, free of charge, in an effort to make air travel as absolutely risk free as humanly possible. I mean, clearly, if the imminent threat of terrorist attack is so great that we must now irradiate our children before allowing them to board a flight, then TSA can surely use all the help it can get.

Remember, the goal here is to eliminate all risk, no matter how improbable, and no matter how expensive, inconvenient or irradiating the means. With that in mind, my first tip to TSA is:

Eliminate Web Check-In.

Web check-in, in which you check in and print your boarding pass from home, has proven a huge convenience and time saver for tens of millions of passengers, not to mention a big money saver for the airlines. But it’s another 9/11 just waiting to happen.

Assume for a moment that the TSA’s limit on liquids, gels and aerosols is based on legitimate security concerns rather than pure fantasy. Currently, such substances must be in containers no larger than 3.4 ounces, and all such containers must fit in a single, one-quart, zip-locked bag per passenger. Now assume that the TSA is actually capable of scanning for such substances, rather than like, say, when I recently returned from Vegas and forgot to remove the very visible 750 ml bottle of water from the mesh enclosure on the outside of my backpack, only to have it pass through the x-ray machine without comment.

Well, assuming liquids are potentially dangerous, and assuming TSA is capable of consistently screening them out, web check-in creates the opportunity for a team of terrorists to individually carry through security, and combine on the other side, dozens of 3.4 ounce bottles of liquid explosive… without even buying tickets for each member of the cell!

See, TSA doesn’t actually scan the bar code on your boarding pass like they do before you board the flight, they just look to see if it’s for today, and whether the name matches the name on your ID. So all an enterprising group of liquid bombers has to do is print one boarding pass, capture the image, and photoshop it to create and print additional boarding passes for each member of the cell. No cost, and no need to tip off authorities that a bunch of people with dangerous sounding names are all traveling from the same airport on the same day.

And secreting through security large quantities of liquid (or individually innocuous looking parts for some easily assembled weapon) is just one of the many nefarious things a terrorist might achieve via the fake boarding pass scam. For example, a terrorist on the watch list could simply purchase a ticket in somebody else’s name, and then photoshop the name on the boarding pass to match his own ID; the airlines and TSA would have no idea that this terrorist was even flying!

So while web check-in may be a welcome time and money saving convenience, as long as there’s even a vague risk of it being used as part of a terrorist plot, TSA has no choice but to shut it down and go back to the old system where we all waited in line for hours to check in.

For if Goldy al-Ḩmār can imagine it, so too can the real terrorists. And can we ever be too safe?

I’ll be on KUOW’s The Conservation today at about 12:40 PM to discuss the installation of pointless, stupid, dangerous full-body scanners at Sea-Tac… and I’ll do my best not swear on air.

You know in the end why Newscorp felt so comfortable giving $1 million to the Republican Governors Association… why it felt such an unprecedented political contribution would have absolutely no impact on the credibility of FOX News? Because it’s never really cared about the credibility of FOX News, and it knows that neither do most of its viewers. And that, above all, is what has freed FOX News to become so successful.

While traditionalists fret about the decline of objective journalism, Rupert Murdoch long ago had the insight that objective journalism never really existed — that it could not exist — and that fairness and balance is not the responsibility of the individual news outlet, but of the entire news media as a whole. So while most of his competitors squeezed their eyes closed real tight and wished and wished for the news industry to be what they hoped it be, Murdoch went out and kicked their ass by producing products designed to exploit the way the industry really is.

I mean, honestly… do you really believe that FOX News executives really believe that their network is “Fair and Balanced,” or did they specifically choose that motto as a playground taunt to their stodgier, holier-than-thou competition?

So laugh or cry or scream or whatever at the blatant hypocrisy of Newscorp’s million dollar contribution to the Republican Party, but as long as we continue to pretend that we can do something about it, Murdoch and his minions will continue to kick our collective ass. For while there is still a place for traditional journalism, it is time to admit that FOX News is not the exception, but the rule. This is the way the game is played, and FOX deserves credit for playing it better than the rest of us.

Bravo, Rupert. And game on.