In 1980, Lisa Birnbach released the Preppy Handbook, which documented the culture and contradictions of some of the last holdouts of traditionalism during the increasingly liberal tilt amongst American elites during the 1970s.

David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise, published only a few months before September 11^th, 2001 also helped to catalog the styles and mores of an era that no one could see had reached its conclusion.

The cover of Golf Digest’s now-infamous “10 Tips Obama Can Take From Tiger” issue was announced on the Web about five minutes before Woods’ career-altering misadventures at the end of November. But when I finally saw the issue on the newsstand around Christmastime, and could read the actual article inside, it occurred to me that it may be a miniature — albeit entirely unintended — version of those same books. (Much of the rest of the magazine, which combines the aesthetic stylings of Birnbach’s book with the contradictions of Brooks is a hoot as well.)

If the American public is lucky, hopefully, the Golf Digest story marks the final chapter of the mythological hagiographic prose from such Northeast Corridor liberal Obama-boosters as Joe Conason, Tom Friedman, and Golf Digest’s own in-house staff. (To the best of my knowledge, the text of this section isn’t online — I suspect it may be quite a while before it does appear at Golf Digest, but bloggers with scanners and OCR software will have lots of fun blockquoting this material.)

For 40 or so previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and keep scrolling and watching.

(Incidentally, Tiger’s woes at the supermarket magazine stand continue. And speaking of Brooks…)

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Greetings from the snow dome, where I’m hiding out while trying to avoid all the global warming coming down around it:



(The DC cops joke refers to this classic moment in law & disorder, in case you missed it.)

I couldn’t let the recent spot of bother at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit go without doing a Silicon Graffiti video on how climate change has changed over the years. In six and a half minutes, look back at:

• 100 years of climate change headlines!
• Time and Newsweek discover their inner Fonzies, get cool in the mid-1970s.
• In the Court of the Cooling King.
• Leonard Nimoy goes In Search Of “The Coming Ice Age.”
• And then we leave the 1970s to look at some of the recent, and increasingly shrill PSAs:
• MasterCard searches for thoughtcriminals; more thoughts on that ad from an earlier Silicon Graffiti on PC adverts in general.
• The WWF imagines a green 9/11, and then deploys the human shields.
• It’s raining bears — and crushing Cadillacs!
• The Boston Globe hides the decline; their readers rather vociferously find it for them.
• A thoughtful viewer helpfully reminds Canada’s CBC about the big story that’s right under their upturned noses.

Click here to watch:

And for 40 or so previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and keep scrolling and watching.

The weekend before November’s elections, Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a curious column titled, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.”

Apparently, in Rich’s mind, because conservatives thought — accurately as it turned out — that Dede Scozzafava, running for Congress in New York’s 23^rd District was a Republican in Name Only, and they preferred a more conservative candidate, that made them…Stalinists!

On the other hand, it was rather refreshing to see a journalist with the New York Times use the word pejoratively. Needless to say, that hasn’t always been the case, as we’ll explore in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, including:

• Thomas Friedman’s love for Big Brother in China and Cuba.
• The Time’s necrophilic 1953 obit for Stalin.
• Walter Duranty: ace foreign correspondent.
• A quote from the New Yorker on Pinch, Punch, and “the other guy’s country.”
• And the Time’s first ombudsman on where the Gray Lady sits on the ideological spectrum.

Click below to watch:

And for 40 or so previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and keep scrolling and watching.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute believes that it has finally come with the scratch big enough to tempt Al Gore to finally debate global “warming”:

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YouTube Direkt

Say, this video, borrowing from an old Saturday Night Live sketch, seems just a tad familiar. In fact, we tried a similar approach way back in 2007:

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YouTube Direkt

We didn’t have much success either, but still, at least we were playing with real money: we offered $750 a president.

So there.

Here’s more footage I shot at Western CPAC this past weekend — this time with a decent camera and tripod to boot! It’s highlights from Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota’s keynote speech on Friday, October 16th.

Pawlenty’s speech was about nearly an hour long; the above are just five minutes of highlights. Unfortunately, I was shooting reaction shots of the crowd when Pawlenty had one of his best moments. But Ed Morrissey (who resides in Pawlenty’s state) had his camera fortuitously aimed in the right direction at the right time. Scroll to about 1:25 into Capt. Ed’s video for a nifty riff that dovetails quite well with the title of my clip:

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YouTube Direkt

And for my earlier video clip of Andrew Breitbart at Western CPAC, click here.

Recorded this past Saturday at Western CPAC, when Andrew Breitbart of Big Government, Big Hollywood and other sites in the burgeoning Breitbart new media empire held an interview with the bloggers covering the event. Breitbart expands on the remarks he told the Washington Post:

“When I saw these videos [by O’Keefe and Giles], I couldn’t help thinking, this is the Abu Ghraib of the Great Society,” said Breitbart, who put the videos on BigGovernment.com. “Everybody that is a conservative news junkie thinks that ACORN is the most important institution for us to uncover to the American public.”

And speaking of the Post, as Dave Weigel wrote last month in a competing DC newspaper, the Washington Independent:

When one report from The Washington Post called him for a story about O’Keefe and Giles, Breitbart compared their tape to the photos of Abu Ghraib prison released in April 2004.

“She goes, ‘Wait a second! I worked on the Abu Ghraib stories,’” said Breitbart. “I go, ‘Yeah, that was one aberrant National Guard unit. And now I have five ACORN places that are all complicit in the exact same thing. And there are more!’” (The reporter, Carol Leonning told TWI that the conversation did not go this way, but that she enjoyed getting Breitbart’s take “very much.”)

Breitbart, angered by the Post’s eventual story–it seemed to intimate that O’Keefe and Giles had been motivated by ACORN’s registration of non-white voters, in a line that was corrected days later–moved right on. BigGovernment had claimed a victory that conservative journalists and activists had been seeking for years, occasionally embarrassing ACORN with a state lawsuit, but drawing no blood. It was a natural next step for Breitbart. Until a few years ago he was known mostly as the man behind the curtain of The Drudge Report and a ringleader for Hollywood’s quiet community of political conservatives. (Breitbart lives in Los Angeles and runs his web operations from an office in his basement.) With the launch of BigGovernment, he is gaining new recognition as the conservative movement’s most successful — in terms of damaging liberals — new media pioneer.

“I get accused of breaking some journalism school rules,” said Breitbart. “Well, why don’t we have the Howard Kurtz conversation on a low-rated CNN show after this? Or at a J-school of your choice? I’m willing to be accused of being a monster.”

Actually, in the interview with Western CPAC, Breitbart describes himself as a latter-day “merry prankster”, happily attempting to make the media play by their own self-professed rules; or as an earlier generation’s chief prankster once wrote:

Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

Of course, these days, the legacy media are very much their own religion; not for nothing did Hugh Hewitt once dub Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism “the highest temple of a religion in decline.”

Click below to watch, or visit my YouTube page to watch the interview in a variety of other formats. The group interview with Andrew was somewhat hastily announced, which is why I used the cigarette pack-sized Sony Webbie HD I happened to have on me to record it; be on the lookout for more from the event, albeit hopefully in a slightly smoother form, and recorded on more sophisticated gear. But I think Andrew’s remarks compensate for the handheld videography:

Breitbart’s appearance at CPAC, and his speech after this interview to the assembled masses on new media, was one of the high points of Western CPAC. At Hot Air, fellow Western CPAC attendee Ed Morrissey has been doing an excellent job documenting some of the less-than-stellar moments there, including the gentleman on our new media panel who espoused the virtues of a truly bleeding edge social media technology — the fax machine(!) — and another nontraditional journalist’s attempt at a kamikaze interview with the one of the conference’s chief organizers.

(Click here to watch my earlier interview with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV for their take on Internet video versus another territory of the ancien media regime — television.)

Update: The above clip was the conclusion of Breitbart’s chat with the bloggers at Western CPAC. The fellas at Verum Serum have video of the first few minutes his conversation.

Update: Welcome to those clicking in from Instapundit, Free Republic, Bill O’Reilly, and Big Government.

The other day, I asked Iowahawk, the legendary bard of Des Moines, if he would mind if I adapted one of his recent parodies (at least I think it’s a parody. Who can tell these days?) into a video. Somehow, in a moment of weakness, he agreed; this satiric clip is the end result:

And for 40 or so previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.

Late last week, I interviewed James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute for my newest Silicon Graffiti video blog. (With a little help from the crew at PJTV, who made the transcontinental Internet HD video connection possible.) Piereson has an article in the latest edition of the New Criterion that’s a rebuttal to Sam Tanenhaus’ new book, The Death of Conservatism. As James wrote in his essay:

Sam Tanenhaus has now reprised the old arguments about conservatism and tried to bring them up to date in his newly published jeremiad, The Death of Conservatism.  Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of a justly acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, argues that the conservative movement collapsed under the presidency of George W. Bush, and that Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 marked the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics. Tanenhaus is not altogether certain as to the causes of this collapse, at times suggesting that conservatives undid themselves because they were corrupt and unprincipled in their pursuit of power and at others suggesting that they lost the support of the American people because of their devotion to right-wing “orthodoxy.” The one thing about which he is certain is that he dislikes conservatives—intensely and unremittingly so, judging by the rhetoric deployed in this book. Tanenhaus says at various points that conservatives are out to destroy the country, that they are driven by revenge and resentment, that they dislike America, and that they behave more like extremists and revolutionaries (“Jacobins”) than as genuine conservatives. In this sense, he has resurrected the liberal literature about Sen. McCarthy and “the radical right,” and sought to apply it to contemporary conservatism as if nothing of importance had happened in the meantime. All of this is nonsense, of course, and given some of the author’s previous writings, particularly his biography of Chambers, one had reason to hope that he would have produced something more elevated than the partisan assault against conservatives that he has packaged in this book.

And during our interview, I asked James about this quote from the book, discovered by a staffer at the Weekly Standard and linked to by Brent Baker of Newsbusters:

Catching up with a great catch in last week’s Weekly Standard “Scrapbook” section, the September 7 issue highlighted an example of how it takes a worldview that sees liberals like Barack Obama as “consensus”-oriented/“explicitly nonideological” centrists — and Republicans as “ideologically committed” conservatives — to work at the New York Times. Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the newspaper’s Book Review and Week in Review sections, in his new book, The Death of Conservatism, proposes on page 23:

The primary dynamic of American politics, normally described as a continual friction between the two major parties, is equally in our time a competition between the liberal idea of consensus and the conservative idea of orthodoxy. We see it in the Democratic Party’s recent history of choosing centrist, explicitly nonideological presidential candidates (Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama), as contrasted with the Republicans’ preference for ideologically committed ones (Goldwater, Reagan, George W. Bush).

The unnamed Weekly Standard writer scoffed: “The sophistry here is breathtaking. Tanenhaus not only conflates his own political preferences with the American ‘center.’ In order to prove that only the Democratic party nominates ‘centrist, explicitly nonideological’ men for the presidency, Tanenhaus (1) puts Obama – Barack Obama! – in the ‘centrist’ camp, and (2) totally ignores Democrats Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and Al Gore, as well as Republicans Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and John McCain.”

President Obama is centrist and “explicitly nonideological”? That would be news to those who participated in the 9/12 Tea Parties in DC and elsewhere. Speaking of which, as Rick Moran wrote, “What makes Saturday’s massive turnout around the country so significant is that it is the first truly conservative mass movement in American history.” This could have significant impact in 2010. But in the meantime, for a look at how a journalist with the New York Times can spectacularly misread an ideology, tune in to the video below:

And to catch up with previous editions of Silicon Graffiti you might have missed, click here and keep scrolling.

Steven F. Hayward stopped by the vast Silicon Graffiti production facilities in the suburbs of San Jose on Friday to discuss the second and final volume in his history of Ronald Reagan and his era. The new volume is titled, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989, and is due out this week. We’ll discuss:

• Why it took eight years to get this second volume out after the first volume hit the streets in 2001.
• The shape of the economy Reagan inherited, (which I explored in my review of the first volume in this early Blogcritics post) and how the Reagan administration turned it around.
• How Reagan’s actions during the Air Traffic Controllers’ strike reverberated as far as the Soviet Union.
• How prepared Reagan was when he took office in 1981?  (With a cameo from Kiron Skinner, who edited Reagan In His Own Hand, the collection of op-eds and radio scripts the Gipper wrote in the 1970s.)
• In the final analysis, was there, as initially promised, a Reagan Revolution? And if so, what was it?

Tune in here to watch:

Stop by PJM Political this Saturday to hear the rest of the interview, which will further discuss President Reagan’s legacy, plus explore its administration’s self-inflicted wounds during its second term. And for previous editions of our Silicon Graffiti blog, click here and keep scrolling.

Update: Fouad Ajami compares and contrasts our 40th and 44th presidents.

Update: Welcome Power Line readers!

Chris Muir, who’s been drawng the Blogosphere’s favorite daily cartoon since 2002 stops by for an interview in the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti. It’s a follow-up of sorts to the interview we did back in 2003 for Tech Central Station. In the new video, Chris explores how the cartoon began, how his characters have evolved over the years; how they’re adapting to life in the Obama era, and his thoughts on traditional newspaper cartoons.

One big difference between the two is that Chris’s cartoon is self-funded; note that while Chris is apparently winding down his fundraising drive, his tipjar is still open, and I’m sure he’d welcome your contribution.

And if you enjoyed this edition of Silicon Graffiti, click here for the back story; there are over 30 previous videos to watch.

The latest edition of Silicon Graffiti definitely lives up the first half of the series name, as I interview Silicon Valley’s own Michael S. Malone of ABC News and the “Edgelings” blog at Pajamas Media, about his new book, The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation. We’ll discuss:

• What is a “Protean Corporation”?
• How does it differ from a “Virtual Corporation”? Whose name, now commonplace, derives from an earlier book that Michael co-authored.
• Why the Obama administration is trying to reign in a wildly diversified economy with a command & control governing style.

And he’ll also extensively discuss his Drudge-lanched article at ABC and Pajamas, (each of which received literally hundreds of reader comments) near the end of the 2008 presidential election, in which he wrote, among other things:

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a manner that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it’s because we don’t understand what their motives really are.  It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide – especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s.  That’s what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign?  Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors.  The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages.  They are the real culprits.

Why?  I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one:  Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry.  The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent.  Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared.  Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb.  The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures.  Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play.  Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here.  After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway – all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself:  an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.  With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country . . .

Tune in here to watch — and listen to this coming week’s  PJM Political for more from our interview:

To watch our nearly 40 previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling, or visit our YouTube page. You’re more than welcome to embed the above video on your own blog — in fact, we encourage it. For a YouTube-sized version, click on the sideways-Y-shaped icon on the above video. To embed the bigger 16X9 widescreen version, click here, then click “Embed” and choose (naturally enough) “Big Widescreen Player” from the options below.

Last time around, we looked at the wide-open demassified future of TV in the age of the Internet, with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.tv’s daily B-Cast show. In the latest episode of Silicon Graffiti, we explore the legacy of the man who personified TV news in the much more limited era of three over-the-air national channels.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters.org and Austin Bay of Austin Bay.net join me to discuss the legacy of Walter Cronkite, including:

• The first CBS Evening News with Cronkite.
• Why Cronkite’s legacy was mourned by Old Media.
• Cronkite announces JFK’s assassination, and man landing on the moon.
• Austin Bay on Cronkite and Tet.
• Cronkite in retirement: advocate of World Government; less than champion advocate of the American Everyman.
• Searching for the next “Cronkite Moment” in Iraq.
• And more!

To watch our nearly 40 previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling, or visit our YouTube page. You’re more than welcome to embed the above video on your own blog — in fact, we encourage it. For a YouTube-sized version, click on the sideways-Y-shaped icon on the above video. To embed the bigger 16X9 widescreen version, click here, then click “Embed” and choose (naturally enough) “Big Widescreen Player” from the options below.

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Update: At one point in the video, Noel and I discuss this Cronkite quote from 2005, as Uncle Walter expressed his indignation with the results of the previous year’s presidential election:

“We’re an ignorant nation right now. We’re not really capable I do not think the majority of our people of making the decisions that have to be made at election time and particularly in the selection of their legislatures and their Congress and the presidency of course.”

Four years later, even after a very different election result, and one of Cronkite’s would-be successors still holds his countrymen in similarly low esteem.

I blame the pernicious effects of high-fructose corn syrup, myself.

Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.tv’s daily B-Cast show join me for the newest edition of Silicon Graffiti. After a brief flashback to a period when television really was a Brave New World, we’ll look at the future of Internet television:

• What the legacy media thinks of their successors in new media.
• How it’s supplanting the coverage of stories that old media considers samizdat (see also: the Tea Parties on April 15 and the July 4th weekend).
• How new and old media will eventually converge.
• And more!

To watch our nearly 40 previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling, or visit our YouTube page. You’re more than welcome to embed the above video on your own blog — in fact, we encourage it. For a YouTube-sized version, click on the sideways-Y-shaped icon on the above video. To embed the bigger 16X9 widescreen version, click here, then click “Embed” and choose (naturally enough) “Big Widescreen Player” from the options below.


Update: Related thoughts from Clay Shirky:

The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all.

Read the whole thing, as they say in new media.

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On the weekend of July 4th, the latest round of Tea Party Tax Protests swept the nation. We attended the San Jose Tea Party, held on Sunday July 5th at the intersection of Stevens Creek and Winchester Boulevards, and interviewed Richard Geno, president of the the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley, for his take. We’ll also flash back to the April 15th Tea Party in San Jose, as well as the birth of the meme by CNBC’s Rick Santelli, and a CNN reporter who decided to make herself part of the news, rather than simply report it:

You’re more than welcome to embed the above video on your own blog — in fact, we encourage it. For a YouTube-sized version, click on the sideways-Y-shaped icon on the above video. To embed the bigger 16X9 widescreen version, click here, then click “Embed” and choose (naturally enough) “Big Widescreen Player” from the options below. Tune in to all the previous editions of Silicon Graffiti here. And for (literally) hours more video coverage, visit the American Tea Party page at PJTV.com.

Related: Iowahawk satirically tolls the bell for the Golden State: “Fans Flock to Mourn California, 1849-2009.”

Related: Video from the local ABC affiliate of a July 4th Tea Party in the Central Valley of California: “Organizers said 15,000 ralliers showed up in Tulare Saturday morning demanding limited government, fiscal responsibility and free markets, something they believe they are not getting.”

California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass could not be reached for comment.

Related Video: On PJTV, Glenn Reynolds asks, “Who Killed California’s Economy?”, adding, “I talk with Joel Kotkin, author of The City: A Global History, about ‘gentry liberalism,’ media bias, and California’s disastrous economy. Plus, what it means for the rest of America.”

Late this week, Austin Bay and I shot a video interview to discuss his new syndicated column, “Iran In Limbo”, and where Iran goes from here.

As Austin noted in his column:

As Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, Iran enters limbo, an uncertain yet perilous period of time separating anger-driven demonstrations from either bloody tyrannical repression or sustained popular struggle producing a liberalizing revolution.

Frustration, righteous anger and bitterness powered Iran’s post-election demonstrations. These emotions are also fuel for revolution. Toppling Iran’s corrupt Khomeinist regime, however, requires leadership, organization and time — in other words, calculated assessments and cool political war-fighting skills disciplining the emotional fires of outrage and disaffection.

American independence required a field army, ragtag force though it was. Anger may lead to enlistments, but it doesn’t solve supply problems. Anger fades when you freeze at Valley Forge; superior leadership — leading by immediate example and demanding sacrifice to achieve common goals — turns anger into long-term commitment.

It is possible the Iranian people aren’t ready for the sustained sacrifice revolution against murderous tyrants requires. Confronting riot police and armed pro-regime gangs demands courage and a corporate willingness to accept casualties, meaning dead friends in the street. When and where this threshold is reached, then crossed, is a psychological and historical mystery, a gray rainbow of escalation — hence limbo.

The Iranian people weren’t ready to fight the regime’s thugs in 1995, though broad dissatisfaction with the ayatollahs’ increasingly corrupt regime was already evident. My co-author James F. Dunnigan said to me in 1995, as we worked on the Iran chapter of “A Quick and Dirty Guide to War,” Third Edition (William Morrow, 1996): “The Iranians aren’t ready to die for freedom. Not yet.” It was a blunt statement, a bit chilling, but accurate. [The fourth edition of Austin and Jim's book is available here -- Ed]

The surprise election of Ayatollah Mohammad Khatami as president in 1997 may have tempered public disaffection with hope. Khatami, a respected scholar, was supposed to lose, but he won over 70 percent of the vote — a protest-vote candidate writ large. Moreover, professorial Khatami had the temerity to win re-election. The embarrassed Khomeinist mullocracy (with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, playing a key role) jinked the electoral system to ensure there would be no more Khatami-type interlopers.

Now, the robed tyrants pre-selected presidential candidates. As a result in 2005 the noxious, Holocaust-denying, nuclear-weapon coveting millenarian, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, became president.

So where does Iran go from here? That’s the topic Austin and I discuss in the video below. Our Internet connection was somewhat tenuous at times, but Austin made a number of points that make this well worth watching:

And tune in to all the previous editions of Silicon Graffiti here.

The weekend prior to my recent trip to Alaska, I had planned to purchase a Flip Mino HD or Creative Lab Vado HD  after reading the review of the two tiny video cameras by Skye at her Midnight Blue Weblog. However, since Best Buy was out of both cameras, but had a Sony MHS-PM1 “Webbie” in stock, I figured what the heck.

About the size of a pack of cigarettes (to borrow a common measuring term now apparently verboten) for the most part, the Webbie is certainly intuitive enough; rotating its tiny lens up from its protective cover turns the camera on, and the buttons below the monitor screen marked PHOTO AND MOVIE are certainly intuitive enough.

But there are several aspects of the camera that are less than intuitive. Clicking the movie button once lights up a small recreation of a typical video camera’s tally light, to let you know the camera’s recording. But then clicking it again generates a note that says “RECORDING”. It’s the camera’s way of letting you know it’s recording the just captured to the unit’s Memory Stick card, but it takes a couple of tries to figure out just when the unit is actually, you know, recording. (Also, you’ll need to purchase the Memory Stick card separately, which bumps the total price of the unit up slightly, as the Webbie’s onboard 12MB is pretty useless except for recording a handful of still shots.)

Right out of the box, the Webbie’s default mode is 720P, which is perfect for uploading videos to YouTube’s recently adopted widescreen format. The above video, documenting my train ride from Anchorage (where my plane got in) to Seward (where we picked up our cruise ship) was shot in the Webbie’s 720P format; mainly because I wasn’t sure how to switch the Webbie into 1080p without first flipping through the Webbie’s instruction manual. The button on the right hand side of the camera marked MENU brings up some commands, but the button to its right, which also doubles as the button to delete unwanted shots is what changes video modes. (VGA is also available as an option, for those who prefer standard def.)

As you can see by the above video, the picture quality is pretty darn good for such a tiny camera. But perhaps the most frustrating feature on the Webbie is the lack of a smooth zoom control. Obviously, because of its tiny lens, the unit uses electronics to generate its zoomed images, rather than adjusting the actual lens itself, a money and space-saving feature common on lots of low-end consumer camcorders.

But most camcorders have a fluid zoom effect. In contrast, the Webbie ratchets between positions in its zoom; you’ll want to compose your shots first, then hit record, or be prepared to discard the material shot while the camera zooms, and fluidly focusing on an object then zooming back (see Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon for this technique repeatedly used as a leitmotif) is impossible.

While the unit does have a tripod mount, it lacks a seperate microphone input, so you’ll be relying on the Webbie’s built-in mic, which may be fine for some occassions, and very frustrating for others.

But then, that’s the Webbie in a nutshell, isn’t it? Filling the gap between a cellphone camera and a decent consumer camcorder, the Webbie is great for quick and dirty video blogging, as a handy second camera for shooting B-roll footage, and certainly for home movies. But with a few additions and modifications, it could have been a much more useful little tool.

More on the Webbie from C/Net, which also includes a video of the unit in action:

Update: The Blogfather links to more reviews of tiny camcorders.

You’d think that advertising would be the most political neutral environment around. Historically, most business owners have been reluctant to talk politics; why anger half your customers?

But an increasing number of corporations — or at least the ad agencies they hire to promote their wares—seem to love pushing the edge. And not surprisingly, that edge points sharply to the left.

The latest edition of Silicon Graffiti explores a troika of ad campaigns whose creators seemed more interested in politics than promoting product:

• Absolut’s Vodka-fueled Reconquista fantasies.
  
• Ogilvy & Mather’s Revisionist History Channel Ads.
• MasterCard’s Orwellian Environmental Nanny-isms.
• And for contrast, a look back at the advertisers of the past.
• Plus a cameo from Roger Ailes!

For an earlier video look at politically-questionable advertising, on the use of 9/11-themed ads, check out one of my first editions of Silicon Graffiti from March of 2008, before all our production elements started to coalesce. (To put it in terms that Donald Draper would appreciate…) And for about 30 more videos, click here and just keep scrolling.

Update: Welcome Red State readers, particularly since Caleb’s Howe’s post there last week is what got the ball rolling on this video.

Update: Welcome fellow Vodkareaders, and those clicking through the lovely image of Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks that Don Draper, Don Surber embedded at the Daily Mail.

Update: Welcome those readers clicking in from STACLU, 5′F and the InstaMan!

As Jim Treacher quipped on Twitter last month, that whole “‘Obama is a megalomaniac’ thing is such a ridiculous right-wing smear. By the way, now he wants to take over the weather.”

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, (coming to you this week from Space Station V in geosynchronous orbit high above my garage in Northern California, the only place I could find high enough to avoid being buzzed by Air Force One), we’ll explore the proposal that  John Holdren, the president’s new science advisor, put on the table last month.

As the AP wrote at the time:

The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”

Indeed they’re not, and Holdren’s peculiar pollution particle plan is just one of several risky geoengineering schemes ideas that scientists are kicking around to stop global warming. Even though,  As the London Telegraph noted at the end of last year, “2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a ‘scientific consensus’ in favour of man-made global warming collapsed.”

But then, as a Rasmussen poll noted last month, only 34 percent of American voters now believe that global warming is manmade, but 48 percent of the “Political Class”, as Rasmussen puts it, do.

Which may explain why Editor & Publisher, the house organ for the newspaper industry ran an essay in 2007 titled, “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”

Of course, as they’re coverage of the 2008 presidential election reminds us, newspapers have gotten over objectivity on every issue under the sun.

So turn on your telescreen and enjoy six minutes or so of orbital insanity — which could very well be coming to your a galaxy near you, if President Obama’s science advisor has his way.

And for 30 or so previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and keep scrolling.

Historian Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics posits:

“The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”

Malcolm Muggeridge’s Law explains that “there is no way that a writer of fiction can compete with real life for its pure absurdity.”

Hence, the P.U.M.A., the new vehicle that General Motors (or Government Motors as many are calling it these days) has teamed up with Segway to produce. It’s Iowahawk’s infamous Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition from November of last year come to life; (the video of which was used by permission of the Burge For Auto Czar Coaltion) despite the fact that (a) most Americans continue to buy large cars and (b) the Segway hasn’t exactly been a top-seller, despite the hype from over-eager journalists in search of a new story. (Err, like this fellow about five minutes before he started his blog in early 2002…)

This is our 30th edition of Silicon Graffiti; click here and keep scrolling through the archives for plenty of free-wheeling video action, burning down the Information Super Highway at a blazing 30 frames per second!

Related: Don Surber notes that in automobile-unfriendly New York City, “tree-huggers go to an auto show to show off their moral superiority.” Meanwhile, regarding the P.U.M.A., “Rest assured, the blur effect was Photoshopped.” Gentlemen, start your Evereadies!

More: “GM prepares bankruptcy filing, with $70B taxpayer pricetag.”

Update: Heh! Found in the comments to this post, GM is apparently testing the P.U.M.A. for military applications…