Some quick hits from the Politx:

• Holy Motherfucking Shit: Here's a guy who got a personal visit from the FBI because the barista at his coffee shop felt it was suspicious he was reading an anti-Fox News editorial.
• Goddam Shit-Flininging Monkey Balls: Says here that Cheney's stonewalled notes from his "energy task force" meetings contained maps of Iraqi oil resources and fields.
• TinFoil Hat Alert: A key figure in the British WMD scandal turns up dead. Where's my Vince-foster buddy when I need him?

That's what the world looks like today; teetering on the brink. I'm off to California to try out new things. Let's not forget that necessity is the mother of invention.

I'm about to jump in a car bound for the East Bay. I'm feeling better about life in general after venting a little bit to a couple of different lady friends. It's ironic that I've been so frustrated by my friend's communication breakdowns, and that in the midst of all my frustration I've not been able to talk to them about it. "It's like raaaaaaain, on your wedding day..." Ok, let's not start that shit.

So life is still pretty beautiful and all. I'm still pretty lonely most of the time, but today it feels more like that warm comfortable melancholy rather than a swirling, sucking eddy of dispair. Everything moves in waves, and this one will turn itself around in time.

Yesterday in a bit of personally chilling news there was a SAM (Surface to Air Missile) attack on a C-130 cargo plane in Iraq. This is the type of bird my good buddy in the Air Force flies on. According to the news reports there was only one missile launched, which is a good thing. As my friend explained to me in the interview he gave, C-130s are quite versatile and maneuverable (in spite of an enormous wingspan) are very capable of defeating a single missile launch; they can change direction and speed rapidly and release a countermeasure (e.g. a flare to distract the missile), which is usually more than enough to save their skin.

The problem arises when there are two SAMs in play. Once the plane has used up all its forward energy banking and/or changing altitude, the turboprop engines take a while to get the velocity back. In the few minutes after taking evasive action, the crew is highly vulnerable to a second attack as they have little airspeed to maneuver with.

Though this was the second attack of this nature, I dearly hope that these are isolated incidents. For me, the stakes have beeen raised.

Here's something great by way of Salam Pax (the O.G. blogger from Baghdad): Ishtar Talking, a blog by a young(?) woman in Iraq. She writes in arabic and Salam translates for us puny monolingual Americans. The tone of both their writings lately is not so hot. They sound defeated and this is bad. Salam's voice was to me a beacon of hope for that country, representational of a goodness and desire for a better life that just might turn our bumbling occupation into a firtile event. Sadly this seems to be slipping away.

As for me personally, I'm better than an hour ago. The midday heat did something to my bones, something good. I've lost touch with my body lately, lost touch with some basic good things. Maybe I'll take a yoga class down there in the Berkeley. Definitely need to ride more bike.

I'm sitting here in a bunker-like office at the U of O -- a little spot with a desk lamp and ethernet my mom hooked me up with, used to be a bathroom but now it's an intern pen -- kind of holed up with myself. It's lonesome in this town, nothing doing and nowhere to fit. Every place that's going-on is another scene, and I'm just blowing through. Never been much of one for the scene anyway.

I've been mulling over a lot as of late. Feeling pretty vulnerable these days; raw, lonely, confused. I suppose that's part of being on the rebound. Am I on the rebound? I don't really know. I'm on something.

I know things move in cycles and I know what this one feels like. Rewind 18 months and press play, click here and read up. Nice to know could turn a phrase back then. But what the hell is going on with me right now?

I know that looking women in the eyes is hard, pretty much no matter who they are. I know that when I was out at the Country Fair this past weekend I had some major issues with opening up. There was this almond-eyed beauty I kept seeing, some kind of mythological creature, and it felt like high school in a real bad way. I put off weird vibes these days. I'm afraid of touching people. I'm sexually repressed (again). I have a lot of unaddressed/unaddressable needs. I feel tired a lot; physically, mentally, emotionally. I know I feel like crying still and I know I'm not really letting that happen. I know I can't keep doing this for very much longer.

I know that I miss Sasha, but I don't know if that's just because I'm super lonely or because of something greater. I know that I feel kind of like a looser; that I have a hard time having fun; that I don't know where the dream is leading me, or if there even is a dream anymore. I kind of want to cram it all and go back to New York now, but I know that's not really a possibility.

I know I need to make a break. I'm going outside for a while to warm up and think some sexy thoughts.

One of the unfortunate casualties of the past's years politix -- especially the war --has been my trust in the mainstream media. It started with the hyping of the 9-11 anniversary, the lack of any real investigative reporting or even independent thought; it went on through the undercounts and newsroom spinning of the peace protests; it crested with the jingoistic blindness of embedded reporters and the ceaseless repetition of the CENTCOM party line. The beast has been sick for some time, but it's now too malignant to even pretend that anything is ok.

Like most of you, I don't feel too suprised at the news scandals that have popped up over the past few months, the shoddy reporting, the page 10 retractions. It seems clear now that most people in positions of power -- and even a good chunk of the rank and file -- within the newsmedia are simply corporate hacks, people who over the years have rendered themselves utterly devoid of spirit or higher purpose. They are an industry, just like any other, and as such almost completely without human value. Just like the corrupt and hollowed-out cancer that is the music business, the current newsmedia structure exists only because of size and seniority. It's a legacy, and not an especially functional one at late. It will either regain its purpose or it will crumble, but frankly I've already moved on.

So I now glance at the NYT only once every few days for local stuff and maybe a column. I get my political opinion from places like Daily Kos and Billmon and I take my news straight from the worldwide wires, usually via The Agonist (for foreign policy focus) and Google News.This weekend while I was offline and doing me own thing, the WMD scandal went from simmer to low boil. Today I decided to pop my head back into the mainstream and see which way the wind's a-blowing. It looks like the worm is turning.

Today's Paul Krugman column starts connecting the dots in a way that looks truly frightening for Team Bush:

So the Iraq hawks set out to corrupt the process of intelligence assessment. On one side, nobody was held accountable for the failure to predict or prevent 9/11; on the other side, top intelligence officials were expected to support the case for an Iraq war.

There's something intuatively right here, something about the half-assed bullshit quid-pro-quo cronyism that pervades corporate America and the current White House team; it seems very plausable that the Bush Squad agreed to shield the intel bigwigs from any responsability for not preventing 9-11, then turned around and leaned on them to provide the cover for Operation Iraq. Not that such explicit words would have been recorded or even exchanged, but there would have been an understanding. The poor intel suckers were so spooked about being held accountable for our national tragedy they rolled over in fear, they gave up their professional obligations, their purpose, and became a part of the Bush industry. That or they saw a path to personal gain, a chance to climb the ladder by doing the boss a favor, a chance to hit the big time. Whatever the reasons, they sold out.

What happened man? It used to be about the intelligence!

Now as the mid-level CIA people, the ones who actually work on things, are beginning to leak en-masse, the Republicans are circling the wagons in a partisan effort to keep the hearings closed and protect the president. People smell the wind changing, the blood in the water. Press conferences are becoming less and less softball affairs; anchorperson hacks are starting to test their claws. These people are sharks and egoists, and they're getting ready to tear apart the monstrosity they helped construct a last desperate bid to retain a scrap of their original moral legitimacy. There's sacrafice in the offing. Some will survive; some will truly change; some will be left to the annals of history. Something big is going to happen.

I'm back from a long weekend offline. It was good. I have 238 emails to answer and a lot to catch up on, so if you're waiting to hear from me it might be a while. It seems that the much anticipated Dean - Lessig blog confluence happened. Here's the slashdot, which I've not read yet but will skim to see how it reads in the geek world. I'm glad to have been a very small part of setting that in motion, but the major kudos belong to Britt for being the first (the first I know of) to bring the idea up, and Zacker for hitting the iLaw and pressing the flesh.

The weekend was valuable. It wasn't a pleasure-fest, but I didn't expect it to be. There was a lot of digesting to be done, many lessons learned and a few ideas found. I am the tent. I'll write it all up as a feature sometime in the coming weeks; after I write up my interview with my Air Force friend. Time to hit the ground running.

Out here at the OCF... trying to put the theory into practice. It's hard hard hard work, but maybe worth it; we'll see.

Right now I'm reading Linked: The New Science of Social Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. It's cracking good stuff. Reminds me of some of the things I was writing in my little handmade journal this past spring, thinking about how people's media/news/information network informs their political awareness and general personhood. One thing the book has not addressed in all it's talk of egalitarianism and so forth is reciprocity in linkage. That is to say, in reality, all links are not equal: some are one-way streets, others are bi-directional. In most human relationships, it's a balance between the two. A real solid scientific analysis of interpersonal links would have to view them as vectors, but I'd settle for something that could take into account binary (one-way/two-way) directionality.

A few examples; someone who works a room, gladhanding with a message can make contact with 100 people. But that will be 100 one-way links unless this person happens to actually absorb something from someone else in the process of all the palm-pressing. The likelyhood that this person actually absorbs as much as they put out from all 100 of the people in the room is close to nil. Consumers purchasing the same products are all on the recieving end of a link. Web sites linking to internet "hubs" like Yahoo or Amazon are on the giving end. Thinking politically, it's not hard to see how television news and talk radio are largely uni-directional links; the proportion of viewers watching the show to viewer emails displayed on Wolf Blitzer must run into the 5th order of magnitude.

It would seem that egalitarianism and democracy in networks is contingent on some critical mass of bi-directional linkage. For all these reasons and more, I like our chances with the net. It's becoming more diverse and hard to define out here, in spite of all the commercial encroachment. Participation is on the rise. While there are still "hubs" and "connectors" and mega-popular power-law sites, there's also a lot of actual community forming out here as well; dense and lively clusters of voices which both individually and collectively represent a vibrant society.

Ok, the new design is now site-wide. It makes some of the pages look a little wonky... I like big pictures and they don't work too well with the new layout, but whaddya gonna do? If you see anything really screwy, let me know.

I also peeked at my stats. I cracked 10,000 visits last month with more than 5,800 unique visitors. I figure that means most people stopped in more than once, which is kind of nice. I've been at this for close to two years now, and it does make me feel good. Hopefully it makes you feel good too.