Slate asks just what the hell Karen Hughes though she was doing in the middle east late last month.

Karen Hughes, Stay Home! – What on earth is she doing in the Middle East? By Fred Kaplan
Let’s say some Muslim leader wanted to improve Americans’ image of Islam. It’s doubtful that he would send as his emissary a woman in a black chador who had spent no time in the United States, possessed no knowledge of our history or movies or pop music, and spoke no English beyond a heavily accented “Good morning.” Yet this would be the clueless counterpart to Karen Hughes, with her lame attempts at bonding (“I’m a working mom”) and her tin-eared assurances that President Bush is a man of God (you can almost hear the Muslim women thinking, “Yes, we know, that’s why he’s relaunched the Crusades”).

It is stunning just how arrogant and out of their depth this administartion is. How else to explain yet another colossal misfire?

Apple’s announcement of a “new iPod with Video features”:http://news.com.com/Apple+unveils+video+iPod%2C+new+iMac/2100-1041_3-5893863.html?tag=nefd.lede is causing serious meltdown on some of the sites reporting it, including “Engadget’s live report”:http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000207062697/ and “Apple’s own site”:http://www.apple.com, both of which are taking forever to load right now.

This isn’t a big suprise, of course. 18 months ago, I was “skeptical, if not dismissive, about the idea”:http://www.geekfun.com/2004/01/07/movableleron-apple-keynote-thoughts/, but six months later, I was “convinced it was inevitable”:http://www.geekfun.com/2004/10/28/ipod-photo-the-idea-of-a-video-ipod/.

Apple is, of course, ready to go with video content for the new advice, delivered through iTunes6 and an update to the iTunes Music store. Initial offerings include music videos and recently broadcasted ABC TV shows like “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives.”

I’m not sure I’m convinced about how compelling either of them will be. I think music videos are the right kind of content. They are short and they are the sort of things people would want to show to friends as a sort of conversation starter, but they are also something that has traditionally been free, and I’m skeptical about people laying down $2 for a conversation starter.

I think the price on the TV shows ($2) is also a bit high, but probably reasonable for something that could cost the networks viewers and ad revenue on highly rated shows, and not so much that a devoted viewer wouldn’t pay for it. The downside is that I think the number of people who want to keep up with their favorite 30 or 60 minute shows on a small screen doesn’t stretch too far beyond mass transit users in major metropolitan areas.

I think the TV shows would be a more attractive buy if they were higher quality, but my guess is that they are targeted at the QVGA screen of the new iPods. This is VHS quality, which is more than enough for such a small screen, and probably looks ok via the new iPod’s video out to a TV set, but these days, when people pay for stuff, they are used to DVD quality video and audio.

The new video capable iPods are clearly just an upgrade to the existing iPod line. The video capabilities come under the same name (just “iPod”) and price points as the older iPods with smaller hard disk capacities that they are replacing, but I think they could end up being revolutionary, but not as platforms for the sort of content Apple is launching with.

I think the new iPods will create a market and an audience for short form video content that people can share with one another at the water cooler. Now that the media landscape is so fractured, a portable video device can give people a way to establish common ground again. The new iPod’s aren’t quite there though. They don’t have a speaker that allows multiple viewers to listen to the associated audio, and they don’t let people swap clips without involving their computers.

Edgar Bronfman Jr, who has squandered a great deal of his family’s liquor fortune trying to be a media mogul, has been running his mouth lately about how completely untenable Apple’s 99 cent/song pricing is on the iTunes Music Store.

Similar comments cropped up “a month ago”:http://www.geekfun.com/2005/08/27/music-industry-misses-foot-reloads/ in a New York Times article which is no longer available on the web without paying (stupid, but the subject of another post), but as I recall, those comments weren’t attributed to someone in quite so high a position of authority, nor someone posessed of such appearant cluelessness.

RED HERRING | Bronfman Fires Back at Apple
“There’s no content that I know of that does not have variable pricing,” said Mr. Bronfman at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investor conference.

I’d quip that he hasn’t been to the movies in the past 50+ years, but appearantly he is aware of how ticket prices work, because he doesn’t like it:

Why, [Bronfman] asked, should you pay the same amount to see a $2 million movie as you would to see a $200 million one?
“from slate”:http://slate.msn.com/id/1862

Um, because a $200M movie is a mass market product that needs to sell a hell of a lot of tickets to break even, much less profit, and raising ticket prices much will cut into that audience, which will reduce word of mouth, which will cut into the audience even further.

I should be applauding Bronfman’s willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, but I can’t bring myself to.

I checked the visitor statistics for Geekfun tonight and was suprised to see that I’ve racked up an unusual number of visits over the past few hours, and most have been looking at a single post I wrote over a year ago titled “Why is Bush Drinking Again?”:http://www.geekfun.com/2004/09/08/why-is-bush-drinking-again/.

A little investigation revealed that most of them were searching for some variation on “bush drinking again” on Google, where my post is appearantly on the first page. I get a hit every couple of days from people searching for the same terms, and my first thought was that Google had adjusted their index in the last day or so, and I’d gotten bumped to the first page of results. A little investigation proved otherwise.

It looks like National Enquirer has a new story that Laura caught GWB taking a shot of booze at Crawford recently. All sorts of “blogs have picked it up”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=%22bush+drinking+again%22&btnG=Search+Blogs. Most of them are asking “Is Bush Drinking Again?” At this point, none of them are asking “Why is Bush drinking again?”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=%22why+is+Bush+drinking+again%22&btnG=Search+Blogs The difference might subtle, but it is important, something I’m sure Karl Rove can appreciate.

My trust in the media took a big dive when I saw how they covered the emergence of the Internet over a decade ago. I thought I was skeptical before, but after I saw “them” cover something I knew a few things about, I was disgusted.

I’m particularly disgusted with their science reporting. This article in the guardian hits on a couple of the major problems.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don’t dumb me down

bq. It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science.

One big issue, the way they dumb down their stories to the point that they carry no real information:

bq. What’s wrong with the coverage itself? The problems here all stem from one central theme: there is no useful information in most science stories. A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the “correct form” of the drug. I don’t use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information.

It’s not just science stories either. In the past few days I listened to two longish local stories on the TV news that were so general as to communicate absolutely no information of any relevance, and last night I read an AP wire story on Yahoo that was similarly content free.

Even if the point of the news media is to deliver readers to advertisers, it seems dead wrong to me to dumb down stories so much that there isn’t a single sentence that might challenge even the stupidest most ignorant readers brain. Such readers might be easily swayed by advertising, but how much money can they possibly have to spend?

This very interesting article by Jared Diamond challenges the idea that “progress” is really progress.

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

bq. One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9″ for men, 5’ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3″ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.

He continues:

bq. Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others.