One of the most persistent (and personally unconvincing) remarks I have heard from many artists when asked about what they do or are trying to do is that “art mirrors life.” Whatever this might mean to artists, many of them expound that art is just an expression and a sentiment towards what is going on around us.

I asked a very well-known and awarded artist once what he felt about the problem of intellectual property rights especially as it touched upon the medium and process of his work (film), and again, he simply said that he only wishes to express his creativity.

A very similar explanation is given by quite a number of people, not necessarily artists, when they are confronted about what they are doing (or not doing). For example, recently, I have a friend who refused to translate a document because he knew it would be used to allow people in the rural areas to submit to tests of new drugs. For the solicitors of the translation, it is just a job and the task is simply to find another translator.

Another friend of mine is currently in correspondence with someone in America who seemed to routinely explain away each sign of cruelty in society as either unstoppable or inconsequential, thus this person explains: “the world is not perfect, it is important to understand it, and we cannot do anything about it.”

When a colleague asked a Dutch woman about how the Dutch, who have often refused to cooperate with each other, might be able to deal with the problem of water which needed cooperation, she explained it away: “Everybody should express themselves and have a right to an opinion. I think that we should listen to minorities such as women, but I don’t know anything about the problem of water, that is for the government to work on.”

Milton Mayer, in “They Thought They Were Free: the Germans 1933-45″ eloquently described these mostly imperceptible compromises, and their consequences:

“What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . . . (Mayer: 1955, 166) To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it–please try to believe me–unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted’ . . . .(168) Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. . . .” (169)

“Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.” (171) - From Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog, A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle, 2003.

The “gradual habitation of the people”, one time I likened to a frog in a pot of water with temperature rising little by little, until, unknown to the frog, it had already been cooked.

In relevance to current times, Ingle explains:

“So Mayer’s answer to the age of Bush-Ashcroft amounts only to an reiteration of his central insight: principiis obsta, resist the beginnings, lest institutions like the state overwhelm you. George Fox, the founder of Quakers in the seventeenth century, did not use these exact terms, but he certainly knew how to denounce and disengage from the apostasy he saw all around him, the one he believed stretched back sixteen centuries.” - From Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog, A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle, 2003.

As we now admittedly live in very confusing and confused times, relevant also is Mayer’s note on this habituation of the people “to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand.” Such complications, when taken into the private visions of the intellectual elite, and the elites, like those of the Bead Game “are engaged in exchanging their esoterica with one another in the game.” … “The world outside the community is convulsed by riots, wars and revolutions, but the players of the Bead Game have lost all contact.” (V. Papanek, 1970, on Hermann Hesse’s “Magister Ludi”)

But the world, as Papanek then saw, has now been reversed. The intellectual elites of the Bead Game have now evolved into a much much larger community of “doers”, no longer a small community of thinkers with their own esoteric private visions, but a global community of sheltered people:

“You have lived sheltered lives,” he (Milton Mayer) explained, “but you have had no one to shelter you from your parents or teachers. Your parents have done what they could to adjust you to the deplorable society to which they, as their advanced age testifies, have successfully adjusted themselves.”

In time, he warned, “You won’t even know that you are corrupt. You will be no worse than your neighbors, and you will be sure to have some that you won’t be as bad as.” He remembered that his own “education prepared me to say no to my enemies. It did not prepare me to say no to my friends, still less to myself, to my own limitless need for a little more status, a little more security, and a little more of the immediate pleasure that status and security provide.” - From Milton Mayer, Quaker Hedgehog, A Review and Profile, by H. Larry Ingle, 2003.

In our current society of adjusted citizens, there is little difference between the ‘artist-intellectual’ of the cultural cold war era who has the babbling eloquence to describe a flat surface as “disinterested painting … aware of nothing but art, absolutely no anti-art” and the ‘artist-doer’ of the current age who has the same babbling eloquence to say “art is simple, life is simple, art is just self-expression, a visual tool for communication, mirroring life.”

While the artist-intellectual was seen as a snob who assumes superiority for his own thoughts outside relevant human experience, the artist-doer is a noble slob who is just expressing himself through a purely visual statement without responsibility for ‘complicated things.’

In “What Shall the Responsible Intellectual Do?” (1963), Chomsky made clear that the intellectual is not to engage in esoteric games by himself, and “that I am by no means taking any sort of self-righteous attitude to all of this. I meant it quite sincerely in the article, when I referred to the page of history on which we find our proper place, those of us who stood by in silence and apathy as this catastrophe developed and who continue, today, to look away and to restrict our protest.”

The spirit of resistance, though marginalized, still lives in those who in their judgment and conscience take responsibility for what they do or refuse to do. For certain, I consider it important not to succumb to the overwhelming helplessness of a society of victims, of people who seem wholly convinced that matters have become too complicated for either informed action or responsibility.

While with a few friends we take heart in the thought that at best we could still plant our vegetable gardens, we take responsibility in that which we do or refuse to do, to take note and criticism of the apostasy around us, not simply to mirror it or echo the propaganda of media, the church and our useless politicians.

In all this, principiis obsta, our obligation to resist the beginnings.

I just narrowly escaped being photographed wearing Napoleon’s hat with yellow flowers! My caregiver’s camera went lowbatt before she could press the button, thank dog! So, while the batts are being fully discharged (before they can be fully charged, heh!), I had enough time surfing and bumped in to a website called Church Sign Generator. The results:

And if that isn’t waste of time enough, I wrote a paper (in one sitting, thanks to the famous work by three grad students at MIT, SCIgen) for an upcoming academic scam-conference.

Enjoy!

Towards the Synthesis of Web Browsers

Edward Nutmeg, PhD

Abstract

Many cyberneticists would agree that, had it not been for the study of von Neumann machines, the understanding of IPv7 might never have occurred. After years of confusing research into sensor networks, we disprove the unproven unification of context-free grammar and lambda calculus, which embodies the confusing principles of robotics. Fuar, our new methodology for the synthesis of superpages, is the solution to all of these grand challenges.

Table of Contents

1) Introduction
2) Related Work
3) Fuar Exploration
4) Extensible Algorithms
5) Results

• 5.1) Hardware and Software Configuration
• 5.2) Experiments and Results

6) Conclusion (more…)

It was evening of October 25 when some kids started knocking on our door calling out “Trick or Treat!” Hmmm… isn’t that a bit too early? Trevor, who has been anticipating this much earlier, has been preparing since first week of October for these kids by saving up coins to give away. And just like the Christmas carols, the same group of kids come back for more treats a few minutes later.

The other day, I was even more surprised when the kids came at 3 in the afternoon! Hmmm … so I told them to come back later. Our landlady who lives upstairs told them all to go away, there won’t be any trick or treats around here until October 31!

I told Trevor we might’ve spoiled the kids by giving them some money as treats (we didn’t like the idea of giving them candies, although sugar treats are apparently the norm in the US. However, I did hear some of our neighbors giving them treats too. So far, I haven’t heard of any tricks, but considering that in the UK police have warned parents that Halloween pranks by their kids will be punished, I can only say “thank goodness!”

Anyway, when the same bunch of kids kept coming back within a couple minutes, Trevor decided to give them a ‘trick.’ He opened the door and growled at them, scaring them all off screaming. It was fun and I’m sure the kids had fun too.

This evening they came back. I opened the door and saw them far from the doorway, obviously scared in case Trevor comes out at them. I told them, “oi kids, why aren’t you in costume?”

One of them replied, “we don’t have money to buy costumes, but later if we get enough money …” They were trying very hard to look like poor street kids (something they probably learned from watching Wowowee) but it didn’t work - they were very obviously kids from middle-income families. Anyway, I told them, “you don’t need money to get costumes! You can cut up paper and all sorts of things and make your own costumes.”

And for a while I thought about how strongly “Trick-or-Treating” and “Halloween” are commercially pushed and socially accepted activity - just like Christmas, Valentines Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, etc.

Actually, the scariest trick or treat costume, besides being the cheapest one, is also of indigenous origin: the bayong (a bag made of woven palm leaves). One can cut eye holes in the bayong and wear it over one’s head. The bayong mask is reminiscent of the spies of the Filipino volunteer armies, such as the Makapili, organized during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines.

Then I told them, “when you kids come back you better tell me where this trick-or-treat came from and what it means. And why didn’t your parents do trick-or-treating when they were young?” They made all sorts of guesses and one of them said trick-or-treat (as many other things) came from America.

As far as the Philippine experience is concerned, that is quite true, although originally, the tradition comes from the British Isles in the Middle Ages (also known as “souling”): “trick-or-treating resembles the late medieval practice of “souling,” when poor folk would go door to door, receiving food in return for prayers for the dead on All Souls Day (All Hallows Day).” See the Wikipedia entry.
“Souling” translates to “pangaluluwa” or “mangalulwa” in Filipino, which means to go around serenading homes, simulating souls temporarily released from heaven during the eve of All Sants’ Day.

However, most Christianized Filipinos would prefer to go to the dead rather than have the dead go to their homes. Thus All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2) are days when families visit their dead, many often spending overnight or longer at cemetery. While cemetery security is being more tightly enforced now, previous practices included plenty of eating, drinking, music, gambling and other games

Evidently, trick-or-treating resembles the practice of going door-to-door singing Christmas carols in return for ‘treats’, which connects to wassailing (from the Anglo-Saxon toast wæs þu hæl, “be thou hale” — i.e., “be in good health”). In cider-producing areas of England, such as the West Country, wassailing also refers to drinking (and singing) the health of trees in the hopes that they might better thrive. (See the Wikipedia entry on wassailing).

Trick-or-treat, as an activity for children in which they go from house to house in costumes, asking for treats such as candy with the question, “Trick or treat?”, is a 20th century phenomenon. Apparently, the activity came to the Philippines from the US - and only very recently. I have not had any experience of Trick-or-treating when I was a child, and have not had kids trick-or-treating our homes until the late 90’s.

Ritualized begging on Halloween in the US seem to have become popular only in the 1930s, with the earliest known uses in print of the term “trick or treat” appearing in 1934 (Oregon Journal), and the first use in an American publication occurring in 1939 (The American Home). From western America, trick-or-treating spread eastward with lulls between 1942-1947 because of sugar rationing during the Second World War.

In the Philippines, Halloween parties, costumes and trick-or-treating seem to have been first adopted by children of upper class families, evidently as influences by their families’ friends and contacts from the US, including upper class families preference and access to US media and lifestyles.

In our old neighborhood in Sampaloc, Manila where I grew up, there was no such thing as trick-or-treating, but around the same time, lavish Halloween parties, costumes and other activities took place in exclusive residential compounds such as Corinthian Garden, Forbes Park, Ayala Alabang, Dasmarinas Village, Bel-Air, and the like. Only recently, did the practice get adopted by middle- and perhaps even lower-income families with the promotion of such practices in mainstream media and almost all the shopping establishments.

What I do remember as a child during All Souls Day, besides the customary visit to the cemetery, was sitting in the candlelit darkness with my brother and sister, listening to our father tell some of the scariest stories ever…

Although we didn’t need to be at Immigration until next week, we decided to go today just to make sure since there seem to be quite a number of non-working holidays coming up - the upcoming elections and All Soul’s Day.

It was the usual commute to Manila, for our 2-month’s worth dose of carbon monoxide. It’s not as difficult for me anymore, as I was getting a bit more used to the pollution, although I still feel nauseous as soon as I get down from the jeepney.

We decided to go to Fort Santiago again to wait out the 4-hour processing for the visa extension. It’s quite nice there, a distance from the pollution and the noise of motors. On the way there we decided to buy some bottled water at MiniStop and two kids asked us if we could buy them some doughnuts. I saw the doughnuts in the shop, they were not really shaped as doughnuts but were shaped as holloween motifs - ghosts, witch’s hats, pumpkins, etc.

We got the kids some doughnuts and chocolate drink. Then when we went to the nearby Chinese fastfood for some lunch take-aways, the kids were there again, cheering us, and then said goodbye.

They were one of several regulars in the area - a bunch of kids collecting garbage in that part of Intramuros.

We had our lunch and then a bit of rest at Fort Santiago. Quite a surprise to see a number of tourists - Americans, Japanese, Koreans, etc. - when two months ago the place was all quiet. The entrance fee seem to have gone up too, I don’t know if it’s permanent or only for the peak season.

The horse-drawn calezas were all busy - nice for the cuchero and plenty of exercise for the horses. Even with all the foreign travel advisory I guess there are still some tourists who like coming to the Philippines, although it’s not very clear what might be there to see in Manila compared to other parts of the country like Cebu or Palawan, apart from foreigners coming over perhaps because they have family or maybe because of business.

Anyway, here’s a photo of myself and Edward, wearing clothes worn by Filipinos from early 19th century Manila. The clothes were perhaps drawn from Damian Domingo’s watercolor albums from the 1830s, called “Tipos del Pais.”

And here’s a photo of Trevor as a Spanish friar.

In the meantime, I’ve managed to do some crocheting at Fort Santiago and at Immigration. So at least, work is progressing. I am making a smaller version of the red roses purse for our landlady’s daughter.

Then I got an email and a really lovely photo from an ex-colleague now based in the US. Beautiful environment, in Georgia if I’m not mistaken. Earlier I got an email and photos from an old BBS friend now living in Canada - some really lovely photos of himself and little daughter at a beach in western Canada.

I feel so envious, that in other countries a clean environment is still accessible to the public whereas here you have to be rich or a tourist to enjoy such things. The cleanest enclaves here seem to have been fenced off by rich resort developers or bought out by foreigners, and the air polluted by motor cars and waters and earth polluted by industrial development (many of them foreign investments) … Whoever said the best things in life are free must be joking or just being cynical.

If the countryside aren’t polluted by mining, industrial processing and monocrop agriculture, cities are quite horrible too. I was just thinking some time ago after the Glorietta 2 mall explosion in Makati City - if it really could be gas explosion, not gas from cooking but gas from sewer, since police investigators seem to be getting sick. I remember some 3 years ago I went to the new Ayala Museum, went to the toilet, and then when I flushed, water and shit swam out of the bowl, luckily I was able to jump out of the cubicle in time!

Big cities can have real problems with sewage systems, and perhaps especially Makati which used to be all swamp…

In just a couple of days, my caregiver was able to finish this small purse and had just gone out to give it (together with Alwin’s finished crocheted dragon) to her sister who gave birth to a baby boy a week ago. Although I wasn’t there, my caregiver told me that Alwin was so excited, jumpy, jealous, playful, mischievous, etc. - in short, a much naughtier kid than before his new little brother was born.

Well, human babies and certainly puppies are nice little things until they grow up and be such a pain in the ass.

Anyway, my caregiver has given me the pattern for the Beaded Olive Purse (a ‘classic design’, her sister quipped). Again, this is from scrap yarn left in the apartment hundreds of years ago by the previous owner. As scrap yarn, there are no specifications as to what type, weight or brand of yarn was used. Anyway, my caregiver is making another purse, this time dark rusty brown in color which she intends to give away as usual. And after that another crocheted rose purse which she plans to give as a birthday gift to their landlady’s 4-year old daughter next month.

It seems that my caregiver has been distracted into making silly little useful things …

Front of the purse.

Beaded Olive Purse
by Fatima Lasay

Ch 41. Turn.

Sc in 2nd ch from hook. Sc across.

*Ch 1. Turn. Sc in each sc across. Repeat from * 42 times or until purse is of desired height when crocheted piece is folded in half.

Begin purse flap as follows:

Rnd 1: Ch 1. Turn. Sc in first 3 sc. * Ch 3. Skip 2 sc. Sc in next sc. Repeat from * across ending with 3 sc in last 3 sc from previous row. Ch 1. Turn.

Rnd 2: Sc in 3 sc. *Sc in each 3-ch loop, sc in next sc. Repeat from * across. Ch 1, turn.

Repeat from rnd 1 two more times or until purse flap is of desired height.

Fold crocheted piece and with sc join the front and back sides of the purse. Weave in all ends.

Use glass beads, needle and thread to make the flowers and leaves design shown in the photos.

Back of the purse.
Note: Use no. 3 steel crochet hook.

Obviously on the Inquirer website, advertising is much more important than newscasting.

An unbelievable barrage of commercial garbage accompanies news on the Inquirer website.

On the GMA website, they’ve done it better: newscasting is advertising.

A very insensitive clumping together of a highly sensationalized boxing event and a tragic explosion (currently being linked to the government) in Glorietta Mall in Makati City.

A truly tasteless and insulting clumping together of news (and supposedly investigative reportage) on the recently concluded elections, the verdict on ex-President Joseph Estrada plunder charge, and women in bikini called “Bataan Beauties.” [1]

Incidentally, I have just seen a relevant quote from KG Pontus Hulten’s “The machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age” (1968) as cited by V. Papanek (Design for the Real World, 1970):

“The production of articles that nobody really needs, but which occupy the ground floors of all the big stores, is one of the many outward symptoms of something basically wrong in a world of overproduction and undernourishment. In order to control overproduction, without going through the intricacies of selling the product, it becomes necessary for a willfully destructive war to be going on permanently somewhere. Today, the world is spending over $150 billion per annum on the actual or potential destruction of lives and property, as compared with the capital transfer from rich to poor countries of about $10 billion per year - including a large share for military aid.”

The quote describes the link between mindless consumerism (created by professional market and motivation researchers, mass communication and media, and advertising and design) and war, poverty in the world.

But today, not only is there an overproduction of useless objects, there is also the overproduction of useless (redundant) information to keep its distribution currency afloat. And as demonstrated by the Inquirer and GMA news websites, media which has lost contact with its social and moral responsibilities contribute to this global cancer by trivializing if not sensationalizing as entertainment the socio-political issues that continue to assault and plunder the Filipino people and the world.

As a result, we have the undernourishment of the minds of people even (and especially) in the richest and most powerful countries in the world.

According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, poverty is a key cause of human rights abuses worldwide and states must make every effort to ease inequalities.

I think that there is something quite not right about this. What if we imagine for a moment that poverty is the EFFECT, rather than the cause, of all the human rights abuses wreaked worldwide, especially by the rich and powerful countries?

So it is quite sad that so many people with presumably good intentions cannot think anymore of the true implications of things such as the UN calling on everyone to “take part in a 24-hour “Stand Up and Speak Out” campaign against poverty.” So many people with presumably good intentions find enough comfort in the belief that if they watch television and see the house-mates in Big Brother House light a bonfire against poverty, or donate money to such causes, then they are doing their part in supporting the cause.

So many people presumably with good intentions have become so confused by the complexity of the relationship between overproduction and undernourishment that they turn to consumption and entertainment as a religion. Artists and media, in turn, supply the soothing balm of mindless entertainment-cum-religion.

In the early 60’s, more people seemed to be aware that the root cause of suffering and inequality in the world is the military-industrial complex. However, as this complex became wider, deeper and more ubiquitous, the less that people became aware especially as they too profited from it.

Hopefully, the minority who still have enough intelligence and sensitivity to know will live to see them impending collapse of this complex.

[1] As of October 31, 2007, GMA News have changed their news banners - “Carnage in Makati” is now clustered with the more serious “Erap Plunder Trial” and “Women of the Peninsula” is now clustered with more trivial news such as the Paquiao boxing match and a university-wide basketball game.

Some time ago, I thought I’d write an article about why I don’t put advertising on my website. In the course of writing that article, I thought I’d search the web for other people who also didn’t like advertising on their own websites. So I went to Google, and entered the following keywords (in quotes below) and got the following results.

“no advertising on our website”
- Homes For Sale By Owner at BuyOwner.com, Sell Real Estate, MLS …
- Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy
- Advertise On Our Website - The PCman Website Advertising
- Sell TimeShare: No Closing Cost, No Commissions, Buy & Sell TimeShares
- SalesTrax.com: Advertising on Our Website

“wrong with internet advertising”
- Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy
- The Daily Pennsylvanian
- Doctor File Finder’s overview of services at www.drff.com: web …
- Let us put our resources to work for you. Additionally we don’t use e-mail addresses that are tied to our domain names. …. Together among other endeavors and sites they run Community Advertising …

“wrong with google ads”
- MYBLOG by Ouriel: There is something seriously wrong with Google …
- MYBLOG by Ouriel: So, finally Google admits there was something …
- Is There Something Wrong With Google Adsense Right Now? // General …
- I’m not seeing my adsense vertical banners on the 2 sides of my blog. - Joannes Vermorel’s blog » Blog Archive » What’s wrong with Google …
- Beyond The Invisible: Google Gone Wrong - Funny Goolge Ads
-INTERACTIVE MARKETING BLOG: Where “Google Adsense” goes wrong…
You went completely wrong with this post, buddy. Adsense actully does work.

“why we don’t put ads on our website”
- Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy
Google has also proven that advertising can be effective without being flashy. … We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search …
- CityNews :: How to write an ad that sells
- Lead Discovery - Don’t roll the dice. We are changing the debt …
- Does my web site suck checklist Part One Web Pages That Suck learn …
- Teacher Website. Can we put links on our district web pages to the TeacherWebsite? …. At this stage we don’t, but work is under way to have a full affiliate program setup …

The amazing thing is, I couldn’t find any relevant information through Google (as obvious with the above search results). I tried other search engines and got largely the same results. All the results were pro-advertising on the Internet, and all the results that discussed a problem with advertising were not in principle against Internet advertising but were simply having problems with how to make the advertising work better on their websites.

However, on the Dogpile.com search engine, I was able to get a few relevant links, notably:

- Where P. Lutus answers a question from a student asking: “should we allow advertisers into college texts in order to subsidize the cost of these books for students?”

While the above link is not directly related to the topic I was looking for (advertising on the Internet), I was able to find another article in the same website which provided “an analysis of online advertising, including a true, first-person account by a victim of online fraud.” The article was called “Networks Of Sleaze”

What I thought rather surprising was that I never would’ve found that article through Google or most popular search engines.

Doesn’t that indicate some sort of bias?

At least the Wikipedia admits of its own bias and tries to do something about it:

Of course I wasn’t willing to believe that there’s nothing wrong about Google ads in particular or internet advertising in general just because I couldn’t find any information about it on the web through search engines.

However, because finding the information I specifically need is difficult when it runs counter the profit interests of a highly commercialized Internet, then the viability of most search engines as useful tools for searching is questionable.

OK, so I thought that maybe if I went to some of the progressive websites then I would get some information through their no-ads policy. By “progressive”, I thought of folks who thought differently from the mainsteam and had some kind of social and moral responsibility about the content they were putting online, and so probably had some principle against promoting a consumer-orientation to their site visitors.

You’d be surprised how hard it is to find such information.

Everyone was full of Google Ads.

Even the PCIJ hasn’t caught on what TV journalist Linda Ellerbee tried to tell everyone 20 years ago in her book “‘And So It Goes’ Adventures in Television”:

“Please remember that in television the product is not the program; the product is the audience and the consumer of that product is the advertiser. The advertiser does not “buy” a news program. He buys and audience. The manufacturer (network) that gets the highest price for its product is the one that produces the most product (audience). It might be said that the value of any news program is measured by the whether it increases productivity; the best news program, therefore, is the one watched by the greatest number of people. Argue the point if you like, and when you get tired, argue with the weather. Altruists do not own television stations or networks, nor do they run them. Businessmen own and run them. Journalists work for businessmen. Journalists get fired and canceled by businessmen. That is how it is.”

She also said, no television newscast made money before John Kennedy was shot, but the first time one did, everything changed.

Since then, we can expect Inquirer and GMA news networks to become tools for manufacturing the product (the news audience), but PCIJ? Much worse, are we succumbing the Internet to TV idiot box?

OK, so the reality is, one has to pay the bills.

Consider the approach by ZNet , the people who publish Z Magazine.

The ZNet blogs are already a tremendous amount of freely accessible information, and there are additional content available to those who can pledge a very flexible donation: “$10 a month to ZNet/ZMag (or $5 if you are low income and can’t afford more–or anything between $5 and $10, as you choose) or $3 if $5 is too much.”

Furthermore, the principle is, ZNet would rather pay the bills by selling content rather than selling their readers to the advertisers:

“Z knows that relying on advertising, which is really selling users to advertisers, makes content secondary to commercialism and thereby corrupts it. Thus, Z has to attract support via donations and/or the sale of content, not be advertising.”

I used to subscribe to feeds on PCIJ, but have removed them, apart from the fact that I have a very hard time accessing their website because of the advertising, the things mentioned above apply to why I’m not “buying” and refuse to be “sold.” This is also why I don’t have ads on my website. There’s a fashionable term for web advertising now too: “monetize your website.”

I truly hope that intelligent people re-think what that really means.

Also, the search engines are not as innocent as you think - they’re biased. And your free Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL email account? You think censorship happens only in “China, Burma, Cuba, Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Erithrea” and other such “oppressive countries”? Think again: AOL/Microsoft, Hotmail preventing Delivery of Turthout Communications .