@meeneecat: Yes, not everyone thinks it's newsworthy. But there are few subjects that everyone thinks is newsworthy. If I were only to cover those things on which there was universal agreement, I wouldn't have much to cover. So I choose to cover what I think is newsworthy.

She didn't grant an interview to me, but she posted information about herself on the Web -- ie, in public. Are you saying reporters should only quote interviews? Well, then, what about the State of the Union address? Is that an interview? Just wondering.

you say: "Drawing attention to your having succumbed to the same prurient, train-wreck fascinations that imbue the viewing-habits and notions of 'newsworthiness' afflicting the masses of our celebrity-obsessed culture will not do good things for your market value."

That seems contradictory, at the least. If the tabloidy stuff is as popular as you say, why wouldn't my reveling in it increase my market value?

Should work now.

For example: you could have easily changed the tenor of this discussion and inoculated yourself from accusations of "official" bias by pointing out how data -- including supposed "photographic evidence" of mobile WMD labs -- was either misinterpreted or misused by various officials in the run-up to the Iraq War. How many neo-cons still stubbornly believe in those imaginary WMD labs they once thought they saw?

The piece you're reading is an excerpt from my book; the book, in fact, focuses on many other examples -- such as the one you cite above -- of people becoming divorced from reality. It examines in full the Rashomon culture you discuss; that's its point, indeed.

This link is now in the piece; e-mail can be found there: http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp

You can read more excerpts (including the introduction) -- and search inside the book -- at Amazon.

No, what's that?

Nike's what?

Sorry, blank, I was being silly.

Stumbling across a Salon thread without the obligatory OCD grammar junkie would be like leaving the living room w/o flicking the lightswitch seven seven seven seven seven seven seven times. Can't have that.

You've posted 144 letters in fewer than seven days, so certainly you're an expert on Salon comments and I'll take your word for it on the proliferation of copy editor-types here. Some might see a bit of irony in you going after people for doing something repeatedly -- you're posting about 20 letters a day! -- but rest assured, not me.

Might not have worked; Comcast was inspecting packets, not blanket-closing certain protocols.

Several people have sent me this link; NSFW, obviously:

http://pine-magazine.com/content.php?id=337

...what you're commenting on before you take that leap. (Some advice for you.)

For instance, if you'd read the story at the link, you would have seen I was not talking about government mergers. From the article:

In the business world, most mergers don't work, Nanda says [Nanda is Ashish Nanda, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and an expert on corporate mergers]. Many fail to produce the sort of spectacular results that their promoters promised at the time of the merger, and the merged entity is often less successful than were the individual parts brought together. Inflated expectations, "culture clashes," and the inevitable shuffling of positions in the new firm can cause problems in the merged firm several years after the integration, he says.

More on merger success rates:

http://www.csc.com/cscworld/072006/fa/fa004.shtml ("Most mergers fail. Failure means that the new organization is worth less than its pre-merger components.")

This is like that time you said I advocated the elimination of copyright for anything digital. I didn't say that, and you might have known that had you read what I've written on the subject. Reading works, I promise.

The article I linked to is an interview -- my interview -- with an expert on corporate mergers; he discusses the difficulty of mergers (corporate mergers), and why the numbers didn't bode well for a particular federal merger (the Homeland Sec. merger). He spends most of the article talking about business mergers, which is not a surprise, considering that this is his expertise (ie, that's what he studies, corporate mergers).

I linked to it with the tag "most mergers fail," and indeed, the article backs that up -- but sure, stand by your assertion that I failed to support that. It's OK with me where you stand.

Watch the video again -- you see two girls, at least, landing punches (pay attention to the girl in the red T-shirt). Also, at one point where the camera swoops down, it looks likes we just miss another of the girls landing shots.

Thanks, you're right. Fixed.

Are you saying?

I told you what the *prediction* was. If predictions turn out to be wrong, that doesn't mean you lied; it means you -- ie, Tivo -- were wrong. I can't see why that confuses you.

I have written a book; thanks for giving me the opportunity to mention it.

http://www.amazon.com/True-Enough-Learning-Post-Fact-Society/dp/0470050101

I'm typing this on my XP desktop, my main machine, a new one I built myself a couple months ago. I switched to this after my Dell laptop, which I wrote my book on, got too slow. In my kitchen, I've got another PC laptop, an old Thinkpad I use mainly for streaming NPR. I do have a Mac Mini at the office, but I'm hardly ever there.

You get in trouble for jumping to conclusions.

I suspect this is a matter of taste, but I'd urge you to try out a ThinkPad's pointer, the red-rubber pointing stick. In my experience, no notebook pointer even comes close to the stick in speed, accuracy, ergonomic soundness, general wonderfulness.