I eat granola and I know that Al Gore is a super rich gas guzziling fraud that lives one mile from me. Built his family empire generating carbon monoxide from burning the millions of tons of tobbacco his family grew for generations.

ALpha Male? OK If all Herman Munster look alikes can be one too.

Global Warming? This guy could care less. Watch him drive around Nashville in his Cadillac 8 cylinder SUV. he haw what a joke!!

Just because he uses a lot of electricity, and flies a lot, and didn't invent the internet, doesn't mean he's wrong about the climate change.

And even if he is wrong, is that a gamble that you want to take?

Being a literate person in a blue collar job, I can tell you that this endless repetition of themes is, basically, what you get when anyone who can look for the meta in the everyday deals with Joe Average. Fallacies and misinformation roll on forever, and the casual nature of the whole thing keeps it from ever reaching a state of point-counterpoint debate, so someone can go years or their entire life without a basic misapprehension ever being challenged at all.

What we're seeing is the Internet bouncing our society's ignorance back at us. Don't like it? Donate money to a public school. (So they can enthusiastically spend it on the new football field they just cancelled their Advanced Literature program to pay for.)

I thought it was funny.

useful no.

I wondered exactly ...

"Sometimes it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the dialogue enabled by the Internet is simply an infinite loop of the same conversation running over and over again.'

But decided that since the web is so much an actual 'complex adaptive system' or 'cellular automaton' that

the 'strange bubblings-up which surface to the boil' are operative.

The conclusion is that in the nature of things, you will

encounter of lot cross-pollination & stuff taken whole, inbreeding and even incest,

Most of which which is simply informational momentum...

But....There Will Be Surprises.

And that's what makes it both useful and fun.

but, as another commenter pointed out, you do realize that by using that same meme you denounced, you effectively undermined your own point, don't you?

Do you realize that the sub-caption of your article just helps to reinforce these memes? Isn't it one of the cardinal rules of journalism that many readers don't read beyond the lede? And yours is: "The former vice president talks to engineers in San Jose, and probably wishes he'd never invented the Internet" I realize this might be the editors of Salon, and not you, but please, all of you, STOP IT!!!

cloudberry - I have only five more days to ...

... enjoy posting here, and read your comments, before my wife returns

Even now my engagement is usually clandestine, so please, just think of it as a free-form primal scream.

spacecabooie, can I have a toke of whatever you've been smoking?

Sometimes it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the dialogue enabled by the Internet is simply an infinite loop of the same conversation running over and over again.

A.L., are you begging to have our well established vortex disturbed ? Some genuine innovation in the adventure of ideas ? Or have we not depths yet to plumb before we come to a complete understanding of HTWW ? Is the history we know the history as it was ? As falls Wichita so falls Wichita Falls.

Really though, clever to so connect your title and leading line - the mechanism (the internet) by which new industry has been let loose and sleeping giants awakened and Gore's presently expressed regret over this, coupled with the particular market which is tilled to exasperation by his latest audience (forever-executing computer processors).

But Global Warming - REALLY a stretch for Gore to say that he can find a common context for all of this, accept a misplaced standing ovation for describing it, and not feel ashamed ... all the way to the bank ...

but i wrote that display copy myself, so it was my own joke that was, alas, so horribly unfunny.

generally, you can hold me accountable for all headlines on my blog posts.

Ironically, and unfortunately, the lead in on the website parrots the talking points that Leonard denounces:

The former vice president talks to engineers in San Jose, and probably wishes he'd never invented the Internet

Salon's web producers might want to grasp their writers' points, rather than trot out, as Leonard put it, a "tortured poem of talking points" in a horribly unfunny attempt to be funny.

And you're absolutely right about roughly 80% (and counting) of the Internet. I remember the heady days of the late 90s boom, when 'zines like Feed and Suck amplified intelligent, witty and worthwhile conversations about all sorts of topics. Now people think they sound sophisticated if they trot out the same tired cliches they've read a thousand times on like-minded blogs.

In a word: UGH.

Happy to cut their nose off to spite their face.

Like the welfare states of the south supporting federal tax reduction ...

And now a group so conscientious yet unrecognized that it has no time, courage, or confidence to look beyond the silicon.

24 Noble Prize physicists, William Gray, and Dick Lindzen from M.I.T., as but a fraction of the scientists who can and do debunk

The same media that Glenn Greenwald mentions lately participates here, don't forget. But I'd like to hear more from Commenter #5:

at 4/10/2007 1:29:11 PM, Steve Szirom said:

I attended the Al Gore keynote and was sitting in the front row as an analyst/press person.

While the global warning is happening, there is much controversy over how much and how fast...clearly he is at the extreme end of very much and very fast.

Most scientists do not agree that the East Coast will be under 20 feet of water in 20 years.

While this controversy lasts and he is in the public eye, he stands to profit immensely from his book and film products, not too mention speaking fees.

ESC could do better in signing up keynotes. Steve Szirom, senior analyst, InsideChips.com.

Of course, just the type of industrialist Blood and Gore target, along with the population of Africa, the gullible democratic party (which does have more enlightened members, as well), and its nihilistic Green Wing.

By the way Andrew, there was a most singular intervention at the Keynote Address. As there are everywhere he goes, when people are allowed to speak. The $400 price tag on this one was supposed to limit attendance. Full report not in yet, though.

How utterly predictable that the topic was global warming. An irrelevant subject for an audience who would otherwise be expecting to automate whatever technological products there are to be developed. Slipping this off-topic subject in can only be to aid their mental habituation and acclimation processes as the conditioning for a very dark future continues.

The "industrialists" (scientists ? hmmmm ... ) from SV whom I know have cut and run, with their millions and billions, from the industrial development scene. Living far far far from SV.

You and Big Al know what they have left behind ...