When John Paul I sloughed off that mortal coil, it was reported on automated country station KGBS-FM, Los Angeles as a live interrupt in a program generated by a machine that played musical selections from a series of tapes intermixed in real time.

When the somber announcement of the pontiff’s death ended, the next song played was Bobby Bare’s “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life.” There’s subtlety in the way words and images are put together, and we have a long way to go before machines have enough rules that they’re even good at it.

Google news has had tremendous problems with determining snark from straight reportage; their answer was to limit the sources they scanned.  But Google Ads still puts their netfoot in it with regularity.

The best I’ve seen recently is the google ads insertion (at least in my browser) in a great piece on scientists being driven to laughter and/or tears when they dropped by the Creation Museum.

Biola University 100%

Biblically centered education in an all-Christian community. Apply…

Even though all the words are right, and the context is perfect, the best place for an ad for a hundred-percenter Christian university is NOT in the middle of a piece about what stupid douchebags they are.

When cable and high power satellite suddenly gave the media and the media consumer as many pathways as they could use to stream content and the 2000-channel universe began, something very important died. The ability to create and broadcast more worthy programming than there was room for in the pipe had an upside.

Before the FCC threw open the floodgates and granted new station licenses with abandon in the 1980s, there were relatively few outlets. Radio stations could employ whole staffs to produce shows that aired once. Sometimes they weren’t aired at all, and their production costs written off.

In the golden days of radio, KFI employed an orchestra whose job was to sit in the studio and be ready to play on a moment’s notice if called upon by the local announcer who was himself standing by in case the network feed failed. News departments at the early television and major full-service radio stations, even into the 80s, were large enough they could take over and feed content 24/7 if a new story caught the public’s attention.

Nothing saves energy like shutting down 2 days/week.

In mid 20th century Los Angeles, brush fires, floods, even a little girl down a well, commanded 24/7 coverage. The stations realized that was a part of their service commitment, and the licenses were so valuable and the renewal process so onerous, that overtime got authorized and journalists went without sleep.

Somehow, we’ve lost that. As Iran explodes in anger, MSNBC cries poor and runs Lockup:Indiana and Sex Slaves-The Teen Trade. Ten years ago that might have flown, but in the face of Twitter and Facebook’s minute by minute coverage, MSNBC looks out of touch. CNN cycles old programming, even though CNN International could be switched live to US Domestic viewers, but that brings up commercial concerns.

But last night, an isolated live CNN origination of Larry King Live with Christiane Amanpour crackles across twitter, and numbers soar. Today, CNN is in high gear doing live focused coverage. Perhaps this will convince MSNBC that news is important, even if its not something you can easily cover at a time when you don’t want to spend money. Or perhaps, like radio, NBC/Universal realizes the golden days of cable are numbered and you’re best to take every last dime out before the roof falls in.

The near 60-year history of counterintelligence has been one of having no one in charge of the enterprise. The CI community is not organized or integrated to accomplish a national mission.

Rather, the various CI elements are part of a loose confederation of independent organizations with narrower and varying responsibilities, jurisdictions and capabilities.”

—Michelle Van Cleave

The Twitter social networking site became an international political football this week when the State Department deemed it so valuable in keeping the world abreast of conditions in Iran, that it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled update and remain online.

The Islamic Republic first tried to control public dissent over suspicious election results by the old-school method of stifling journalists, but they were choking an already dying media and making their own situation worse by helping the decentralized alternative to mushroom.

This has led to a new kind of intelligence and counterintelligence activity, where the role of the “mule” is played by the Internet-astute in their offices, studies and bedrooms; an elaborate cat and mouse game, where Iranian Twitter users tweet information, that information is then repeated by others outside the reach of Iranian control, and the original tweets are deleted by the Iranians who originally posted them.

It’s accelerated the evoution of the citizen journalist, because when you remove the real source because you fear for their safety, you take the burden of the credibility of the content on your own shoulders. A lot of people are coming of age in this sudden change: the Iranian students whose bravery is an inspiration to the world, and the responsible users of the social media networks that are trying to help them by reading the shadows half a world away.

Like so many others twits tethered to computers and net-aware devices by business or obsession, I dabbled with Spymaster from its “beta” days through roll out. It was easy to keep it running on a browser deep in a window stack on a powerful computer. I could click away at it until my virtual energy was depleted, building up cash and virtual weaponry not quite knowing what the right or wrong answers were, figuring things out as I went along.

There wasn’t much there there, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t have much “here” to give it. But then the unfolding events in Iran made the whole thing silly. It just seemed far more productive to spend my free ponder time trying to figure out what to retweet as truth and what to publicly question as disinformation, than figuring out which safehouse to buy and which weapon to sell to buy something more powerful.

There’s a lack of clear goals and strategy in Spymaster that suddenly was supplanted by a real world situation that I could play some small part in from the safety of my real-yet-virtual viewport on it. I could leverage what knowledge I have of the tubes to some real advantage; because out there in the streets of Tehran people are dying for an idea that is only hinted at in Spymaster.

When people are putting their lives on the line for real values and a laudable goal, it just seems silly to play with virtual weaponry when sneaking the right words past Iran’s oppressors could make some small difference.

UPDATE [4:05 AM Tehran Time]: I’ve just been identified on Twitter as an “Iranian Government Account.” This is a tremendous compliment, as it comes from a twitter user (@Persian_Guy) that is almost certainly an Ahmadinejad disinformation entity.

Back in the day, when the federal government exerted far more control over the far fewer radio and television stations, an outbreak of hate-fueled domestic terrorism would have prompted at the very least a campaign of public service announcements pointing out that killing doctors or shooting up the Holocaust Museum is not the way to change a course of government that you think is wrong.

While I won’t listen to the width and breadth of Fox and Clear Channel, I got a full dose of Rush Limbaugh today who was blaming MSNBC for the media hate mongering and calling out Shepard Smith for his honesty and concern.

Gentlemen of the legacy media both right and left: Deregulation has not removed from you the responsibility to act responsibly, and to address the hate mongering that is leading to domestic death as a problem faced by all of us. It is not an excuse to blame the other guy and suggest your viewers and listeners stop tuning in the other network.

Limbaugh and Fox may choose to believe that its the other guy making the incendiary speeches, but when one network clearly has the eyes and ears of the vast majority of conservatives then they have the bulk of the responsibility to call for restraint when its the right wingers pulling the triggers.

Fox and Clear Channel need to start calling for restraint with the same zeal they’re using terms like “baby killer,” “Socialist” and “closet Muslim.”

A debate has been raging among Media Matters, Daily Kos, Gawker.com and Tommy Christopher over at Politics Daily over a Jake Tapper piece about President Obama playing the Hussein card as he speaks to the Muslim world. I have to agree with Christopher and come to Tapper’s defense.

For the past 8 years, we’ve done everything we possibly can to inflame American sentiments against Muslims, and to inflame middle-eastern Muslims against the United States.

I knew if we could get through the campaign without the Hussein part of Barack Hussein Obama completely overwhelming the percentage of the electorate with one word attention spans, this would suddenly become a feature as we explain to the peoples of the mideast that we’re not all oil-grabbing Christian Soldiers: we just had the misfortune to elect some of them to lead us.

Every few months the left wing noise machine forgets that it’s politics we’re playing here, and sometimes the shadows turn out larger and more influential than the characters who cast them. When we forget that, unpredictable results can occur. We got our ass handed to us by Lieberman; we made him a bigger monster than he would have been had we left him alone.

This is a damn good thing Obama’s doing, and its good journalism that points it out. We didn’t like the press cowed by the nationalist jingoism of Bush/Cheney, but we seem hell-bent to repeat it by not tearing up the pre-election talking points now that the Hussein card may turn out to be trump.

We tend to forget that the commercial model that brings us “free” television takes a toll on content.  We learned recently that AT&T may have given Conway, Arkansas groups lessons on how to vote.

Jeff Reisdorfer (@JeffSays) says this isn’t cheating and I have to agree, but its an excellent reminder that though American Idol claims its goal is to find and expose new talent, its prime directive is really to sell product. When one of those products is the votes themselves, and they’re willing to sell as many votes as AT&T customers are willing to buy, it makes the whole enterprise not very credible.

“Judge Judy” makes local stations’ adjacent commercial time particularly attractive to local ambulance chasers, soap operas were so completely designed to sell detergent that they even were so named. And American Idol does an amazing job, even in light of declining ratings, in selling texting to teenage girls.

When Randi Rhodes returned to the air today, now syndicated by Clear Channel’s Premiere division, she didn’t get her old timeslot back at her old hometown WJNO.  Sean Hannity replaced her when her relationship with now-defunct syndicator Nova-M radio blew up.

Hannity’s numbers in her old timeslot at the station where she actually originated her show are beating her, according to John Hunt, market manager for Clear Channel West Palm Beach.  So Rhodes will return, timeshifted to 6-9 PM, where uber-reactionary Mark Levin was previously heard.

But Rhodes will be live again starting June 1 on another Clear Channel AM station, according to Hunt, who won’t make the formal announcement for a couple of weeks. This new station will have a better signal than WJNO, Hunt added.

South Florida progressive radio took a hit when 940 WINZ, Miami flipped to The Sports Animal 940.  Clear Channel owns one other AM facility in Palm Beach County, 1230 WBZT now programming business and variety talk. WBZT’s signal is superior to WJNO’s.

Arriving early at the IMAX for opening Thursday’s second show gave me half an hour in the theater to watch the patrons; everywhere was life imitating art. In the nearly 43 years since the franchise premiered on NBC at the start of the 1966 television season, the audience is almost an embodiment of the predictions in Gene Roddenberry’s mind when he first proposed the series nearly 50 years ago.

As we waited, we talked about our expectations with our communicators flipped open. We all had them. and they’re more full featured that the first predictive models. Some of us twittered and texted, others checked news. Still others watched video that had more inherent resolution in the palms of their hands than the original transmission of the first Star Trek episodes.

Video, which offered so little quality that 60s television was produced on film and converted to television at the last minute, has changed places with film. Today, if film is even used for acquisition, it is converted to video for special effects work, and then converted back to support the legacy projection systems that still use it.

More important (POTENTIAL SPOILER AHEAD) the plot requires of the audience an understanding of time-space concepts that Star Trek helped many of us to understand.

The intervening years have expanded our knowledge of these concepts and popularized them to a public beyond sci-fi fans.

The cell phone is boon to nearly everyone except scriptwriters. Its dealt a lethal blow to any script with an O. Henry twist that one party doesn’t know a fact that another party would instantly communicate, if only they had the means to.

You either need a bit of business to disable the cell phone, or recast it as a period piece. This is a problem Star Trek has always had to deal with.

By including characters that exist multiply because of space-time manipulation, today’s Star Trek writers have a rich new vein to mine for a franchise that started when I was a teenager but with this brilliant rebirth will almost certainly outlive me.

We’re not traveling space, but if we’d had the right administrations for the last three decades we well might be. I know that audience was ready. They’d already adopted everything they could get their hands on, and that’s driven life to imitate art in a most wonderful way.

When William Randolph Hearst was the current incarnation of the devil we today call Rupert Murdoch, his premier columnist was one Westbrook Pegler. Books have been written about Pegler damning him with faint praise, and there’s no lack of material to trash him. He started as a sports reporter and columnist, then moved to politics becoming the chief attacker of FDR. He was, for his day, O’Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh all rolled into one.

Time soured Pegler; he became a rabid anti-Semite and early proponent of the John Birch Society. But he was by all accounts a great writer. He was like Andrew Sullivan on steroids; somebody who could take a totally distasteful political theory and delight you with his description of it. His wit was lethal; he inspired the quote, “It feels good to have your throat slit by a professional.”

I wish I had him back for just a day, or even a small measure of his talent to describe what’s happened to the folks who sponsor the #tcot and #p2 Twitter hashtags. He was at his best when describing people in shouting matches with each other over meaningless fine points and irrelevant details. Even he might not be up to the task.

Hashtags are short tag descriptors that Twitter users include in their tweets so that downstream search engines and applications can perform automated categorizations. Both the left and the right have gotten into pissing contests in the last two weeks over what terms should be used, who may use them, and what they should mean.

Pegler would probably use a card game as metaphor. He liked those. Just when the players worked out what the winning hands were, and what all the chip colors meant, new players would arrive. They’d argue with the old players endlessly but then that argument would be eclipsed when even more players would show up with their own chairs, sit at the table and throw in a new deck of cards.

These twin catfights didn’t arise from conservatives being more anxious to monetize hashtags and website membership than liberals, or liberals unable to decide if good is enemy to the best or vice versa. Its because the players don’t own the card table, or the card room, or the game, nor do they make the rules. Twitter does that by allowing anybody to use #tcot and #p2 for anything they want, and unless that changes, we’re all arguing over the ownership of something we don’t own in the first place.