Category: Uncategorized

Webcasters are already going off the air after the Librarian of Congress published the final fee structure for webcasting.

The main effect of the rates are that many people who have set up small Internet broadcasts that reach at most hundreds of people will have to pay the same sort of royalty rates that major radio stations that reach hundreds of thousands of people do.

Oh, and the rates are retroactive back to October 1998. A lot of people running small webcasting streams in their spare time suddenly own RIAA a big chunk of money.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell’s in the news again for supporting a Southern Baptist preacher who attacked Islam’s founder for being a “demon-possessed pedophile.” Rev. Jerry Vines, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, blamed religious pluralism in the United States for our nation’s many problems (what problems?) Vines said,

They would have us believe that Islam is just as good as Christianity. Christianity was founded by the virgin-born son of God, Jesus Christ. Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives, the last one of which was a 9-year-old girl.

. . .

And I will tell you Allah is not Jehovah, either. Jehovah’s not going to turn you into a terrorist.

And it’s not just Islam that Southern Baptist presidents have problems with. In 1987, former Southern Baptist president Bailey Smith told an audience that, “God almighty doesnÂ’t hear the prayer of a Jew.”

The real problem with Fallwell, Vines, et al is that they agree with the single worst aspect of Islam in completely rejecting secularism and a strict separation between church and state.

Source:

Anti-Muslim Remarks Stir Tempest Leading Evangelicals Back Baptist Preacher. Alan Cooperman, The Washington Post, June 20, 2002.

My hometown paper, the Kalamazoo Gazette, had a small front space on the front page to fill so they rewrote an Associated Press story which in turn simply rewrote a press release from an advocacy group with an astonishing finding — it turns out that fast food isn’t good for you.

Now I know most of you think that when you order a Big Mac, a Supersized Fry and Coke that this is the ideal meal, but the folks at the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity somehow learned that all of those supersized fast food value meals are in fact just loaded with excessive calories, fat and salt.

Moreover, those dastardly McDonald’s and Burger King chains are actually making it cheaper to get supersized meals! Apparently they missed the memo explaining that, for the good of the nation, food should be priced as expensively as possible to save us from our own bad habits.

I know I’m changing my habits — no more McDonald’s and Burger King. Besides, the Dairy Queen is closer.

The University of California at San Diego is currently trying to suppress a student-published satire newsletter in a case that is truly unbelievable.

At UCSD there is a nutty extremist Hispanic group called MEChA. In 1995, MEChA was involved in a bit of a free speech controversy involving its newspaper, Voz Fronteriza. After a Latino officer with the Immigration and Naturalization Service was killed in California, MEChA ran an editorial about the case called “Death of a Migra Pig.” Among other things, the editorial said,

We’re glad this pig died, he deserved to die . . . All the Migra pigs should be killed, every single one…the only good one is a dead one…The time to fight back is now. It is time to organize an anti-Migra patrol…It is to [sic] bad that more Migra pigs didn’t die with him.

That drew nationwide coverage and calls to censor MEChA. UCSD Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Joseph W. Watson said at the time that MEChA was protected by the First Amendment. In a letter Watson said that students have

. . .the right to publish their views without adverse administrative action….Student newspapers are protected by the first amendment of the U.S. constitution.

Switch to 2002 and it turns out that what Watson meant to say was that MEChA has the right to say what it wants, but no other student newspaper at UCSD does.

The Koala is a student-run satire newspaper. In November it sent a reporter to an open MEChA meeting. Later, another student who was at that same meeting approached the editors of The Koala and sold them some photos he had taken at this open meeting. The Koala ran a story making fun of MEChA accompanied by one of the photos.

In February 2002, UCSD formally charged The Koala and two students who attended the MECha meeting with student code violations for “obstruction or disruption of teaching, research, administration, disciplinary procedures, or other UCSD or University activities.” According to Watson, taking photographs at an open meeting of a student group is unconscionable. Watson issued a statement saying, “We condemn The Koala’s abuse of the Constitutional guarantees of free expression and disfavor their unconscionable behavior.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Student Press Law Center are helping out The Koala folks though, as is typical with such cases, the trial of the students will take place in a secret Star Chamber environment.

Not that I’d urge you to contact him or anything but Joseph W. Watson, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs can be reached at 858-534-4370; [email protected]

Sources:

Student Humor Magazine Prosecuted for Parody at UCSD University Decision Expected This Week. Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, June 18, 2002.

Glenn Frazier has one of the moreinteresting posts in the interminable debate among some webloggers over their traffic (as I’ve said before, I think most of those claims are meaningless since they rely on bogus metrics like unique visitors).

Frazier focuses on what drives traffic to weblog sites, especially how links from well-trafficked site translate into increased traffic on smaller, lesser known sites. One of the things Frazier talks about is whether or not it makes sense to write an entry specifically with the intent of trying to increase the likelihood that someone like Glenn Reyonlds will link to it.

I wrote several articles on this site with the hope that Reynolds specifically would link to them (which he did). My advice — it makes sense to do so if your weblog is getting low traffic (under 1,000 page views a day), but once you’re getting decent traffic, it’s probably not worth it. There’s still nothing that beats having your web site show up in the first ten results of a Google search.