Howard Owens

You've got to admit, these are pretty bleak days for TiVo. Engadget has declared a deathwatch.

I would like to think that TiVo can be saved, because it is the superior technology. But being good is no guarantee of success in the marketplace.

Fine piece on The Maltese Falcon in SFGate.com by Eddie Muller , one of the first and possibly the finest example of film noir. A lot of good history on how the film came to be made, including the terrible taste of George Raft:

Raft was a bona fide star, but it was his connection to bona fide gangsters that gave him leverage with his home studio, Warner Bros. He had right of first refusal on every "tough guy" part. The previous year he'd turned down "High Sierra," giving Humphrey Bogart his first romantic lead. The following year he'd pass on "Casablanca." The year after that, he nixed Paramount's "Double Indemnity." It's a safe bet nobody ever asked George for advice on stocks or horses.

Is it no wonder Bogey is better remembered and more admired than Raft?

John Huston's version of Falcon was the third Hollywood adoptation of the Hammitt classic. Like the first two, it would have flopped if anybody but Bogey had played Sam Spade.

In previous postings, I've compared TiVo to Mac. Here's a story that takes the comparision one step further: TiVo needs a CEO like Steve Jobs.

TiVo is the superior technology, just as Mac in its early days. Apple survived because of visionary leadership once its core technology became a commodity. TiVo's core technology is evolving to the commodity stage quickly. Innovation won't necessarily save TiVo, but the company must negotiate the competitive environment with vision and courageous choices.

More broadband = more video. Easy equation. The hard numbers are, 80 percent increase in video streams.

Kevin Featherly reacts to a James Fallows essay that engages in a good deal of gnashing of teeth over the state of journalism.

I'm far more optimistic -- both about journalism, and about the direction of civic discourse and the role journalism plays it.

Let's start with this quote from Fallows:

But "general" news--the shared info on which people make decisions about policies, politicians, and the general business of self-government--is weaker than before. The most striking symptom was the "separate fact universes" of the 2004 elections. It's not just that half the public disagreed with the other half about opinions or policies. It's that they disagreed on basic facts -- e.g., whether Saddam Hussein had launched the 9/11 attacks.

Let's see, where do I start, with the straw man in Fallow's argument, or his mischaracterization of the actual debate, or his outright lie?

As I pointed out in June 2003, the assertion that most Americans believe Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks is highly dubious. The assertion has become a favorite canard of the left (which seems to hint as Mr. Fallows' own biases), but the left never talks about the contradictory poll numbers nor the flaw in how Gallup asked the question in the first place. Instead, the "poll data" is trotted out whenever the left (or some left-leaning journalist) wants to broad brush Bush supporters as misinformed.

The fact is, there are no "separate fact universes," because the facts are what they are. There are only highly partisan spins. The right makes a big deal about Atta's Prague-in-Spring visit, even though the evidence is murky, and the left ignores reports that show Saddam clearly coveted WMD and an opportunity to use them against American targets. Or to use one of Kevin's examples, disagreements over Bush's service record aren't over the facts, but which facts are facts (and not lies) and which facts are important. Remember, not all facts are equal, so if the left wants to argue about pay records, the right is free to cling to the evidence of discharge records.

Also, to be a fact, a statement must be immutable, otherwise it is merely an assertion. On both the left and the right, assertions are too often treated as facts, which might lead some to conclude there are "separate fact universes."

Where the right and left disagree, the complete smorgasbord of facts and assertions are available to both sides, but each side is highly selective in which facts are important and which assertions to believe. This isn't a bad thing. It is simple reality. And it's also the way it's always been. We just get more of it now. And it's louder now. But it's not new. Just think back to every pre-Internet election you ever lived through.

I think there is a certain smug elitism in the idea that we all most become fully informed to participate in an election, or even in a civic debate. The long-standing food chain of opinion and knowledge, which has remained in tact for more than 200 freedom-filled years, has served our democracy well. I don't believe the Internet or any changes in the journalism business have significantly altered how information passes through the chain. It's just that the chain has become longer and more complex, and a few links have decreased in importance.

But even at the bottom of the chain, the causally informed are far more knowledgeable than some partisans give them credit for. Some partisans may not like the results, but that doesn't make the casually informed any less wise.

In fact, everything that we're seeing now in the hue of Fallow's "separate fact universes" world only argues for the value of more channels of information and debate. The bigger the network, the smarter we all are. You have to wonder how much more effective the Karl Rove spin machine could be without the free-flowing networks of fact-checking and information follow up we have today. In some alternate universe, maybe we wouldn't know any better than but to selectively believe Saddam personally met with each of the hijackers. After all, the Washington press corps has rarely shown itself to be terribly industrious in ferreting out facts (Watergate not withstanding).

In other words, there is value in highly partisan fact checkers who push the envelop of evidence and opinion, so long as counter-weights exist that are equally vigorous. Let the information marketplace sort it all out. Markets are rarely wrong, and when they are, our society and our democracy can absorb the blow.

This change in the media landscape may unsettle those who cleave too religiously to MSM, but it makes the whole fact and context checking process more rigorous. This better serves democracy.

In this highly competitive environment, the only way professional journalism is going to survive is to be both good and business smart. It takes money to produce quality journalism. Donation-based bloggers can't do it on their own. As quickly as the turbulent and dynamic news business is changing, it will take smart, disciplined and savvy business leaders to keep the professional outlets of journalism alive. The most successful media businesses will be those that do the best job at maintaining credibility in an era when readers own the markets. Top-down journalism is dead, but that doesn't mean good journalism is dead. In fact, we're likely to get better journalism down the road because that will be the best way for media businesses to make money.

What we're seeing now in the marketplace is merely flux as the old guard is retired and the power of the marketplace shifts from producers to consumers. In the meantime, the old warts are showing, but warts have never been fatal. Journalism will be fine, and so will democracy.

Best Super Bowl commercial: CareerBuilder.com. See it on iFilm. I'm sure Ken Layne liked the monkeys in both the CareerBuilder and the Verizon commercials.

Other Super Bowl thought: Ex-Charger Rodney Harrison should have been the game's MVP.

Why will podcasting become popular? Because it's easy, as this video, "Four Minutes About Podcasting," shows

The counter argument might be that many people don't own MP3 players. Well, there's two rejoinders to that. First, more people will. Second, you don't need a portable MP3 player to listen to podcasts. Any computer will do.

It's all about the consumer controling the channel. In fact, channels as we knew them as kids are dying. From this time forward, it's all about the content, not the means of distribution. (Hat Tip: Glenn Franxman).

I came across two good journalism-related blogs today and thought I e-mailed myself the links so I could post about them tonight, and damn, if I only got one link in my gmail thingy.

Well, here's Michele Rosen's blog, and I'll have to get you the link to the other later.

Meanwhile, we get our first link from Susan Mernit, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last week in San Francisco.

UPDATE: The other blog is by David Feld.

Interesting change in strategy by the Hartford Courant Web site ... the former CTNow.com has ceased its portal-like ways ... CTNow is now strictly an entertainment site, which a nice youthful flare, and all the news that's fit to digitize can be found at a traditional newsy looking courant.com.

Both sites are fine.

I have some contradictory thoughts on the switch. On one hand, the whole local-news-site as portal phenonem of five or six years ago was slightly misguided. The newspaper brand is vitally important and newspaper Web sites should never have gotten way from that. However, in many, many markets, the local newspaper is THE major media player -- their Web sites should be a portal of sorts to of local information. Those sites should be community centers, community hubs.

That said, seperating out entertainment into its own, hipper, more interactive site makes a lot of sense. News audiences and entertainment audiences are very different, even if some times they are the same people.

CTNow.com ain't exactly lawrence.com, but then that's OK -- it's a very different market. The median age in Lawrence is 26. The median age in Hartford is 37. There are few communities in the U.S. with a median age in the range of Lawrence, which is one thing any newspaper site manager should look at when considering whether to duplicate what Rob Curley is up to these days.

My favorite feature of the new CTNow.com is the calendar for upcoming events this week right at the top of the page. Very smart.

In their own words, "two nerdy girls" have decided to start a locally focused online publication. Cara and Katie are writing about it and other online news observations on their new blogs. Katie seems more interested in local news and Cara is studying convergence. Both topics of personal interest. I plan to keep an eye on what they're up to.

To fix journalism, Doug Moe suggests, get Deadline USA released on Video/DVD.

As he notes, a lot of journalist love this movie.

I've seen it. I love it. I'm not sure there's enough journalist who would take an interest to make it's release commercially viable. However, every journalist should see it. If you're a journalist and you don't love this movie, I question your suitability for the profession. Sure, it's a bit of sap and pap, but the whole notion of "it's the press, baby ... and there's nothing you can do to stop it ... " is the right touch of sentamentality about what motivates good reporters.

I still believe journalism is an honorable profession and that it should attract bright young people who believe in truth and justice. It should also attract people who feel compelled, absolutely compelled, to get the story out.

Is Deadline USA a great movie? Not by a long shot. The plot is a bit contrived and even by the standards of the day, the acting (except Bogart, of course) is a little stilted. I would also argue with Moe that it's the best journalism movie ever. I'd put All the President's Men, Citizen Kane and His Girl Friday ahead of it.

But I do have a poster of Deadline USA hanging in my office at work (along with a Kane poster).

I got the Moe link via Romenesko, who also links to this Moe column that mentions Deadline USA in context of Peter Hamill's love of the movie (Hammill is one of my wife's favorite authors). Also, this Bob Green column, which includes the key closing dialogue.

And all but the first quote in the IMDB listing are ones I contributed, including this favorite: "About this wanting to be a reporter, don't ever change your mind. It may not be the oldest profession, but it's the best."

I'll never be able to argue with that.

If you haven't seen the movie, it's on teevee every six months or so. Just set your Tivo to wait for it.

Just got this e-mail from my old bandmate Dave Ybarra:

Sounds Like San Diego

A Fundraiser For Folk Arts Records

Sunday January 30 2005
Dizzy's

Sun Jan 30: SOUNDS LIKE SAN DIEGO - A fundraiser for integral San Diego mainstay Folk Arts Records, who recently lost their lease after decades on Adams Ave., featuring an evening of songs made famous throughout the years by San Diego performers, ably covered by some of San Diego's best, including: Joey Harris, the Shambles, Rookie Card, The Truckee Brothers, Mark Decerbo & Four Eyes, Jose Sinatra, The Coyote Problem, Berkley Hart, Carol Ames, Gregory Page & Tom Brosseau, Lou & Virginia Curtiss, Derek Duplessie, 21 Grams, Modern Rhythm, Roy Ruiz Clayton, The Wild Truth , Billy Shaddox and surprise guests.

If you're in San Diego, you should go to this. Folk Arts is one of the best record stores on the planet.

I'm getting to where I enjoy photo blogging more than text blogging. I've always enjoyed photography, but it was always a hobby that costwise was well beyond my means. I've been fortunate to be gifted some very nice cameras, but the cost of film was prohibitive, not to mention that if you want to crop, dodge and burn, you need your own darkroom (read $$$$).

Until digital photography came along.

I've just posted pictures I took today in San Francisco on my buzznet. I hope you'll take a look.

Digital video is pretty cool, too, though I don't do as much with it as I should. Even though when I was a reporter I had no trouble marching up to a stranger and saying, "I'm with the Daily Planet and I have a question for you," I seem to be way too shy to approach some guy on the street with, "I'm a blogger ... " Maybe I need to leave that sort of thing to the young and the hip.

At any rate, here's two quick videos I shot today. First, a panorama of Powell Street and Market. Second, the arrival and departure of a BART train.

Business Week says:

Something powerful is at work here: The explosion of the global digital "back-channel."

It's a good piece that brings together a few of the elements of new media that are changing the world. Not discussed are P2P, TVIP and wireless devices.

Remember all of the hype about the World Wide Web back in 1995? And remember how with the dot com bust, the nay sayers were able to say, "See. Told you. Hype." Well, it's not hype now. It's happening now. All of the world-changing potential of digital technology is coming to fruition, and the change seems to be accelerating, at least to me.

I'm reading Gillmor's book now, and going through his history of personal publishing, it brings up some painful memories -- painful because I knew back then what I should have been doing, but I wasn't doing it. I was trying to build businesses instead of acting on my instinct about personal publishing. I remember telling a group of fellow journalists in Washington D.C. that the Web was going to change information flow in ways we couldn't totally understand at that moment, that somewhere there was the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs working away in his garage developing some information delivery platform that was going to profoundly effect us all, and that the Web made possible a new age of pamphleteers. Well, no one individual can get sole credit for the personal publishing revolution going on now, but the rest of what I said has proven essentially correct.

As much as I loved pontificating, you would have thought I would have started a personal Web site back then. What I wanted to do, but felt I didn't have time for, would be a distraction, wouldn't help my career, was start a Web site and publish a weekly opinion column. I should have done it. Now, I see, it probably would have been the best thing for my career I could have done.

Instead, I came to the blogging game late (stared April 2002).

One observation's of Gillmor's I want to touch on -- how Sept. 11 changed blogging. I find it ironic that the enemies of freedom and democracy played such an important role of spurring on a democratic revolution that no terrorist will ever be able to stop. What the net is and where it's going (P2P, as Gillmor notes, is an essential tool in protecting freedom) makes effectively ever quashing freedom an impossibility.

I introduced you to Phil the Barber here. Also, wrote about him here.

Recently, Phil turned 90.

He still cuts my hair.

Ken Layne offers directions and background for tourists heading to San Diego with an interest in sites of murder and suicide. He mentions three infamous crimes, but if wants visitors to find ghosts of mass death, I would include a four-block area of North Park around Dwight and Nile streets.

On a clear-skied Monday morning, Sept. 25, 1978, a Cessna being flown by a student pilot, collided with PSA Flight 182. On the ground, some people slept, a few tended to their gardens or hurried off to work. In North Park, homes and apartments are tight against each other, so the neighborhood is thickly populated. But Monday is a work day, and North Park has never been a haven for the leisure class, so most of the dwellings were empty that morning. When the jet hit the ground, a four-block area burst into flames, yet only seven people on the ground were killed. There were 144 people on the Flight 182 and all perished.

I heard about the crash from classmates before I ever saw the news. A few of them had seen the plane go down. My high school, Grossmont, in La Mesa, is probably about 20 miles from the crash site. I was in gym class at the time of the crash, but on that particular day, we were playing basketball indoors. When I got home that afternoon, my mom had the news on, transfixed by the horror of burning homes and black skies on TV. I guess the initial TV coverage was pretty graphic, but I never saw that. A picture of some burned out homes can be seen on this page.

The photo of the plane going down was taken by an amature photographer who was refueling his car at a nearby gas station. The Evening Tribune, which ran the picture that afternoon big and wide, won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the tragedy.

I first visited the neighborhood a few months after the crash. There was nothing there. It was a sad, lonely place. Now, homes have been rebuilt and if you didn't know about the crash, you wouldn't recognize the place as a site of disaster, even the architecture is totally different from the surrounding homes.

I've done my fair share of media bashing. I have a particular anxiety about how journalism is practiced within the beltway and New York. But I take issue with this sentence from Prof. Reynolds:

If more journalists believed that their craft was that important, they'd be less willing to dilute it with efforts to shift opinion, wouldn't they?

The implicit premise, as I take it, is that a good portion of journalists, if not most, practice a shaddy form of the profession, repeatedly infusing their reporting with political agendas.

I've worked at a variety of newspapers over the years, and freelanced for many more. I've been deeply involved in our professional organizations and I know reporters and editors all over the country. I can count on half of one hand the number of reporters I suspected of putting slant ahead of honest reporting.

As much as I am a critic of the beltway media, I would still bet that the majority of reporters there work hard to remain non-partisan observers.

That's not to say that even good reporters don't have blind spots to their own prejudices, but that's very different from deliberate distortion, and I think even the blind spots are rarer than they seem.

I believe the vast majority of journalists care deeply about their craft, their ethics and their calling to be the eyes and ears of the people who depend on their reports.

It's fine to bash bad reporting, but it's a mistake, I think, to broadbrush the profession.

San Diego means a lot to me. It's the place of my birth. Much of my family lives there, including my parents. The friends I've known the longest, I met in San Diego. San Diego is a place where my love of music was nurtured, and where I learned to play golf, and started smoking cigars and drinking gin, and the place I longed for during four lonely years in the USAF. It's where I went to college and my favorite sports teams all play their home games there. And, of course, it's also the place where I met and married my wife.

I love California. I've been to just about every corner of the state. I've lived in Lompoc and Santa Maria, and been to San Luis Obispo, Morro Bay, Paso Robles, Big Sur, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Redding, Sacramento, Fresno, Modesto, Bakersfield and spent at least a weekend a month for about a year prowling around Imperial Valley and the Borrego Desert. I've spent more Saturdays than I can count in Los Angeles. I've even spent a few hours once or twice in Orange County.

My career may eventually carry me away from California, and I would be okay with that, but I love this land with an ecosystem as varied, enigmatic and eclectic as the people who live here.

I will always call San Diego home, and to anybody reading this who might be involved in the decision, when the time comes, I want to be buried in El Cajon.

But Ventura is where I live, and more and more, day by day, I come to love it here. It doesn't have the emotional ties San Diego pulls, but the longer I'm here, the less I miss my home town.

When Billie and I first moved here, we were struck by how friendly everybody was. And how little traffic there was. How there was less graffiti and trash in the streets. You could always find parking at the mall and not wait for a table at the best restaurants in town, or stand in line at the movies. We would tell people, "Ventura is just like San Diego, but with less crowding and fewer cars on the freeway, and less smog and less crime."

We were fortunate to find a nice place three blocks from the ocean.

On its best days, palm-tree-laden Ventura is sun drenched and breezy.

In the aftermath of a month of rain, flooding and tragedy I've been reminded over the past three days just how beautiful Ventura can be. There are more days like these than there are of dreary darkness and wet pavement.

Like Paul, I can be content where I am or whatever my situation, but if I live another 60 years and spend them all in Ventura, I won't taste the salt of a single tear.

The full-bodied original of the picture with this post can be viewed through this link. I snapped the picture after turning down a street I'd never been on before. I was awed by the pre-evening view of the calm Pacific and the brooding Channel Islands over a weed-spammed field and the swaying palm trees in the distance along Harbor Blvd.

When I came back to blogging, I thought I'd try some experiments. 

I wanted to make the blog more magazine like, so I set up the home page to have a featured article, links to interesting articles and other blogs.  I've changed most of that.  I'm keeping the featured post at the top of the home page, but I'm dropping the other elements and making the rest of it like a normal blog.  If it's still not enough of a traditional blog for you, you can still use the "Blog" link to the left and go to that page.

Also, you'll notice the return of "comments."  There are two things going on here. One is that I want to play around with Haloscan, which seems like a pretty good comment system.  The other is, I miss having comments.  Only one reader has asked for them, but then, I don't have as many readers as I once did (you could help by linking to me!).  The main thing I want to avoid is getting sucked into stupid arguments.  I'll just have to test my discipline to say out of such things.

Vin Crosby has six predictions for 2005. All of them are interesting.

I agree there will be more arguments between the Church of Citizen Journalism and the Temple of MSM. Me, I'm a bit of an agnostic. The two religions need each other in ways many of the devote rarely acknowledge. Bloggers need MSM as a source content, and MSM needs citizen journalists to grow their businesses.

As for other content, 2005 could be the year of Internet deivery of video, so Vin and I are in step on that count.

Belo not withstanding, I think we're a little ways away from seeing the print side of the newspaper business absorbing online to prop up flagging print revenue. Not in 2005. Maybe 2007.

The Star tells the story of the 10 La Conchita victims. The vignette's will give you a sense of the kind of community La Conchita is and why people would choose to live there in spite of the danger.

Two great tastes that go great together -- XM Radio that behaves like TiVo.

Meanwhile, TiVo continues its slide toward Macinization -- the superior product that loses out as the technology becomes a commodity.

Fast Company looks at Microsoft and spells out three lessons we can learn about innovation.

A group of Pierpont residents got together this weekend and organized a used clothing sale to benefit the victims of the La Conchita mudslide. Billie and I stopped by there this afternoon. I've posted pictures my Storm gallery on Buzznet.

The city mothers and fathers of El Cajon did their best to ruin that city. And by that city, I mean downtown. They tore down nice old buildings and put up ugly ones. The mayor was on a quixotic quest to make El Cajon more like La Jolla. She didn't even get a cheap version of Santee.

At the beginning of my journalism career, I covered Ocean Beach in San Diego. The merchants' association there decided they wanted to do something about their flagging fortunes and essentially voted a tax on themselves. They persuaded the City Council to let them start a facade rebate program, and the city chipped in some community block grant money. The goal was to preserve the character and embrace the town for what it is -- a haven for second-hand bookstores, antique shops and clothing boutiques, with the occasional jewelry and flower shop. OB also had its dive bars, funky restaurants and odd gift emporiums. None of the businesses felt threatened by the improvements because it was clear the intention was to make business better, not different.

Slowly, Ocean Beach evolved into something that was a lot closer to La Jolla than Santee. Sure, some of the old businesses couldn't afford the rising rents because of the improved business climate, but many survived and thrived, and the news businesses that came in complimented OB's essential culture. OB is busier, looks nicer and attracts a wealthier class of clientele than it did 15 years ago.

It's the tale of two redevelopment projects -- one that embraced the strength of the community and another that rejected it. One succeeded and one failed. It's a lesson I've long felt Ventura would do well to pay heed to.

I've heard rumblings for as long as I've lived up here that the City Council wants to get rid of downtown's thrift shops and second-hand stores. I say, don't ruin downtown by driving out its most essential businesses. Thrift stores are to an aging downtown what Macy's and Robinsons-May are to shopping malls -- anchors that create traffic for the other businesses. Contrary to conventional wisdom, thrift stores attract the affluent and the artistic most of all. Sure, the poor use them, too, but is it a crime for poor people come downtown?

One anchor stores in downtown Ventura is Trueblood's. It's bills itself as a collectables shop, but it's really a funky and unique house of American culture featuring an odd assortment of the sublime and the crass of American commercialism on its shelves and walls.

Johnny Trueblood, a local musician and free spirit, has operated the shop for 30 years. By September, Trueblood will close the doors for the last time. He may reopen again somewhere else, but the rent along Main Street is getting too rich. He doubts he'll stay in Ventura.

I guess I can't really blame the city for this one, since officials can't stop a landlord from raising the rent, but it's a sad passing.

I was in Johnny's store today and I've posted some pictures to a special Buzznet gallery.

Stewart Rowlands is back.

Spam, spyware, security hacks -- they're killing the Internet according to this "sky is falling" report from the LAT.

A small but growing number of frustrated computer owners are coming to the same conclusion. They're giving up or cutting back their use of the Internet, especially at home, where no corporate tech support team will ride to their rescue.

Note the hedgy use of "growing number," which is quickly undercut by the Times' own reporting.

Seemayer is still in the minority. Overall Internet use continues to grow.

While I think writer Joseph Menn is hyperventilating a bit, I find few things about the Internet than AdWare.

The companies that produce these malicious programs are every bit as unethical and evil and spammers. I have no love for virus writers, and agree neither with their methods are their cause -- assuming most virus writers are doing so out of a cause of being anti-corporate/anti-microsoft, which does seem to drive a lot of virus writing, that and kiddies who are just curious about what they can do with a script. I don't like it, but I understand it. But spammers, adware makers are evil because they're trying to make a buck in the most unethical ways possible. And that's just plain wrong.

On the other hand, these users who are just throwing up their hands and quitting are terribly short-sighted. First, because the Internet is the future. Second, because it's pretty much their own damn fault that they got their machines infected. Using the Internet is fairly simple: Don't open attachments you're not 100 percent sure of; don't download software you shouldn't be downloading -- which means, know what you're downloading, and if you are unsure for any reason, don't download, no matter how badly you want it.

Why is that so hard?

My pal Matt Welch is back in L.A., and with lots of bloggy goodness.

The tragedy of La Conchita has dominated just about everybody's thoughts in Ventura County the last few days, and it's also been the subject of much discussion in the blogosphere.

There is nothing more tragic in these parts than the story of Jimmy Wallet, who lost his wife and three of his children to the massive mudslide while he went to the store to get ice cream. Wallet can be seen in this video trying desperately to find his family.

The blog takes on the disaster range from sympathy and curiosity to playing the blame game, and sometimes it's the residents who get blamed:

The only person you can blame is you, yourself and no one else. So call Dial-A-Lawsuit and take God to court for putting you in the wrong line when brains were handed out. Just make sure that you spell check the word “idiot” before you file it or God won’t be the only one laughing.

And sometimes it's the government:

I will bet that responsibility for these mudslides will be shirked. Which makes me wonder, why is there a disconnect between the responsibilities of the State and that of land developers. I think these fines levied against developers are a money-making racket for the State and cities, and that they only use environmental conservation as an excuse.

Must there always be somebody to blame?

The residents of La Conchita may or may not have taken fully into account the dangers they faced by living in the shadow of what is basically an overgrown sand dune, but I figure that's their business. Now, you can argue, I suppose, that it's our business, too, because taxpayers ultimately pay the price of rescue and recovery. But that's what governments do and that's why we pay taxes -- it's insurance against our own miscalculations as much as it is against acts of nature or the various cruelties of our fellow citizens. We pay taxes first and foremost to be protected. But in paying taxes, we don't necessarily gain a carte blanche right to tell other people how and where to live.

The vital fact here isn't that people choose to live in this dangerous place. It's that ten people are dead, including four members of a man's family. That's why we should care.

Ken Layne's new project can be found here. He writes about it here.

I haven't had time to fully explore it yet, but since it's Layne, you know it's good, vague business plan (sometimes the best kind) and all. But where's his link to RVClub.com?