RUY TUXEIRA GOES TO WAR?

I’VE MENTIONED IT BEFORE, but enough people have emailed me about it that I guess it’s worth mentioning again: The South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog is a collaborative resource blog set up to provide news, and ways to help, regarding the tsunami and its aftermath.

UKRAINE POST-ELECTION PHOTOBLOGGING: Very nice.

GOTCHER HEALTHCARE BLOGGING RIGHT HERE: Grand Rounds is up.

BLOGGERS TORTURED IN IRAN: Spread the word. It helped last time.

UPDATE: Sorry for the typo. Fixed now. That’s what I get for posting on the way out the door. But I didn’t want to wait!

AMAZON.COM is accepting donations for Tsunami relief. The total is currently $112,000.00, but it’s rising very rapidly. “Stingy,” eh?

UPDATE: Reader Jared Phillips writes:

I am absolutely amazed at what I am seeing – if you go to the amazon site you’ll see the click to donate. On that next page you see the amount collected and the number of donors.

Now click refresh on your screen.

It is increasing literally every single second. I am totally blown away. In the 5 minutes since I donated it has increased by 1,000 donors.

Yeah, I just looked and it’s headed toward $400,000 already. Doesn’t look stingy to me. I wonder if any of ’em were U.N. employees . . .

MORE: Jeff Jarvis says that Amazon is already sending more money for tsunami relief than the French government.

STILL MORE: Holy crap, it’s just broken a half-million bucks, less than four hours after it was at $112,000. Donations are about fifty bucks each. Stingy, eh? Well, here’s some more stinginess:

The Everett-based aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is headed to the Indian Ocean to help with tsunami relief efforts.

And there’s this:

More than 5,000 military personnel of the Navy’s Expeditionary Strike Group 5 will skip their New Year’s holiday on Guam to fulfill a humanitarian mission in Sri Lanka.

The USS Bonhomme Richard docked in Apra Harbor yesterday for what was originally planned to be a five-day stay, but was called to bring relief aid to the inhabitants of Sri Lanka who were devastated by a tsunami this past weekend.

Stingy, indeed.

BILL QUICK NOTES that there’s a hasty cleanup underway in some Ukrainian circles.

LANCE FRIZZELL is photoblogging from Iraq, where he reflects on priorities and reports that the U.N., together with CNN International, is managing to inadvertently boost troop morale. Wow, and it was already pretty good!

TSUNAMI DEATH TOLL at 59,000 now. We’ll never know the precise numbers, but I fear that it will rise considerably from this point simply because there are still affected areas that haven’t been heard from at all yet.

ROGER SIMON wonders whether the Left only cares about “our people,” and not those dadburned foreigners.

UPDATE: A reader emails that the author of the post, Ross Douthat, isn’t a lefty but a righty. It’s so hard to tell the difference, nowadays.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Lengthy response from Douthat, who seems upset, here. Hey, it’s not as if anyone’s accusing him of putting puppies in blenders. . . .

ARE THE NEW MEDIA COSTING THE OLD MEDIA MONEY? Well, quite possibly:

Free community Web site Craigslist has cost San Francisco Bay Area newspapers up to $65 million in employment advertising revenue, according to a report released Monday.

Craigslist, which generates more than 1 billion page-views each month, also has cost the newspapers millions more in merchandise and real estate advertising, and has damaged other traditional classified advertising businesses, according to a report published by Classified Intelligence.

Classified advertising is the big moneymaker for newspapers, and it’s the aspect most readily undercut by the Internet. But it’s only one of many such vulnerabilities

UPDATE: And there’s not much sympathy for ’em. Reader Greg Kane emails:

Boo hoo for the newspapers with their monopoly prices.

This year a three line ad in the Denver Post cost me $108 per week. How
come the MSM is only outraged at other peoples’ greed?

Beats me.

CAPT. ED MORRISEY is trying to organize a demonstration of appreciation at the Pentagon, and wants your help.

FREE MUSIC! Earlier, I mentioned Joey Kingpin, and you can stream lots of stuff from his A Beat Down in Hell Town album for free at the Radikal Records site. They’re still samples, but they’re longer than the ones on Amazon.

Radikal is a label I like, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of their compilations, too, including the “Radikal Techno” series. There are streaming samples there, as well.

NORM GERAS rounds up theological and philosphical responses to the Asian tsunami. However, he leaves out the tacky responses.

UPDATE: More on the evolving (and rather pathetic) blame game, here.

NEW YORK TIMES: Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster:

For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.

The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help.

Indeed. Nice to see people noticing. (Via Todd Pearson).

JUST THE ESSENTIALS, please. Wireless and breakfast!

BRUCE BARTLETT ON BLOGS:

What I have discovered in the past year is that there is increasing specialization among bloggers, with more staking out narrow areas of commentary. . . .

One disappointment this year in the blog area has been the weakness of some institutional blogs, those sponsored by newspapers and thinks tanks. They are often unreadable and seldom linked to. It confirms my view that blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic and need to be pretty independent in order to be successful.

I believe that the Internet has barely scratched the surface in using blogs to analyze and disseminate information. I look forward to their continued evolution.

Me, too!

DAN RATHER, PETER JENNINGS, and a Marine. Heh.

VARIOUS QUESTIONS FROM THE CULT OF THE IPOD, ANSWERED: Did I buy the wireless transmitter that I mentioned but said I wasn’t going to buy just yet? Yes (how well some people know me!). How is it? It’s . . . okay. If you get into the car and just turn it on, it sounds pretty good. If you switch to it after either listening to the iPod on headphones or the CD player in the car, though, you can hear the difference. It’s probably best to think of it as a car charger with additional wireless capabilities — OK for occasional use, but not high fidelity. And though it’s not cheap, it’s not really very expensive, either.

How do I like iTunes? I like it a lot, and I’ve bought a few songs (Paul Oakenfold’s “Ready, Steady, Go!” is a winner, and I’m not usually a huge fan of his) and even the latest Thievery Corporation remix EP. It’s cool, but there are strange omissions. For example, the latest Joey Kingpin album, Stereo Thriller, is available on iTunes, but the (to my mind superior) predecessor, A Beat Down in Hell Town, isn’t. (You can listen here for samples from Beat Down (I recommend “Transylvania A-Go-Go) but strangely there are no samples online for Stereo Thriller. It’s not bad, you know, I just like the earlier album better.) It’s still not an Amazon.com for online music, but it’s quite cool, and it’s easy to imagine spending a lot more on music than I spent on the iPod.

Various non-iPod-cult members have told me that I should have bought other players (the Creative Zen Micro seems a favorite) but all I can say is Foolish doubters, you will be cast into the lake of fire!!! that having heard so much about the iPod from so many readers, and having observed the strong devotion it inspires in its owners, I wanted to check it out and I’m quite pleased so far.

UPDATE: Reader and cult-member Dave Whidden says that this armband is a must-have (picture here). And Brannon Denning says he’s had trouble finding open stations for the tuner above, but he lives in a bigger city than I do.

PETS.COM LOST A LOT OF MONEY — but dogblog Lab-Tested is still around. It pays to have low overhead, I guess.

THE NEWS COVERAGE HAS GOTTEN ALMOST THIS BAD:

Washington, DC – Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, a international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly “make water spirits angry.”

The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled “Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad,” the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.

Sigh.

OVER AT THE CRIMPROF BLOG, a look at the surprisingly common phenomenon of phony lawyers. Also, a bizarre death penalty deal: “Lopez got 10 years, Hutchinson was sentenced to death. Some people can afford to hire better lawyers than others, and the sentence can turn on that, but can it really be that death can turn on how much you have to pay the family?”

Weregild — it’s not just for Vikings anymore!

JASON VAN STEENWYK takes apart Bob Herbert. (“Again, Herbert seems wholly ignorant of some pretty basic facts here.” And again, and again . . . .) And this related post by fellow military-blogger Baldilocks is worth reading, too.

THOUGHTS ON DISASTER PREPAREDNESS, DISASTER RESPONSE, and societal information processing, over at GlennReynolds.com.

MICHAEL BARONE LOOKS AT RAMPANT FOGEYISM.