Yikes

The agency said Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar Bin Sultan has refused to take responsibility for the Saudi embassy in Washington. The agency cited a source as saying he hasn't entered the embassy in years.

I have no idea how reliable this particular news source is - I've never heard of the "World Tribune". I just had to marvel at the idea that an Ambassador with more than ten years of experience on the Washington scene, one who enjoys the reputation of being one of the most influential diplomats in the country, has *NOT SET FOOT IN HIS OWN EMBASSY IN YEARS*. The mind boggles.

Oh, yeah - and we expelled over seventy Saudi diplomats over the last month. For acting as propagandists for al Queda.

Wait, what?


Via Instapundit.

Demonstrating why you should never, ever take your political cues from performing artists, Moby endorses Al Sharpton. Notice how his criteria are entirely performative - Sharpton is well-spoken, gives a good performance, sounds good on the stump, the endorser "likes" him. Moby's reasons for endorsing his candidate are entirely presentational - how he comes across. No mention of Sharpton's career failure to get elected to so much as the borough council; no mention of his history of political blackmail, monumental dishonesty, nor his utility to the New York Republican Party as a racial spoiler against mainstream Democratic contenders. The only thing that matters is what kind of show Sharpton puts on - how much love he gives an audience.

Never trust an artist with your politics - for every Reagan you luck onto, you'll find yourself burdened with three dozen Sean Penns, Susan Sarandons, Errol Flynns, Mobys, or Babara Streisands.

Via Tacitus.

You gotta love a guy whose secretary starts conversations with "Listen, asshole..." Joe Trippi makes me look like a people person in comparison. Of course, Carville has pretty much the same reputation... the only difference is that Carville actually wins campaigns. In retrospect, I can't imagine what inspires politicians to hire Trippi. The concentrated charisma of monumentally obnoxious egotism?

That article was proofread by a monkey, by the way. Every instance of "office" has been replaced with the word "once". Does GQ actually have any editors, or do they just put random relatives on the masthead?

"They're robocalling our ones," he moans. Their "ones" are the Iowans they've identified as absolutely, positively Dean voters (though it would turn out that they were absolutely, positively wrong on the number). He has just gotten a report from the field that Dean "ones" are getting bombarded with computer-generated phone calls telling them to make sure to caucus for Dean—then giving them the wrong address.
Who would do such a thing?
"Kerry," he snaps. "They're the only asshole snake campaign that would do it."

You know, when Republicans indulge in this sort of ratfucking, Josh Marshall is all over it. I don't remember him yelling about this. Do you? Of course, it could be Trippi's own cultist-slacker volunteers getting their call-sheets mixed up, and sending their people to the wrong places *by accident*. I wouldn't put it past the headcase loons the Deans apparently fielded in Iowa.

Hrm. This was written by a "Lisa Depaulo". I know it's sexist of me, but the article really read "male" to me. I guess it's just because you don't see many female writers doing gonzo, let alone political gonzo. The Gender Genie agrees with me – it gave the article a 6316/9086 male score.

Via Tom McGuire.

I regularly read a webcomic called "Life of Riley" by the Clan BOB collective. It's a half-gaming, half-apocalyptic soap opera sort of deal. Goofy, but lots of fun. They recently introduced Lilith as a character, and made an offhand reference to Nippur bowls, which went right over my head. They were kind enough to provide a link to a paper on Nippur bowls in particular, and Lilith traditions in general. That last link is a pretty solid paper on the textual references to Lilith over the millennia, from secondary Gilgamesh stories and Isaiah to rabbinical satires and medieval Kabbalistic arcana.

The rabbinical satire, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, sounds interesting. Sadly, it seems as if there has never been a full English translation of the book. There's a partial translation in an out-of-print book called Rabbinic Fantasies (Stern, David and Mirsky, Mark J. (1990). Rabbinic Fantasies; "The Alphabet of Ben Sira". New Haven: Yale University Press); looks like Pattee Library has a copy on campus. Maybe I'll make a trip of it this weekend.

"A tragedy for the American soldiers, the British, the Poles and every one else ...who have to struggle on bitterly against the worst kind of nihilists, and have been getting damn little support or even moral solidarity from people who describe themselves as antifascists in the world's richest and fattest neighborhoods."

Have I mentioned lately just how much I adore Paul Berman? He's like Hitchens without the conversion-experience attitude.

...and there was nothing left to do but to hit each other over the head with our respective drinks.

There's nothing quite so amusing as having a writer defend a Republican against leftist rage by calling it 'false consciousness.' It would have been perfect if he had thrown in a line about 'mystification'.

Via Roger L. Simon.

Ben "Chromal" Hauger emails a link to a fairly cool London art project: a pink tank.

Tres cool. I wonder why there was a T-34/85 parked in the middle of London? Where the hell did it come from? They don't identify what it is in the accompanying text - it's a late-war Russian tank from WWII - a T-34 with a bigger turret & a high-velocity 85mm gun. So far as I know, the British never got any of them, unless it's a capture from Korea or the Suez War.

I mean, it could be a Bob Rector-type collector's tank, but why would somebody put tens of thousands of dollars into importing a tank and then abandon it in the middle of London? To judge from the "before" pictures, it was a rusting, abandoned grafitti-magnet.

It looks as if Lieberman's irresponsible and feckless disregard for the financial interests of the providers of his campaign funds might possibly provide me with the opportunity to be equally irresponsible with my primary vote when its finally Pennsylvania's turn to close it's collective eyes and wing one in the general direction of the electoral dartboard. Yay, Joe.

You'll never be president, but at least you can provide an ideological out for the last half-dozen or so Scoop Jackson Democrats left in the party.

Mark Miyake of Abode of Amritas asks what the word "well" is doing in this sentence:

Well,* that wasn't Sean Kinsell's intention, but his words do describe the world view of...

I'm not sure what the technical term is for it, but I've always called them "throat-clearers". Words such as "like" or "well" or "ano", noises that are half-word and half-nonsense, like "er" and "um" and "ah". They're informal oral devices, which aren't technically supposed to be used in formal settings such as public speech or formal writing. Or at least, that's what I think they are.

So how do you spell it "Hawaii" or "Hawai'i"? The state front-page spells it in the former fashion, the governor's page spells it with the apostrophe. And what the hell is up with a state website where the only functioning link is the one to the governor's page? Half-assed half-hearted half-state bullshit, if you ask me.

With all this news about the primaries, and with all the buzz about the "accelerated" primary season, I was getting all excited about my first serious primary as a Democrat. So when is Pennsylvania's primary? April 27th, same as always. What the hell?

California, Alaska, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest are screwed on Election night by their placement several time-zones away from the electoral center of the country, in Eastern and Central. In decisive contests, the election is over before some West-Coasters can even get to the polls. Pennsylvania is self-screwed by the dinosaurs of our party committees, who didn't scramble for the top of the calendar with the rest of the "Feiler Faster" crowd. While it doesn't seem as if the nomination will be sewn up by April 27th, there's a pretty damn good chance that your and my first choices will have been driven out of competition by then.

Last cycle, when I was a liberal Republican, McCain had pretty much thrown in the towel by the time I had a chance to vote in the Pennsylvania primary. This cycle, it seems as if only Lieberman's stubborn intractability will make it possible for me to throw my vote away on a doomed protest candidate.

Al Franken assaulted a LaRouchite heckler at a Dean rally. You can't make this shit up, people. Not that I blame him too much. LaRouchites would try the patience of a saint, let alone your average hair-trigger pundit.

I got some email from a LaRouchite challenging me to a debate a week or two ago. At first, I thought this challenge had come out of the clear blue, until I remembered an offhand comment I had made on Command Post last summer, questioning whether the solicitation of campaign funds for a presidential run by a convicted felon wasn't some sort of fraud. I still can't believe that the LaRouchites are back. I would have thought that they'd be objects of Cold-War nostalgia, like the Hare Krishnas they used to share airport terminal soapbox space with.

There's a bit of a stink kicking up from a free festival in Edmonton, Alberta called Animethon. They're a festival more than a convention, in that they rely on donations and sponsors to cover their bills instead of registration fees. Looks like they have the usual secondary income sources, such as program-book advertising, dealers' fees, probably merchandising and the like. But these secondary income sources are generally not enough to cover much more than the immediate departments involved. Dealers' fees can be a profit center if structured properly, but it's been my experience that the advertising fees don't even cover the cost of the publishing department, let alone anyone else. Merchandising can be a profit center, but it's easy to overproduce. For the convention I work for, registration fees represent the overwhelming majority of income.

It sounds as if Animethon was using sponsor donations to cover the operating budget, probably from Grant MacEwan College, a school so obscure I've never heard of it before. I can't imagine how they've been making ends meet - probably by skimping on materials and relying on free meeting space from their college.

Nevertheless, they've got an "attendee" base of about three thousand. Keep in mind that these are "free ice cream" numbers - the "attendees" are the general public, and aren't technically paying to get in, although it sounds as if there's a "donation" requested for an associated charity. It's probably how the college is justifying free meeting space.

From the tone of open letter #1 and open letter #2, it sounds as if what we're looking at is a textbook case of conrunner burnout. The original staff core failed to put in place a mechanism for replacing themselves, and now find themselves chained to their positions with bonds forged equally of ego and despair.

Now, Canada is a different legal environment from that of the United States, and I don't know the particularities of the situation in which the Animethon people find themselves. It's possible that their association with a campus group, "BAKA", may prevent them from converting Animethon into a proper convention, with registration fees, etcetera. This is one of the reasons we didn't form our convention as an adjunct of the campus group in which it was originally conceived. Another reason was the bad prior experience this campus group had suffered as the result of a disastrous science fiction convention held by that group a number of years before I had become a member. In Animethon's case, it is the festival which is constrained by its ties to the parent campus group; in my campus group's case, it was the dangers the failure of yet another convention posed to a fragile campus club.

Any festival or convention the size and scale of Animethon [attendance
4,000?] taking place in the anime community or outside of it has a core of
paid staff that organize and operate it.

This excerpt caused a bit of excitement, in that it seems to make the false and malicious claim that all major conventions employ their core staff. (No, this is not true - not even for Project A-Kon, which is technically a for-profit company, unlike the rest of the pack, which are almost all non-profit corporations of one stripe or another.) However, if you read the rest of the paragraph:

I prefer to couch it in more psychological terms than financial though. When rewarded, even simply by a modest honorarium or free admission to what would otherwise be a paid event - staff have an incentive to put in an effort, and a penalty if they do not perform. An incentive to go the extra mile, to investigate, to pursue efforts they would not normally. A salary, honorarium or tangible fringe benefits from free food to preferred admission make a person accountable for their actions, and accountability is something sorely lacking in several incidents in even this past year.

As you can see, the author is using a definition of "paid staff" that is vague enough to include every category of worker from paid full-time employee to volunteer staff to gofers who get free crash space or a t-shirt in exchange for a number of hours worked. This type of vague definition would normally represent a masking attempt, usually in conjunction with some sort of slight-of-hand designed to move the goal-posts from "volunteer staff" to "full-time paid employee". I would not go that far in this case, as the author is clearly trying to exaggerate the steps necessary to convert the festival to a membership-fee convention.

No Cameras notes the recent burst of revelations about the dispersal of Pakistani nuclear technology to rogue states in the last ten years or so. I'd like to note that all of the public hand-wringing from the anti-proliferation crowd that I can remember from the "New World Order" Nineties was about the materials, technologies, weapons, and scientists of the former Soviet Union. Perhaps it's just my selective memory, but it seems to me that everyone was worried about chaos and anarchy, while all the time, a state actor or that state actor's direct employees, were distributing those very prohibited technologies with a metaphorical fire-hose.

I'm not a libertarian, but it's my increasing feeling that the state actor is always to be feared first, and not last.

Pixy Misa of Ambient Irony is celebrating the Australia Day weekend with his granddaughter Trixie's rambling, highly critical review of Allistar Reynold's Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and Elizabeth Moon's Trading in Danger, and how peculiar certain scientifictional assumptions appear in retrospect.

I can't find words strong enough for a proper recommendation of these articles. Go read them - really.

Hey, Pixy, how's that novel coming?

One of the more interesting non-polemical bits from Fagan's The Long Summer was the idea of ecotone-straddling. This is a practice of groups which settle on the borders between one habitat ("ecotone" is the term he used) and another. That is, instead of planting your village in the middle of a plain, or in the middle of the hills, you want to settle on the edge of the plains and the hills. When the weather and season favors the grains and animals of the plain, you can live off of the bountiful plain. When the weather or season turns the other way, you can go hunting, or harvesting nuts and such, in the hills. The idea is a sort of hedging of bets - by placing yourself on the edge of two or more habitats, you can enjoy the safety of an ecological back-up.

You can sort of see the same effect occurring in the blogspheres. People whose reading and links are largely within the same ideological habitat, are less fruitful of interesting material than those that straddle real ideological divides. Someone with one foot in libertarian circles, and another in leftist circles is going to have more to talk about to each side of the divide, largely because she's going to be able to pass material gathered in one circle, and offer it as a novelty in the other circle. But it also means that actual news that won't grab the denizens of one circle, will be interesting to the other. Thus is avoided the dreaded blog-famines driven by temporary droughts of originality, ambition, or interest.

My personal frame of reference for talk about corporate governance was my term of service on the board of directors of a fannish non-profit corporation. Now, the interests of this group were essentially non-economic. The idea was to run a convention, not make anybody rich, not employ anybody, not serve anybody's financial or legal interest. The corporation existed as a shield to permit the activities inherent in running a fan convention to occur without serious legal or economic risk to any of the participants. The goal was to allow the convention to run, and to continue to run, without exposing anyone to serious risk of legal liability or economic loss. The corporation, and thus the board, exists to serve these interests. There aren't any shareholders to speak of - in a 501(c)3, they're replaced by a membership, (in our case, Active Members) who don't have any serious financial interest in the corporation. The Active Members and the "members" - the attendees of the convention - pay membership dues which give them certain rights as defined in the corporate bylaws. This does not give them any claim on revenues, profits, or other financial considerations that the corporation might produce.

The "high-risk" pressure from the membership doesn't exist in the form of a profit-maximizing interest, as it would in a for-profit corporation, but rather in demands for the coolest convention possible. The "low-risk" pressure from the management of the convention - the fear of failure - is less than you would think, due largely to short management terms. The management of the convention serves at the pleasure of the president, who is defined in the bylaws as that year's con-chair. He cannot serve more than one term concurrently. Similar bylaws provide for short terms of office for the other offices - you can't hold an office for more than three years, and you can't hold a seat of the board for longer than, hrm, six years I think.

The actual conservative pressure, by the way, is expressed largely from a distinct group of Active Members, some number of which are usually representing their faction on the Board. This group is always pushing hard for a secondary priority - the creation and maintenance of a "disaster" reserve of capital equivalent to "one convention" - the resources necessary to fund and operate one year's convention, in the case of a total fiscal failure in any particular year. Think of it as a granary against cataclysmic drought. This reserve is more an ambition than an actuality, mostly because the convention and its budget keeps growing beyond what might have accumulated in the current reserve. Cold-funding a convention of 300, 1200, or even 5000 members is far cheaper than cold-funding a convention with attendance in five digits.

So far, the board has been able to avoid serious problems of self-dealing and fraud. There was a problem a few years ago, when I was the President, but the issue involved an individual who was not on the board proper. The board came together, charged the individual with returning the misappropriated property and capital, and that was that. In practice, it worked more as a shunning, than any sort of legal procedure, but it did work. At least, I haven't heard of any similar incident since then. Other convention-corporations, with much more rigid, powerful, and permanent boards, have gotten themselves in considerably deeper waters with a capital reserve. I think the difference between that case and my case is that their board was not representative of the interests of their membership, but rather acted as a permanent, interested party. Our board is rather a collection of limited-term representatives of greater interests.

Wait, no, that's not true. Rather, that board became a collection of proxies for one, particular, permanent interest, which used a nondemocratic director selection process to fill the board with influenced outsiders with no direct interest in the internal questions of the corporation/convention. An advantaged interest drives out disinterest, and fills the vacuum with its own interest, instead of negotiating with the other interests.

Prof. Bainbridge has posted the text of a lecture on the business judgment rule that contains an interesting definition of his "director primacy" theory. Now, he's been referring to director primacy throughout the life of his blog, but this is the first time I've seen a full explanation of his conception of the corporate board of directors as "hiring the factors of production", by which he means capital, management, labor and resources. More broadly, he is a proponent of this "director primacy" theory of corporate governance, over the conventional "shareholder primacy" theory, which holds that the corporation is a creature of the capital represented by its existing stock issuance. Bainbridge holds that the shareholder is a hireling of the corporation, in the same sense as employees, managers, contractors, and bondholders are hirelings of the corporation.

Now, I am not a lawyer, thus it follows that I can't be any sort of expert on corporate governance. But, as they say, everyone has [an opinion]... Consider it the blog equivalent of thinking out loud.


I can't help but feel that "director primacy" is structurally arbitrary - why should the directors' relationship with the corporation be privileged over that of the shareholders'? In most cases, the directors did not create the corporation, but are rather, themselves, hirelings of the corporation, delegated limited and indirect decision-making authority.

I strongly suspect that this doctrine of "director primacy" is also historically arbitrary - directors are far more often the creatures or cronies of management or majority/plurality shareholders, than they are independent agents. I'm no expert in the subject, but the instances I can think of where the directors are powerful in their own right, that power is usually an expression of some form of interlocking directorate scheme, where the directors derive their power from a syndicate of shareholders or conspirators in some greater, extra-corporate entity, like a trust. CEOs do not "capture" a board - more often than not, they're the architect of the board. They *create* the board by control over the means of appointment. The independent board of directors seems to be no more common in the wild than, say, a free quark. To insist that independent boards of directors can exist in the wild without artificial means strikes me as rather dubious. Thus, I have to wonder at someone who champions directorial independence, while rejecting the very sort of regulation required to maintain such a creature.

Bainbridge points out the conflicting interests of shareholders and managers. Shareholders are protected from the extremes of risk-derived failure, and thus are rationally inclined towards higher-risk decisions. Managers are more exposed to the fallout of high-risk decision-making, and thus will tend towards a lower-risk decision-path, to avoid such things as liability for corporate actions, or the degradation of their human capital. Bainbridge specifically notes the manager's inability to diversify his "capital" in the same fashion that a rational shareholder does, by spreading investments among different corporations. The board, on the other hand, has no significant financial interest in the corporation, by design. A director can sit on numerous boards, and thus "diversify" his "human capital". A director's reputation is not tied intrinsically with the fate of whatever corporations he or she might serve as a director. The director is essentially disinterested in the economic fate of the corporation, barring any self-dealing allowed by the other creatures of the corporation, the law, or the regulation of the state. I would think that it is this very structural disinterest that drives the inevitable capture of a board by one of the other creatures of the corporation, or by outside forces. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, economics must abhor disinterest. The disinterest of the ideal director is displaced by interests: the cronies of the CEO, the representatives of the shareholders or the unions, the agents of an external agent such as a trust or syndicate.

I like his use of "bounded rationality" to argue that rules like the "business judgment rule" are an example of judges "shirking", or avoiding work through a simple heuristic. That is, a legal rule giving strong protection to boards means that the courts don't have to *deal* with insanely complex business judgments, or have to do the work of the boards in the course of evaluating whether their performance meets a required standard of adherence to the shareholder interest. He further notes that due to Delaware's status as a favored residence for corporations, the judges of that state have a much larger body of experience in corporate law, and thus have a lesser inclination to avoid this sort of "shirking", which would explain why the judges of Delaware have recently begun applying a much less stringent version of the "business judgment rule". That is to say, because they have a greater body of experience, they're more inclined to become activists on the subject.

He goes on to discuss boards as consensus-based teams, with accompanying group dynamics. I have to wonder what the difference is between a "team" and a board of representatives? One usually imagines a team as consisting of independent individuals, whose allegiances extend only within the closed system of the team itself. This is not the case in entities like a corporate board of directors. Individual directors are not, usually, independent, but are rather representative of interests or bodies of interests. The CEO's cronies are in this corner, the shareholder representatives in the other, perhaps a minority shareholder representative, or a union advocate, someone with greater industry interests, even trust or syndicate representatives. The result is not consensus, but negotiation.

I have to think that his emphasis on fraud and self-dealing is less to the point than concern over the director as representative of a greater, aggregate fraud, a syndicate for self-dealing on a grander scale. That is, I'm having trouble getting into his mindset, of imagining the directors as agents in their own right, rather than representative of

Salam wants to know if Iraq is becoming the 51st state.

Well, do you want to be? I mean, if I were you, I'd hold out for the 51st, 52nd, and 53rd states, at the least. It would make for some significant problems with language incompatibilities and the like. But, you know, you could do worse. And we've dealt with large non-English-speaking minorities before - the early Republic had over three hundred thousand German speakers in a population of four million - and I think we have more Spanish-speaking American citizens right now than there are Iraqis.

Personally, I've thought that the solution to long-term political stability in Iraq would be an United Governates of Mesopotamia, but no-body of importance seems to agree with me, given how fast they're pushing this whole June 30th thing. Somebody needs to remind Sistani that the American Constitutional Convention was an undemocratic, self-selected body of elites. Popular sovereignty means the people vote in favor of a constitution; it doesn't say anything about drafting the constitution by democratic or popular means. The push-and-jostle of campaigning produced the Bill of Rights, not any formal process of institutional consensus.

Anyways, if Iraqis want to petition to join the United States, there are procedures in place in our Constitution for such an eventuality. Be mindful of Article IV, Section 4, though. You do actually have to have a valid and operational set of state institutions in place before they can accept you. It isn't a short-cut for avoiding the work of constructing a grown-up government. That would be "declaring oneself a U.S. Territory". And we already have one more Puerto Rico than we really need, thank you very much.

Hey, I'm all for new states. It's been more than forty years since the last new state, but that doesn't mean that there can't be more. Would make something of a hash of the flag, though. How the hell do you balance 51 or 53 stars on a field?

George Soros offers a candidate for the official motto of the post-9/11 intellectual: Unfortunately, I don't have time to read; I only have time to write.

It's an interesting interview. I find myself going back and forth on the subject of Soros. On the one hand, he's a rich man who's put his wealth towards a very laudable, and successful organizational drive for practical democracy in Eastern Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union. I mean, look at the success in Georgia late last year. On the other hand, he's a moral idiot of the first water. Observe:

By saying what I'm saying, I'm not comparing Bush to a Nazi. I'm not calling Bush a Nazi. I want to make it very, very explicit that I'm not. And I don't think that the comparison is helpful. In fact, I think it's harmful.

It's a different threat. And it's actually a very strange, unexpected [threat]. If you go back to this Doublespeak and the threat of deception, the Goebbels propaganda machine had a total monopoly of the media. The Soviets had such control that they could actually erase people from history, airbrush out leaders who fell, who were disgraced. The deception in America is practiced while you do have pluralistic media.

He wants - ever so badly - to call his enemies names, but he doesn't want to be caught, yet again, in violation of Godwin's Law. So he's going to say what he isn't going to say, then he's going to say it, then he's going to tell you he didn't just say what he just said.

You do have, you know, different channels that are available. Nevertheless, something is going on in the way of managing the interpretation of reality that is actually successful and poses a danger to open society.

I think what's going on here is a demonstration of just how little a career in currency manipulation prepares one for dealing with practical politics, or with people in general. Soros was not only a CEO, with all the authoritarianism and Big Man fetishism that goes with that lofty perch; he was a CEO in the currency markets, where social graces and consensual leadership are deeply discounted, and predatory behavior are rewarded disproportionately. To Soros, the normal bump-and-jostle of actual practical politics, of actual mass communications and public partisanship, are difficult to distinguish from totalitarian Big Lie propaganda.

Soros and Marshall both push heavily for a return to international legalism, and a dismantling of American supersovereignty, to coin a word. They think that the doddering old derelict can be picked up off of the curb, dusted off, put in a nice new suit, and be marched forth as Sheriff UN, ready to do battle with outlaws. To the Soroses and Marshalls of the world, the solution to the "anachronism" of national sovereignty is not an exploration of new alternatives, possible solutions - rather, it's a redoubling of effort behind the very institutions that failed so spectacularly and visibly in the late 90s and early 00s. There's some congitive dissonance that makes them fail to recognize that the very problem of national sovereignty for failed states cannot be solved by institutions reliant on the "legitimacy" of the national sovereignty of failed states. The problem isn't with an American supersovereignty; it's with a Libyan or Syrian or Zimbabwean sovereignty which is equal and interchangeable with the sovereignty of a Germany, a Norway, a Nicaragua, an India or a Singapore.

Soros and Marshall's dream world of strong international law will be nothing more than a fevre-dream until the day in which international institutions which regard legitimacy as indistinguishable from popular sovereignty are the rule, and not the exception.

Jeff Jarvis shines a spotlight on a webroach called Vibrant Media. They're pushing something called IntelliTXT, which will scan content for keywords related to those of advertiser's products, and intrusively add direct hyperlinks to the scanned content. I can easily see freeware bloghosting sites adopting this monstrosity, and making their bloggers into inadvertent shills.

Google's targeted ads don't bother me - they stay in their place, they're clearly labeled as ads, and it's well understood that the writer has no control over them, except in the indirect sense of talking about X will elicit random ads on approximately the same subject. I've seen forums (such as Angels from Another Pin's, ferinstance) amuse themselves by attempting to engineer the Google ads with targeted jabber.

This "IntelliTXT" goes beyond mere targeting, and literally hijacks the content. If I'm ranting about the horrors of the Dean candidacy, I don't want to spasmodically link to Margaret Cho's site without actually, you know, intending it. I could imagine a MoveOn enthusiast ranting about Bush and Hitler, and find herself accidentally linking to David Duke propaganda, or, even worse – Kim du Toit. Neither outcome is something we objectively want to see, however funny it might be in the heat of the moment.