This one slipped right by me.

Both the House and Senate are considering legislation that would put us in a state of war with Iran. Right now.

H. Con. Res 362 and S.Res.580 are identical bills (designed for expeditious passage) which have as their goal "preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, through all appropriate economic, political, and diplomatic means, is vital to the national security interests of the United States and must be dealt with urgently...." The bills introduction coincided with the AIPAC conference.

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I am so not upset by Obama's endorsement of the FISA "compromise." Nor was I upset by what he said to AIPAC, to Miami Cubans or whatever.

I want him to win not to go down in a blaze of glory like my all-time favorite Democratic nominee, George McGovern.

Back then I needed my nominee to be simon-pure and McGovern was. He also won 17 electoral votes.

In the years since, I have supported every Democratic party Presidential nominee and I have not regretted any statements any might have made that won them votes, only the ones that cost them votes. There have been three Democratic nominees in my time who said things that caused me to wince and think "sellout." They were Carter, Clinton, and Gore -- the same three who went on to win the election.

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Anyone who is familiar with Clay's writing won't be surprised to hear that he does a very nice job of discussing how recent technological innovations are allowing for more and more "organizing without organization". The book is a great mix of engaging descriptions about examples of how people come together in the pursuit of various goals and interests, and a deeper more conceptual examination of how such phenomena are changing in light of recent advances in technology.

I am sorry to come to the conversation so late due to some travel. I regret missing out on much interesting back-and-forth. Nonetheless, I wanted to add a bit to the conversation.

The issue I want to raise has to do with questions of inequality like much of the earlier discussion, although I approach this from a somewhat different angle than what's been presented. While there is no question that new opportunities are allowing more folks to organize and more voices to be heard, they seem to privilege those already in more advantageous positions. I'd like to see more discussion of what circumstances in particular allow those with fewer resources to benefit from these new opportunities.

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The cease-fire is still in effect, which is something of a surprise.

After all, this is a cease-fire few like -- especially in Israel. Some of the same government officials who secured it wasted little time in saying that they did not expect it to last and that, when it did collapse, Israel would launch its long-deferred invasion of Gaza.

In essence, the critics are saying that all the cease-fire will accomplish is a delay in the deaths of, I don't know, dozens or hundreds of Israeli soldiers and hundreds or thousands of Palestinians. Rather than plunge hundreds or thousands of families into mourning this weekend, the cease-fire provides a delay of a week, a month or six months.

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Earlier today I voted "no" on the FISA Amendments Act (H.R. 6304). Speaking from the floor of the House of Representatives, I noted that if this bill becomes law, it perhaps will be the only lasting legacy of the Bush-Cheney Administration overhaul of our national security policy: a Congressionally-blessed distortion of checks and balances.

You have already read my concerns that this legislation does not adhere to the principles that should be included in any reform of FISA. I would like to go beyond the original post and address some of the bill's specifics, which some readers have commented about.

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I've been so interested in reading the various posts this week that I completely forgot my core goal, which is to shill for my book, so here's a message from our sponsor: Buy a copy of Here Comes Everybody, at fine booksellers near you.

Now, on to a point I wanted to make about Tim's post on Norms of Reciprocity in Free Software and the Blogosphere. He says "One of the things that I think is really interesting about the GPL is that formal legal enforcement is practically irrelevant."

This is true in a numerical sense; the amount of fighting about GPLed code is legendary, and very little of that fighting has taken place in the courts. However, I think the key element of contract law is operative here, even in an arena as socialized as Open Source software: One thing that keeps a contract from needing to be legally enforced is that it is obvious that it could be enforced.

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• Christopher Williams describes white flight, and the self-ghettoization of suburbanites lured by cheap gas and "safe neighborhoods."
• Billy Glad responds to David Brooks on the "race card" in the Democratic Primary. Billy: "The race card, like the gender card, is a joker. It can't win the hand by itself. It has to be matched up with other cards."
• Jason Miller proposes a strategy for dealing with the Republicans-- a good offense. "I am betting on more of us being in a place to hear hard-truths laid out in uncompromising language. I also think we are more ready than ever before to contemplate big, bold initiatives that will take this country in a brand new direction."

Atrios and others are taking too hard a line on Barack Obama's FISA stance.

The key issue here is immunity. The Senator said he'd try to persuade the Senate to alter that provision. Furthermore, he said that as President he would make sure there's a way to get to the bottom of what happened here. I don't see what else can be expected under the current circumstances.

The deal here was negotiated by other people. I don't see how Senator Obama or for that matter Senator Clinton could be held responsible for those negotiations, which have gone on behind closed doors for several months. Moreover, the details of the surveillance legislation both require much more study and will be dependent on responsible enforcement by a new Administration. I think we'd all agree that the country would be best off if that were an Obama Administration. As to the immunity portions, the best that can be hoped for at this stage is what Senator Obama has promised.

The last place I want to find myself is in the middle of an intellectual firefight between Clay Shirky and Henry Farrell, two of the smartest people I know! And I'm sorry to enter the discussion so late. In my defense, I started this post three days ago and then got swamped.

I don't have much to say about the question that's consumed most of this discussion, which is whether the near-infinite number of communities in which one can acquire status changes the "zero-sum positional conflict" of status. Henry is skeptical that being famous in, say, World of Warcraft is comparable to being a famous soccer star, as measured by money, attractiveness to members of whichever sex or sexes one wants to be attractive to, etc. That may be, but it seems reasonable that the kind of person who is today a legend within WoW (pretty much the only thing I know about World of Warcraft is that that's the shorthand for it!) would have had, in 1970, far fewer outlets for that particular kind of satisfaction and status. And status is hardly the only source of satisfaction: these zones create more ways for people to find the satisfaction that comes with active engagement in creation, cooperation or competition.

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I like Mayor Bloomberg. In fact, I told my New York homies to vote for him both times he ran and I'm glad I did. He's a fine mayor.

He's also a fair guy as evidenced by this. You cannot overestimate how influential Bloomberg is with those Jewish voters who care about endorsements from landsmen. Unlike Joe Lieberman and the Bush-D'Amato supporter, Ed Koch, he is not particularly controversial. (Not only the best mayor since LaGuardia but also one of the richest people in the world).

I don't know if Bloomberg is on the VP list. I would hope that an African-American would not put another minority on the ticket (if he did, I'd be for Carl Levin). But he deserves consideration. And thanks for doing this.

The House interrupted its normal business for a few minutes yesterday, not long before it went back to the job of funding George Bush's war. The break in the action was not a national story - yet - but the results of what transpired will be.

This was the swearing-in of Donna Edwards, who wrested a House seat from Al Wynn, eight-term incumbent and tool of every special interest in Washington. Donna won a special election Tuesday (June 17) to fill the remainder of Wynn's term - he having left Congress after his primary defeat in April to take a cushy lobbying job.

Take note. She's a local story now, more or less, but will be a national story before too long. Her maiden speech to the House (yes, that's the quaint term used to describe a Member's first floor remarks) made it clear she was going to lay down some markers and not back off. She showed her mettle by being one of the 155 who voted against continuing to fund the war. She also voted against the FISA "compromise" that would allow such grave Constitutional abuses.

Let's go to the video:

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Doug Feith's feelings are hurt.

On Wednesday, he withdrew from a House hearing on interrogation methods used on detainees because he would not sit at the same witness table as Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief-of-staff.

According to Feith's lawyer, the former undersecretary of defense objected to certain things Wilkerson (and Powell, in fact) had said about him.

In 2006 Wilkerson accused Feith of being a "'card-carrying member of the Likud party' whose allegiance is to Israel rather than the United States." Also, Wilkerson said of Feith, "seldom have I met a dumber man."

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I appreciate your thoughtful responses. We clearly agree that this is an important issue. As many of you noted, it is vital that we get this legislation right. The passage last August of the "Protect America Act" - hastily passed in the context of a relentless drumbeat of propaganda and disinformation orchestrated by the administration - was an illustration of exactly how not to pass a bill.

In reviewing the FISA legislation now under consideration, it is clear to me that it does not meet the criteria or the principles I shared with you earlier.

The bill lacks the very specific "reverse targeting" protections I secured in the two previous House FISA bills we've passed. This goes to the issue of not being precise in who we are targeting. It appears to me that innocent Americans who are not "targeted" still may have their communications intercepted with ultimately damaging results.

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• Scientific posts on how Michelle Obama has recently been shoved into the limelight, and why she makes white America uncomfortable.
• Cory Liebmann writes on the Federal investigation of Milwaukee Alderman Michael McGee, and asks why U.S. Attorney Steve Biskupic decided to bring in an Arabic speaking agent, one of only 33 in the FBI.
• Doc Nebula talks the inextricable link between America's thirst for oil and the decision to go to war in Iraq. In a nutshell: "It is all about the oil, but it's not about giving the American people access to cheap gas."

Congress on Friday will debate legislation that would update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This is the fourth or fifth iteration since last year that Congress has addressed this issue in the face of baseless claims and propaganda by the Administration and its allies that the intelligence community is unable to do its job.

Fundamentally, this debate is about how we can protect the American people in every respect - by giving the intelligence community the flexibility and tools it needs to identify and stop those out to harm us and by protecting individual Americans from harmful suspicions, intrusions, and interference. Such protections were not contained in the so-called "Protect American Act" that the President signed last August. That law has expired and the surveillance ordered under it still stands. Some of those orders will begin to expire after August and the Administration is demanding that Congress act.

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I don't want to get too far away from the topic of Clay's book - but the basic questions about inequality in status and income that we are talking about are important to his chosen themes. Two quick points in response to Julian.

First, I'm not actually making a materialist argument that everything reduces down to money. My original post, which spurred Clay to invite me to participate in this seminar, had a title riffing on a famous Max Weber essay which is all about how Karl Marx is wrong, and status distinctions can't be reduced down to material benefits. Good lefty that I am, I think that material forces are incredibly important, but they don't explain everything. Here, I'm relying on Bourdieu, who argues for a variety of different forms of 'capital' without saying that they can be reduced down to material benefits or to anything else (this causes some real problems for his theory, but since this is already sounding too much like a graduate seminar, I won't go into them here). So my argument doesn't really rely on everything depending on the cash nexus.

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It's become obvious in the days since he sewed up the nomination. Barack Obama is playing to win.

Not surprisingly, I am delighted. I am especially delighted that he has decided to opt out of matching funds, allowing regular folks to underwrite his campaign.

Think about it. It is possible (more than possible) that Barack Obama will go to the White House because millions of new donors provided him with the largest campaign war chest history and because millions of previously disenfranchised voters came to the polls.

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What has gotten into George Packer? In Blood of the Liberals he undertook a wrenching examination of American liberalism's agonies and ironies; and in The Assassin's Gate and his play Betrayed, he bore searing, humbling witness to the ordeals of Americans and Iraqis who wouldn't have written for themselves.

Yet Packer's New Yorker account of "The Fall of Conservatism" gives us only voices of people who make their livings making phrases that describe and influence that vast majority of Americans who don't make their livings that way.

Since I, too, turn phrases for money and political deliverance, I count it a gift of the gods. But I was always under the impression that writers in a democracy should help non-writing people to speak for themselves, not just have them spoken about.

That should be so even in the New Yorker, which exists to present the American people to bemused collectors of unearned income and Steuben glass and to the intelligent recent college graduate who for some reason wants to be like them and is therefore seeking "the most comfortable and least compromising attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into actual conflict," as the critic Robert Warshow once wrote about the typical reader of... yes, the New Yorker.

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Here comes Everybody has so many interesting ideas that I hope no one will object if I change the subject to another part I thought was really good: the "bargain" section of the "Promise, Tool, Bargain" chapter. It talks about the growing pattern of complex online organizations governed by norms of reciprocity rather than formal legal rules. One example is the GNU General Public License, a popular free software license (From page 273):

Sometimes contracts are an essential part of the bargain, not because of the direct language of the contract but because of what it says about the service. Linus Torvalds offered Linux under the GPL because that was a way of assuring the developers that their work could never be taken away from them. This was an important way he communicated his bona fides years before Linux was valuable enough to appropriate; Torvalds took this step early on to forego any possibility in the future that he could change his mind and patent or sell Linux. It became valuable precisely because he offered a bargain that limited his future freedom; adoption of the GPL was a serious token of commitment.

One of the things that I think is really interesting about the GPL is that formal legal enforcement is practically irrelevant. After almost two decades in existence, the enforcibility of the GPL has yet to be tested in US courts. Yet it has proven a remarkably popular and durable agreement.

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At the risk of taking us further afield from our assigned topic, I think that in light of the latest exchange between Tim and Henry, it may be helpful to step back for a moment and distinguish between the types of inequalities we're discussing, the potential objections to them, and how they're related.

We began with a question about status inequalities, which has blended into a discussion of economic inequality. This makes a certain amount of sense, since wealth is one dimension of status. This is one reason that's offered for objecting to income inequalities as such: Even apart from whatever concern we have about the absolute welfare of those at the lower end of the distribution, it's suggested that there are psychological harms from recognizing that one is in a poor relative position. This is the kind of harm Clay suggests may be ameliorated by a growing number of diverse status hierarchies. Henry and others have pointed to a relationship that runs in the other direction--focusing, so to speak, on the exchange rather than the use value of status--by pointing out the ways that some forms of status are more easily parlayed into cash than others. (Though I should note in passing here that some folks do indeed turn their Night Elf skills into real world cash by auctioning items or characters.)

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I feel like grandma here, wanting to say of Henry and Tim's positions on social status and the internet "You're both right", which is tricky since they disagree so directly.

Let me quote Henry: "People can opt out of status races where they are likely to lose, and opt in to status races that they are likely to win. Given a near infinity of possible status hierarchies, they can choose the ones that they do well in. But this argument presupposes that these different possible status hierarchies are disconnected from each other."

Henry is right that they are not disconnected, but I'd argue that they used to be tightly coupled (I think Tim's observation that "until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status" is spot on) but now they are increasingly loosely coupled.

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• Genghis gets into John McCain's tax plan. Besides the fact that the Tax Policy Center called his plan "very regressive," there's that other little detail: McCain was against the Bush tax cuts before he was for them.
• Waldengirl asks why Kucinich's articles of impeachment against Bush have been derided by bloggers because it's "not the right time." She writes: "If we are expecting Obama and the Congressional Democrats to have the courage to take on the big issues confronting our society, we must let them know that we will hold our leaders accountable for their actions, or lack thereof."
• Big Blue returns to profiling Obama's potential cabinet members. Today: a few picks for Secretary of Labor.
• San Fernando Curt speculates on how Bush--and by extension McCain-- will play the tentative Middle East peace talks. "With some semblance of peace on its borders, Israel and the United States could marshal their forces for an all-out attack on... well... you know."

Henry Farrell and I seem to be talking at cross-purposes on the question of power laws and inequality, which I take as a sign that my initial post was muddled. Let me see if I can do better. I entirely agree with the following:

Even if we did know that US income was distributed according to a power law, we still wouldn't know all that much. There is a very wide variety of mechanisms that can produce power laws. Without further investigation as to which mechanism is in play (which can't be discerned just from noodling the observed distribution), we may have a Nature publication, if the editors are dozing off again, but we haven't gotten very much closer to an understanding of what is causing the observed data.

This, indeed, was entirely my point: the skewed distribution of income likely arose from a variety of factors. Some of them are related to past policy decisions. Others are the inevitable consequence of having a complex market economy. My ideologically-colored guess is that the latter factors dominate, but I don't know, and I doubt anyone else does either.

Given this, I found Farrell's framing of his final point puzzling:

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Jon Stewart did a great bit the other day about how criticism of Israeli policies is considered beyond the pale in Washington. He concluded by saying "but you know where it's okay to criticize Israel. Israel." Then he showed a raucous (and typical) scream fest at the Knesset.

Of course, he's right. The only problem is that it is at least as important to freely examine Israeli policies (and American policies toward Israel) here as it is in Israel. And here, despite movement in the right direction, debate is constrained, to say the least.

Democrats are no better than Republicans.

Some of the loudest liberal Democratic critics of the Iraq war, uberdoves on US policy, are hawks when it comes to Israel. The House of Representatives, in particular, is full of people who see no inconsistency about being utterly skeptical about Bush/Cheney foreign policy but utterly credulous when it comes to Sharon/Olmert/Barak/Netanyahu or whoever. Not only that, these same legislators try to keep everybody else in line.

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I live in a building owned jointly by a hundred families, a cooperative. The other day the board asked the members to vote on a plan to spend four million dollars on renovating the building. When the members voted "nay," the board asked for another vote, on a slightly reconfigured loan. The membership reacted with great dismay, as it was obvious that if they had voted for the loan, no second vote would have been called for. They felt manipulated, and their resentment is still agitating our small community and threatening future plans to act in unison.

EU politicians are responding to the Irish "nay" vote on the Lisbon Treaty in the same high handed manner my board did, and the effect will be the same. EU leaders are all for democracy--as long as the people vote the way they prefer the vote to come out. In effect, leading EU politicians are more devious than my board. At first they pressured Ireland to hold a swift second referendum. When the Irish refused, the EU politicians called for others to proceed anyhow.

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Tim Lee's post on power laws and inequality is interesting, but seems to me to be quite wrongheaded. The putative existence of power laws just can't be taken as evidence that income inequality is somehow inevitable and "simply a natural characteristic of complex social systems" that we have to live with, for a number of reasons.

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I'm happy that Clay is using my disagreement with Will to extend the argument that he makes in Here Comes Everybody. The book (which is great) is all about how lower transaction costs make it much easier to form groups. The question then is how does this change society.

Here, I'd like to clarify the argument that I made in the original post. What I said there sort-of-suggests that there are fixed cultural hierarchies, which isn't really true. A much better way to think about what is happening is to look at the struggles over how hierarchies are defined. Here, dead French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had some very interesting things to say. To simplify his argument, social life is a continual struggle between people with different kinds of cultural, economic and social capital over how different kinds of capital should be valued and exchanged. Thus, for example, when impoverished academics sneer at the 'vulgar' taste of rich people, they are semi-consciously trying to improve the exchange rate between the kind of cultural capital that they have lots of ('good taste' as they themselves define it) and the kind of economic capital that rich people have lots of (money).

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I'm not predicting the November results. I think Obama will win (and even big) but, because of certain variables, I think McCain could win too. I won't believe the Democratic ticket will prevail until....after it's over.

But one thing is obvious already. Barack Obama has lucked out with John McCain as his opponent. Like Bob Dole in 1996, the guy has no appeal. He seems old, disconnected, charmless and not particularly well-versed on the issues. Say what you will about George W. Bush, the guy does have a certain appeal. Against the wooden Gore, he was almost, I don't know, cute. That is where the dumb "who would you rather have a beer with" mantra came from.

McCain has none of that. He comes across as mean and old. Have a beer with him? No way. He'd just yell at you.

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In a NYT front-pager, Elisabeth Bumiller declares:

Perhaps Mr. McCain's biggest departure from the president is on climate change. Mr. McCain has called for mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, unlike Mr. Bush, who says such limits would be bad for the economy. Mr. McCain also supports a "cap and trade" system in which power plants and other polluters could meet limits on heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide by either reducing emissions on their own or by buying credits from more efficient producers.

So McCain the Maverick puts in his mandatory appearance. That's the prevailing mainstream story line even as the Straight Talk Express's wheels come off. But meanwhile, paying attention to the Real McCain, the alert Hilary Bok, aka Hilzoy, quotes McCain speaking at a Monday press conference...

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Reports are emerging from the region that the long awaited truce effort mediated by Egypt between Israel and Hamas (representing all the Palestinian factions in Gaza) is reaching closure. According to reports, the arrangement will come into effect at 0600 on Thursday, barring any negative developments. It is still unclear whether this will be a formal ceasefire or a set of informal arrangements--though you can certainly forget any theatrical hand shaking ceremony with accompanying pyrotechnics (well not those kinds of fireworks, anyway). Negotiations have been taking place for several weeks and if there is a cease-fire, or tahadiyeh, then it will be fragile, have implications for Israeli and Palestinian politics, for the peace process, for the region, and for the US. So here are 10 quick and initial thoughts on where we are, what to expect, and what to look out for.

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• Richard Bacon revisits Obama's neighborhood, Hyde Park, Chicago. I just returned to the nabe this past weekend to graduate from U of C, and I have to say I, too, love Valois!
• Deanie Mills writes about her family's repeated deployments in Iraq. "Each successive deployment was more bloody and horrific than the one before." For the first time since the war began everyone in the family is home.
• I hate to contribute to the Tim Russert memorial echo chamber, but parenthetical has a good post up speculating who should take over Meet the Press. Jump into the thread and throw in your own suggestion.

Danah is surely correct to say that, for most people, status in some online niche space will never be as important as validation from the people in your neighborhood--the people that you meet each day. But I think her focus on teens, whose social milieu is to a great extent given by their parents' choices, may obscure one of the phenomena Clay highlights in his book: The collapse of the '90s meatspace/cyberspace dichotomy.

As I noted previously, Tim and I are friends in the "real world," but we met physically only after years of corresponding electronically via Adult Friend Finder a now-defunct chat forum we both frequented long ago. As I type this, I'm sitting at a café with a friend who (like many people with whom I socialize) I originally got to know because we were both blogger-journalists. Later tonight, I'm going to play poker with a some friends from my college debate circuit, who I'd have lost touch with years ago if not for e-mail and spaces like the league's Facebook group. Some of the other players are members of a double-secret DC mailing list for liberal writers and activists, named after the pub where they often congregate. I may be geekier than the modal American, but social patterns of this sort are increasingly common.

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Speculating on social status in an age of networked participation, Clay Shirky accurately points out the ways in which metrics for status have become diversified. It is possible to gain satisfaction from achieving high status in World of Warcraft, even if popularity there is quite niche. In our ethnographic study of new media and youth culture, the Digital Youth group at Berkeley and USC also found that many youth involved in interest-driven digital practices rejected traditional status markers in preference for those that could be achieved in subcultures. Becky Herr and Mimi Ito examined different aspects of fan communities; Patricia Lange and Sonja Baumer looked at vid practices; Matteo Bittanti observed gaming culture. In all of their studies, they found diverse ways in which people marked and negotiated status, confirming Clay's suspicion that networked participation can alter the markers of status.

Now, here's the caveat...

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Just in case the methodological questions that have been raised about Stanley Milgram's original "six degrees" experiment have led anyone to doubt the reality of the small world phenomenon, let me begin by noting that Tim and I once lived in the same group house, and Will Wilkinson's girlfriend was at a neighborhood rock show I attended last night.

Turning to our own ad hoc community, Clay asks:

The question it leaves me with is this: if we have a way of increasing people's satisfaction with their activities in flexible social spaces, is that a net gain, because it increases satisfaction, or is it a net loss, because blissing out on our local social contexts lowers our sense of injustice, in a way that makes us less likely to fight against it?

Aside from endorsing my erstwhile roomie's remarks, I think the best I can do here is to paraphrase, from memory, a scene from the '80s sitcom Who's the Boss:

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One of my favorite passages in Here Comes Everybody is the discussion of power law distributions that begins on page 122. Power law distributions are ubiquitous in social systems. For example, we can see power law distributions at work in the blogosphere. The most popular bloggers get millions of readers, while there are millions of bloggers who get hardly any traffic at all. You will find power law distributions in almost any complex social system: the popularity of books or music, the number of contributions to Wikipedia or free software, the popularity of programming languages, university endowments, and so forth. Shirky makes a really interesting observation about the imbalances inherent in a power law distribution:

The imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. And among those contributors, no effort is made to even out their contributions. The spontaneous division of labor driving Wikipedia wouldn't be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality. On the contrary, most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it...

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This is why Obama's Father's Day speech leaves me ultimately cold. To see people whose understanding of hip-hop doesn't extend past a few random viewings of BET, or their disgust at the handful of black boys they happen to notice on the street or on the train, proffering this idea that Obama will civilize the blacks makes me retch:

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Will Wilkinson is both a friend and a colleague, so it will surprise no one that I find Will's perspective on status competition to be congenial. I also wholeheartedly agree with Shirky's take on the subject. It requires little imagination to think of status hierarchies whose "implicit meta-ranking" are completely unclear. Will's comparison of Chief Justice Roberts with Peyton Manning is a great example.

What I think lends Farrell's claim of "implicit meta-rankings" some plausibility is the fact that, until recently, the national media provided something like a uniform yardstick for status. In 1970, whoever appeared on national television and in national magazines on a regular basis was a celebrity by definition. And because there were only three television networks and a dozen or so national magazines, the top end of the status hierarchy really was close to zero-sum. If you appeared on Johnny Carson, you displaced somebody else.

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I don't get it.

I'm not going to lie. I felt terrible when I heard the news but only because he was someone I "knew" from television, because he seemed like a lovely man, and because I felt for his wife, son, and father. I still feel "shocked."

But that's it.

So tell me, why is thing being covered this way? How is it that the media barely notices 4,000 American (and 100,000 Iraqi) dead in the war but goes insane over this? Aren't thousands of dead and maimed kids (soldiers and children) infinitely worse, especially when the war is a fraud, engineered by lies and liars?

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It's very unusual for any company to obtain immunity from liability before anyone knows what that firm has done. Yet rumors are that Congress is about to assure the telephone companies such immunity from allegedly illegal surveillance, while passing the responsibility for actually conferring the immunity to courts, who are to ask a question that inevitably will obtain an answer resulting in immunity.

Is this really what is being negotiated? Does anyone know what's happening?

I'm going to open with something quite speculative. Since finishing Here Comes Everybody, which outlines many of the observations I'm comfortable making about social software, I've been left with the observations I'm not comfortable making -- things where I don't have a good enough sense of what's going on to say much with any certainty.

One of those observations concerns cultural vs. sub-cultural membership and satisfaction. There's an interesting argument between Henry Farrell and Will Wilkinson about various status games being played on the internet, and whether they are all ranked on one big social scale, or whether individuals can now choose to participate in only those status games that make them happy.

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"Explosion without an objective is politics in its purest form."
-- Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

It was said of George H.W. Bush that he was born on third base but thought he had hit a triple. We could say that John McCain takes himself for Roy Rogers but is really Gabby Hayes. (We realize this reference is lost on the addled youth.) By contrast, Senator McCain has compared Barack Obama to William Jennings Bryan, alas another figure all but lost to young denizens of the Internet.

McCain understands Bryan as a great speaker bereft of substance. Of course, all familiar with Senator McCain know that when it comes to the content of policy, as a Wall Street Journal profile once put it, "he gets lost in the tall mangroves."

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Greetings Cafe-ers!

So, Clay is in a conference this morning and his first Book Club post will be going up later this afternoon. In the meantime, I wanted to write all of you to introduce myself and say hi. (Hi!) I've taken over editorship of TPM Cafe (though Andrew is still by my side-- my girl Friday, as it were). I started out as an intern at TPM Cafe this past March (working on mostly news and video for the front page), and this is a really exciting transition for me.

One of the things that sets me off a little from the rest of the TPM crew is that I came to my love of politics-- specifically the breaking news of politics-- a bit later in life. I went to The University of Chicago, and I've always been a great books person-- since I was a little kid, literature came first, everything else came second. It wasn't until I'd graduated from college and started working for Bill Moyers, on his 2006 documentary Buying the War, that I really got turned on to the political scene.

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Back in March, I posed the question of whether the growth of a new middle class in the developing world was going to stress the world's capacity to provide food and fuel. At that time Light crude was selling for $85 a barrel and there were no food riots in Egypt, Pakistan, India, Thailand and Sudan. Yesterday, The New York Times weighed in on this question. They presented a balanced view on both sides of the story, concentrating more on the food issue than the fuel.

The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.'s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world's wealthy.

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Clay Shirky will be joining us this week at TPM Cafe Book Club to talk about his new book: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. His first post will be this morning, and I'll let him introduce the argument.

Joining him will be Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University, Mark Schmitt, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Henry Farrell of George Washington University, Timothy Lee of the Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez of Reason Magazine and Danah Boyd, PhD candidate at UC Berkeley.

In keeping with a proud tradition of misreporting on financial markets, the Post began a three part series on the housing bubble yesterday in which it defines the housing bubble as a story of bad subprime loans.

This is wrong. We had a housing bubble before the beginning of the subprime nonsense. The corruption associated with the suprime market extended the bubble, but it did not create it.

Competent economists were warning about the bubble in the housing market as early as 2002. It was easy to recognize because real house prices had already increased by more than 30 percent. By comparison, real house prices had remained virtually flat for the century from 1895 to 1995. No economist had any plausible explanation of this run-up, which is why it was possible to recognize it as a bubble.

Unfortunately, the Post does not like to present the views of competent economists. The most widely cited expert on the housing market in the Post in the years from 2003 to 2006 was David Lereah, then chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, and the author of Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?: The Boom Will Not Bust and Why Property Values Will Continue to Climb Through the End of the Decade - And How to Profit From Them. (Available for 39 cents from Amazon.com.)

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Early Friday morning my friends Oliver Martin and Dylan Ellis were killed in downtown Toronto. They, like many of us had just watched the Celtics come from behind to claim their third victory over the L.A Lakers and were on their way home. Seconds after the shots were fired people poured out of the apartment and held their childhood friends in their arms as they died.

I never believed that I would know someone who was shot. I remember remarking on this to a friend who taught in D.C public schools and thinking about how awful it was that so many of her students were close to such extreme violence. It was something that I felt isolated from given my sheltered upbringing in downtown Toronto- a place where this kind of violence is extremely rare.

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