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CBS' "60 Minutes" had a segment last night addressing what has become a combination of cultural imperative and viral marketing campaign: the "Stop Snitchin'" movement.* As CBS points out, it used to mean "don't tell on others if you're caught committing a crime," but it now means "don't cooperate with the police, period," even if you're just an innocent bystander. And apparently it's intended to cover everything from drive-by shootings to corporate and governmental fraud.

Folks, that way lies real anarchy, not the fake punk rock kind, and if it happens you are much more likely to lose than win.

After the incident at Guilford College earlier this year, I wrote a bit about the obligations of being a grownup. Part of being a grownup is being a snitch. And I'm not just saying that because I count on news tips for a living. I mean that there are bad people in the world who will never be held to account if you don't step up and open your mouth, or at least drop the incriminating documents in the mail to someone who will know what to do with them.

The rule of law is a fragile thing, and right now it is trying to hold itself up against many forces that want it broken. If you want to keep that from happening, start snitching. And then look around you and see what needs snitching about, and keep snitching. Heck, fight the power trend and make yourself a "Keep Snitchin'" t-shirt. Write a rap song that urges listeners to keep snitchin'. You want to be cutting-edge? That'll do it.

Ain't nothing riding on this but the future of the country, and this is one area in which one person can make a difference. You're a grownup? Go make a difference, then.

Hold. Them. Accountable.**

*Hat tip: Ed

**Make that one a t-shirt, too.

Freelance journalist (and former organized-crime investigator) Greg Palast doesn't quite prove that Mexico's recent presidential election was stolen. But he makes a convincing argument that any other explanation for the way votes came in is incredibly improbable from a statistical standpoint.

Glenn Greenwald's book "How Would a Patriot Act?," which I reviewed here, will debut this Sunday June 11 at No. 11 on The New York Times' Paperback Nonfiction bestseller list.

This is a book that was released May 15 and isn't even in most bricks-and-mortar bookstores yet.

Either I am the Most Influential Book Critic Evah, or Greenwald has caught some lightning in a bottle.

I know which one I'm putting my money on.

I'm still digging out, but there are two new blogs to keep you occupied while I do so.

The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation has its own blog, here.

And our GoTriad arts/entertainment section now has a blog to call its own: staffer Jeff Hahne's Musical Garbage Can, featuring quotes and outtakes from interviews Jeff does, concert and CD reviews, and so forth.

Enjoy.

If you're an elected official, or want to be, or work in government, and you're not already blogging, you'll want to come to the Blogging Teach-In on March 19. It's free. You can get your own blog up and running and get insights into blogging culture from some key Greensboro-area bloggers, leaders in the most vibrant local blog community in America.

The class is limited to 16 participants, but each participant will have an individual mentor.

Information and a registration link are here.

So join the conversation.

David Wharton reposts a comment from the kind of couple Greensboro has been trying desperately to attract and keep. I'm skeptical that the kind of urban planning they advocate would make a huge difference, even as I acknowledge a personal taste for it that I picked up during my 18-month exile in New York two decades ago. But it probably would help at least a little, and given the success of the city's Southside project, it's at least worth discussing.

Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, engages in some, well, creative self-defense on the New York Times op-ed page, and media critic Jeff Jarvis righteously, if occasionally rudely, calls him out on it.

You might or might not recall hearing that while the 2005 omnibus federal spending bill was in conference committee (where differences between House and Senate versions are negotiated or smoothed out) recently, someone slipped in a provision that would have allowed certain senior members of Congress access to anyone's personal or corporate income-tax return. Naturally, the provision was not discovered until after the bill had been voted on.

That provision, we are assured, is now dead, but it raises the question of why members of Congress so often must vote on measures neither they nor their staffs have had time to read.

Liberal blogger Josh Marshall has been discussing a suggestion one of his readers e-mailed him in the wake of this event: Changing House and Senate rules to require at least three days to pass before such a bill or reconciliation (what comes out of the conference committee, where competing versions of a bill are "reconciled") could be voted on. Taking that a step further, Marshall's reader asks, why could not such bills be made available publicly, via the Internet, for a certain minimum period before any vote? That way, the public could weigh in before the final vote.

As Marshall says, there are some reasons not to do things that way, but not any good reasons. I would agree. I'm not naive enough to think it would end the practice of sneaking things into bills in the dead of night, but it might help and it probably couldn't hurt. And there's no reason why we couldn't impose similar requirements upon the N.C. General Assembly, too, for that matter.

What do you think?

Would you believe that a school barred a teacher from giving his students copies of the Declaration of Independence because it mentions God? Think carefully before answering because your answer will tell a lot about your relationship to objective reality.

Here's an interesting passage a relative sent me from a book called "The Logic of Failure: Why Things Go Wrong and What We Can Do to Make Them Right," by Dietrich Dorner:

Anyone who has a lot of information, thinks a lot, and by thinking increases his understanding of the situation, will have not less but more trouble coming to a decision. To the ignorant, the world looks simple. If we dispense with gathering information, it is easy for us to form a clear picture of reality and come to clear decisions based on that picture.

Sometimes there is probably even positive feedback between the amount of information we have and our uncertainty. If we know nothing at all about something, we can form a simple picture of it and function on that basis. Once we gather a little information, however, we run into trouble. We realize how much we still don’t know, and we feel a strong desire to learn more. The more we know, the more clearly we realize what we don't know. Anyone who is fully informed will see much more than the bare outlines and will therefore find it extremely difficult to reach a clear decision.

Positive feedback between uncertainty and information gathering may explain why people sometimes deliberately refuse to take in information. It is said that before the Seven Years' War Frederick the Great declined to hear about the modernization of Austrian and Russian artillery. And it is said that before his invasion of Poland Hitler deliberately ignored a report that England was serious about coming to the aid of its ally if Germany attacked Poland.

New Information muddies the picture. Once we finally reach a decision we are relieved to have the uncertainty of decision making behind us. And now somebody turns up and tells us things that call the wisdom of that decision into question again. So we prefer not to listen.

To deal with a system as if it were a bundle of unrelated individual systems is, on the one hand, the method that saves the most cognitive energy. On the other hand, it is the method that guarantees neglect of side effects and repercussions and therefore guarantees failure.

A reductive hypothesis tying everything to one of variable has, of course, the positive virtue of being a holistic hypothesis, which is desirable because it encompasses the entire system. But it does so in a certain way, namely, reducing the investment of cognitive energy. The fact that reductive hypotheses provide simplistic explanations for what goes on in the world accounts not only for their popularity but also for their persistence. Once we know what the glue is that really holds the world together, we are reluctant to abandon that knowledge and fall back on an unsurveyable system made up of interacting variables linked together in no immediately obvious hierarchy. Unsurveyability produces uncertainty; uncertainty produces a fear. People use many dodges to defend their pet hypotheses against logical argument or the evidence of experience. One excellent way to maintain a hypothesis indefinitely is to ignore information that does not conform to it.

We are infatuated with the hypotheses we propose because we assume they give us power over things. We therefore avoid exposing them to the harsh light of real experience, and we prefer to gather only information that supports our hypotheses. In extreme cases, we may devise elaborate and dogmatic defenses to protect hypotheses that in no way reflect reality.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has grown into a major story not just among bloggers but in the mainstream media, darned fast. It's worth a review, not necessarily because of the partisan political implications for the 2004 presidential election but because of the implications for all of society.

More after the jump.

UPDATE, 10/21: Daily Kos has posted a transcript of "Stolen Honor." Also, Sinclair now says it will air only a portion of the video as part of a "special one-hour news program, entitled 'A POW Story:
Politics, Pressure and the Media." The statement also quotes company executive Joe DeFeo as saying, "As with
all news programming produced by Sinclair's News Central, "A POW Story" is being produced with the highest journalistic standards and integrity." I'll resist the urge to snark here, but I will point out that company president David Smith is falsely claiming that people are trying to prevent the show from being broadcast. In fact, they're seeking the legally required equal time for John Kerry and are seeking an injunction against broadcast as leverage toward that end, not as an end in itself.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jay Rosen, dean chairman of the New York University j-school journalism department and author of the PressThink blog, has been following this story closely, and today he brings the pain to Sinclair.

Blogger Mathew Gross is soliciting predictions on the outcome of the presidential race: you pick the percentage of the popular vote down to .1% (e.g., 44.3%, to decrease chances of a tie between contestants) and the total number of electoral votes garnered by each candidate.

I don't do predictions, but if you're feeling lucky (or blessed with superior insight), Matt's waiting.

In honor of tonight's presidential debate, local blogger Mr. Sun! presents:

The deadline for registering to vote in the Nov. 2 election is 25 days before the election, which means this Friday, Oct. 8. The link also includes info on where you can register and where you can vote, so if you want to vote and haven't registered yet, now's the time.

The war in Iraq. Terrorism. The deficit. The economy. Education. Health insurance.

But what does Congress focus on? Getting us a national tree.

UPDATE: Edited for clarity.

I imagine that if there were any great truths to be gleaned from The New York Times' lists of bestselling books, we'd have learned them by now. So what follows is (much) less cultural observation than random weirdness.

A lot of political books line the lists, but the top seller appears to be the 9/11 Commission's report; two editions can be found in the Top 10 paperback nonfiction list, one of them at No. 1. This is kind of surprising to the extent that 1) the book came out weeks ago and 2) you can download it for free, in your choice of *.pdf or *.html formats, here. Perhaps the upcoming third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is sparking renewed interest.

One nonpolitical book that stands out from the others is "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," by porn star Jenna Jameson, currently No. 6 on the hardback nonfiction list. I suppose some people will take this as a sign that the end times are near. But I suspect some of those people were standing in line in Dallas to pay $7.50 to see "Deep Throat" back in the day -- what was it, 1972? -- when $7.50 was real money. Like it or not, the adult-video industry is huge business, bigger than "legitimate" cinema. It can't be just a few isolated perverts paying this kind of money. If you're not already familiar with Ms. Jameson's oeuvre, then some of your relatives, friends or neighbors probably are. And unlike such other bestsellers as, say, Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," I'm pretty sure that a significant percentage of people who buy the Jameson book really will read it. Cover to cover.

Per National Public Radio today, September is Be Kind to Writers and Editors Month. 'Course, technically it was still August when the mayor made his speech ....

I was surprised and delighted to read a slightly different version of this story in today's paper:

WASHINGTON - A former dictator's cocktail preferences and a facetious plot against Santa Claus were classified by the government to prevent public disclosure.
Also stamped "secret" for six years was a study that concluded 40 percent of Army chemical warfare masks leaked.

These and other ludicrous and lethal examples of classification were cited Tuesday by members of Congress and witnesses at a House subcommittee hearing into the Sept. 11 commission's conclusion that secrecy is undermining efforts to thwart terrorists.

Some classifications were made in error or to save face.

The CIA deleted the amount Iraqi agents paid for aluminum tubes from page 96 of a Senate report on prewar intelligence. The report quoted the CIA as concluding, "Their willingness to pay such costs suggests the tubes are intended for a special project of national interest."

That price turned out to be not so high. On page 105 of the same Senate report, the same security reviewers let CIA's figure — up to $17.50 each — be printed twice, along with other estimates that the Iraqis paid as little as $10 apiece.

"There are too many secrets" and maybe too many secret-makers, said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., chairman of the Government Reform Committee's national security panel. There are 3,978 officials who can stamp a document "top secret," "secret" or "confidential" under multiple sets of complex rules.

No one knows how much is classified, he said, and the system "often does not distinguish between the critically important and comically irrelevant."

Why? Welcome to Lex's Civics 101:

The government has the power to tax you, and if you don't pay it can imprison you, and if you try not to go to prison it can shoot you. When you strip all the societal and cultural niceties off your relationship with the government, that's pretty much what you're left with. The only way to impose any kind of balance in that relationship is to insist on the maximum level of openness consistent with public safety (including national security). Anything else encourages -- and, I would argue, almost inevitably leads to -- mischief. For every legitimate use of secrecy to protect national security, there are multiple examples of frivolity, self-dealing and even outright fraud. Indeed, if a contractor knowingly sold the Army gas masks when 40% of those masks wouldn't keep the wearer alive and healthy as advertised, you could argue that the contractor has taken the step from fraud up to manslaughter if any soldier dies as a result.

I've been paid for the past 20 years to watch the government, and with very few exceptions (routine hiring decisions among them), the good that comes from government secrecy is outweighed by the bad. On the national level, I'd love to see Congress impose tighter rules on what can be classified in the first place and rigorous standards for declassifying what's already secret. Right now, the executive branch has too much leeway to decide via executive order, when what they're deciding on isn't just their business. It's also yours and mine.