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Not long ago I watched the movie Once, which I recommend highly. The main character, a busker in Dublin, plays a guitar that has large holes worn in it. As it turns out, that guitar is the personal instrument of the actor playing the role, musician Glen Hansard. Then I saw Willie Nelson playing on stage before the Super Bowl, and his guitar was in similar condition. The guitar made me think about aesthetics of this era, where the highest aesthetic value is often associated not with things that are shiny and new, but rather with stuff that looks old, worn, and lovingly cared for. I attribute this completely to the fact that we live in an era when new things are commonly available and cheap. Wal-Mart, Target, and other stores are full of them. ...

One thing that has annoyed me over the past year or so has been the persistent and perhaps willful misunderstanding of why violence is down in Iraq. There’s no question that the presence of more US soldiers has the effect of diminishing violence to a certain degree, but the real key has been co-opting the insurgents through a number of means. John Robb explains how this has worked: What did happen with the Awakening, and the speed of the transition should be a clue to this, is that the US military opportunistically embraced the insurgency (in a move akin to IBMs embrace of open source development in the 90’s). This embrace showered autonomy, weapons, money ($300 per month x 60,000 participants), protection (from Shiite militias and the Iraqi government), and training on insurgent groups. By doing so, it replaced the ISI (Islamic State of Iraq, an al Qaeda affiliate) as the leading participant in the insurgency. The only “cost” to these insurgent groups, which were under extreme pressure from Shiite militias due to overreaching by the ISI, was to sacrifice the ISI. They rapidly complied. ...

Looks like OpenID has caught the eye of the big Web companies. All of those “2008 is the year of OpenID” predictions people made are looking better every day.

It seems that the recent trend in the music industry has been to make tracks available without DRM but to snub Apple by refusing to allow them to sell the DRM-free tracks through the iTunes Music Store. I suspect that this is a sort of vigilante antitrust action by the record companies that they hope will enable them to recapture a bit of power relative to Apple. Currently, there are a lot more DRM-free MP3s available for download through Amazon.com than there are through iTunes Music Store, and Sony’s catalog hasn’t been made available yet. It was supposed to be available from Amazon.com at the end of January, but it looks like they missed their date. ...

If you have 20 minutes and are going to vote today (or at any point this year), check out Larry Lessig’s video endorsement of Barack Obama.

Andrew Leonard posts today about Barack Obama’s views on economics. It’s the best analysis I’ve yet seen of Obama’s economic philosophy, and is a bit of a deeper look than the one provided in the New York Times article I’ve linked to a couple of times. Leonard describes Obama’s economic orientation as left-libertarian, which probably describes my own general outlook pretty well. As you can probably guess, I really dig this stuff, so links to similar articles on any of the remaining viable candidates are much appreciated. On that note, you’d better post any Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee notes tonight, because by tomorrow evening those guys will be toast. ...

Is it just me or does the Microsoft/Yahoo merger stand to foster a lot of innovation on the Web by driving away many of the smartest people at Yahoo and perhaps even some of the smart people at Microsoft? How many startups will be created by former employees of those companies, and how many startups will hire key staff members from the legions of disaffected Yahoos? If you worked on a project at MSN that is trying to catch up with a similar property already provided by Yahoo, wouldn’t you be thinking it may be time to start looking for other opportunities? ...

Another undersea cable connecting Europe to Asia was severed today, this one of the coast of Dubai. Everything I know about undersea cable I learned from Neal Stephenson’s Wired article, Mother Earth Mother Board, from December 1996. It’s my favorite thing Stephenson ever wrote, and my favorite Wired article of all time. The cable severed today is part of FLAG, which was the topic of Stephenson’s article.

My first impression of Microsoft’s $44 billion offer for Yahoo is that this is one of those big mergers that’s doomed to tedium, if not failure. It sort of reminds me of HP buying out Compaq. What was the end result other than some people getting a lot richer and a bunch of other people getting laid off? Was the merger a failure or success? Does anybody even care? Something tells me that Yahoo is a bad cultural fit for Microsoft. This is a company that built its infrastructure on FreeBSD – not only did they go with an open source operating system, they went with a non-obvious open source operating system. ...

I don’t think I can eat meat that any more if I don’t know its source, and maybe you won’t be able to either after watching the video in this blog post. It’s hard to verbalize my anger and disgust after watching it, and the same sorts of things are happening all over the place.