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I’m researching this year’s “incomplete and subjective” year-in-review cartoon(s) — see previous examples here and here — and it occurs to me that I ought to toss it out to all of you as well. What particular highlights, lowlights, absurdities, stupid quotes, inane punditry, and whatever else from 2007 stand out for you so far? Suggestions welcome, and eagerly solicited — tomtomorrow (at) ix (dot) netcom (dot) com. (Not that I’m asking you to do my work for me, I’ve put in many long hours on this one so far — but there’s always going to be some wonderfully stupid moment I’ll overlook or forget …)

Off to join the throngs of holiday travellers soon, because that’s just the kind of American I am. Light posting likely for the next few days, at least from me.

An “information wants to be free” pioneer issues a mea culpa:

INTERNET idealists like me have long had an easy answer for creative types — like the striking screenwriters in Hollywood — who feel threatened by the unremunerative nature of our new Eden: stop whining and figure out how to join the party!

That’s the line I spouted when I was part of the birthing celebrations for the Web. I even wrote a manifesto titled “Piracy Is Your Friend.” But I was wrong. We were all wrong.

Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web would increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google, Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users.

There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated.

How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough. If there’s one practice technologists ought to embrace, it is the evaluation of empirical results.

* * *

Affordable turns out to be much harder than free when it comes to information technology, but we are smart enough to figure it out. We owe it to ourselves and to our creative friends to acknowledge the negative results of our old idealism. We need to grow up.

Amir Taheri, the Iranian royalist who brought us the tale of Tehran’s plan to make Jewish Iranians wear special yellow badges, turns out to have made up other things too…things which Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen repeat as real. I’ve stuck the details over at Mother Jones.

It’s this kind of bald-faced lying that makes me respect Taheri. Even the most egregious propagandists usually can’t bring themselves to fabricate things out of whole cloth. Instead, they’ll misrepresent what people actually did say, or cite facts selectively. It’s just how our monkey brains work.

This often leads monkey-brained hacks to behave in preposterous ways, as they go to incredible lengths to consciously mislead people while not exactly “lying” (see a funny recent example here). I always look at their exertions and want to ask: since you clearly have no moral scruples, why not just make things up?

But clearly this is something we will never have to wonder about Taheri. And he is the bigger man for it.

What is the problem with friendly dictators? During a discussion on Fox this week about Musharraf, William Kristol explained:

KRISTOL: They are sending Deputy Secretary Negroponte over there earlier this weekend. This is the Marcos moment, I think, where we tell our ally, the friendly and decent dictator, that his time has passed.

The problem with these friendly dictators is they end up wanting to hang on, they like being dictators beyond when it is in their country’s national interest, and beyond when it is in our interest.

I think this actually manageable. I do think Musharraf is going to have to go.

This is why we need experts like William Kristol. Unsophisticated people might think the problem with friendly dictators is the “dictator” part. In particular, individuals whose testicles the friendly dictators have hooked up to electrodes often focus on this to the exclusion of what actually matters, which is whether or not the dictators are effectively serving the needs of William Kristol and his friends.

Then there’s the dictators themselves. They often are concerned with the way the lifespan of ex-dictators tends to be short. What they don’t understand is that they should be happy to die if that’s convenient for their employer, the United States. Just as William Kristol doesn’t worry about what happens to his maids after they’ve outlived their usefulness, why should he worry about his dictators?

Consumers Union has created another funny video with a song by the Austin Lounge Lizards. This time it’s about America’s hilarious lack of food and product safety inspections. You can watch it, and get involved in the Consumers Union campaign on inspections, here.

If you enjoyed that, be sure to watch this previous video, from their prescription drug campaign in 2005. I would like to meet the woman who does the voiceover at the end, and sing her a tender song.