Citizen Power

Usually I write about energy, power, or climate change, or politics. Today’s topic is about a different kind of power — too much power in the hands of one company to destroy most of a person’s web presence.

This is not my only blog — I have several websites,  and a forum,  and three art/photo galleries, and two podcasts I host on one server hosting account with this one company.   I’ve accumulated these sites  over the last 5 years or so, like a lot of people have.   That means one company, my current host, has a lot of power over the existence of my websites.

Today, they abused that power.  Big time.  This account is with a company I will not name because now I’m afraid they’ll sue me if I reveal who they are, but it rhymes with Blue Toast.  So this company, which I will call Blue Toast, today pulled down all of my websites. Without warning!    If you were to go to them today you would have seen a blank screen with “Account Suspended” in giant letters.  All my sites were gone - vanished.  I have been a good paying customers of theirs for almost five years and today, with no notice of any kind, they simply suspended all my websites.    They notified me of this by an email that said basically — “Your accounts are suspended.  Call customer service.”

So I called them in a serious panic.   I found out that a long time ago, over a year ago, I made two folders with “backup” in the title in this account, and that was a violation of their “terms of service”.   Strictly forbidden.  I guess I shouldn’t have done this, but they should have checked with me first to see what kind of folders these actually were.   The customer service rep. told me “we are not a backup service!”  OK, fine, I said, but let’s be reasonable–  I’ve been a good customer and this is what you do to good customers?  A simple, harmless mistake that you call a terms of service violation that deserved a warning — not immediate suspension of my account which resulted in all my sites down and inaccessible!    I was mad, as you can probably imagine.

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Tonight is the season and show finale of Battlestar Galactica,  in my opinion the best sci-fi show to ever hit the airwaves.  I would not have written that 8 years ago, when I still thought Star Trek TNG was pretty much the pinnacle of TV sci-fi; or 7 years ago, when I loved Firefly, but BSG has surpassed them both.   Of course, movies used to be another matter altogether, but with the introduction of BSG, that changed too.  The show has always had movie-quality special effects, and movie-quality writing and acting. The show just took TV to another level completely, and even made me get plasma screen HD envy.  But alas, I still have my little 20″ TV screen, and it doesn’t do justice to a show with such walloping great production values.

I won’t bother to review the  show. You either like it or love it, or you don’t like science fiction, in which case I can’t change your mind and won’t try, even if BSG was and is far more than science-fiction.  It’s human drama at its finest.   I have never seen anything like this show on TV except for the long-defunct “Firefly”, the 2002 sci-fi show by Joss Whedon.  That show also had great writing, acting and special effects, but it was on FOX and didn’t even last one full season. Still, I was a huge fan.  Battlestar Galactica came very shortly after it and included some of the hand-held camera effects, and similar quick cuts in action.  Actually, I’m not a fan of the quick cuts but I like the hand-held effects because it seems more like you are there in person viewing the battle scenes, etc.

This show is famous not only for its quality but also for  how it mirrored a lot of the dark times we suffered as a country after 9/11.  The show took everything much farther of course:  an existential threat of being wiped out by a scary enemy, the tough decisions, the wars, the following ethical concerns of torture, capital punishment, holding captives, and much more.  There were alliances with good guys and bad guys, there was disloyalty and treason, and there was even a thrown election!  Remember the President cheated in order to win her election by throwing out some votes!  It seemed this show had a mirror event for everything we were going through, but of course, they were floating out in space with many fewer choices than we had.

I will mourn the end of this show for a reason related to that — as the war in Iraq is ending, so is BSG, so it will probably be the fate of the show to forever be tied to the so-called “war on terror” in peoples’ minds.  That’s too bad, because even without our own events the show would still be great.  It was one of the darkest, most confusing, most ethically-challenging shows of any type that I can recall.

And just to tie this slightly to my “power” theme — did you know they only ate algae-created food?  This might be our future, if we manage to move to becoming vegetarians, and then say climate change-created droughts cut down on the food supply drastically.  We might need to turn to the oceans for our food supply, and that might involve algae.  (or, gods-forbid — Soylent Green .  Let’s hope it never comes to that!).

They also powered their ships with “tylenium”,  a substance that doesn’t seem to exist.  The closest I can come to finding out what the frak that is, is a reference in a book discussing a “dimethylacenaphtylenium ion”.  Since I have no idea what that is, I can’t even write about whether or not it’s a plausible source of energy!

If you have never watched BSG, I would not start with the finale.  For the rest of us who have, the finale promises to be an amazing ride.

Marine Life Census Finds 235 Common Species at Poles

This is  amazing.   Many people think that no life can exist in very cold water at the poles, but life has a way of surviving even the most extreme conditions.   At least 235 marine species live both in the Arctic and Antarctica, way more than previously thought, according to research by the Census of Marine Life. Although almost 7,000  miles separate the polar seas, the researchers discovered the same species of cold-water worms, crustaceans, sea cucumbers, and snail-like creatures, called pteropods, among others. Scientists suspect that during ice ages, the common species were carried from one pole to the other — most likely from Antarctica to the Arctic — by frigid currents that drop to the bottom of the sea floor and slowly move north. The Census of Marine Life is a decade-long project to catalog the world’s marine species.

You can see some of their photos here. (pictured above: The nemertean, Pelagonemertes rollestoni, which is about three centimeters long, uses a dart attached to its tongue to harpoon its prey. Its yellow stomach reaches out to feed all other parts of the body.)

I hope what this accomplishes in part is to keep the oil and gas developers from swooping in to the areas at the poles and destroying some of this fascinating life as they search for yet more finite oil and gas.   According to the report, it says,

“The polar seas, far from being biological deserts, teem with an amazing quantity and
variety of life,” says Dr. Ian Poiner, Chair of the Census Scientific Steering Committee.
“Only through the co-operation of 500 people from more than 25 countries could the
daunting environmental challenges be overcome to produce research of such
unprecedented scale and importance. And humanity is only starting to understand the
nature of these regions.”

The polar Census teams are documenting:
• The distribution of ocean animals – mapping their changing ranges and hotspots;
• The diversity of species (to date: 7,500 animals in the Antarctic and 5,500 in the
Arctic, of a global marine life species total estimated at 230,000-250,000); and
• The abundance and sizes of major species groups at various levels in the food
web, in order to gauge how they change over time;

These places include seafloors exposed to light for the first time in as long as 100,000 years,  when  ancient ice shelf lids melted and disintegrated in recent years.

This isn’t just about polar bears anymore. This video explains tipping points and feedback loops very well. Does that sound too geeky for you? Watch the video, it’s very enlightening. It’s called “Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip”, which I found on ClimateAction.au.

Here’s the bottom line: We need to get the carbon level in the atmosphere down to 350 ppm. At the highest, we could probably stand 400ppm. More than that and serious problems will occur. Methane is already leaking out of the permafrost in the north, and methane is our biggest, worst greenhouse gas. Unfortunately, we are currently on track to get up to 600ppm, or more, which would literally change the planet into a place where life might not survive. At least, not life as we know it. (Climate change evolution has already started in insects). What will solve this gigantic problem? The big question is, how can we stop this before we get to a tipping point after which there is no return.

The 8 leading industrialized countries have to take on much more ambitious plans than they have today, and get the developing countries to understand they can’t go where we have been. They need to start several steps ahead of our industrial revolution. How do we know this? A super computer program. This climate simulator was developed by MIT and several other entities. It’s called C-ROADS. Bob Correll of the Climate Action Initiative was recently interviewed on NPR and I’m going to play what he had to say in the next Futurism Now podcast. Bob Correll has been using the C-ROADS simulator to explore the long term impacts of several country-level commitments to address climate change. So far, the commitments are not adequate, but that’s what upcoming climate conferences are for. The following article is from Climate Interactive.

C-ROADS — The Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator
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We have work to do. For anyone who cares about climate change, our first job is talking to people about global warming — oops, I mean climate change. We all have to help in educating the public, because what the public doesn’t know will hurt us all.

Tip #1: First, we should stop calling climate change “global warming”. It’s climate change. The climate is changing. It warms here and there, it warms over all, and it’s warming on average, But, in some little pockets it’s getting cooler and that throws everyone off. People get confused just because winter came and it got cold. Yes, simple things like changing seasons confuses people. Call it ‘climate change’ and some of the confusion melts away.

Tip #1.5: (this is optional, depending on who you are talking to) Keep it simple: Storms, and hurricanes getting stronger, migration of large amounts of people due to sea rise as ice melts., etc. Insurance gets more expensive. Carbon talk can make people’s eyes glaze over. Say “parts per million” and see what happens.

Tip #2: Stop arguing with “Deniers”. It just gives them credibility, and since the denial movement is now approaching cult level, the last thing they need is credibility. Refer to them as flat earthers, to their face if possible. And please keep evolution out of analogies. (Evolution is currently undergoing its own bad street cred phase.)

Tip #3: Let go of your astonishment of what things cost. Fighting climate change will be very very expensive, but we have to do it. We have no choice. This is not optional. Whatever it costs, we have to do it. Let your elected representatives know this because they are reluctant to spend money on things that aren’t saving banks or a war.

Skeptics are still definitely worth talking to. Think of deniers vs. skeptics as the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. With the atheist, there is no possibility of convincing, so don’t waste your time. With an agnostic, you have a chance to convince them because their mind is still open. There have been many guides written on how to talk to a climate skeptic. The most effective thing to tell climate skeptics at the onset of your conversation is that you understand their skepticism. Tell them you were once a skeptic too. Then tell them that climate change can never be proven as being caused by humans with 100% certainty, but we have to act on it now anyway, like we act on other unproven things, like terrorism, because the stakes are so high. We can’t wait. Will terrorism happen again? We don’t know, but we have spent billions trying to prevent it, just in case, because the stakes are so high. And we didn’t wait. (That is not an endorsement of what we did, but war is another subject).

When people are receptive to your message, show them articles like the following. Don’t start out with hard science articles. Most people relate more to anecdotal type stories that segue into topics they can relate to.

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I recorded this hearing, and it’s linked below, so more people can hear it. How many people go to C-SPAN and listen to the hearings there? I don’t know — I usually don’t unless I have to.

On Wednesday, January 28, Al Gore testified on climate change to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (Gore was also there to support President Obama’s stimulus package, which was up for a vote at the time he was testifying.) John Kerry, Russ Feingold, and several others on the committee talked and questioned Al Gore. This is a must-listen committee hearing for anyone interested in how we are going to deal with climate change. They not only heard a presentation about how serious things are with our climate, but concrete ways to deal with it. In fact, in the last half hour (of part 2) Al Gore really discusses some solid plans and solutions, and puts forth what can be done.

It’s probably the most useful and politically practical thing I’ve heard on dealing with climate change so far, and it’s good to hear something so positive and optimistic about climate change solutions. I think Al Gore is one of the best people to communicate the facts and solutions, too.

But before the solutions, Gore covers some frightening facts. Here are two more graphics I was able to grab off the CSPAN screen (where I got the recording). The picture on the top of this post is the one he used to illustrate what a planet with all of its CO2 in the atmosphere becomes: The planet Venus, at 855 degrees, with all its carbon in the atmosphere (none in the soil or the oceans).

The graphic here on the left shows that hundreds of thousands of people will be displaced by rising sea level if climate change is not reversed. In the second picture, it shows how the sun’s rays, which would normally bounce off ice, are now absorbed by the ocean when the ice is missing. Gore loves slides shows and that’s part of what his presentation was.

The hearing was about 3 hours long and I split it into two parts, and they are downloadable below. This is the hearing in its entirety, minus a couple of minutes at the beginning where chairman Senator John Kerry was intoning his introductions and thank-you’s. But for all Kerry’s previous dronations, his speech this time is very interesting throughout, as is the whole hearing. I think it’s the only senate hearing I’ve listened to in its entirety and not been bored one minute.

Download/ Listen to Part 1 here.

Download/Listen to Part 2 here.

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Some of the mainstream media is finally admitting the truth. In the U.S., you can’t turn on any “news” channel without seeing the effects of the multi-million-dollar ad campaign designed to convince Americans that coal is clean and oil and gas are necessary and wonderful. It’s really beyond sickening how they are pushing this propaganda on us. In a surprise move, it’s the New York Times that contradicts one part of the clean coal/wonderful energy myth. After this excerpt from the editorial, check out the question asked by ClimateProgress on whether or not we can convince China to stop using this horrible fuel source. Coal plants are still being approved around this country too, and in order to stop them from being constructed, everyone has to act in some way. A call to your representatives in Washington is a good first step.January 23, 2009

Collapse of the Clean Coal Myth

“A month of negative news for the Tennessee Valley Authority could lead to positive changes in national policy, including federal regulation of toxic coal wastes and new legal constraints on coal-fired power plants. More broadly, the authority’s recent travails may help persuade the public that coal is nowhere near as “clean” as a high-priced industry advertising campaign makes it out to be.

In December, hundreds of acres of Roane County in eastern Tennessee were buried under a billion gallons of toxic coal sludge after the collapse of one of the T.V.A.’s containment ponds. It was an accident waiting to happen and an alarm bell for Congress and federal regulators.

Senator Barbara Boxer of California noted that coal combustion in this country produces 130 million tons of coal ash every year — enough to fill a train of boxcars stretching from Washington, D.C., to Australia. Amazingly, the task of regulating the more than 600 landfills and impoundments holding this ash is left to the states, which are more often lax than not. Ms. Boxer will press the Obama administration to devise rules for the disposal of coal ash as well as design and construction standards for the impoundments.

Just as the T.V.A. was dealing with this mess, Lacy Thornburg, a federal district judge in North Carolina, ordered the giant utility to reduce emissions from four coal-fired power plants that had been sending pollution into North Carolina. The ruling validated an unusual legal strategy adopted by North Carolina’s attorney general, Roy Cooper, who sued the T.V.A. in 2006 on grounds that pollution from its power plants in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky constituted a “public nuisance” to the citizens of his state. Mr. Cooper chose this route because the Bush administration had systematically weakened regulations that had been used in the past to force power companies to clean up their emissions.”

We will see more and more lawsuits soon on the issue of coal and pollution. I suspect that someone at the New York Times is sending our new president a message. I doubt they would have bothered to run an editorial like this while Bush was still in office. There would have been no point.

Read More here

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Wall-E was a great movie, one of the best I saw last year. I rented it because I liked the cover art! and I like animated movies that are very well done. Not knowing exactly what it was about, I was completely entranced with it and didn’t get up until it was over. Imagine a future of obese people who don’t exercise and eat all day who only get around on scooters — sounds frighteningly like the present day, in some ways. Imagine a planet covered in its own garbage. At least we aren’t quite there yet.

So I’m glad it’s been nominated for six Academy Awards today. It’s an futuristic, environmental warning movie with some politics thrown in, and yet it was a huge hit and did very well last year, and deservedly so.

“Wall-E, the little robot who saved Earth, is having a big day - six Oscar nominations have been bestowed upon the film for Best Animated Feature Film of the Year, Original Score, Original Song, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Original Screenplay. These six nominations tie the film to Beauty and the Beast, long considered the best animated film of all time, and the only animated film to have ever been nominated for Best Picture. I wrote a review of Wall-E last June, and discussed its environmental ramifications.

Though “Wall-E” campaigned for a best picture and a best director nod, the film was passed over. “Clearly, and unfortunately, the Academy chose to follow tradition and ignore ‘WALL-E’ in the Best Picture and Best Director categories,” said the Pixar blog. The film will certainly win Best Animated Film (sorry, “Kung-Fu Panda” and “Bolt”), and is a top contender for score and song, where it is only up against “Slumdog Millionaire.”

By sheer volume of nominations, “Wall-E” will go down in the record books as one of the best-ever animated films. It was also the fifth-highest-grossing film in the U.S. in 2008, so its green message was spread far and wide, and was met with critical acclaim on hundreds of top-10 lists. If “Wall-E” wins big, it will have a place in movie history both for its beauty and its message.”

From USNEWS blog.

Now we need a movie or two like this every year until everyone in the public understands that environmental movies are not dull and boring or somehow associated with Al Gore! Environmental issues are associated with common sense, with humanity and with a concern for the future generations. As Wall-E shows in an amusing and sweet way, preserving the planet for the people to come is a human rights issue.

Every winter when it gets cold somewhere the climate change deniers come out of the woodwork and claim we are headed for a new Ice Age and that the usual cold weather proves global warming is bunk. This happened Tuesday night on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN. Lou Dobbs had two climate change deniers on his show along with one environmentalist. This form of presentation disguised as logic is meaningless, but the media loves it because it gets people to argue (and American media is now mostly all about fights, not debates). Dobbs began this segment asking if we are entering a new Ice Age and said that 2008 was one of the coolest years on record since 1998. (A very misleading thing to say). His first speaker was Joseph D’Aleo, co-founder of the weather channel, is a climate change denier. He said 2008 was the 14th “coldest” year on record (not true) according to “satellite data” which in his mind is more accurate than any other kind of data. Naturally, he didn’t explain why.

Then Jay Lehr of the Heartland Institute said he is of the Fred Singer school of thought (that global warming isn’t real) and that sunspots cause most of our warming. And because sunspot activity is down, he said he felt we were in a major cooling period. He was on the show to warn Congress not to pass legislation regarding climate change, like pollution standards, cap and trade, and what he called “dramatic legislation”.

Dobbs asked if we should be concerned about our carbon footprint, and he was answered by his third guest, Alex Wissner-Gross of C02stats.com (see my Green label from them at the top of the left-hand column). They seem to be a good organization, but Alex admitted that to him, “efficiency is most important, carbon footprint second.” He’s a professor at Harvard, so I think he should know better and maybe he did; Dobbs only let him talk briefly.

Dobbs then brought up a good point — we should be reasonable stewards of the planet even if global warming is real or not, in his opinion. This got an agreement from Joe and Jay. Joe said yes, we need conservation whether it continues to cool or warm, warming being in his mind a “far less dangerous scenario”, and to him, throwing in whatever he could before his time was up, he said that includes “nuclear, coal . . . and whatever it takes.” He just wanted to get “coal” in there. Tell me, how does a person start the Weather Channel without knowing a darned thing about science? Maybe he just likes storms.

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This has nothing to do with politics, but it’s about a TV icon who passed away on December 18th.

Majel Barrett-Roddenberry was the wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and someone I admired.   She died on Thursday of leukemia complications.  Barrett was the original Star Trek feminist, the powerful, smart woman. In the original Star Trek pilot she played “Number One” which was the Captain’s sidekick or sort of a vice-captain. Score one for the women. That role later went to “Mr. Spock” when the series started, but she blazed that path briefly back when it was still a woman’s place in American society to defer to men and look pretty. She did that later too because after all, it was Star Trek. To her credit, she never appeared on the show in a bikini or harem pants, (did she?) at least until she was much older and played Lwaxana Troi, when she appeared (faux) naked for her wedding ceremony.

Barrett’s most well known as “Nurse Chapel” (remember her Spock Gaze) on the original series, and also as the voice of the ship’s computer through several of the ST shows and movies. I used to be a huge, geeky fan of Star Trek, and even went to a ST convention once, though I never met her. I think I have seen every episode of ST, (except for some Deep Space Nine episodes (and much of the last show, Enterprise)) several times. Star Trek, especially TNG (The Next Generation) helped form how I think about the world and is one reason why I am a progressive. It’s one reason why I thought things like science, immigrant rights, space exploration, and governments were important. It made me see into the future, and consider ideas like borders don’t matter when you are dealing with a universe, even at a very young age. It was a show that made you wonder. What’s a parsec, anyway? Would food replicators solve world hunger? Would the Federation be a good evolution for the UN, or would it be repressive? And remember, there are no borders in space, so free trade… well, that’s Firefly, not ST. (Firefly was every bit as good as Star Trek, it just burned out far more quickly).

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In my spare time I produce an anti-war podcast called “Civilianism”, so I figure I might as well write about it here, since it’s my last one of 2008. They will return in 2009, or at least that’s the plan. I’ve been doing a podcast since 2005, and while it was a lot of fun for two years, it’s gotten to be a lot of work. But it’s the only real “activism” I do, especially in the winter, besides writing on websites. The following is typical of what I usually post for each podcast. The current one is about Obama’s plan for a continued war in Afghanistan. I’m totally against this idea, but then, I’m not the president. (Since Sarah Palin ran, though, I’m now convinced I’m as qualified to be president as anyone). These notes were for the podcast I just finished today. Even if you don’t listen to the podcast, the links are all to good articles about what people now are thinking about Afghanistan. Many people previously in favor of that war are now against it.

What can we expect from foreign policy in the Obama administration in 2009 - will U.S. imperialism take precedence, or will peace? We can’t have both. The U.S. continues to impose its will by force around the world, and there is no sign of this stopping any time soon, because our new president says he will increase troops to fight the so-called “War on Terror”.

Gore Vidal, Andrew Bacevich, and Arundhati Roy strongly disagree with U.S. imperialist policy, and so do I. I play portions of all three, and a portion of an interview from KBOO radio. You can listen from the following link.
Download this episode here

Here’s one article I talk about:  “The Taliban Control 72% of Afghanistan, Surround Kabul, and NATO is in Denial”

“Armed clashes in Afghanistan have reached the highest level since the Taliban was ousted by American-led forces in 2001, according to the United Nations. Taliban leader Mullah Omar today warned violence will rise and urged foreign forces to withdraw, Agence France-Presse reported, in his first public statement in a year. Pakistan militants torched 50 NATO trucks carrying supplies for troops in Afghanistan, the second such attack in as many days, AFP reported today, citing a police official.”

More…

BBC article: Drivers halt Afghan supply route — Lorry Drivers in north-west Pakistan say they will no longer deliver supplies to NATO. If this means the war will have to end, that’s OK.
BBC: Countering the Taleban’s 20-year war
The Taleban is planning for a 20-year war in Afghanistan, so we must too, the article argues. I hope they are completely wrong.

Gore Vidal’s interview was about his book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
(here is another interview with him, for more information, not the one I played)
Arundhati Roy’s anti-war talk Come September can be downloaded from iTunes
You can read the transcript here.

Times Online: US accuses Britain over military failings in Afghanistan.

(The In These Times magazine article, “Obama’s Burden” that I read from, is not online.)

Also see: More U.S. troops to Afghanistan? by Russ Feingold

Also see: Official Calls for Sensitivity to Afghan Demands

Also see: Brzezinski: Surge In Afghanistan Risky, Some McCain Backers Want World War IV
Obviously, let’s not let them have it.

It’s time for American imperialism to end and peace to prevail.

This is the last episode of Civilianism for 2008 — Happy New Year!”

And that’s how the show notes end. I used to post every bit of music I included, but that really is too much work, and sometimes I don’t even know where I got bits of audio that I include, so I just stopped doing that. If anyone really wondered, I suppose I could find it. The music in this episode in the 2nd half is all from the documentary “We” that is about Arundhati Roy’s speech “Come September”. “We” is a documentary that you can find online just by googling it. There are many clips of it on Youtube too. Basically, it’s just an anti-war speech with a lot of U.S. history thrown in.

The news that Jay Leno, the mainstream late night talk show host in the U.S., is moving to a different timeslot isn’t big news by itself. But the underlying reason why it’s happening is news. He was interviewed Tuesday night on NBC News with Brian Williams, and sounded defense about this move. In part, his defensiveness was probably due to the fact that people thought he was going to ABC and Conan O’Brian would get his job, and now that won’t happen.

Leno explained the time change move to “prime time” by saying that people are going to bed earlier because they are working more, and they are working harder, so they are missing much of his current show.

It’s probably true. The U.S. is in a recession and there were 533,000 layoffs last month, so people are scared, and working more and working longer hours, if they are lucky enough to still have a job. They aren’t doing this because they’re bored, or just like to work a lot. Politicians don’t get that, but it looks like the media networks do understand what’s going on. NBC realizes there is a serious economic problem brewing and they are adapting. It would be a bad move to leave one of their highest advertising draws and continue to put him on the air when people aren’t seeing him anymore.

At least the networks seem sensitive about the reasons. I remember well when George Bush was in a townhall meeting in 2007, and a woman told him that she worked three jobs. She meant that she had to work 3 jobs to survive, and he took it to mean she was an industrious American who worked so hard because she had some kind of enormous drive to work. His response to her was “Uniquely American, isn’t it?” It is getting more and more American for people to have 2 and even 3 jobs, as our economy tanks. You can a hear a clip of that famous exchange here .

The economic downturn is even hitting the spinoff parts of NBC, so the economic problems at NBC are deep. There will be layoff announcements starting this week, and executives are even being told to fly coach to the Super Bowl ! This is, however, industry-wide, despite it being more obvious at NBC. This is also affecting ABC and CBS, at least.

I knew that things must be bad at NBC when, during the Mumbai terror attacks of two weeks ago, MSNBC ran only old, canned shows about cops and prisons, instead of live news. They did that for hours and days while the attacks raged on in India, which were covered live on most of the other major networks.

Now, its reported that NBC might even scale back to only 22 hours of network programming a day. That means they would actually go dark — something that has never happened in my memory. I know that when TV first started there was only programming for a certain number of hours a day and then the TV would go to a holding pattern screen and then to static. But this is 2008, the age of 24 hour news, global news, and constant advertising! It’s hard to imagine a giant like NBC having to cut back to the extent that it actually goes off the air for a few hours a day. Part of this is not just the economic downturn — it’s also the competition from online media. Networks like Comedy Central and other online media put many of their shows on the air every day for free. That is tough competition. NBC has responded by putting many of its shows online too, but that cuts down on advertising revenue. Is the future of TV online-only shows?

So, Jay Leno is going to essentially do the same show on NBC, only earlier, and it’s probably because of the economic downturn, and the realities of internet programming. I know people who say they only watch TV online and I have been doing more watching online too. Maybe the next industry to go are the TV manufacturers. Sony announced yesterday that it too is laying off 16,000 workers next year!

Leno’s prime time show will start in the Fall of 2009.