By now, Paul Shirley’s blog post about Haiti has become infamous in our little corner of the globe. He crossed many lines of decency in his “blame the victim” rant, but he at least attempted to justify his stance, and he did offer a broader grasp of the devastation.

Still, he did dump on some people who have had enough dumped on them already. Above all else, his timing was perfectly awful.

I’m something of a gadfly over at the Mo’Kelly blog. It seems that I am frequently not of the same opinion as Morris, who is more than gracious in affording me the space, opportunity but more important, the invitation to express myself however I may choose.

He frequently disagrees with me - after all, I disagreed with him first, and all’s fair - but we quite often have enormously fulfilling exchanges, where we are both, I believe, made better by having had the experience. And it is not uncommon for such exchanges to take place with others who drop by. It’s an intellectually challenging place and I enjoy it immensely.

Morris jumped out in front on this story. It turns out that Shirley, a former low level NBA basketball player, also did a guest stint on the ESPN blog. Once ESPN found out about Shirley’s blog post at FlipCollective, they summarily “fired” him from that spot. Told him that his presence was no longer wanted. Morris was highly in favor of that outcome and dedicated two separate posts to it, the second of which also appeared on HuffingtonPost.com. If Morris saw any irony in that stance, he did not say so.

FlipCollective still welcomes Paul Shirley. He published a “reaction” post the other day. So, based on current evidence, Shirley has not been punished for saying what he said. Not at the place where he said it.

He just doesn’t get to call ESPN “home” anymore. Fair? Sure. It’s their place, they can deactivate your entry pass whenever they want to.

What concerns me, more than a little, is that what Morris refers to as “personal conduct” was in fact the act of a blogger blogging. Just as I am doing now, sitting down at my keyboard to be as honest as I can, that’s what Paul Shirley did. He sat down at his keyboard and attempted to be honest.

He didn’t slander anybody, didn’t threaten anybody, didn’t seem to have any animosity toward anybody. He simply believed that this nation was very poorly led, and that there ought to be some sort of method by which, this time, the assistance they will surely receive can be applied to a better future. In other words, “tough love.”

Real tough. Barbaric, cruel and ill-timed. All of that, yes. But also a point worth pondering. The standard of living in Haiti is below miserable. Natural disasters will always whack them in the ass. If we don’t, as a species, find a way to improve that, just as sure as you’re born, there will be more and more humanitarian disasters in Haiti.

Now perhaps ESPN just decided that hey, if you’re against aid to Haiti you must be a scoundrel and we don’t need no scoundrels working ’round here. Or maybe they didn’t think it through. Whatever their motivation, what is clear is that they have the power. They have the power to kick a guest blogger off of their site for views he expressed somewhere else.

So “personal opinion” is now “personal conduct.”

Meaning, be careful what you say. It could cost you everything.

And so far, Morris doesn’t get that, and I don’t think too many other people do, either. See, Morris is all confused about the fact that “This is not a First Amendment issue!” which is correct. Shirley’s rights aren’t being violated, and he is not only still free to speak, but he kept the gig where he wrote the original piece. He hasn’t been maligned nor constrained in any appreciable way.

No, this isn’t about Paul Shirley, who is a lot more famous today than he was a week ago. This is about ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which also owns ABC and a host of other properties. This is about the fact that more and more humans communicate through the web, which means they use somebody’s service to do it. It might be Google, it might be AOL, it might be Facebook or Twitter.

And what we saw with this episode is a glimpse of the future, a future where “corporate interests” overrule “free speech”. A future in which you can and will be silenced if your opinions aren’t good for business. A world in which speech can never be eliminated but it can be tightly controlled.

I suppose it was there all along, this threat. And I suppose that I’ve been aware for some time now that the best way to get through life is to keep your head down. Why cause a fuss, why call attention to yourself, why become the latest example that the system will never let you threaten it?

We live in a police state, not at all unlike China. We’re given just enough freedom so that we have reasonable quality of life, which makes us happier workers. But if we even consider interfering with the free flow of commerce, if we seem to be the slightest threat to economic vitality on a small or large scale, then bells will go off, red lights will flash, and a car with dark mirrors will screech up along-side, with masked men inside waiting to whisk us away.

And for a few days people will ask, “Where did he go?”, until the word comes back that he went too far and now he’s gone, after which others will stop asking questions and make sure to keep their own heads down from now on.

I want Beyonce to write some political songs. I think she’s capable.

Don’t we need this generation of musicians to start expressing the reality of life in the 21st century?

I start by asking the question: what sort of century are we having? Where is it likely to lead us?

25 years ago I was the next generation, the one being handed a mess to clean up. Divisive racial tension, high deficits, unjustifiable wars, pollution, foreign oil, Wall Street and so forth. We really thought we had some stuff to solve.

Compare that to today.

Today’s 25 year olds face unknowns wherever they turn. How good an idea is an MBA? A Law Degree? An MD? Any college degree at all? How useful will today’s skills be in five or ten years? How will we continue to afford health insurance, energy, car insurance and so forth? How many more bites can they take out of our paycheck for “small” expenses that add up quickly? Who among us isn’t mostly broke as soon as we get that check?

I never feel as broke as I feel on payday.

So, NextGen, here is the world and we’ve made it quite a mess for you. On top of the urgently pressing immediate problems, we’ve got some fantastic long-term problems for you. Social Security is basically insolvent; global warming will get so much worse in the second half of this century, that you will be accused of handing off a dismal legacy to your children unless you come up with some really incredible solutions really soon.

Likely you will not. Likely your generation and all future generations will be about massive adaptation to a rapidly changing world.

Along the way, you might want to decide that you ought to take more control over what’s important.

So, talk among yourselves, NextGen. There’s quite a bit to figure out, other than, you know, who had the best dress at the VMAs.

Just saying.

Banks getting pummeled in the press. Bernanke under seige. Geithner hideously unpopular. Taxes on bonuses being proposed. No let-up in sight.

And most of the people mentioned above have no idea why they’e being treated this way.

“It’s the meltdown, stupid.”

See, to a man (and they’re all men; almost all white), they believe that (a) this is not all their fault; (b) to the extent that they are at fault, they’ve learned their lesson; (c) they are still the best stewards of the financial apparatus of capitalism because they understand it better than anyone else.

Listen - this is true. It may seem ridiculous, it may seem in many ways like a joke, but it - is - true.

That is exactly what they believe.

Did you notice that stocks were down quite a bit last week? Do you know what the reported reason is? You may choose not to believe this, but anyway:

Because Bernanke may NOT win a second term as Fed Chief.

That’s right, the markets are supposedly afraid that it will be bad news if Bernanke is not re-upped.

Either that’s a fabulous example of financial press spin being tightly controlled from the inside, or an enormous paranoia on the part of investors that a new fed chief would mess everything up; or both.

In any case, what it points out is that irrationality has become the norm. The only truth these men understand is making money. They are money changers. Their job is to take somebody’s money, give it to somebody else and make a profit from it. They were decried as evil in the bible, and to this day, if you explain their job to the average person, and how their incentives work, and how their compensation works, you would be very angry. You would say this makes no sense. You would say that there must be a better way than this.

You would understand that. They do not.

The money changers view themselves as capitalism’s grease. After all, what happened when they crashed? The economy ground to a near-halt. Doesn’t that prove how important, how vital they are?

They also proved they were too big to fail, and they proved that the government would choose to save them rather than find out what the world looks like without them.

A game of chicken that they neatly won.

And now they want to accomplish one thing, and they are very urgent about it: Resist any and all attempts to interfere with or regulate their practices.

They really don’t get it, do they?

It’s the meltdown, stupid.

You presided over the worst financial debacle in history; you lost more economic value in a short time than had ever been thought possible before, and you came within a whisker of destroying the very system. You cast millions out of work and made millions more paupers, losers of all their wealth.

You destroyed a large swath of the consumer sector. You destroyed property values. And in both cases you strongly encouraged rapid growth, THEN destroyed that value.

The people don’t know exactly how you did it, they only know it was you. When they hear you say that you want to go back to paying single-year bonuses to one person that is more money than they will ever make in their lives - and that you want to do it for hundreds of your employees - guess what? They don’t say “Ah, the American Dream at work!”; they say “That’s where the money went!”

In other words, any system that could pay somebody that much in a year, and lead us into this deep of a mess, must be a completely wrong system.

No wonder you won’t let anybody in to fix it. You like it just the way it is.

And so it’s simple. The mass intelligence of the people is taking over. They will not stop until the system that caused all of this, that they were deliberately meant to not understand, is replaced by something simpler, something stronger, something better and something explainable.

Now the only question is: Does the President understand any of this?

Who is Scott Brown?

Why, he is The Terminator, of course.

He just terminated the Obama Presidency and with it any hope of an ambitious liberal agenda.

The people of Massachusetts have spoken: That wasn’t Ted Kennedy’s seat, and they couldn’t wait for him to finally die so they could put a Republican in his place and kill the Senate super-majority that was needed to pass health care reform.

Quite a mouthful, sorry.

But here it is: Kennedy is dead, Brown is in, and it looks to these eyes a whole lot like the honeymoon is over.

Or is this merely backlash for Obama calling the Cambridge Police “stupid”?

Well, maybe. An Obama backlash for sure, though. A heavily Democratic state just handed a historically liberal seat to a man who vows to oppose any such legislation, starting with health care reform.

Obama has spent almost all of his political capital and was greatly counting on a bump in the polls once this thing got passed. Now it will not get passed, not in anything like its current form, and all the Democratic options are bad.

This is 1994 come early. You remember 1994, Contract With America and the obliviation of the Clinton agenda. It seems to me that health care reform was on the table then, too.

If 2010 turns into a year where Republicans make major gains in Congress, here’s the result: We will never, ever again have a meaningful push by the federal government to reform health care.

That would be two out of the last two Democratic Presidents having their hat handed to them for even trying.

America doesn’t want health care reform? It hurts too much to laugh at that one. Of course America wants and needs health care reform, they just can’t agree on HOW. The best chance we had was for one party to get SOMETHING passed, and then hammer away at the thing for the next generation until people stopped complaining about it.

Ugly, I know, pathetic for sure, but the only way to get meaningful reform done. One party passes something and then we keep working on it.

The Republicans had six years of a stranglehold on power and didn’t even attempt such reform. Now they’ve succeeded, spectacularly, in blowing up the Democratic plan.

And the lesson which will certainly be learned is, Never again…

The New York Times is, by the spring 2011, going to be charging for content. We don’t know yet if that means all content or some content, or all content some of the time, or some content all of the time.

I only know it’s a very bad thing.

You see, they really don’t need all those printing presses anymore. They really don’t need all those machinists and drivers and all those other dirty little jobs that used to be necessary when the method of presenting their product began with the killing of a tree.

It’s the economics, stupid.

Many newspapers failed to downshift into the new mode. Do you remember what happened to vinyl albums when CDs became popular? Vinyl was still available, but it was scarcer and more costly than before. In other words, if you had to have your vinyl you had to pay a premium. In the CD world, there were bargains galore as companies sought to ramp up their production to cost-effective levels, which they did in about 3 or 4 years. From 1982 to 1986 the world of recorded music changed absolutely and with hardly a murmur.

The Times, like other spectacular failures before them (including themselves: Remember TimesSelect?) have got the model backward. They are losing money hand over fist on the dead tree side of the business, and they believe that the way forward is to subsidize that by making us pay for the new, much cheaper method of delivery.

(a) Do they think we just fell off the turnip truck? We will still have access to news, even without the Times.

(b) What makes them think they can, now, get us to pay for something they’ve been providing, free, since 1996?

This is sheer desperation on the part of a dinosaur which is failing to adapt to its new environment. Surely the online side of the business is not the cause of the revenue drain. Surely the offenders in that regard are (a) decline in circulation, raising the cost of producing each copy; and (b) loss in advertiser dollars due to item (a) as well as more competition from the online world and a general slump in the consumer sector.

And their solution is to shoot themselves in the online heart?

Evidently, because talks are pretty far along. But does it make the slightest sense? No. Can it possibly succeed? No. Does it run the risk of destroying their online brand? Absolutely.

And yet, it still seems sure to happen.

And that’s why dinosaurs die.

Tomorrow I will be 50. The Rev. King would have been 81. I know the holiday is next Monday, but I would like to take a moment to speak of my feelings for a man who I have taken to calling “The Last Great American”.

Over at the Mo’Kelly blog, Roger wrote: “Man can overcome his enviroment when he seeks a higher plane.”

That was so beautifully said that I immediately started breaking it down. I decided that the word “enlightenment” belongs in there somewhere, and it reminded me that Dr. King believed in the same thing. He believed that enlightened humans were incapable of injustice, of inhumanity, and therefore of racism. He spent the last 15 years of his life, knowing he would die young, moving from city to city and issue to issue to represent the belief that we can talk to each other. He knew in a way that many of his contemporaries flatly rejected that not only did you need to find some white folks you could trust, not only did you need a number of white folks on your side, but that there were good, honorable, decent people who understood his message of enlightenment and considered themselves enlightened.

I am one of those people.

I cherish the man and all he stood for. Some will choose to peck away at his shortcomings. I’m comfortable saying that his personal peccadillos were first and foremost human frailty, and second and most important, vastly overshadowed by his contribution to modern society. He was the rightful heir to Gandhi, and it is no mere tokenism that we celebrate his birth as a National Holiday.

Happy Birthday, Reverend. We miss you now more than ever and we are ever thankful for what you gave us.

Lesser beings live among us.

Have you ever pondered why there is such a gap between humans and the next smartest species? I mean, it’s an incredible gap. Why aren’t there species in-between?

My answer has long been: Because we killed them all.

In recent years I have amended that view somewhat. Those who we did not kill, managed to survive by assimilating with modern humans. In other words, lesser beings found a way to survive in our world.

And we found use for them. They clean our toilets, they tend our gardens, they dump our trash, sweep our floors and serve us our fast food. Do modern humans also do these things? Sure. But modern humans could do almost anything else, if they wanted to. Lesser beings cannot. This is the limit of their abilities.

The problem is, they don’t recognize themselves as lesser beings. They in fact believe they are superior to others, despite a complete lack of evidence other than their own belief. However, according to the U.S. constitution, they get the same one vote that modern humans get.

You can spot a lesser being a mile away. He or she is completely certain of their beliefs and sees the world in terms of those who are right and those who are wrong. As soon as they know your opinion about something, they immediately have you classified. They almost universally believe in one form of religion or another, and it is common for that religion to teach them that those who do not believe as they do are evil.

Before you get any ideas, yes I absolutely assert that today’s Republican Party has made it their primary objective to appeal to lesser beings, having learned that they can be folded into a voting majority. However, you will find lesser beings all across the spectrum of views and beliefs.

In The Age Of Twitter, the post-apocalypse of the IM world, we are well into our second generation of people who will never be able to spell, and will never be able to express a thought which is longer than 140 characters. It is impossible to fully tax one’s brain when so little is required in order to communicate in such a way. Speed and the ability to multi-task are all that one needs.

So, for example, they will be extremely well qualified to run the take-out window.

I’m in a bad mood about the state of discourse in this country and the world at large, which is at an all-time low in my half century on this planet. Lesser beings live among us but they are allowed to vote, are allowed to gather in large numbers in order to seem substantial, and take it upon themselves to impose their shallow, misguided beliefs on the rest of us.

And it’s difficult for me to imagine either the world that portends, or what it would take to alter that course.