GigaOm’s Om Malik and Mashable’s Pete Cashmore like to present themselves as leaders of a new kind of Web 2.0 journalism. Both turned up at Current TV’s offices Friday, ostensibly to cover Current’s Twitter-enhanced coverage of the first Presidential debate. Truth is, Current’s publicists had called reporters to tip us off that executive chairman of the board Al Gore would be there. Gore didn’t bother to use Twitter himself — he didn’t even stick around for the debate. But he did take time to pose for photos.
Malik and Cashmore, perhaps taking a cue, didn’t do any real reporting on the event, leaving that to Threat Level and Laughing Squid. The two simply blogged their Al-and-me pictures as news stories on GigaOm and Mashable, bringing themselves one step closer to the old media stereotype of the vain reporter who can’t stop inserting himself into the story — or in this case, into the non-story.
Generally, the government doesn’t meddle too much in Amish affairs—it doesn’t make them educate children after the eighth grade, for instance, ’cause of the First Amendment and all that. So it’s kind of surprising to see many Amish threaten to quit farming in a battle with the government over lojacking their livestock with the Mark of the Beast.
They’ve joined up with a lawsuit challenging the National Animal Identification system, which requires livestock to be tagged with an RFID chip. The government says the chips help them track livestock disease. The lawsuit says that the RFID chip is in fact a “Mark of the Beast,” as foretold in the book of the Bible that set up one of Arnold’s worst movies ever, End of Days:
“Use of a numbering system for their premises and/or electronic numbering system for their animals constitutes some form of a ‘mark of the beast’ and/or represents an infringement of their ‘dominion over cattle and all living things’ in violation of their fundamental religious beliefs.”
It’s a serious enough violation of their religious beliefs that, if enforced, many would not be able to farm, even though they maintain a bunch of heirloom crops and livestock—which they note could be genetically handy if disease or a terrorist attack seriously batters our food supply. Personally, I’m not quite ready for Armageddon, so maybe the government should back off, just in case. [Threat Level via Fark]
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