David Weinberger's Weblog. Let's just see how it goes.
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David Weinberger's Weblog. Let's just see how it goes. |
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Blogrolodex Akma
How to survive a nuclear war with just a hat Sites Seeing |
Friday, November 15, 2002 Rubbernecking MichaelI can't find a legitimate reason to run this photo of The King of Pop in court yesterday:
Go here for a history of how this happened to the poor man. 11/15/2002 12:21:16 PM | PermaLink The Register on PoindexterThe Register has a good screed about W's appointing convicted felon and anti-Constitutionalist John Poindexter to be in charge of the world's most invasive database. You can read William Safire on the same topic here. (Thanks to Greg Cavanagh for the link.) 11/15/2002 11:40:14 AM | PermaLink AKMA and Derrida:AKMA casually mentions that he's going to hang with Derrida. Get Buddy Rich on the drums and you've got a group that will swing! I am drenched in envy. Forgive me. 11/15/2002 09:10:47 AM | PermaLink It's a Google UniverseCraig Allen points us to a science fictionish story by Paul Ford about how Google could become the center of the known universe. And Gary Unblinking Stock points to recent activity at his Gogglewhack site. (A Googlewhack is a word pair that gives one and only one hit when searched for at Google; the pair must not be enclosed in quotation marks.) In submitting a Googlewhack, one must also provide a definition of the pair. Yesterday alone Gary received (among others):
This is shocking! Given that our civilization is built on phallic overcompensation, this is like "Nigerian scam" turning out to be a Googlewhack. 11/15/2002 09:07:18 AM | PermaLink
Thursday, November 14, 2002 Mad Magazine on Gulf WarsHave a laugh. It may be the last one for a while... Also, Madkane has written new lyrics to Billy Joel's "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" about kissing goodbye to our rights. I wish I knew the Billy Joel song. It's so hard to keep up with what the kids are listening to these days. 11/14/2002 04:01:42 PM | PermaLink Call Your SenatorThe Homeland Security Act is the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution for civil liberties. Today and maybe tomorrow is the only chance you'll have to tell your Senator to vote AGAINST it. You can get your Senator's phone number here. (If you live in Massachusetts, Kerry is at (202) 224-2742 and Kennedy is at (202) 224-4543. Here is William Safire's piece on this in the NY Times today, reproduced in gleeful violation of the copyright law: YOUR ARE A SUSPECT WASHINGTON � If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend � all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database." To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you � passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance � and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen. This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks. Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua. A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing. This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American. Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight. He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans. When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president. This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act. Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear. The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads "Scientia Est Potentia" � "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before. -- William Safire Thanks to Jeff Angus for email pointing out this outrage. 11/14/2002 11:44:34 AM | PermaLink Adina on the TalmudAdina discourses on the hyperlinked nature of Judaism's basic texts, saying in a couple of paragraphs what it takes The Talmud and the Internet an entire book to say. (What does the hyperlinked nature of the text and the conversational nature of its interpretation tell us about the nature of the religion and the community/people?) 11/14/2002 11:05:01 AM | PermaLink Life in Jail for HackersFrom Declan McCullagh:
11/14/2002 10:34:32 AM | PermaLink The Gatekeepers of AbundanceI gave a talk yesterday to a library association and managed to make it all the way into the Q&A session before uttering the word "doomed." We ended up talking about whether there can be librarians without books. The very first model proposed by the audience was: "We're the gatekeepers of knowledge." This role will only become more important as the amount of bad information on the Internet grows. Supposedly. But there are two forces working against the gatekeeper idea. First, we seem to be self-organizing our own gatekeepers. Sometimes they're collaborative and sometimes our new gatekeepers emerge from the noise in unpredictable ways. There will certainly still be top-down gatekeepers in the traditional sense, but they are at least becoming less important because there are so many other gates. Second, when there's true abundance, gatekeeping actually drives down the value of what's being protected: if there's manna everywhere, putting a gatekeeper in front of a storeroom just means that that no one's going to bother with the protected manna. Similarly, if I can find out everything I need about Ghana easily by surfing, I'm not going to pay the Britannica a fee to get the same information. But, reply the librarians, you may not get the best information for free on the Web. No, but I don't need the best information. I just need good enough information. And where I do need information certified as the best, I will be willing to pay for it. But the most important change in all this is indeed a movement away from thinking that there routinely is such a thing as "the best" information that's kept in guarded, temperature-controlled cellars. For better or worse, in an economy of abundance, good enough is good enough. 11/14/2002 10:29:07 AM | PermaLink Why Spam Doesn't WorkMasha Geller of MediaPost thinks she's figured out why response rates to spam — um, "email marketing — are so low:
Here are some other reasons that occurred to me in just the last 24 hours: If I had some domain names to register, I'd rather use .COM or .NET than .US or .NAME or .OBSCURE or whatever it is that you're selling The cheapest airline tickets are likely to have restrictions I wouldn't like, even if they are totally guaranteed Spying on my neighbor's hot teenage daughter or on our babysitter would be just plain sick I can't fire my boss because, well, it just doesn't work that way I have more than enough printer ink for now I haven'really been much interested in farm animals since I was 5 or 6, so I'm not going to go to your web site to look at photos I don't believe I can grow rich without doing anything of value I don't know what HGH is and I think I don't care While I'm flattered that you are impressed by my financial standing, I have more credit cards than I use I read Nabokov's Lolita and was quite disturbed by it, so I'm not interested in having Lolitas delivered to my inbox Yes, my teeth are yellowing (how did you know??), but I'll check with my dentist instead of buying whitener over the Net I'm fortunate in not needing a debt reduction program My wife's not complaining Nope, I still don't need any HGH I'm an animal rights type of guy so I don't want a leather coat Thanks for noticing that I am rather sexy, but sex with women less than half my age isn't really all that appealing. Besides, if you can see that my teeth are yellow, why can't you see the ring on my finger? I'm not interested in toner cartridges that don't come with HGH, whatever that is I would have helped you get your money out of Nigeria, but how can I trust an email that doesn't properly close all of its HTML tags? 11/14/2002 09:52:58 AM | PermaLink
Wednesday, November 13, 2002 Quotable PanelLast night's panel discussion at the Jewish Technology Business Network turned out well. This is remarkable not because of the caliber of the panelists (Larry Weber, Chris Meyer, Cliff Conneighton) but because we didn't have a topic. Moderator Scott Kirsner (columnist for the Boston Globe, contributing editor to Wired and Fast Company) did an excellent job of pulling the discussion together. The audience seemed happy. Beforehand Chris Meyer said that Arthur Miller (the lawyer and moderator, not the playwright and Monroe husband) once told him that there are only two rules for a good panel discussion: Have fun, and no dead air. Chris, in the course of the evening, had some quotable quotes: "As they say in the AI industry, as soon as something works, it's not AI any more." "No one has ever seen a bubble from the inside" — Lester Thurow He also asked the audience whether the "mass of the US economy" has increased or decreased in the past century. And he meant literally how much the goods weigh. His point was that it's decreased because we've miniatured and strengthened, and that's going to happen again, radically, as nanotech emerges. Finally, Larry Weber said that TV viewership is at an all-time low. Interesting. 11/13/2002 11:59:42 AM | PermaLink Garrison Keillor on FireGarrison Keillor is flaming. As one of our culture's best story tellers ever, and as someone who has trademarked a transparent gentleness and a genuine civility, this outburst is remarkable. It's short on particulars because, as the end reveals, it comes not from offended reason but from a broken heart. (Damn! It's available only to Salon premium members. Pay Salon the money, will you? It's an experiment that deserves to succeed.) 11/13/2002 11:25:49 AM | PermaLink USAToday Op-EdUSAToday today runs an op-ed by David Isenberg and me about why the telcos ought to be allowed to "fail fast." This is based on the letter to the FCC a few dozen of us signed a couple of weeks ago. But USAToday introduced an error into it. Where we said that the telephone network "was not designed" to handle anything other than voice data, USAToday edited it to say that it "can't handle" non-voice data. Not right. This makes us look like dopes to people who are smarter than I, although I don't think it actually much effects our argument. 11/13/2002 10:33:09 AM | PermaLink
Tuesday, November 12, 2002 Bush Binoculars(Notice the lens caps.)
Michael O'Connor Clarke of I Love Me, Vol. I, points out that Snopes says the above photo is a hoax. I say to Michael: Does exposing this fact make the world a better place? I think not. 11/12/2002 04:16:09 PM | PermaLink Among the JewsI'm a panelist tonight at a meeting of the Jewish Technology of Boston Network (well, it's something like that) along with Chris Meyer, Larry Weber and Scott Kirsner. I think it starts at 7:30 at Temple Betha Avodah in south Newton. I don't know if you need to be a member, to be Jewish, to be Jewish technology or to have a Jewish member, but I'm looking forward to it. Also, the syndicated radio program "Here and Now" is running a 4-minute interview with me at 12:20 EST. I'm talking about ebooks. They ran one a couple of weeks ago and I hope to be doing these fairly regularly. Finally, USAToday apparently is running on Wednesday an op-ed that David Isenberg and I wrote. 11/12/2002 09:29:23 AM | PermaLink 21st Century EducationThe Boston Globe has an editorial today about the MCAS, the standardized test required to get a high school degree. It gives two examples. First,
Then they teach to those trends. Second, the editorial reports that the same school is fobbing students off onto computers, using a $1,667 piece of software called "Plato." To my amazement, the editorial isn't using these two educational programs as examples of what's wrong but of what's right. This is giving students a "21st education at schools with 21st century resources." Gosh, torquing your entire math curriculum in order to have kids pass a test and plopping kids in front of instructional software is so 21st century. Heavens forfend that we should revert to teaching kids so that they learn to love learning, reducing class sizes so teachers can teach what each kid needs to learn. That this comes from a generally liberal editorial board is all the more depressing. 11/12/2002 08:34:26 AM | PermaLink
Monday, November 11, 2002 Grand Theft Auto and Moral FictionWhy is it that I find the computer game BlackHawk Down reprehensible but I'm ok with Grand Theft Auto 3 (GTA3)? In BlackHawk Down, you're a righteous American soldier fighting local warlords who are starving their own people. In GTA3, you're a hoodlum who succeeds by randomly killing innocent pedestrians and taking their money. Also, you hijack cars, kill policemen, and blow stuff up. Why do I have my moral polarity reversed when it comes to these two games? I watched Pulp Fiction again the other night. I don't want it to be one of my favorite movies, but it is. There, too, the fact that we side with hit men is oddly liberating. Unlike movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos where we're responsibly reminded intermittently that the protagonists are capable of violence that separates them from us, Pulp Fiction is non-judgmental about its characters' murderousness. It accomplishes a true suspension of moral belief. This isn't used for any profound purpose — Tarrantino is no Dostoyevsky — but it does enable us to enter a world where the basic rules have been altered. It is the equivalent of science fiction, except instead of removing the law against time travel, the law against murder is removed. Call it "moral fiction." To be popular, GTA3 and Pulp Fiction had to be comedies. GTA3 even has its own radio stations playing parodies of various musical styles. ("Ah," says the pretentious classical DJ, "that reminds me of the summer I spent reading Proust ... in the original Italian.") In suspending morality, they keep us so disconnected from the victims that we can laugh at what in real life would be horrific. If we were to connect with our victims, the morality would no longer be suspended; when Nicholson falls for the hitwoman who is to be his victim in Prizzi's Honor, morality — sort of — comes back into play because the human connection is made. Not with GTA3 or Pulp Fiction. Both are unrelentingly disconnected. In fact, the implicit disconnectedness is itself the source of humor: When in Pulp Fiction Travolta accidentally blows a kid's head off in the back of the car, that it means nothing to him and Jackson except that they have a mess to clean up is funny. The suspension of morality is so obvious and so obviously a literary device that it has no more effect on my actual moral stance than watching Star Wars made me think I can levitate objects by channeling "The Force." I understand why parents are concerned about GTA3. And I understand why news magazines make a to-do about it: Show a 5-second snippet in which a player is shooting a cop and you're guaranteed an 8 minute segment with outraged parents and indignant politicians. And I'm queasy enough about it that I don't let my 11 year old son play GTA3 because I don't know what "moral fiction" will feel like to him. But the truth is that I'm more concerned about heroic games like "Blackhawk Down" where the ultimate moral message is that being right puts one in a zone where everything is permitted. That to me is the most dangerous moral idea. Salon reviews the new version of GTA. Salon says it's art. I don't know about that, but it sure sounds like it kicks fictitious ass. 11/11/2002 10:57:39 AM | PermaLink
Sunday, November 10, 2002 Information: Some Historical FactoidsI'm giving a talk to a library association this week and thought I'd talk a bit about the history of information. My point will be that the post-computer sense of information is utterly different from the old sense but the new sense is infecting our view of ourselves and our relation to the world. Among the factoids: 1. I can't find an instance of Herman Hollerith, inventor of the punch card, referring to the cards as encoding information. In his patent application he talks about recording "data":
2. While I knew that Hollerith had been inspired by the way in which some looms were "programmed," I didn't know the following:
I like the way this ties holes in a card to the most personal and embodied of the "information" about us: how we look. 3. Dr. Johnson's Dictionary (1755) defines "information" as follows (according to an interesting academic article by Rafael Capurro):
"Information" at this point wasn't something separable from the human conversational context. 4. The third definition points to the oldest sense of "information" as something more than what is known. Aristotle thought that the form of a thing impressed itself upon the potential which is the human mind and that is how we come to experience the world. "In-forming" was thus our most basic human relationship to the world, the way in which soul and body met the world itself. That's a lot different than our abstract sense of information today. 5. There is no N in Hollerith. (Ack. Thanks, Adina.) Capurro has another article, which I haven't yet read, called "Hermeneutics and the Phenomenon of Information." Here's the abstract:
Aw, what the hell, here's a summary of sorts from the beginning of the article:
11/10/2002 12:40:28 PM | PermaLink
Saturday, November 09, 2002 Googling Page RanksArt Medlar writes to a mailing list:
Cool! 11/9/2002 11:44:30 AM | PermaLink "News from the Bottom Up"Jim Law points us to the Hypergene Media Blog about participatory journalism ("news from the bottom up"). Lots of good information and ideas. For example, here's a snippet:
11/9/2002 11:41:10 AM | PermaLink
Friday, November 08, 2002 Microsoft: We're Losing the Open Source BattleEric Raymond reproduces a Microsoft memo assessing their battle against Open Source software. Eric also comments on it and draws lessons for the Open Source movement. (That a software development paradigm has been turned into a "movement" is itself telling.) The Register summarizes and comments on the memo also. The shortest summary: Microsoft's own surveys show that they're making no headway against Open Source. 11/8/2002 12:35:08 PM | PermaLink Where Did Pagoo Go?A friend of mine is wondering what happened to Pagoo. This is or was an Internet call waiting service for people using their telephone line for dial up. When you're online, Pagoo intercepts voice calls and shunts them to an Internet location where the caller can leave a message. Pagoo then notifies you on your desktop that you've got a message. Click and you can listen to it. Pretty cool for $56 a year. But now Pagoo seems to have hung up with no forwarding. Does anyone know what happened to them? And do you know of anyone offering a similar service? 11/8/2002 11:59:33 AM | PermaLink A Zippy I Liked (Because I Misread It)I usually haven't done enough drugs that early in the day to really "get" the Zippy comic strip, but one the other day struck me as trenchant. Zippy is talking to a building shaped like a fish.
Now, I like that. But I liked it better before I started typing it in because I thought the last line was: "If I'm so safe, why do I have this feeling of immediate alienation?" Safety and alienation go together like guns and fear. 11/8/2002 11:54:18 AM | PermaLink
Thursday, November 07, 2002 Sean Penn PensJon Husband has published the text of an ad Sean Penn took out in Washington Post yesterday. It's an open letter to W. After making nice in the first paragraph, Penn writes:
It continues... Penn paid $56,000 to run the ad and then he didn't post the text anywhere on the Web, as far as I can tell. Someone quick get that actor a weblog! 11/7/2002 05:44:18 PM | PermaLink Near-Miss LatinVergil Iliescu blogs a column in the Sydney Morning Herald that has been running an informal contest: change or add one letter to a common Latin saying and come up with something amusing. Among the results (more on Vergil's site): Cine qua non - Nothing much on at the pictures.
Parsona non grata - Two Mormons at your door (Tony Turner, Tuross Head) Bet al - Backing all the Cup runners to get a win. (Nigel O'Dea, Mosman) Hores de combat- The girls are fighting again. Gait accompli - The toddler's first step. (Peter Maxwell, Berridale) (I may have screwed up some of the attributions. Sorry. Well, you know what they say: "Et su, Brutus": Go sue Brutus.) Anyway, "Carpe Diet": I'm going to start losing weight today! And one great way to do that is through "sex nihilo": meaningless sex. Also, I'm thinking of getting a big car while I still can because, as they say, "Cars longa, vita brevis." Of course, I'll never lose enough weight to have meaningless sex in its bucket seats because "Arse longa, vita brevis." 11/7/2002 11:58:56 AM | PermaLink Sick of InfoDarwinMag.com is running a column of mine about why I'm sooo tired of hearing about information:
11/7/2002 10:45:24 AM | PermaLink In Defense of ReflexesI received an email yesterday accusing me of supporting liberal ideas "reflexively." I bristled at the charge only in part because it's true. The rest of the bristling was due to the inaptness of the "reflex" simile. "By reflex" is a pejorative meaning "thoughtlessly." But I don't believe it's a matter of operating by reflex or by thoughtfulness. Our aim should be to develop the right reflexes. Even Aristotle — Mr. Rational Animal Guy — thought that the virtuous man (sic) is one who has developed the right habits. In the same way, someone who is politically virtuous has developed the right reflexes. These reflexes are the result not of random muscle spasms but of having a complex context that gives ideas and experiences a richness they would not have taken in isolation. Besides, hard-headed rationality — which, of course, has its place — is the signature of the CE0 Conservativism that has taken over US politics, with a balance sheet written in the economics of fear. 11/7/2002 09:23:28 AM | PermaLink
Wednesday, November 06, 2002 Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to ChooseTen ways today is worse than yesterday:
11/6/2002 08:56:26 AM | PermaLink Kushnick Supporting LinksBruce Kushnick has sent me some links that related to the filing he submitted to protest the US Telecom Association's demand of the FCC that phone record-keeping be eased up.
11/6/2002 08:50:38 AM | PermaLink
Tuesday, November 05, 2002 Telecoms Ask for Shredding on DemandAccording to Teletruth.org's Bruce Kushnick (from a mailing list):
I can't find information about this at the FCC site, but Kushnick is respected by people I respect. 11/5/2002 10:13:41 AM | PermaLink Get out! The Vote!Make sure you vote today, assuming, of course that you are a US citizen, legally registered to vote, and in basic agreement with me. If you do not agree with me, then please do vote anyway. But keep in mind that if you push the chad all the way through, you have destroyed your ballot. So you just want to lightly "dimple" the ballot with your choices, as per this official instruction sheet from the US Dept. of Elections:
(But seriously, if you are a Massachusetts resident and you want to register your disagreement with Senator Kerry's spineless vote in favor of the Let W Declare War When His Popularity Flags Act, you can write in Randall Forsberg. But you have to do it as follows to have it count as anything other than a vote for "other": "RANDALL FORSBERG, 950 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.") 11/5/2002 09:32:49 AM | PermaLink
Monday, November 04, 2002 [email protected]Gen Kanai has a fascinating blog entry asking what the advent of game console telephony will mean. Both Xbox and Sony are adding the ability to talk with other online gamers via headsets:
What would it take to publish a "game" CD for these boxes that turn them into free IP phones? 11/4/2002 09:23:57 AM | PermaLink Why Life HurtsSlate's daily press round-up notes:
No. The solicitous spouse has become a cue for a more intense sympathy experience. I mean, what else is the point of pain? 11/4/2002 09:13:53 AM | PermaLink Let's Give a Blogging Welcome to Ned BatchelderNed Batchelder, who turns out to be a fellow Brooklinian (Brookliner? Brooklinite? Brooklinista?), has an eclectic young blog that seems to care about programming, usability, and language as an object. By "language as object" I mean thinking about it as shapes (Halley's Alphabetical Order (or Halphabetical Order, if you prefer)), collections of letters (pangrams) and accidental meanings (puns). And he quotes Quentin Tarrantino from a 9/23 New Yorker article:
That's a couple of days after Ned's written "Want to quickly see how a Unicode string comes out in UTF-8?" Like I said: eclectic. 11/4/2002 08:26:12 AM | PermaLink
Sunday, November 03, 2002 The Assosciation of Beleaguered ProfessorsCharlie Green has found a site for college teachers who feel oppressed. In particular, he points to an interview about the (non-)importance of hypertext. It's an "edgy" (= obnoxious) piece, typical of academic squabbles except without the usual pretense of civility. The intro says:
Here's a taste of the tone:
11/3/2002 01:10:01 PM | PermaLink Gillmor on BroadbandDan Gillmor has a terrific column today on what it'll take to get broadband going in this country. And he even has some words of encouragement for the FCC.
11/3/2002 01:07:13 PM | PermaLink
Saturday, November 02, 2002 Why We Blog: Halley's Alphabetical OrderHalley wonders why "m" comes before "n" in the alphabet since "m" clearly builds on "n." What an odd thought. Might as well go all the way. Here's what seems to me to be a more rational alphabetical order, following Halley's Sequential Principle. Upper case: Lower case: 11/2/2002 11:56:23 AM | PermaLink FloridastanFrom Mark Dionne comes this article from the Independent in the UK:
Let us hope that our comrades to the east can help us live up to their ideals of democracy. On the other hand, given that Florida continues to improperly exclude tens of thousands of voters, mainly African-Americans, because they've been misidentified as former felons, the chances of the election being fair are nil to begin with. 11/2/2002 10:15:07 AM | PermaLink Will the War Start Tomorrow?An incident on Sunday. A US response on Sunday night. A war on Monday. An election on Tuesday. Just a thought on Saturday. 11/2/2002 09:16:13 AM | PermaLink
Friday, November 01, 2002 Contribute to MondaleBush, Cheney and Laura have all decided to visit Minnesota in order to make sure that Paul Wellstone's death also kills the hopes for a Democratic Senate. MoveOn.org is trying to raise $100,000 for Walter Mondale now. If you'd like to contribute, they've made it very easy here. 11/1/2002 05:14:56 PM | PermaLink OppositesThe opposite of a machine is voice. The opposite of information is trust. 11/1/2002 08:48:03 AM | PermaLink Peace in Mass.A couple of ways you can bring about world peace if you are in Boston or Massachusetts: 1. Momentum is growing to write in Randy Forsberg for senator to protest John Kerry's spineless support of the Bush War Powers bill. This is cheap 'n' easy because Kerry has no credible opponent, so you know you won't be in effect helping to elect someone to the right of him. (You need to write in "RANDALL FORSBERG, 950 Mass. Ave., Cambridge" so that it won't register simply as "other.") 2. There's a peace march against the war in Iraq, Nov. 3 at 1 pm in the Boston Common. Speakers include Howard Zinn, Jill Stein (Green Party candidate for governor and the only person on the slate who doesn't drive decent human beings from the room screaming with their fingers in their ears), Forsberg and others. According to the email about the march: "The music will be live, with rock to reggae and not too much folk. Buddhist drummers will lead the march." Frankly, I'd be more motivated by a good protest song or two than by trance-like rhythms that bring me in touch with the world's essential nothingness. But, then, that's just me. 11/1/2002 08:35:03 AM | PermaLink |
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