Ethan Zuckerman highlights a story in Tuesday’s Boston Globe that reports that we’ve hired a notorious British mercenary to coordinate security in Iraq. The $293M contract goes to Tom Spicer, “a retired British commando with a reputation for illicit arms deals in Africa and for commanding a murderous military unit in Northern Ireland…” The Globe goes on:

Spicer is known for his role in the 1998 Sandline Affair in which a company he founded violated a UN-imposed arms embargo by shipping 30 tons of arms to Sierra Leone. When the scandal erupted in the British media, Spicer told the press that the British government had encouraged the operation, touching off a storm that for weeks involved the office of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Spicer also figured prominently in a 1997 military coup in Papua New Guinea. When that country’s army learned that he had received a $36 million contract from the government to brutally suppress a rebellion, the army toppled the sitting government and arrested Spicer, later releasing him.

In 1992, , two soldiers in the Scots Guard unit commanded by Spicer were convicted of murdering an 18-year-old Catholic named Peter McBride in North Belfast.

Ethan adds some details and writes:

I gotta ask – what were they thinking? Anyone who’s concerned about dirty dealings in the developing world knows who Spicer and Sandline are, and what they’re done in the past. With accusations that PMC [private military companies] s tortured people at Abu Ghraib, why would the Bush administration hire a PMC with such a questionable track record? Was this an accident, or just incredible arrogance and an assumption the press wouldn’t follow this story?

Or maybe having an appalling lack of judgment is as baked into this Administration as its commitment to tax cuts and its religious conviction that teaching birth control is immoral.

6 Comments »

As Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Republican Small Business Council (damn, I can’t get that name straight), I received a personal taped call just now from Rep. Tom Reynolds. …More here

1 Comment »

In case you were wondering why RageBoy was rejected by Google’s AdSense program, he explains it, in his usual, sweet, reasoned way.

Be the first to comment »

Mark in a comment sends us to Kiss This Guy, a site that aggregates misheard lyrics (kiss this guy = kiss the sky). Which reminds me of something I heard at the Seattle airport yesterday…

Two parents where shepherding their 8-yr-old daughter through the long “security” line. The parents took off their shoes and the girl started laboriously to unbuckle hers. “Does she have to take off hers?” the father asked the security guy. “Children are exempt,” he said with a slight Southern accent.

Still the girl insisted on taking off her shoes. After urging her not to a few times, the parents decided it would be faster just to let her finish.

After they had cleared the inspection, as the girl was putting her shoes back on, the mother said, “Why did you take off your shoes? We kept telling you not to.”

“Because,” she said, clearly upset by the stress, “the guard said that childred are exammed.”

4 Comments »

As Canada protects the patents on genes, Download Aborted wonders whether the genetic code should be considered Open Source. It’s slashdotted here.

And as atonement for saying something positive about the people at Microsoft — man, you folks are rough! — here’s some slashdottism about the anti-Open Source think tanks that Microsoft is funding. (But I still like the Microsofties I’ve met. So there.)

Be the first to comment »

I talked to two groups at Microsoft yesterday: the Web publishers across all of Microsoft’s departments, and Microsoft Research. With the publishers, I talked in a cluetrainy way about the rise of voice and conversation in world that’s been dominated by a broadcast model of marketing. To the Research group, I talked about how our insistence in thinking of everything as information (hint: DNA is not information) leads us to miss the importance of the unspoken. (Hmm. Both topics sound rather stupid when I put them like that, and possibly they were.)

During the Q&A at the publishing group session yesterday, someone asked me to expand on what I’d said about why DRM scares me. I had concluded my presentation by talking about the need to resist the Faustian bargain by which we agree to clamp down on voice in order to gain the illusion of control, and that doing so — given the temptation of treating the Web as a mass medium — would require a miracle from Microsoft. So, now I said something (very roughly…I don’t have much of a verbatim memory) like this:

When it comes to creative works, we are not “consumers,” and we are not users. Rather we appropriate creative works, that is, we make them our own. We apply them to our own context. We get them somewhat right or entirely wrong. They become part of us. That’s how how we learn and how culture changes. But that means that creators should lose control of their works as quickly as possible. Obviously, creators need to be be paid for their work, but not for every bit of value they create: You shouldn’t have to pay me if you re-read my book or lend it to a friend, even though you are getting more value from my book. Tough noogies on me. A pay-per-use system and allowing artists to control their works much past launching them into the world will kill culture. Further, since publishing creates the public [a point I’d made earlier], building an infrastructure designed to allow that type of control will damage the new public of the Web as well as cripple culture. It’s a really really really bad idea, so don’t do it.

[Cory made a stir at Microsoft a couple of weeks ago by saying something like this, and, best of all, in that Cory-ish way of his. Dan Gillmor has said something similar. And that Lessig fellow has also been known to touch upon this topic, I believe. Among many many others.]

15 Comments »

I’m in Seattle today to keynote an internal Microsoft conference on Web publishing. I’m going to make a plea for amateurism, which is really a plea for voice and ambiguity.

About twenty of us went out to dinner last night and had a great a time. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Microsofty that I’ve disliked. In my 15 years of experience with ’em, I’ve generally found them to be hugely bright, passionate, and funny … although some of what they do when they’re put together into the mighty Microsoft Entity deeply disturbs me. Even so, the people I’ve met have been straightforward and non-huffy when talking about where we disagree. (Disclosure: Yes, Microsoft is paying me for speaking. No, I am not required to say nice things to or about them.)

I’m meeting with Microsoft Research in the afternoon and I think I’m going to go over the current outline of the book I’m pre-working on, which has something to do with how the info revolution is changing the principles by which we categorize and classify things, and how this is affecting how we understand ourselves and the world. Something like that.

7 Comments »

Dave Winer has sent an email to a mailing list I’m on, asking for help getting word out about a change in the redirection policy for former weblogs.com users:

If you know people who are affected by this, please let them know.

4 Comments »

Yesterday, during a conversation — telephonic! — with Jeneane, the question of what constitutes “authentic voice” arose.

I dislike the word “authenticity” although I use it because it gets at
something we all (?) sense is there: We know there are phonies, so we need
words to express non-phoniness. “Sincere” works when we’re talking about the
possible gap between feelings and expressions. “Integrity” applies to behavior that consistently matches principles. Authenticity refers to a
possible gap in our very being, whatever that means. (But it seems to mean something.)

While we need the word, applying it to voice gets straight at the difficulty. Authenticity implies that your visible behavior matches your innerness – or, more exactly, it implies a lack of distance between the two. But, our voices always contain some element of construction, decision, anticipation, drafting. That’s not a bad thing. It means that in speaking with you, I am aware of how I think you’ll hear me.

Conclusion: We need the term “authenticity” so we can talk about phonies, and simultaneously shouldn’t trust its implication that only “unfiltered” voice is “real.” But, then what marks an inauthentic voice from an authentic one?

(FWIW, I think the problem with the term “authenticity” is its presumption that we have inner and outer selves, and that the inner self is our real self. I personally find those ideas more misleading than helpful.)

35 Comments »

Brian Mooney writes a front-page story on the increasing demand that e-voting machines leave a voter-verifiable paper trail. In the course of providing Balanced & Professional Coverage, Brian writes:

”There are valid concerns on all sides,” said Dan Seligson, editor of electionline.org, a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy group that tracks election reform efforts. ”Whether democracy is truly threatened by paperless voting machines, I’m not sure that’s the case. Nor am I sure it’s the case that these are 100 percent reliable. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

I wish the truth were in some middle ground, but in this case, we are going to have people who are psychologically and politically motivated to find fault with the system, so having technology that is not 100% trustworthy and verifiable is 100% guaranteed to erode our trust in the leaders who emerge from the process. Any unverifiable election that is at all close will be suspect. Any election that surprises us will be claimed to have been rigged. The frayed fabric of good will will rip. And we will lose the joy of upsets.

Scott Kirsner writes about Bose’s shock-absorbing system that is said to make cars ride as smooth as a hovercraft on fresh blacktop. “What on earth is a speaker company doing trying to reinvent the way auto suspension systems work?,” Scott asks. He answers by pointing to the fact that Bose is privately held and can support the diverse interests of its founder, Amar Bose.

But I believe (= am guessing) that there’s an additional point of connection. Could the Bose auto-suspension system use the same principles as its noise-cancelling headphones?

[Note: The Boston Globe’s links only work for a few days. I.e., you can read the fresh and relevant news for free, but the stale, obsolete news will cost you.]

3 Comments »