"I'm the first one to call 'bullshit' on clueless flower children, but there are some people painted with that broad brush who actually do some good, who don't buy into the kind of hip cynicism that has resulted in an America that's riddled with corruption, led by a murderous and greedy elite, distracted by trivia and short of memory, circling the bowl and awaiting the final flush."
"Learn something every day : the number 420 is freighted with significance for dope smokers ... This 420 stuff is an example of that context-hijacking dialogue that goes on constantly under the noses of the uninitiated. Fascinating stuff." - (via emptybottle.org)
"A digital camera is great fun. I bought a Canon Powershot S30 this week, and as long as I don't mess with the settings, (of which there are plenty), it seems to be doing a fine job compensating for my total lack of photo experience. Don't worry, I won't bore you with my underexposed closeups of Tunisian chess pieces. I thought a view into pro-Palestinian Norway would be more interesting, so I went downtown to see the weekly protest outside Stortinget today. Here are the results. Yeah, I know, half the pictures are out of focus. I'm still learning.
(Silly me: If I'd stuck around for a few more hours, I could have caught the pro-Israeli protest as well.)" - (via Bjorn Staerk
"What are the best places to live, work and visit if you are a liberal? What about the worst places? Below you will find a guide to the best and worst America has to offer, from thriving, progressive liberal-friendly cities, to backwards conservative places still stuck in the 19th century."
"Eventually we'd like to see atheism recognized as a 'protected' category in civil rights cases. As it is now, you can be fired for being an atheist and you have no legal recourse. I hate sending an atheist over to the ACLU or some other group, because they turn it into a religious freedom case. We don't want to say that we're another religion. We want to argue that we have a right to freedom from religion."
"This is how I surf the web. Turns out creating your own start page beats all portals, back-flipping, personalized corporate pages, and book-marking tools." - Vikas Kamat (on his page of Indian Blogs)
SkeptiNews
"Passages between plagiarisms are editorial comments to provoke discussion."
"Do drugged conspiratorialists waste perfectly good solar energy by plotting in the dark? Should they swim in medicated rivers? Would anyone notice? No?"
Is SkeptiNews a nutcase? Possibly. However, at least he / she recognizes that reactor embrittlement is a significant issue-- although the technical conclusions provided are somewhat off.
RE: Free webpages / blogs can never take off and acquire a a large, ongoing following (below)-- Maybe material like this "Sassafrass Log," which is essentially a reading log and a guide to how I surf / search the web, works best on a free site for a limited audience.
If you can't get into any search engines but Blogdex, a limited audience is assured! For a few days, Google considered "sassafrass log" a misspelling, and refused to search for it. Today Google turns up the USS Clueless page that acknowledges links for "sassafrass log". However, "Your search - "sassafrass.pitas.com" - did not match any documents. The spelling correction - "sassafras.pitas.com" - also did not match any documents."
Do sites like the Indie Web ring and BlogHop constitute significant publicity, or provide significant access to information on weblogs?
"Found an interesting source for weblogs, www.weblogs.com. Bloggers can ping the site with a script after they update their own blog and weblogs.com will add the site to their continuously updated list of updated blogs. The list is about 430 long with the most recent updates on top. On average it takes about 2.5 hours for a blog to go from the top off the list to the bottom and off. - (via Doug's Dynamic Drivel)
"One of the best reasons to blog is that you feed the search engines with data. With more data and better search engines, the more likely it is that you find what you're looking for. And I like that blogs in general are straightforward. They're merely thoughts written down. If I feel that I must deliver a perfect presentation of a thought, I probably won't get around to producing it (see this example). When I've been toying with my IrOBEX project (to update the phonebook and calendar in my cell phone) I've been looking for info on the net. One page I've visited many times is this raw dump of a computer-cell phone dialog – which has been very helpful! Just put your thoughts out there, ad hoc style!" - (via tesugen.com)
"After getting a geocities page that explained the account had exceeded its daily bandwidth allowance, I realized something. As we inch ever closer to the end of free anything on the web, things that orginate on free hosts have no chance of ever getting popular or taking on a life of their own."
Excerpt:
"China is often identified as the world's worst offender with its National Firewall and arrests for on-line activity. But the idea that the new Mandarins could have pulled this off by themselves is absurd. The Chinese have aggressively targeted the Western software giants, not only as a means of acquiring technical know-how, but also as agents for influencing Western governments to their advantage through well-established corporate networks of political lobbying. Everything is for sale: names, connections, and even national security ...
"It is the unpopular opinions that are most in need of defense. Without them, society would remain unchallenged and unwilling to review core beliefs ... Our definition of hacktivism is, "using technology to advance human rights through electronic media." ... We need to start thinking in terms of disruptive compliance rather than civil disobedience if we want to be effective on-line. Disruptive compliance has no meaning outside of cyberspace. Disruptive, of course, refers to disruptive technology, a radically new way of doing things; compliance refers back to the Internet and its original intent of constructive free-flow and openness. ...One key to countering the cadres of information censors in China and elsewhere is the fluidity of open code projects. Another is through peer-to-peer (P2P) networks."
(Also of interest: The Distribution of Signals in Cyberspace -
Looks at the essentials of TCP/IP networking over the Internet, the web, "and how search engines and content filters work. The purpose of this examination is to see how content controls can work, and how these compare to the basic ideas of broadcasting regulation."
I'm not finding much on this subject ... must not know enough to search for it!)
What can I do?
"As you pursue a direction you find vital and interesting, it is possible it will lead you into corporate work. If this happens, it is indeed likely you will at some point in the future be presented with some fairly forceful reasons to trust the corporate version of history, or even the corporate version of you. (It may for example become difficult to keep working while seeing your work environment for what it is.) We believe that performing an ®TMark project can help you, psychologically at least, at such a difficult juncture; but more importantly, we urge you to at all costs remember that laws should defend human people, not corporate people like the one of which you will be a part. If you keep this in mind and work towards making it a reality, you may find your life much more bearable."
"Let's say that someone who works at a large well-known business with an interest in emerging technologies, especially of the computer and Internet varieties, wanted to look into using blogs as a possible business tool ..." - (via asparagirl)
I find the name of Justin Raimondo's antiwar.com highly amusing. How often does a declared radical peacemongerer actually manage to cash in on his ideas? Add Anti-war.com to a steady diet of Fox News, toss in the assumption that the entire universe revolves around the US government, major corporations, and the "war on terrorism," and presto! You've got "fair and balanced reporting."
"... the anti-war libertarian (like Andy Kashdan, who believes in justice, not Justin Raimondo, who believes in cynical whinism) is highly dissatisfied with the manner in which the war is prescribed."
"I searched for "kingston" at Google Image Search in the hope of finding an image of picturesque Kingston, Jamaica. I got no such hits, but my attention was caught by this picture of two air force guys talking to each other WITH HEADPHONES ON. The guy to the left has a bunch of papers in his hand. You can read the word "manifest" written with a felt-tip pen. I wonder what they're talking about." - (via tesugen.com)
"When I met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1983 he came to the door naked ...
He was living in a room that had only two pieces of furniture that I remember: a mattress with no box spring and a small TV set set at the head of the mattress. As I later learned that he had once lived in a cardboard box in a New York park, the lack of furniture must have been a habit. However, the floor was covered with an amazing array of clutter: art history books, cassette tapes, art supplies, and clothing including lots of paint spattered Armani that I took to the dry cleaners in a plastic garbage bag. Then there was the more: lots of drawings on the floor, many having been walked on, art supplies including oilsticks, paintbrushes and rollers, and last, but not least, bags of marijuana, and wads of cash." - by John Seed - (via metascene)
Weblog Translator, powered by Google Translate.
Translate any weblog from French, Spanish, Portuguese, German or Italian into English. -- (via Fabulousness, a blog for foregn language and linguistics buffs)
Interesting Monstah Jay Zilber Kesher Talk - Judaism, Jewish culture and politics, Middle East affairs, etc.
Article - The Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War Arab News - "There is an impending Palestinian holocaust." Turkish Daily News "Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit apologized to the Jewish people for the third time for his statement, which described Israel's actions in Palestine as "genocide." ... "I told both parties that Turkey was ready to help many times in recent days. Turkey has always been a friend to both Israel and Palestine. Turkey's balanced approach has remained unchanged for years ..." Common Ground News Service
At War with an Idea: Strife is not the Only Way "The grass-roots co-existence projects that brought Israelis and Palestinians together during the Oslo period should stand as incontrovertible proof that this conflict is not intractable."
10/04/2
"Every once in a while I find (or, in this case, am led to by referrer stats) a weblog that rekindles my fading with age?? embers of outrage; and sparks my interest with yummy link-steaks (medium rare with a piquant sauceiness). Sassafrass Log exudes the gamut of vital attentive char while maintaining quick wit and finger-linky goodness. Happily slid to the left.
"Yes, IN-Q-Tel (ed. COINTELPRO squared) is a project by the dreaded "them!" It's a chilly wind indeed that blows our direction from Ground Zero, but it's been blowing a long time."
This summary of worldwide efforts to put together a "Peace Army" is in response to events in Israel and Palestine.
"No matter how insignificant what you are doing may seem, it is very important that you do it!" Are any of these initiatives cause for hope?
Peace Brigades International, is probably the best-known organization, and has worked in many regions, including the Balkans, Colombia, Indonesia and the Middle East. Working directly on terrorism, as well as war, is the Sarovodaya Movement of Sri Lanka.
"You get what anyone gets -- you get a lifetime." -- Death, young woman character from "The Sandman"
The truly radical statement of equality!
One passage by Starhawk comments on a woman in the SF coroner's office lighting a candle after her autopsy on a murdered homeless woman. A friend in New York comments that the homicide rate started going down once the police began dedicating full investigations to any murder victim, no matter if they were Skid Row bums.
This quirky forensic pathologist in Thailand knows that honest autopsies are the first line of defense against human rights abuses. She's got real style!
Another forensic pathologist with a following is Cyril Wecht of Pittsburgh, PA.
Who's your favorite forensic pathologist? Is this a creepy question, or what?
"Sometimes a blog is just a blog. But sometimes it's not."
'The proliferation of weblogs is bound to add twists to this area of law. Traditionally (and logically), public figure status has turned on "prominence," and can attach to those who, for example, "thrust themselves to the forefront of particular public controversies in order to influence the resolution of the issues involved."' (via Bag and Baggage)
Every time I see a "United We Stand" bumper sticker, I change it in my head to "Strength through Unanimity of Opinion." Then I think, "Who wants that?" -markand, 3/18/02
