Sunday, February 29, 2004modern communications
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
The Internet has created the potential for information connectivity among millions of ordinary people living long distances from one another. This has never been possible before in human history and I think it's amazing. Not everyone is online yet, but the numbers are growing every day...
Nearly Half of U.S. 'Net Users Post Content - Report
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=internetNews&storyID=4463144§ion=news
Nearly half of U.S. Internet users have built Web pages, posted photos, written comments or otherwise added to the enormous variety of material available online, according to a report released on Sunday.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that about 44 percent of the country's Internet users have created content for others to enjoy online.
posted @ 08:44 PM PDT Saturday, February 28, 2004alt.energy = jobs
This organization is pushing for new policies to fund the development of new forms of energy creation and as a result, create jobs. This is visionary thinking and I applaud the work they're doing.
Apollo Alliance
http://www.apolloalliance.org
he Apollo Alliance is building a broad coalition within the labor, environmental, business, urban, and faith communities in support of good jobs and energy independence.ˆä The Alliance is developing public education campaigns and communications strategies to link allies and build a national constituency for a bold, broad based, and immediate program of public policy.
posted @ 07:39 PM PDT Friday, February 27, 2004byebye Freedom of the Press
This should be cause for um, concern.
Publishers Face Prison For Editing Articles from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya or Cuba
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/24/1557214
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes which include Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Cuba. [includes transcript]
Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a "service" and the treasury department says it is illegal to perform services for embargoed nations. It can be punishable by fines of up to a half-million dollars or jail terms as long as 10 years.
posted @ 07:01 PM PDT Thursday, February 26, 2004is the election going to be rigged?
This is a major issue that isn't getting much press in the TV media. Please consider spending a minute or two doing some easy e-activism from this site:
Lift the Curtain on E-voting
http://www.mediafordemocracy.us/campaign/evote/w8ggwdw24widxj
Despite the already checkered history of the new machines -- which includes evidence of political favoritism by the executives of the two primary manufacturers of e-voting terminals, and tests that reveal extensive flaws to their software -- the networks have failed to consider electronic voting worthy of coverage. As a result, few voters will see news reports about these glitch-riddled systems before they come face to face with the voting machines on Election Day.
posted @ 07:18 PM PDT Wednesday, February 25, 2004freedom to love
Gay marriage has become a big issue in America. I personally believe that love needs to be encouraged in this World and that consenting adults should be allowed to do whatever they want in their bedrooms with whomever they want. If you think that being gay is wrong or icky, that's fine, don't do it.
Christians should remember Matthew 7:1 aka judge not lest ye be judged.
Here are a few items I liked on this issue:
What's all this about amending the Constitution?
http://www.freedomtomarry.org/document.asp?doc_id=1092
Discrimination has no place in government, in marriage or in the Constitution. Politicians who play with fire near our nation's most precious document are the greatest threat to American families and values. All Americans, gay and non-gay, deserve respect and support for their families and basic freedoms. Government should not be putting obstacles in the path of people seeking to care for their loved ones. And candidates, president or otherwise, should be uniting the American people, not dividing us, at a time of challenge for freedom in the world.
The Marrying Kind
http://www.theonionavclub.com/4008/savage.html
Sure, I can explain gay marriage. Some gay and lesbian couples would like to marry for the same reasons so many straight couples would like to marry or have already married: They're in love, they've made a commitment to each other, and they want the rights, privileges, and responsibilities (RPRs) that come with legal marriage. While some gays and lesbians are after the "Gays are okay!" message (no one has ever gone broke overestimating the insecurities of gays and lesbians), most gay couples don't just want the symbolism of marriage, TA, but those RPRsˆ…and guess what? Both matter.
"Marriage brings extremely important tangible and intangible protections," said Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom To Marry, the organization leading the charge on gay marriage. "Tangible or intangible, neither is symbolic. To have clarity and security, to have people know who you are in relation to the primary person that you're building your life with, is no mere symbol. And gay people have the same need for that security, clarity, and, by the way, equality, as non-gay people."
PRONOIA HOLIDAY in San Francisco
from Rob Brezny's newsletter this week:
There's been an explosion of good news in San Francisco recently, as hundreds of gay couples have leaped at the chance to be married, taking advantage of a crack in the sour and puckered mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as "reality."
This is PRONOIA at its most sublime, a transgressive act that smashes one of the absurd taboos against joy and passion. Glory to the Goddess for conspiring to foment this radical blessing.
posted @ 10:01 AM PDT Monday, February 23, 2004what's worse than terrorism?
How long are we going to deny that this is a problem, and what is it going to take for the government to actually do something about it?
Oh how I wish Americans would stop electing oil barons into office...
Leaked US report warns climate change may bring famine, war
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1050857.htm
The Pentagon report, commissioned by Andrew Marshall, predicts that "abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies," the newspaper reported.
The report, quoted in the paper, concluded, "disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life....once again, warfare would define human life".
Its authors - Peter Schwartz, a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) consultant and a former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Dough Randall of Global Business Network based in California, said climate change should be considered "immediately" as a top political and military issue.
It "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern", they were quoted as saying.
Experts familiar with the report told the newspaper the threat to global stability "vastly eclipses that of terrorism".
posted @ 10:41 AM PDT Sunday, February 22, 2004see this movie!
I just returned from seeing the documentary The Corporation, which is causing a stir in movie theatres and film festivals around the world.
The film explores the role of corporations in modern society, including the history of how they got where they are today and the effects (both good and bad) that they have on the World (our World!) around them. It touches upon many important related issues including factory farming, water privatization, advertising to children, layoffs, and media conglomeration. It includes excellent interviews with journalists, activists, writers, academics, and corporate leaders (including some more ethical ones.) I especially enjoyed seeing Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Naomi Klein featured.
Though most people don't like to think about it, we're living within an unsustainable system based on producing and throwing away more and more and more that will eventually crumble in upon itself unless it is dismantled carefully. The film stresses the importance of individual responsibility and individual actions and illustrates that around the World, many small battles *are* being won.
I found the film engaging, thought provoking, inspiring, and extremely relevant. I'm thrilled so many people have gone to see it and I encourage you to join them. I especially think it's important for young people to understand these issues. The film will be released in American theaters in June.
view the trailer
posted @ 07:14 PM PDT Saturday, February 21, 2004life is good
Despite the fact that there are a lot of things wrong with the world today, I don't think I'd want to go back and live in the past. I've become used to hot showers and wouldn't want to live without high-speed Internet access...
I believe that in a lot of ways, we as a society are evolving in a positive direction. Politically things are a big mess and hate/fear continue to exist, but the general public is a lot more progressive than it used to be a few generations ago, especially in regard to civil rights and mutual respect.
As a female, I also appreciate the fact that in America, even just a few decades ago, women had fewer choices in life. My mother's experience of going to Engineering School in the Mid-1960s (where she had to fight for the right to wear pants instead of a skirt or dress during Boston winters) was much more difficult than it is for women today. Many of her contemporaries thought she shouldn't be there, since she'd just be "taking a job away from a boy who needs it more." I appreciate the fact that though men and women aren't quite living in harmony yet (though in my social circles it's close!) we have come a long way.
My life has many moments of pure joy. I surround myself with good people who I try to be good to in return. I'm passionate about the joys of life on Earth (love, friends, art, music, dance, nature, etc.) and believe we should work to live, not live to work. Though I know I can't save the World by myself, I try to be a positive influence and as a result, life is good to me. I have my times of struggle and suffering, but know that if I pay attention to the lessons presented (treasure in the trash!) the hard times will help me evolve.
Life today is full of possibilities for adventure and joy, though finding the right path (and right people to spend time with) can require a lot of creativity and diligent work. In my experience, it's worth the effort.
posted @ 12:29 PM PDT Thursday, February 19, 2004slippery slope?
If what this article says is true, scientists have figured out how to resurrect one type of prehistoric bacteria.
Scientists revive eight million year old primitive life forms
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2820249a7693,00.html
Scientists have revived primitive life forms retrieved from frozen ground in the Antarctic and believed to be up to eight million years old.
The revival of ancient colonies of bacteria was a significant step in helping develop new methods for investigating whether alien life has existed, or still exists, on other planets, University of Otago geologist Dr Gary Wilson said this week.
Isn't there a bad scifi movie that starts out this way?
posted @ 10:38 PM PDT Wednesday, February 18, 2004essential oil
What will happen when (not if) we run out of oil? Whether getting us around town, fueling trucks that bring us our food, allowing the military to operate, or shipping millions of crates of disposable plastic junk made in far away countries on huge ships, we depend on it for our survival.
No blood for oil? Yeah, right.
posted @ 07:18 PM PDT Tuesday, February 17, 2004made in Japan
A lot of extremely famous celebrities who would never be seen shilling products in America have made commercials in Japan. Generally it's part of their contract that these ads are never shown back home. There are some gems of Japanese weirdness here.
posted @ 04:56 PM PDT Sunday, February 15, 2004manufacturing controversy
In the past, religious groups have been offended by movies like The Last Temptation of Christ and books like The Satanic Verses. The ironic thing is that complaining loudly about how offensive these things are only helps to make the movie or book become MORE successful.
The publicists of the new Mel Gibson movie The Passion understand this, and have pretty much been encouraging people to protest as loudly as possible. From a PR standpoint, it's quite a clever strategy and so far it seems to be working...
posted @ 04:04 PM PDT Friday, February 13, 2004lucky day
Happy Friday the 13th! One of my favorite words is triskaidekaphobia.
posted @ 06:17 PM PDT Thursday, February 12, 2004happiness pursual
During the dot-com era my finances were going quite well & I bought a house. After I was laid off and the paychecks became a bit more erratic, it was difficult to afford my mortgage there for awhile, and I went into debt. I'm now working full time on contract and am making enough to (just barely) get by with all of my bills.
I'm currently planning on selling my house later this year and using the equity to pay off "The Man" and support myself while I develop a freelance research practice. I'm confident that I'm at the point in my career where I have the skills and experience to make it work but it will take time and I need to have some capital while I ramp it up.
The work I do is Internet-based, so my options for a new place to live are vast. I'm currently having visions of a cabin in the woods where I can hide out with my drumkit and a laptop a short distance from an arty small town in the mountains...
Some of my friends think this idea is crazy, some think it's beautiful. I think it's a bit of both. One certain thing is that it won't be dull.
posted @ 06:46 PM PDT Wednesday, February 11, 2004unfriendly fire
Here's another story that isn't getting a lot of press that I personally consider major news...
Female GIs report rapes in Iraq war
http://www.denverpost.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,36%7E6439%7E1913069,00.html
At least 37 female service members have sought sexual-trauma counseling and other assistance from civilian rape crisis organizations after returning from war duty in Iraq, Kuwait and other overseas stations, The Denver Post has learned. The women, ranging from enlisted soldiers to officers, have reported poor medical treatment, lack of counseling and incomplete criminal investigations by military officials. Some say they were threatened with punishment after reporting assaults.
posted @ 02:07 PM PDT Monday, February 9, 2004dishonest Dubya action figure
If you think that it's wrong to make fun of the President you'll probably find this website offensive. If you think the President is offensive, you'll probably find it funny.
posted @ 11:17 AM PDT Saturday, February 7, 2004important environmental news
While American TV news focuses on Janet Jackson's breasts and scary terror alerts a much more important piece of actual news has been largely ignored. As this amazing article (which appeared in the February 5th, 2004 edition of Rolling Stone) says, "President Bush is letting the timber industry clear-cut America's largest and wildest forest - and he plans to stick taxpayers with the bill."
It amazes me that Americans aren't reacting more strongly to this one. Is it ignorance or is it apathy? Do you know? Do you care?
The Alaska Chainsaw Massacre
http://www.ran.org/news/newsitem.php?id=879&area=home
"Clear-cut" means just what the word says. If it's a tree, it's coming down. Big or small, it makes no difference. Until a few days earlier, this mud-strewn valley of stumps was a forest of old-growth trees, unchanged for thousands of years. Now, because this is private land, the owners can do pretty much whatever they want with it, and that includes clear-cutting the forest and shipping the logs to Asia, where they're dissolved into pulp, processed and returned to America as cellophane and disposable diapers.
But to the west of the clear-cut, across the choppy waters of the Port Frederick inlet, the view is very different. There, in the Tongass National Forest, towering mountain peaks are draped in clouds and covered with ancient trees. The Tongass is by far the largest and wildest forest in America. At 17 million acres, it's as big as the entire state of West Virginia -- more than four times bigger than any national forest in the lower forty-eight. It's also the largest intact temperate rain forest left on the planet, a place that receives as much as 200 inches of rain a year. Although parts of the forest have been clear-cut in the past, much of the Tongass remains pristine, and it's one of the only places in the country that retains every species of plant and animal found in pre-Columbian times, a biological time capsule that includes grizzly bears, wolves, bald eagles and salmon.
But the Tongass -- the remnants of a primeval wilderness that once flowed in a great arc 2,500 miles long, from California north to Kodiak, Alaska -- may not exist in its present wild state for much longer. On December 23rd, President Bush reopened the Tongass to clear-cutting, exempting it from a Clinton-era provision known as the "roadless rule" that banned the building of new roads in 60 million acres of national forests. Bowing to timber interests that helped finance his campaign, Bush plans to punch 1,000 miles of new logging roads into the Tongass, giving timber companies access to remote stands of giant trees that can yield ten times as much wood per acre as the private land Cliff Watson is clear-cutting. What's more, Bush wants taxpayers to foot the bill for the roads, subsidizing the timber industry for clear-cutting the forest (see "The Log Boondoggle," Page 52). Unless the courts or Congress intervene, the wildest forest in America may soon be overrun by machines like Watson's that leave behind little more than giant stumps and shattered limbs.
posted @ 03:45 PM PDT Friday, February 6, 2004healers or pill pushers?
Doctors are finally starting to realize that psychoactive drugs for kids may not always be such a good idea...
New Doubts About Medicating Kids
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0205/p14s01-stss.html
Recent scientific studies have found a link between the use of these drugs and suicidal tendencies among children. In December, Britain banned the use of some antidepressants on patients under 18. The fallout from a hearing called by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week is ratcheting up the pressure for some kind of action on this side of the Atlantic.
"Until I went to the conference, I felt I would be out of step with my colleagues not to" prescribe these drugs, said Lawrence Diller, a pediatrician from Walnut Creek, Calif., in a telephone interview after the hearing. Parents and even children themselves expect to be given a pill today, he says. But "I think pediatricians are going to be much more careful after hearing about this," by either writing fewer prescriptions or monitoring the children more closely.
posted @ 10:44 AM PDT Thursday, February 5, 2004media conglomeration is more obscene than boobies
Oh dear, Janet Jackson's breast "accidentally" popped out of her (tacky) outfit at the Superbowl. What a shocking publicity stunt (yawn.) Lil' Kim already made this fashion mistake years ago at the MTV Awards...
CBS is supposedly upset at MTV about the lewd half-time show but does that really mean anything when both networks are owned by the same company?
The FCC has allowed the great majority of the media to be owned by just a few gigantic corporations (threat to democracy alert) but flash one tit and it's time to freak out and start an expensive investigation with public money. Showing murder after murder on TV is fine, but nudity is totally obscene!
News flash to busybody prudes: the kids have seen breasts (and a lot more) before and they don't care.
Curse Words For Janet Jackson
Daddy, why does that f--- politician hate women's breasts? Because he's a s-- and a hypocrite, honey
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/02/04/notes020404.DTL
And thus did the sanctimonious pseudo-Christian cry go out, powerful and time tested by politicians worldwide, guaranteed to induce fear and ignorance and allow them to paint themselves as all self-righteous and ethical and pretend they're not a corporate shill raping the environment from the back pocket of an oil lobbyist: Who -- pray, who -- will protect the children?
After boob-tube show, activism doesn't seem that 'controversial'
http://www.freelancestar.com/News/FLS/2004/022004/02052004/1253065
But when I did a Google search after the game to stay abreast of the latest developments in this story, I found an article on MTV.com, dated Jan. 28, in which Jackson's choreographer promised "shocking moments" during the show. Accompanying the article was a revealing photo of Ms. Jackson--pretty much a notice of coming attractions, it turns out.
Let's assume, though, that the bosses at CBS really were unaware that the halftime show would be so lewd. The fact remains that both CBS and MTV are owned by Viacom. Surely we can hold Viacom account- able--or is corporate accountability not in style this year?
posted @ 11:39 AM PDT Tuesday, February 3, 2004trying to think inside the box
Here's something about the history of that imagination, happiness, and soul sucking invention known as the cubicle.
The Man Behind the Cubicle
http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1198/no98man.htm
There were early signs that not everybody understood. "A lot of people in the industry said, 'Where the devil is the design?' " Propst chuckles. Still, the Action Office caught on almost immediately, spreading throughout the American workplace, and spawning imitators (Propst's last count puts them at 42). But Propst's forward-thinking motives were misinterpreted by some companies, which simply crammed more workers into smaller spaces and took advantage of the system's huge potential for savings and tax breaks (laws permit businesses to write off the depreciation of cubicles much more quickly than that of traditional offices). "The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive," Propst says. "Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them. Barren, rat-hole places."
Propst marvels at the stupidity of that enterprise: After all, the Action Office began as a way to make workers' lives better, not worse. But don't think he's too cut up about it. Says Propst, "I never had any illusions that this is a perfect world."
posted @ 11:11 AM PDT Monday, February 2, 2004looting the treasury
President Bush has pledged 1.5 billion dollars (that's $1,500,000,000.00!) to "promote marriage." No matter your feelings about the current administration, doesn't this seem suspiciously like spending public money on PR for the 2004 election campaign?
posted @ 08:59 PM PDT Sunday, February 1, 2004recent past near-future science fiction parody
If you like entertaining lowbrow humor movies with guns, try renting 1996's Escape From L.A. It features Kurt Russell in a cheesy mullet and a scary totalitarian president. The movie predicts that by 2013 America will be a full-on dictatorship, and though it's hard to explain, somehow this makes the movie funnier...
posted @ 08:50 PM PDT
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