Dumb Like a Fox

I assume by now we've all seen this:



and we're ready to get to work spreading the meme.Sarah Palin is unready to be Vice President! She didn't even know what the Bush Doctrine is! What a dummy.

I'm not sure that's going to work. Here's why:

What it looks like the Republicans are going for with the Palin love-fest is the same sort of identity politics they always play. They want white suburban, exurban, and rural America to look at Palin and say, "hey she's a member of my community, she's like me!"

Thus, when media outlets and liberal commentators pick out Palin's flaws, a large, powerful segment of the electorate hears the media picking on them. Race, religion, and other crude markers of identity are clearly central to this trick, but when the criticism pertains to issues of knowledge or intelligence, I think there is an additional factor in play that renders this trick particularly effective. Forms of knowledge, skill and intelligence possessed by great swaths of the electorate have been devalued by the corporate de-skilling and outsourcing of work. Thus, these voters are already primed to react defensively to the proclamations of "elites" possessed of knowledge that the market, and our larger society, still grants some value and tokens of respect.

The great trick of the GOP, of course, has been to turn this defensiveness into a weapon to bludgeon exactly those people who might try to blunt the worst effects of this capitalist process of de-valuing the knowledge and skills of working people. The Dems try to point this out, but of course, since the corporations ARE the media, they are always fighting an uphill battle (and the fact that they themselves dare not directly confront capitalism doesn't help any).

My suggestion? Leave the gaffes alone. Concentrate on the war with Russia stuff. By next week the Obama campaign should have ads in heavy rotation repeating Palin's statement that she would "go to war with Russia" and playing it over stock footage of the Crossroads-Baker Atomic test. Basically the "Daisy" ad all over again. Would it be a little dirty? Sure, but to hell with it, they've been waaaay dirtier than that and paid no price for it. If Obama's goal is to lose with a clean conscience, he should think about the very real, very terrible effects a McCain/Palin administration ticket would have on the country.

I'd just like to point out

That by Heart's own admission, the titular character of the song "Barracuda" is not really supposed to be a good person. Submitted into evidence, these lyrics, the only ones repeated during the course of the song:

If the real thing dont do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn burn burn burn it to the wick
Ooooooh, barracuda?

Yes, the GOP has stolen a song about a habitual liar to brand their VP candidate. Who is a habitual liar. Wow.

Kick-Ass Obama Ad

YES! Its like my point 4 below with the Unhealthy Politically Induced Rage(TM) removed. Nice! I want to know if anybody see these up on the air. We gave 'em the money, now they better spend it.

Dear America: WTF? An Open Letter

Yes, time for another open letter from me. Because I'm very fond of my own opinion. This one goes out to the Electorate to the US of A

Dear America*,

The polls currently suggest you are responding to the recent ad campaign (referred to in the press by its trade name "convention") staged by the Republican party. I would like to ask you one, simple question:

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!?!?!

I have always prided myself on standing up for democracy, for advocating for popular sovereignty, but this really shakes my faith to the core. Here's why. The McCain campaign is based on a number of lies totally removed from anything resembling reality. Lies so stunningly untrue that if you believe them, voters of America, I will be forced to seriously reconsider the notion that you are capable of making an informed decision about where to go for lunch, much less who should control the nation. Let me enumerate these lies here:

1. Non-existent American Oil: Ok seriously folks, seriously NO ONE believes there is enough Oil in the US to make even a teeny-tiny dent in Gasoline prices. Even the Republican politicians admit that, when they aren't saying misleading things about "energy independence" in front of cheering crowds. Furthermore, continuing Oil consumption at our current rate endangers the global climate and ensures continued dependence on that political bug-a-boo "foreign oil." See, even if we did increase domestic production in the short-term, in the long-term those supplies run out (remember they aren't very big) and, since price incentives never drove us to reduce consumption, we're back at the Saudi spigot. "Drill baby Drill" is the most blatantly false mantra an American political party has embraced, possibly ever. It promises you, the American voter, that you will be able to continue your way of life unchanged if we just sweep the environmentalists out of the way and let the Oil industry off the leash. This is untrue. The Gasoline economy is coming to an end, the hard physical limits of size of existing oil reserves and the ability of the atmosphere to absorb CO2 make that an inescapable reality. Our only choice is to run off the edge of this cliff full-speed or start thinking about how to make a controlled landing. Furthermore, how much less of a leash do you think we can really give the Oil industry. Have you not noticed the Oil-Man-In-Cheif we've had for the past 8 years?

2. Non-Existent Tax Cuts/Non-Existent Tax-Hikes: Let me make this perfectly clear. Barack Obama will only raise taxes on people making $250,000 a year or more. How many times does he have to say this? And he'll only raise them back to the level they were paying taxes under the Clinton administration, you know, those 8 terrible years of peace and prosperity. So the next time you hear McCain say "Barack Obama wants to raise your taxes" I want you to ask yourself "do I make $250,000 a year?" and if the answer is "no", just tell yourself "he isn't talking to me, he is talking to some McMansion owning rich fuck I can't stand." Either that or he is, you know, lying.

3. Non-Existent Job Creation Plan: McCain insists, insists that his plan to give giant tax breaks to Very Wealthy People(TM) will "create jobs." Newsflash America, this is the exact tax scheme we've had for the last eight years. The same one! With the same plan, let the rich become ultra-rich and they will bestow their prosperity on all of us through the magic of trickle-down economics. How well has that been working out for us so far, eh? Am I the only one who noticed that unemployment jumped UP recently? Cutting taxes on the rich is not a job-creation plan. Scratch that, it is a job creation plan, but it isn't one that will work.

4. Non-Existent Reformer Credentials: If I hear a major media outlet call John McCain a "maverick" one more time I'm going to hit my head into a wall until I pass out. I swear to God, America, you watch me. John McCain has voted with President Bush 90% of the time during his administration. He has endorsed all of the President's major policies in his own policy proposals. Sure, he has his name on a major piece of campaign finance reform legislation, but that was only AFTER he was investigated in a major scandal involving a campaign donor that apparently tapped senators he had given multi-million dollar contributions to for favors. Handy way to clear your name after being caught with your hand in the cookie jar, huh? Don't even get me started on why calling Sarah Palin a "reform" candidate is a laughable notion. Ok, now I'm started, so how about this list: her close relationship with corrupt Alaska senator Ted Stevens, her blatant gaming of Federal earmarks to win $12 million in federal money for an Alaska town with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, her support for the so-called "bridge to Nowhere" before it became a political hot-potato (she literally had a T-shirt supporting it), her blatant cronyism and disregard for professional employees while running Wasilia... see! I told you not to let me get started.

Well, there you have it, America, a few of the Big Lies of this election cycle. Could I enumerate more? Probably, but I really need to get back to work now.

Please, don't buy into this crap. Show me democracy is not a horrible, farcical mistake? Please?

Sincerely,

Andy

*Sorry Canada - it just has a better ring to it than "Dear United States"**
** Additional apologies to Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, South Georgia, South Sandwich Islands, Falkland Islands, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela - props to Colin, who apparently has been playing that "name the countries" game on sporacle.com

Andy's Linux Hacks for NOOBs - Phun with screensavers edition

I'm more-or-less a novice user when it comes to linux. I'm pretty proud of having put together the little hack I'm about to describe, but I realize it is kid stuff for those of you who administer commercial grade servers and write kernel patches and stuff. Still, I thought I would share what I did for the benefits of my fellow NOOBs who might find the information useful. Sharing is what FOSS is all about, right?

I've always been fascinated by the variety of real-time and near-real-time information you can access with a networked PC. I remember the first time I found a Full-Disk GOES image on the web. I was amazed, there was the "big blue marble" of the earth, just like in the famous images from the Apollo Missions (except in black-and-white and higher resolution) and I was seeing it as it appeared just a few hours ago! Since then, I've discovered a variety of live or almost-live feeds of interesting images, like the Kennedy Space Center launch pad, or weather radar images, images from traffic cameras on local highways, or from the SOHO satellite monitoring the sun.

Yesterday it struck me that I had all the tools I needed to set up my Linux desktop box (running Ubuntu 8.04) to automatically download images from these feeds and display them as my screensaver. Here's how I did it.

Ubuntu ships stock with a screensaver called glslideshow that displays a slideshow of image files on the screen. I decided to use this to display my images. First I had to modify the settings for the glslideshow screensaver to pull images from a directory other than its default and to forgo panning and zooming the images it displayed. Sadly, Gnome doesn't give you an easy way to do this from the GUI just yet, so I had to go in and edit a couple of config files. First I had to modify the glslideshow config file to get it to display the images the way I wanted to. This file is located at:
/usr/share/applications/screensavers/glslideshow.desktop

The line of this file beginning with:
Exec=glslideshow
gives the options that the glslideshow screensaver program will be executed with. I set mine to:
Exec=glslideshow -root -duration 5 fade 1 -zoom 100
Which basically tells the program to show images for 5 seconds at a time with a 1 second crossfade between them, and to display the images at 100% screensize, which prevents any panning or zooming effects. You can read the man page for glslideshow to learn more about the options if you want.

For some reason, to set the location the screensaver will use as the source for its images, you have to edit a different file. This file is called .xscreensaver and is located in your home directory. You may or may not have one. If you have one edit it. If you don't have one, create one. In any event add this line to .xscreensaver:
imageDirectory: [Path to Files]
Substitute the location you want to use to store your files for [Path to Files] I used a subdirectory in my home directory so I used
imageDirectory: /home/MyUserName/Pictures_For_Screensaver

Once you get that set up, throw a couple images into the directory you are going to use and go to the "screensaver" entry under the "preferences" menu and enable the glslideshow screensaver to give it a test run. It should randomly display your test images on the screen.

Next, I set up my machine to download images from my sources at set intervals. To do this I used the program crontab, which tells the computer to execute a specified command at a specified time, to automatically run the program wget, which fetches a file from the internet.

You set up crontab by writing a text file with entries that tell the computer when you want it to execute a given command. This can be a little tricky to understand at first. I'm not going to go into detail about how to use crontab. It is a very powerful little program. If you want detailed instructions on its general use, go here. For our purposes, all we need to know is how to set it up to issue our wget commands at regular intervals. You do this by creating a text file and adding lines in this format
*/[Number of Minutes Between Downoads] * * * * wget -O [Path_to_File/Filename] [URL of File to Download]

Ok, what does all that mean? It means that to tell crontab to have wget grab the file at http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GEVS.JPG and save it to /home/User_Name/Pictures_for_Screensaver every 30 minutes you add a line reading
*/30 * * * * wget -O /home/User_Name/Pictures_for_Screensaver/gevs.jpg http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GEVS.JPG

What's the deal with all those "*" symbols? Its complicated. Seriously, read this or take my word for it, you need 'em.


Add a line to the file for each of your image sources. Have the computer grab more frequently updated images more often, and less frequently updated images less often. I ended up grabbing images from the following sources:


http://abclocal.go.com/three/wtvg/cams/henscam.jpg
http://cmhimg01.dot.state.oh.us/images/tolair-AirportHighway-WB-Large.jpg
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_304/512/latest.jpg
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/countdown/video/chan3large.jpg
ftp://ftp.glerl.noaa.gov/realtime/tol2/tol2-1.jpg
http://webcam.princess.com/webcam/star_bridge.jpg
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/FULLDISK/GEVS.JPG
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/pmap/gif/pmapN.gif
http://i.imwx.com/web/radar/us_fwa_ultraradar_plus_usen.jpg

Which gives me an interesting mix. Some local webcams, some silly stuff, a couple of satellites, weather radar...

Once you have your text file done, save it as a plain text file under any filename you like. I saved mine as "cronfile." Then issue the following command from the command line:
crontab [filename]
Replace [filename] with the name of the text file you created.

And voila! Your own auto-updating webcam screensaver! I'm watching mine right now. It is showing me traffic on I475 in toledo and the slow march of the "crawler" vehicle bringing the space shuttle to the launch pad at Kennedy, as well as the most recent GOES and SOHO images, local weather radar, and the current Aurora activity forcast from the space weather center.

Useful? Time will tell. A nerdy thrill from having a "magic window" out on various parts of the Earth and Outer Space? Hells yes.

Post-Modern Meta-Irony

Art collective monochrom continues their attempts at culture jamming:



The thing that makes this really interesting is the context. BoingBoing.net has been one of the most visible sites distributing monochrom's work. Yet BoingBoing is a site with a strong libertarian bent - sometimes trending towards anarcho-capitalist. So the video above - which is a monochrom project distributed via BoingBoing's "BoingBoing TV" - ends up being a truly weird hybrid: art collective members commenting on the difficulty of being subversive under a late-capitalist regime that relentlessly transforms speech into commodity, interspersed with ads hawking the Microsoft corporation's new "crowdsourced music platform."

What I can't decide is, who wins in this exchange?

Amy Goodman Arrested

They arrested radio journalist Amy Goodman in Minneapolis today. This, after days of random raiding of homes and meeting places of peaceful protesters. What has this country come to? Do we arrest journalists for the crime of covering the news now? This is unacceptable. As has become my habit, I wrote the Obama camp to complain and ask for action. I doubt I will get any, but I had to try.

Here is what I wrote:

Dear Senator Obama,

I know, you get too much mail from me. This one is important.

Senator, they just arrested an independent journalist, the well known and widely respected Amy Goodman, in Minneapolis. The actions that have been taken by the police in that city in the days leading up to the RNC: rounding up peaceful protesters on vague warrants, raiding meeting places in force with guns drawn, and now arresting a journalist who was covering a news event, are unacceptable. Senator, you have the eye of the media. You can speak out against these excesses and the nation will hear you.

Senator, I understand that the conventional wisdom is that you must stand silently by while the Minneapolis police shred the first amendment by disrupting American Citizens trying to exercise their First Amendment rights to free assembly and freedom of the press. I understand that politics as usual would say that speaking out against these excesses would make you look "weak" on crime, or terror, or something...

Senator, saying nothing here makes you look weak on protecting our constitutional rights. Are we to understand that this is what we have come to in the United States of America? That we now arrest journalists for the crime of covering the news?

Please speak out. Please reassure the nation that this is not your vision of what the United States should be.

Thank You.

Fellow Gentlemen of the Democratic Party

Please do not attempt to attack Sarah Palin in the following ways:

- Making innuendos about her appearance (ex: a friend of mine's away message "sure she's hot, but is she ready to lead?")
-Snide comments about her beauty pageant experience (ex: Paul Begala on CNN "she seemed very poised, probably got that from her beauty pageant days")
-Any observation on clothing (the only acceptable outfit for female politicians is the pantsuit, its not their fault, its the society)
-Suggesting she is a vapid ditz (http://sarahpalin.typepad.com/)

Sarah Palin, on her own, will not draw many democratic women away from the party. The sight of male democrats dusting off a suite of sexist tropes to attack her, might.

Hyper-Real moment of the Night

And this was the first night of the Political Convention season, a decidedly hyper-real time:

Paul Begala: "The buzzword this year is authenticity and Michelle Obama definitely has it" (a brief moment of recognition in which Begala catches himself), "that is, its not just a buzzword, she really has it"

Why the GDP is Madness

I've read some analysis like this before, but this short piece in a recent Harper's really does a good job of making the case for the insanity of subordinating all other priorities to the cash economy.

Some of my colleagues may disapprove of the way the piece seems tinged by a certain nostalgia for the "traditional" family. They may object to this as essentialist, or as a call for the return of a way of life that was patriarchal, homophobic, and disapproving of many other forms of difference.

I think all these criticisms are meaningful, and would hope that we can work toward a future in which the non-money economy is not founded on unrecognized drudgery by women, and in which closely knit communities are not based around principles that insist on homogeneous aesthetic choices and sexual practices.

However, at the same time, I think we cultural studies scholars, especially those of us who work on popular culture, have an unfortunate tendency to valorize a variety of consumption-based practices and cultural forms simply because they seem "radical" or like something that would shock the oppressively square church-going denizens of middle America.

It may be fun to feel edgy and hip, but so long as our cultural forms are based on consumption, they only serve to hand over to capital ever more power to make decisions about what is best for our society as a whole. And capital, as this piece points out, is systemically incapable of giving a damn about anything other than ever more profit, and ever more production. If we want to introduce any other values at all back into our political discourse, we're going to have to enter into discussion with our neighbors... even if those neighbors may hold values that make us uncomfortable.

Some actual text and analysis by me

To go with that last video. I think it is great that Obama is finally hitting back against McCain on the economy, and pointing out the position of economic privilege that McCain holds, and connecting that to his lousy, benefit the rich and screw everybody else policies. Its smart economic populism and I hope it will go far.

That said, charges of "elitism" always seem to stick more to Democrats than to Republicans, don't they... I'd like to advance a theory as to why.

Maybe its about gender.

The McCain campaign hit back against Obama's remarks by calling him "someone who worries about the price of Arugula" and thus is more "out of touch with ordinary Americans" than his fellow millionaire, John McCain.

I think that says something about how Republicans craft their message on "elitism" and what cultural codes they depend on it activating. I think they are trying to cash in on a long tradition of depicting the upper-class as effeminate - and therefore weak - and the working-class as strong, robust, and masculine. Arugula is expensive, sure, but more importantly it is a salad green - very fem. Rich folks who eat that stuff, like those who spend their money on haircuts (John Edwards) windsurf rigs (John Kerry) hybrid cars (Al Gore) or chardonnay (liberals in general) are effeminate, possibly gay, and therefore disgusting. Rich folks who buy prime steaks, massive SUVs, toy cattle ranches, and sports cars are just ordinary (macho straight) Americans.

One hopes this sort of blatant manipulation of prejudice has a limit, and that the electorate will not respond to it forever. Especially since the policies it enables are now so clearly screwing over the vast majority of the country. Sadly, history would seem to suggest that may not be necessarily so.

I apologize for posting endless video clips

But there are so many good ones out there these days.

Here's Obama, finally throwing punches...



Right on! Hit 'em!

Best Mash Up Evar

Ok, well, best Mash-up this week anyway...

Attack of the Giant Chavez

The above image, from a Reuters article about an upcoming attempt by the Venezuelan gov't to launch a mapping satellite, kinda looks like a giant Hugo Chavez is attacking a satellite dish. Sloppy composition, but hilarious...

Great Indy Campaign Ad

Everyone who supports Obama should put this on their blog, IMHO.

Where to find

The last Lun Class Ekranoplan - a massive Soviet aircraft designed to fly a few feet off the surface of the sea carrying a frigate's complement of anti-ship missiles - on google maps:


View Larger Map

Oh wikipedia, the things I waste time on because of you...

I'm not sure

How much help a recommendation from a site full of marxist rantings and profanity like this one will be for somebody looking for freelance writing/business consulting gigs, but Mike over at http://www.nifftystuff.com/ is a really sharp student of technology and pop culture looking for work. He groks the networked world... if you need somebody to write up your web 2.0 project or give you some insights into contemporary technologically mediated culture, drop him a line.

14 Ways to look at an international conflagration

Well, not quite 14, but as an experiment (and to satisfy my curiosity) I've been watching to see how many different points of view I could get on the Georgian conflict via the internet news sources I routinely monitor. Here's what I've found:

Two articles from the NYT: One broad overview, one more "on the ground"

Some unabashedly (and predictably) Pro-Russian coverage from Pravda

Several short videos from Reuters... good for some sense of what things might look like:




This article critical of what the author perceives as Pro-Western bias in other reports appearing in The Guardian

That's what I've found so far...

Orwell's Diary as a Blog

These folks are posting George Orwell's diary online as a blog. Posts will go up exactly 70 years after they were written, starting today with the entry from August 9, 1938.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of my attempt to get folks to call Orwell "The Democratic Socialist most likely to be cited by Authoritarian Capitalists"

We're also apparently down with

Holding prisoners in tiny wooden boxes

Human Rights(TM) only available for Citizens of the United States* void wherever they would be a bother


*Some rights, especially those protected by the 1st and 4th amendments,no longer available. Supplies of other rights are running low! Get yours today!

Automating the Army

Just in case some of you were hoping the debacle in Iraq would finally convince the United States to abandon the use of military force as a way to pursue its interests, I bring you today's Very Depressing Link (TM).

How will the United States continue using military force around the world when folks get upset about American casualties? Simple! Use Robots for the dangerous combat jobs!

http://io9.com/5033581/us-military-to-be-30-percent-robotic-in-twelve-years

Of course, if we gave a fuck about killing other people
we might be deterred by that... but all the evidence I've seen suggests the US electorate is willing to kill virtually unlimited numbers of "enemies" (including "collateral damage") so long as "our boys" are safe. I'm sure it doesn't hurt that the enemies are usually brown or yellow.

Yes America, we can continue our lifestyle of rampant consumption unabated, and send in the Kill Bots to quell any resistance to our appropriation of resources or labor! Happy Day! Let freedom (for consumption) ring on every (ok, not really every, since the poor and the black won't be getting a cut of this pie, and will be targeted by second-hand Kill Bots in the hands of the Police) American hillside!

They Built a Desert and Called it Peace

Or, in this case, they built a prison and called it peace. Great documentary work by an Iraqi reporter for The Guardian on the current state of Baghdad. The short answer: there is no peace there... just a civil war on hold.



Via the always excellent Juan Cole

How to explain why Capitalism is fucked up in jargon free English

This video by Austrian art collective monochrom is a great, straight forward skewering of Capitalism and Market economies. Nobody's done it better since Marx.

Granted, their simplicity leaves out some important nuances, but hey you can't have it all.

The fact that I can only find this via the increasingly hyper-capitalist and ad-crufted boingboing.net is just a bit of irony to top it all off.

On the same basic lines of my post below

A recently, an episode of the "PhD Comics" webcomic was published that depicted fictionalized versions of some members of my department. The folks depicted were pretty pleased with the comic, and I suppose publicity for the school (since the program has been conflated with another program here, either to protect the anonymity of the folks in the comic or by mistake) is a good thing.

You can read it here.

However, as much as people seem pleased with the comic, I must really, really take issue with the way that my discipline is depicted in this cartoon.

There are a bunch of things I don't like, but right now I'd like to single out the way my colleagues are apparently quoted as saying that, in humanities scholarship, there are "many truths." This sort of simple, pluralist line reinforces what I think is an important mis-representation of what we as humanities scholars do (or at least should be doing, in my opinion).

To say that doing humanities scholarship is about showing that "there are many truths" is like saying that doing environmentalism is about showing that there are many species. Yes, there are, but that is not the point. The point is what is happening to those truths and species under the systems of power at work in contemporary capitalism. Namely, they are being tossed into its gaping maw, shredded, and shat back out as commodities.

And what about the wonderful, snowflake "truth" that our smirking jock-boy conservative ass-clown depicted below lives in? Is it important for us to understand that it exists? Oh yeah. Does that mean we respect it as a co-equal member of the smiling community of truth? Hell no. Our duty is to confront it, to challenge it, to limit the effects of its toxicity where ever we can.

And that means our job is to reach conclusions, to take stands, and to advocate for some truths and not for others. Not because they are the sole truth, but rather quite the opposite, because what truth will prevail is always at stake.

Behold the Modern Conservative, or, Way to Go Boomers

Yes Boomers, remember back in the 1960s, those radical times when you got all radical and challenged the system? Well, at least you challenged the system until it stopped killing you in a misbegotten war in South East Asia and started paying you really well. Then you decided the system wasn't so bad after all and moved out to the suburbs and made sure no Black Folks followed you there. Not that you had anything against them, oh no, you just needed to maintain your home value.

Behold what you have wrought, the modern conservative dude, captured in his natural habitat - the mind bogglingly awful facebook page.

Thank God for your brave sexual revolution Boomers! You made sure Conservative dude could be utterly unabashed about his appetites. But you left the systems of inequality that let him treat his partners as cattle totally untouched. Dismantling those would have been no fun. I understand.

Oh and thank god for the brave war you fought on naughty words, allowing Mr. Douchy-McDouchebag here to express his vile notions of racial supremacy and basic disregard for all human life that doesn't immediately serve or entertain him (aw, lets face it, he doesn't have much regard even for them) with cutting, edgy prose. How fun!

Yes, the conservative dude, the ultimate product of vapid pluralism. Behold his unique and wonderful truth. Is it not beautiful?

You fought for freedom and liberated the powerful from any sense of responsibility for the rest of us. Now voices scream freedom in every direction and justice in none.

What really scares me, Boomers, is I'm pretty sure we Internet Kids are doing it all over again.

If you were a fly on the wall during the making of "Diary of the Dead"

I think you would hear something about like this:

Production Assistant: Mr. Romero, this is the internet

George Romero: By Gum, there's pictures in them tubes!

Production Assistant: Yes anyone can put them there, even with just a cell phone

George Romero: I need to remake Night of the Living Dead! And comment at length about this new media environment!

(Outside the As The World Turns casting call)

George Romero: Its ok if you didn't get on the TeeVee folks! Come be in my Zombie Movie!

(In the writing room)

George Romero: More Exposition!

Writers: This movie already has more Exposition than Ghost in The Shell

George Romero: Exposition is the best vehicle for biting social commentary!

(During Filming)

Black Actors: Why is every Black person in this movie hanging around a warehouse with an M-16?

George Romero: You were at the International Black Folks meetin' when the Zombie Crisis struck!

Black Actors: ummm, sure...

(In My Apartment)

Me: What the fuck was that?

Ok, And if that Other hit from Vancouver is Mr. Gibson

I understand about the Dorotea, I really do. I meet people like that all the time. They are annoying. We're not all like that!

(sigh) Great, now two of my favorite authors think I'm a tool. What a monday.

That or somebody with a proxy server is having fun with me.

If that Google hit from Torino

Searching for "Bruce Sterling," is in fact Bruce Sterling or someone affiliated with Mr. Sterling can I, um, mention that I really loved Schismatrix?

A lot?

Maybe my, um, tone was a bit harsh... sorry?

Academics love the Cyberpunk authors

But the cyberpunk authors HATE academics. Sure, William Gibson's occasional snotty remark about using us as his inspiration for the villain in Patter Recognition is one thing, but Bruce Sterling's blatant mis-representation of the argument being made in an, admittedly snotty but not unusually so, call for artwork is just mean.

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/07/creative-class.html

Yeah, Bruce, cause there is nothing to the notion that creative professionals overlook the labor of the less-hip, less well paid, less visible workers who feed, clothe, and pick up after them. Nope, nothing to that at all.

What do you get...

When you cross Barack Obama's anglicization of "si se puede" with those ubiquitous cheezeburger craving kittehs?

Yes we can has

Brilliant!

The last four days

Have, for me, been all about taking part in a novel political experiment. The Get FISA Right group has been trying to find ways to push Senator Obama, and the rest of the senate, towards protecting our civil liberties and voting down the so-called FISA compromise. We've managed to stir up some attention. Obama's campaign had to issue a response to us, though the response wasn't quite what we wanted (he basically re-iterated previous positions). Now we've crafted an open letter in response to his response. I've included that below.

I'd like to encourage everybody on here to get active and speak out on this important legislation. Starting tomorrow, the Get FISA right group will be starting a phone campaign to put pressure on the Senate to fix this bill. Follow this link for easy action steps you can take.

An Open Letter to Senator Obama
From the 20,000+ members of the my.BarackObama.com group
"Senator Obama – Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity – Get FISA Right"

Dear Senator Obama,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to us with your post “My Position On FISA” dated July 3rd, 2008. In your response, you pledged to "listen to [our] concerns, take them seriously, and seek to earn [our] ongoing support," and in that spirit, we would like to continue this conversation. We ask that you help transfer our passion and political activism into getting the FISA bill right -- now.

Senator, as a legal scholar who has done extensive study of our country's constitution you know that the FISA re-authorization bill currently before the Senate (HR 6304) threatens the rights guaranteed to American citizens in the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment.

One of the most troubling parts of this bill is its provision to provide retroactive immunity from civil lawsuits for telecommunications companies that may have assisted the Bush administration in violating the civil rights of Americans. You wrote in your statement that you “support striking Title II," which provides this immunity, "from the bill, and will work with Chris Dodd, Jeff Bingaman and others in an effort to remove this provision in the Senate.”

We ask that you back up your words with action by addressing your constituents on the floor of the Senate with the same oratorical power you used in Philadelphia to lay out your vision of a 'More Perfect Union.' The American people have just as much right to know of the dangerous precedent this Congress would be setting by granting retroactive immunity to those who "may have violated the law" and allowing spying on law-abiding citizens as we did to relearn of segregation and Jim Crow. The arm of government oppression reaches far and wide, Senator, and we must beat it back on whatever front we find it.

We ask you to reconsider your current position on the bill as a whole and strongly oppose a bill about which you said, "I know that the FISA bill that passed the House is far from perfect. I wouldn't have drafted the legislation like this, and it does not resolve all of the concerns that we have about President Bush's abuse of executive power." In your statement you also wrote, “In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people. But in a free society, that authority cannot be unlimited." We agree. Our nation just spent the holiday weekend in celebration of our independence from unlimited government authority. America in 1776 wished to be strong and free. Much has changed in 232 years but Americans will never consciously abandon freedom.

Senator, while you wrote that not passing this bill would result in the government “losing important surveillance tools," these important surveillance tools are in fact blanket surveillance programs already underway solely due to the passage of the Protect America Act, which you rightly opposed and voted against. This is only one example of how, even without the provisions for retroactive immunity, this bill is still dangerous to the civil liberties of American citizens.

As we understand it Senator, your oath to uphold the Constitution requires you and others in the Congress to vote against HR 6304.

We appreciate your willingness to continue the discussion. We represent a large and vocal part of the movement you have nurtured and that has nurtured you during this campaign season, and include many of your most active and ardent supporters. As you have said time and again Senator, "we are the ones we have been waiting for," and we are here, working to bring about real change in Washington. We have grown to over 20,000 strong in the space of just a few days. We are lobbying our representatives, and working to get our friends, relatives and neighbors to do the same. We are organizing support for removing the immunity provisions for telecommunications companies and building opposition to this dangerous bill in its entirety.

Working together, we have a better chance to assist Senators Dodd and Bingaman, and can achieve what your commitment to us, your supporters, has been before your recent change in position. Together, we can protect our civil rights and continue to keep America safe. Please join us and let's work together to Get FISA Right.

If you would like to join us, please call your Senator, join the group on myBO and Facebook, and help get the word out!

Speaking Out Against the FISA "Compromise"

Barack Obama has run a campaign based on the notion of "bottom up" grassroots political action enabled by the internet. Now some of us are trying to hold him accountable to his grassroots supporters using that same technology. Its an interesting experiment, and someday I'd like to write up my observations on what is happening in detail.

For now, I'd like to recommend that you all go here and read some of the letters that have been written to the Obama campaign expressing discontent with this decision. Some of them are really quite persuasive, others quite moving. If you have a blog, linking to that page will help us raise the visibility of the folks speaking out.

If you want to do more about this issue, a wiki has been set-up with a lot of useful suggestions. Remember folks, Democracy isn't a noun, it's a verb!

Garrison Keillor Continues to rock

If you had to sum up the disasters of the Bush presidency in one paragraph, the last one here could hardly be topped:

A ballgame is a great place to get to know somebody. You talk sideways during the interludes of which baseball has many, and since the game itself is so orderly, you can converse in non sequiturs, and after I told him about my 10-year-old girl, who loves to swim, and we agreed on what a great age 10 is and what intense pleasure a kid is capable of, we got to the grim business of What Do You Do For A Living. He said he was a cop. I said I was unemployed. (You tell people you're a writer and they tend to clam up.)

"Tough times," he said. I nodded. We might've gotten onto politics then, but we got onto music and Ireland and so forth, but I thought, "Here is a guy the candidates have to talk to this summer." A cop is a realist and he knows where Rockwell leaves off and surrealism begins, and here is his girl taking a big lead off third base and he loves her so beautifully and unabashedly and wants the world to be there for her when it comes her time to fly.

I'm 65 and have a good life and can't claim that the Current Occupant has done me much harm at all. It's when I think about 10-year-old girls I start to get hot under the collar. This clueless man has dug a deep hole for them and doesn't seem vaguely aware of it. He has spent us deep in a hole, gotten us into a disastrous war, blithely ignored the long-term best interests of the country, and when you think of the 4,000 kids who now lie in cemeteries, and for what? -- you start to grind your teeth. For the sake of the girl with the beautiful swing, I hope we get a better president than the disgusting incompetent we've wasted eight years of our national life on. Think twice about who you put your arm around, Sen. McCain.

Read the whole piece, its got some great baseball writing.

What are folks up to for the fourth?

Another Experiment in Participatory Democracy

Of the electronically mediated kind.

The Cause Caller site give you tools for setting up a "virtual phonebank" namely auto dialing software for contacting politicians and a wiki to provide callers with a script for guide their phone calls.

I used it to set up a page people can use to call Senator Obama's Senate and Campaign offices to express their disapproval of the FISA "compromise" that lets telecom companies off the hook for helping President Bush spy on us.

So far the response has been a little underwhelming, only about 6 calls or so generated, but I'm going to see what happens.

If you would like to give it a try, click this link to go to the page I set up. Read through the script, then enter your phone number in the box provided and click "start calling." The site will call your phone, then connect you to the first office. Stay on the line when they hang up and the site should connect you to the next office.

Thanks for the help!

I for one would like to welcome our lolcat overlords.

Some of you are probably familiar with the lolcat phenomenon - that curious internet practice of affixing silly captions to photographs of cats. One website seems to have risen to be the largest center for the practice, namely the strange and wonderful icanhascheezburger.com Lately, they've branched out, applying their online captioning technology - they call it the lolcat builder - to a variety of other subjects, including politicians.

Henry Jenkins, eat your heart out... here's remix culture in modular form easy to use as a mouse click. And here's what it gets you:




Pop-culture meets politics meets modular distributed production. Here comes everybody.

Firefox Download Day

If you run Firefox as your web-browser, you should know they have a new version (firefox 3.0) available. If you download before 1pm EDT today, you will help them in their bid to set the World Record for a software download.

If you don't run Firefox as your web-browser, you should. It is available free of charge and under a fairly reasonable open-source license (the MPL - I prefer the GPL, but I am a purest). Lots of fun add-ons and gadgets are available. Security tends to be a bit better than IE.

My ad campaign for Firefox aside, I think the map they provide on their page documenting their ongoing world record attempt, the map which shows the number of downloads from locations worldwide, shows some interesting data points. It is possible these numbers have inaccuracies that keep them from being really meaningful, clearly they were not collected with a rigorous scientific methodology, but it doesn't seem entirely foolish to accept them as somewhat accurate (say, within the right order of magnitude) estimates. As such, they paint an interesting picture of how connected to the global network various places are in the current moment. Some things about this picture are not very surprising - they are the same features Castells noticed 15 years ago - but important to note as evidence of persistent inequality. A few features are surprising, however.

Nations of the developed world tend to have fairly large numbers of downloads. The US is first by far, with over 2 million downloads - though this must be at least in part a result of native pride (Firefox project is organized by the US based Mozilla foundation) and the fact that download day was set from 1pm EDT yesterday to 1pm EDT today, a time span convenient for users in most U.S. time zones. Western European Countries tend to have 100,000 downloads or more - sometimes much more, Germany has over 400,000 - Australia, Canada, Japan, China, and Brazil (Brazil actually beats out its fellow BRIC developing economies here, with more downloads than Russia, India, or China. This may be browser preference in part, but clearly shows the strength of Brazil's economy as well) round out the "over 100,000 club" with one more, somewhat surprising addition I will get to later.

Compare this wealth of downloads to the dirth of downloads on the content of Africa. Only South Africa has over 10,000 downloads. Only Nigeria, Morocco, Algeria, Kenya and Egypt have over 1,000. The Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation of 62 million people, claims only 45 downloads. That's 33 fewer than Greenland. Somalia claims only 10. There is one, lone Firefox downloader in Chad.

The Caribbean also is a low download zone, though it seems signifigantly better connected than Africa. The Dominican Republic, with about the same population as Chad, has almost 4,000 downloads. Of course, they also have about the same population as Belgium, which has 46,000 downloads. Cuba lags, but is not the total blackout zone it would have been a few years ago. They have 860 downloads as I write this and may pass 1,000 before the end of the day. Haiti is by far the least downloadingest Caribbean country, with only 86 downloads (for 8 million people)!

The middle east is also a relatively low download zone. Saudi Arabia, with about 7,000 downloads, is at about the same per-capita download rate as the Dominican Republic. Iraq has fewer than 200 downloads (does the US army run Internet explorer, then?). Israel and Turkey have healthy, if not astounding, download rates (25,000 and 50,000 respectively). The real shocker is the surprise I alluded to earlier. Iran. Iran has 185,000 downloads - more than Pakistan, India, Russia, China, Australia or Brazil. I suppose this might be some sort of fluke or bad number or IP geolocation flaw or something, but if it isn't... well, it says something about what sort of "closed society" Iran is running these days, I think.

Oh and speaking of closed societies, the only country I could find on the map with 0 downloads was.... North Korea. I guess they win at being isolated.

The Rest of my yesterday

Now up on flickr... or at least the shots I liked.

Red Red Radishes

MD, his spousal unit, and I went to the Radish festival in McClure, Ohio. MD was disappointed, apparently you shouldn't let your anticipation for a regional festival build up over the course of four years. I thought it was alright... fun polka and some interesting things to take pictures of. Like this sack of radishes:

More on my flickr page.

Obama on Gay Marriage

I'm curious what JS, MP and others who have expressed some concern about how forcefully Sen. Obama would support gay rights as President will think of this report, which suggests that the Senator expressed cautiously worded support for gay marriage in a meeting with Protestant ministers. Brave for sticking to his guns in the face of a hostile crowd, or wimpy for using "cautious" language?

Fragments from a 21st Century Travelogue

Binghamton, New York

My grandparent's home. They are dead; the upper floors lay vacant; a few belongings are piled in the center of the living room on the odd chance someone wants them. My mother has already removed paperwork, documents, photographs. Among them the stamped passbook that brought my great-grandfather through the checkpoints of the British Army in occupied Germany after the first world war.

In the basement is another mass of detritus: the tattered remains of board games that entertained me, my sister and my cousins when we were children, ancient appliances in various states of disrepair (probably awaiting some promised fix when my grandfather's stroke hit), black rotary Bell Telephone telephones in classic semi-gloss bakelite. My Grandfather, a plumber, had hoarded great masses of pluming fixtures, nuts and bolts, pipe hangers, valves. My mother, aunt, and I sort them carefully and haul them to the local scrap dealer. We make 300 dollars on two hundred pounds of copper and brass. We wait behind a long line of thin, leathery men in pickup trucks at the scrap dealer unloading pipes, refrigerators. One is knocking the wood and foam out of an aluminum boat with a sledgehammer. My part of America is mining its cities for raw materials, selling itself off by parts. I think of electrical lines being run to ultra-luxury hotels in Dubai, of data centers going up on south Pacific islands with no natural resources remaining but their lack of anything resembling coherent structures of legal jurisdiction.

Enfield, New York

My mother's fiance has four years of firewood stacked in front of the post and beam home he designed himself and built with the help of friends in the early 70s. The house is small inside, but comfortable and surprisingly well lit. He brags that he made it through the winter last year without even expending a full year's worth of firewood, all while showing me the massive pile of new wood he will add to his stock this year. I ask about the apparent oversupply of fuel and he shrugs and says, "its poor man's capital, i guess," and compares it to the scrap cars a friend keeps on their lawn, or my grandfather's pipe fittings.

Lock Haven, Pennsylvania

This is the last morning my girlfriend and I will spent in this central Pennsylvania town, with its views of the Appalachians looming low and green over the Susquehanna. I look up from the air mattress on the floor of her empty apartment and see swallows cutting through the pale yellow morning light. Will there be swallows in the Southern City we are moving her to, I wonder? I suspect not. The swallow, I believe, is a natural cliff-dweller and nests among the habitations of humanity only when they are old and quiet enough to mimic their ancestral environs. The low slung brick and concrete and stone buildings of this old river town are swallow heaven. How long until we tear them down, for copper conduit, for steel rebar?

In a 21 foot Truck, West Virginia

If you are a novice truck driver and decide to attempt to maneuver a 21-foot Penske moving van containing all of your beloved's worldly possessions along the narrow and winding roadway that is US 70 in West Virginia, here is what the experience will be like: the world dissolves into one long moment. Your human ability to reflect on the past and plan for the future goes away, except insofar as "the past" refers to the last bend in the road and "the future" refers to the next one. Your conscious mind will grab hold of some tiny piece of thought. Perhaps even this very notion, that "this is one long moment." It will repeat this thought over and over (this is one long moment this is one long moment this is one long moment this is one long moment) a sort of cartesian checksum, a way for it to verify for itself that the truck has not slid from the highway and with it your being into nothingness. This slim thread of ego is all that remains, the rest of you is devoted to the needs of the body, to holding the bouncing truck on its narrow and twisting course, to fighting off the dull ache growing ever sharper between your shoulders. (Some smarty pants may have noticed that I have mixed my philosophical systems in a manner that may not be completely internally consistent. Fuck you! I survived the truck-rodeo! I am among the living! I will appropriate dead men's philosophy as I see fit.)

Unnamed Southern City, North Carolina Piedmont

The girlfriend is a private person. I'll call the city she has moved to "Unnamed Southern City" out of respect for her not to be exposed to the stark gaze of the massed denizens of the global networks. Unnamed Southern City is a riot of growth, both botanical and artificial. Dense green hedgerows are interspersed with sprawling strip malls, apartment complexes, gated communities. The original ecology meets capital's emulation of its supposed darwinian imperatives.

There are no swallows here. The old brick factory shells that harbor them back home never existed in this place. Instead the sprawl sports small, vertical clumps of concrete and glass office towers, new workplaces for a new economy in the new south. Note to the ghost of Bill Faulkner: today the it is the North that is old and vanquished, the South has become young and victorious.

Unnamed Southern City, a small jet aircraft, Regan airport, another small jet aircraft, Syracuse, New York

The aircraft from Unnamed Southern City to Regan is so small I cannot fit my backpack in the overhead bin, and completely full. I have lucked out and drawn a bulkhead seat. I watch the frazzled flight attendant escort a hopeful standby passenger onboard, only to discover that someone was in the toilet for the headcount and there is no seat for her. She escorts her back off the plane. Her bag must be withdrawn from the plane by the crew. There is a delay. My fellow travelers groan. The plane spends less than an hour in the air. The truck and I spent 5 hours making this distance a few days ago. We pass Richmond on our way to Washington. A ten minute flight, a century and a half ago, the distance between two warring Americas.

Regan sits so close to the city you can almost touch it from the tarmac. There is a forest of cranes along the Potomac, between us and the silhouette of the Capitol dome. New construction for the security state. The war, it seems, is still hiring. I spend two hours in the airport, watching the constant motion of arrivals and departures, the thousands of pieces of aluminum kept always moving by the energy of our dwindling petroleum supply. Amazing that it works at all, flinging people through the stratosphere on a daily basis. More amazing when it is gone.

The plane to Syracuse is both larger and less crowded than my previous flight. It seems unlikely this could be a profitable venture for those operating the airline. Again we are less than an hour in the air. I touch down in Syracuse, my mother picks me up from the airport. A few minutes later I am standing at the sandwich counter of my childhood grocery store, remembering looking at the Washington monument a few hours before. A strange juxtaposition of the familiar and novel.

I step outside. It is cool here, and quiet. Swallows are swooping from the old brick office building standing beside the Owasco outlet. A yellow Faye drugstore ad fades and peels from its side. There is no traffic, except for a single dumptruck belching thick black diesel smoke. In its bed are appliances, copper pipe, aluminum conduit...

A real post soon

Sorry about the lack of blog-content, dear readers. For now, this selection, from a fafblog clearly back and in its prime.

This is awesome

From The Onion News Network: "Gay Scientists Discover Christian Gene"



This is a pretty sharp piece, I like it a lot.

Doing My Small Part

For democratic media. Here are some clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wright being interviewed by Bill Moyers on his PBS news program. Watch these, and try to get others to watch them. They're the best antidote currently available for the "LOOKOUT! SCARY BLACK MAN!" show that has been made out of excerpts from his sermons.









Share the links and spread the love children. Lets get the message to the peoples.

Summer Art Project

I'm going to be trying to do a summer art project this summer, taking some pictures of the Grain elevators of Wood County, Ohio.

The Grain elevator seems a fitting subject for this moment of rising food prices, and I enjoy taking pictures that capture the odd beauty of industrial equipment. These ungainly behemoths have that in spades.

The pictures are coming up here... I'm going to try to put together a web-page with a map and some captions in the next few weeks.

This Guy

Might just be saving the world... or at least the parts of it that are pollenized by bees.

Jack of All Trades

Or perhaps more like the deuce of all trades. Sure I could be working on my Dissertation, or on my various political projects, but no... tonight I decided to learn some javascript.

I managed to hack together this crude but kinda fun tool with javascript and the google maps API. It shows a map, you click on something, and it outputs the Latitude and Longitude of that something in nice clean text, ready to be cut and pasted into GPS babel, or hand-keyed into a handy GPS unit.

I'm going to play with Google Maps some more for an Art project I want to play with this summer. I find this stuff to be useful when I'm having a video game craving... the same kind of problem solving is employed, and at least I'm learning a little something in the process.

The tool is here if you want to play with it. It is on my server box on my cable connection, so don't all click at once.

If you find the code useful, feel free to take it (of course), but you'll need your own key from google to use the google maps API.

If you like, please link

This is egotistical to even ask, but if you like the post below, and support what it is saying, please link to it on your own blog (if you have one). If we can get enough links, maybe people will start to read it.

Again, I hate to even ask, but I'd like to see if we can use this crazy internet to reach somebody.

Open Letter to Barack Obama

Dear Senator,

I'd like to start out by saying that I'm a strong supporter of yours and have enjoyed being active in your campaign. I helped organize the get out the vote canvass here in Bowling Green, Ohio - there are even pictures of me working on it in the Getty Images photo pool of the day's events. I think you represent our best hope of real political change in our country.

That said, I have one question regarding last night's debate:

What the hell was that?

Seriously Senator, what the hell? I understand that the questions were nonsensical and a complete distraction from the actual issues facing our country, I understand the moderators did Hillary's attack job for her, I'm as pissed about it as everyone else in the liberal internet-sphere.

But here's where I, with all due respect Senator, think you went wrong when confronted with those questions:

you flinched

You didn't hit back hard and stick to your convictions, you waffled and stammered. The "bitter" question, I'll admit, you got just about right - but with only about the tenth of the energy you really needed to hit it with. The Wright explanation, on the other hand, is a disaster. Again, Senator, I realize you have very experienced campaign operatives working for you, and I am just a grad student and volunteer in Northwest nowhere Ohio, but I really take issue with how your campaign has decided to respond to that question - at least your "short form" answer, the longer Race Speech in Philadelphia was brilliant.

The short answer you gave last night (which seems to be the standard for the campaign) went something like this, "I didn't know Pastor Wright said those awful things, and the awful things he said don't reflect the other good things the church has done. I trust the American people to understand my views aren't Pastor Wright's views, and that Pastor Wright's views are part of a larger context." Senator, if you are going to trust the American people, you have to trust them all the way. You have to trust them to understand Pastor Wright's context, and to reject the notion that you and he share the same politics. Your current answer, on the other hand, attempts to disconnect you from the Pastor's remarks by denying you ever heard them, which suggests you really don't trust Americans to do this, and instead feel the need to make a denial which stretches the bounds of plausibility even for your most staunch supporters: that you did not know what your Pastor of 20 years was saying on the pulpit. I've watched a number of flame wars erupt over these remarks in a variety of online forums, Senator, and not once did your supporters use your denial as a part of their own argument as to why Pastor Wright's remarks should not disqualify you for the highest office in the land. Instead, they have appealed to the basic truth of the second part of your answer: that Wright's fiery sermons make sense in the context of a Black church community struggling to deal with the realities of oppression in the United States, even if the words of these sermons are often over the top; that a church should not be judged by the words of its Pastor alone; and that suggesting that a man's ideas are exactly the same as his Pastor's is absurd.

This sort of waffling, this attempt to deny and then explain continued throughout the debate. Again, I understand the questions were bogus, but just because we want to transform American politics does not mean we can expect it to transform itself for us. We're going to have to be able to operate in the current political environment, until we have secured the ability to transform that environment. The bogus corporate media cannot be ignored, it must be defeated.

In my humble opinion, the way to do that, Senator, is to trust the American people and to trust them all the way. Don't flinch, don't waffle, don't deny. Explain, persuade, and stand up for yourself. One of the things that first attracted me to your campaign was the strength and confidence with which you did these things in the early days of the primary season - a seeming million years ago. As the season has gone on, that confidence has seemed to wane and falter, and I think I know why: you have something to lose now. And so, like so many Democratic candidates before you, you've stopped fighting to win, and started fighting not to lose.

Please, Senator, if by some odd chance you should actually encounter this small letter written by a small campaign volunteer, I have just one request to make. A request I believe will be shared by millions of others just like me.

Fight to win again, Senator. Fight like you have nothing to lose. Democrats have been betting small and losing small for generations now. Look where it has gotten us. It is scary to bet big, but it may be the only chance we've got.

I Read Talking Points Memo

So you don't have to. Another interesting tidbit posted up there today:

Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) on Obama: "I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button. He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."

The point most others are making is that Rep. Davis seems a wee bit racist when he refers to the first Black Senator since the reconstruction as "boy." I agree, of course, but there is something much more interesting here...

When Rep. Davis offhandedly mentions "that simulation that related a nuclear threat to this country," what exactly is he talking about? Do the political parties, as a part of their vetting process, run candidates through some sort of advanced computer simulator game designed to recreate the experience of commanding US Strategic Forces during a nuclear strike on the United States? A sort of 21st century equivalent of Starfleet's Kobayashi Maru scenario - designed to test Starship officers in a "no-win scenario?" Are we to understand from Rep. Davis's comment that Sen. Obama - demonstrating both his intellect and his disregard for conventional thinking - responded to the scenario in the same way as the famous James T. Kirk, by re-programming the simulator to allow for victory, in this case perhaps a nice, peaceful negotiated settlement involving multilateral agreements and robust international organizations heading off any nuclear exchange?

If so, the Obama people need to get this out the the press! The Trekkers will turn out in droves! Imagine the bumper sticker:

Obama 08 - He Beat the Kobayashi Maru

Yep... that's gonna be the big November surprise people, the Trekker vote. You heard it here first.

---UPDATE

I finally tracked down Rep. Davis's comments. He does indeed imply that he and Sen. Obama were involved in a "highly classified simulation" of a nuclear threat! Kobayshi Maru!

Obama!

From Talkingpointsmemo.com: a YouTube video clip of Senator Obama on Charlie Rose in 2004, explaining sentiments similar to those that recently got him called "elitist."



I think it is pretty clear here that, far from being elitist, Senator Obama is doing his best to explain the anxieties of working class people to the (largely privileged) media. For those of you "sick of the politics" of this campaign season, watch his thoughtful analysis here and then look me in the eye and tell me you've seen a politician who thinks and speaks like this in your lifetime.

You haven't. And you won't again. This is your chance America. Don't screw it up.

Another Good Column

By Garrison Keillor on Salon. He's been a bit hit-and-miss over there lately. This is a good one though.

The Pedagogy of Narcissistic Smarm

To involve my students in my lecture on Hebdige's "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" I asked them to provide some examples of contemporary youth subcultures, and how those subcultures might be engaging in the sort of semiotic rebellion that Hebdige suggests is the interesting potential of subculture. They named the emo, goth, and indy scenes as contemporary subcultures.

My favorite part: during the wrap-up I referred to the "emo-goth continuum" as being made up of "various distillates of crude punk." Clever, right?

Yep, that's what keeps me teaching, folks. The opportunity to say clever things in front of a captive audience.

Anthony Famiglietti 1919-2008

One of my earliest childhood memories is of spending a warm spring day with my paternal grandfather. I was a fanciful child, I always wanted to play games based on "imagination." The influence of Sesame Street no doubt. My parents tired of these imaginary exercises, since a young boy's notion of what a submarine or spaceship might be like is not very entertaining to an adult. But my grandfather indulged me, as grandparents will. That afternoon we were playing "Time Machine." We set the imaginary dial, and off we went to the sixties, or the forties, or the thirties, and with each stop my Grandfather would tell me stories of his experience in that time, tell me what it had been like to live through the depression, through the war, through the boom-time afterward. I remember being astounded at the long thread of living memory he possessed, and the ease and joy with which he wove that thread into tales and anecdotes.

That thread is broken now.

Like any good post-modern child of the mediated age, I have recorded images of my grandfather. Squeezed some small portion of the man's vast memory into patterns of bits, in the latest iteration of what must be a human tradition dating back to when we first became able to speak, but the full richness of his experience, and the funny, vibrant, sometimes bawdy man who lived it - that's all gone now.

Goodbye, Grandpa

Fafblog is Back

Fafblog, the death of which I blogged mournfully about a while ago, has returned to life! New posts here.

Ever since I put up the earlier post despairing of Fafblog's apparent demise, the blog here has been getting google hits from far and wide (so Google analytics tells me) based on some combination of the search terms "fafnir" "Chris Mastrangelo" "fafblog" etc. Each hit filled me with a sense of warmth, of community. Somewhere on the net, they told me, someone was searching for the same thing I had lost, someone was wishing on the same star.

And today, someone cruised by my blog to drop a comment and let me know fafblog was live again... how cool is that?

Race and US politics

Malcolm X may have famously said that "Racism is a Cadillac, they release a new model every year," but today Pat Buchanan demonstrated that it would be foolish of us to assume that every Cadillac on the road is the most recent model year.

Yes, I spend a fair amount of time in Ethnic Studies classes talking about "color-blind racism" and "subtle racism" and often have to explain to my students who Willie Horton was and what the Rodney King case was about. Sometimes the texts I use seem awfully out of touch with their attitudes, and the seemingly more complex and subtle racial etiquette of early 21st century America.

But in this post responding to Senator Obama's speech on Race and Racism in America, good old Pat Buchanan shows us that a whole boatload of good, old fashioned racism is still alive and well in our contemporary moment. To summarize, here are a few arguments that Mr. Buchanan makes here, that I really thought we had mostly left behind in our National discourse:

-That Black Americans should be grateful that their ancestors were made slaves and brought to the United States
-That white racism was in no way responsible for the Watts riots and other civil unrest in poor black neighborhoods
-That the Black America is solely responsible for poverty and lack of opportunity in poor Black communities
-That Black people are criminals who prefer to prey upon white victims

The last one really gets me. He trots out crime statistics that claim "black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse" Yeah Pat, because those stats couldn't possibly be influenced by who feels comfortable reporting crimes, who trusts the criminal justice system to take their reports seriously, or who has more property to steal. Nope. Black folks just like crime, and especially like committing crimes against white victims.

Meanwhile he makes the same old plea decrying affirmative action, writing "Let [Senator Obama] go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for “deserving” white kids." Gee, Pat, did you miss the part of the speech where Senator Obama (who Pat calls "Barack" all through his piece, cause, you know, he apparently gets to pick and choose which United States Senators deserve the honorific) specifically recognized the anger and frustration of poor whites "who don't feel particularly privileged by their race," and admitted that their concerns might be valid and deserved respect - even if the target of their anger might be misplaced? Did you miss the part where he called on America not to think of politics as a "zero sum game" and to try to work towards solutions that might be beneficial to Black and White Americans alike?

And yet this man is not a fringe commentator. He is a first string pundit, called on by all the major networks to give his opinion on matters of the day. So I guess this sort of "old model racism" has gone exactly nowhere and is still front and center in our politics.

To paraphrase a writer over at Daily Kos, thanks for clearing that up, Pat.

Happy Easter!!

From YouTube's magnificent collection of sesame street videos.



Kudos to the Children's Television Workshop for not aggressively pursuing copyright enforcement on these. Fans have done a grand job of organizing these old clips and making them accessible.

Computer Countup

My headcount of laptop computers in the room at Larry Lessig's "Change Congress" press conference:

5 Macbooks
1 Macbook pro (Dr. Lessig's)
3 PCs

... I just found this a fun factoid. I'm sure the real journalists and bloggers with reader counts out of the single digits will do a better job writing up substantial facts than I will.

Blogging Right Now!

Pictured here, me chilling in a Washington D.C. bookstore on my way to a Press Conference being held by the great Larry Lessig. I might even get to say hello! Happy day!

Its been awhile

Soooo I forgot to update my blog for a month. Sorry JS, MP, MD, and CW I realize this left you without a needed source of reading material. Here's what I've been up to:

-Spent about a week canvassing for Obama. I like to canvass, it gets you out in the world, teaches you about the place you live and who lives there. You learn who lives where, and a little bit about how they live. You meet guys who want to talk to you about Mike Huckabee on their way to wash their truck, and kids smoking weed and playing video games at 2 on a Monday afternoon. You learn the smell of different neighborhoods. You get to feel like a badass field commander as you run through housing developments and apartment buildings in the dark on high speed literature drop runs, barking out target addresses to your friends. Good times.

-Of course, then when your candidate loses, times are not so good. Especially when you spent the day running through the sleet trying to Get Out the Vote. Very depressing. I think perhaps I'm bad luck, since this always seems to happen to me. Maybe I should campaign for the Republicans.

-Meanwhile, I've been wrestling with the Human Subjects Review Board here to get my dissertation approved. I had to reassure them that I will not be administering electrical shocks to wikipedia users, presumably with some sort of shock over IP technology. I wish I had shock over IP technology, I would use it on the people who try to put spam comments on my blog advertising kiddie porn. Very nasty.

Travelogue

I have always enjoyed highway travel. There is a feeling of freedom there, a feeling of independence that I think might (in part) come from being in-between well defined places - in the gap in the map that seems to belong to everyone and no one all at once. An illusion, of course, the omnipresent highway patrol cruisers tell you that, but a potent illusion all the same - one that seems all the more poignant in these days of peak oil (and now, perhaps, peak food) since it isn't really clear how much longer the asphalt and concrete rivers of our firefly American empire will continue to flow with traffic. How much longer the highway experience and its strange euphoria will still be available and affordable for folks like me. I had a bit of a trip today, a usual run down interstate 80, coming home from my girlfriend's place. I thought I would record some brief observations, just for my own enjoyment...

-I had wondered why I always shared 80 with great convoys of Fed-Ex trailers, some double or even triple trailers strung together, especially through central PA. This trip the obvious occurred to me. The eastward terminus of 80, only a few hours from my starting point this morning, is New York City. Those Fed-Ex convoys were loaded this morning in Hoboken, or some other Lagrange point of the socio-economic gravitational pull of Manhattan island, with freight from the bustling commercial center of the eastern seaboard megalopolis. Route 80 would be the most direct road west, toward the continental interior and, beyond that, the pacific.

-There is a strange feeling in the highway rest-stops of a toll-road expressway, as Route 80 is in central Ohio. The rest-stop is nowhere, a part of no political entity, it feels self-contained... like a sort of pocket universe. This feeling is particularly acute at the Angola rest-stop, on Route 90 west of Buffalo, which is in the space between the westward and eastward lanes of the highway - you access it through a glassed-in pedestrian bridge. I have been to most of the Ohio turnpike rest-stops east of Toledo at this point. None of them have quite the no-zone feeling of Angola, but they all still conjure the feeling of liminality. One wonders what will happen to these little enclaves when the oil runs out. What will our descendants make of them? How will they understand why we needed so many bathrooms, so far away from everyone?

-Heading east while I headed west, I spotted the most tangible sign I have seen yet of our imperial entanglements, perhaps of our eventual demise. Strapped to the back of a flat-bed truck, somewhere in western PA or eastern OH was an MRAP. It was squat, and beige and angry looking - like a Chevy Tahoe on steroids with military training and a bad attitude. I wondered if it was heading for its point of departure, for a ship heading for Iraq or Afghanistan. Of course, my oil-fueled reveries are, in part, what have conjured up our need for such monsters.

So I suppose, in the end, the highway will have to go. I will miss it, though, when it is gone.

A Cyberpunk Moment

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Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

I found this thing adhering to a gas pump at a station in Toledo, like some sort of technological barnacle. It was a tiny advertisement-bot, playing pre-recorded sound ads from some sort of chip while I pumped my gas. It seemed very cyberpunk-esque to me, an example of a sort of omni-present cheap technology bolted onto the older infrastructure of monopoly capitalism.

The Tag of the Semester

IMG_1930
Originally uploaded by choo_choo_pictures

Someone is tagging up my campus with this little stencil. I don't mind, of course, street art is cool with me. I'm just curious as to what it might signify.

Three Words

Warren. Ellis. Webcomic.

You read that right, Warren Ellis, the mind that brought you Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants, is doing a free weekly webcomic.

This is the most awesome thing I have heard about in minutes... and that is a long time on the internet.

Intro poster is on Ellis's blog here
Comic will be up here starting Feb 15. Some funky teaser art up there now...

Oblivion

This last week has been taken up by a lot of playing with technology... rebuilding computers, installing software, working out bugs.

And games... I got onto a game kick for a day or two - Half-Life 2...

I don't know why I did it, why I spent my week the way I did. I didn't want to do anything more substantial. Maybe it was the spillover from last week's stuff. Maybe it was just the old habits of an addict. Maybe it was just procrastination before starting the large and scary project of my dissertation.

Video games are strange. A form of oblivion, really... you forget your senses besides vision and hearing, and those are degraded. Returning to your body... to the smell in your nose and the feel of the clothes against your skin, is a strange sensation.

So, I went seeking oblivion after a brush with it. A story common enough throughout human experience, I suspect. Strange though, how oblivion drives us into its own arms...

the death-urge, I suppose Freud would say

Anyway, some new stuff up on my flickr account, so check that out, and I've revamped copyvillain.org -if anyone is interested.

Copyvillain is running MediaWiki now, as a small part of my diss research... if anybody has any ideas on things to do with a wiki server, let me know.