I'm not eating any oranges for the next couple weeks, and I'm going to stay away from madcowburgers as well. Nothing but apples and chicken for me. Maybe some bacon.
I think that we should mix up the terror color system every now and again. Wouldn't it be cool to be under an occasional code aqua? (be kind of scared but in a sort of noncommittal smooth way).
A link off of Grimmelman’s article led me to the curious AgoraXchange project, which will launch in January. A team including net artist Natalie Bookchin and political theorist Jacqueline Stevens is behind the project, the goal of which is to create an MMG that poses an “alternative to the present world order” guided by four decrees that include the abolition of inherited property rights. The ambition of the project appears to be to create a game that will be instructive in reshaping global society. While such a simulation is unlikely to overthrow capitalism, the idea is a refreshing turn from many MMGs that seem hell-bent on promoting the acquisition of virtual wealth as the highest virtue to which gamers can aspire.
This post was originally published on Grand Text Auto.
This Modern World strip parodies warblogs such as Instapundit.
Teaching The Book of Danielis calling to mind a frightening time in American history, made all the more frightening by the way in which some of the rhetoric surrounding the Red Scare sounds very familiar right about now, shadowy terrorists taking the place of shadowy communists, civil liberties likewise expendable.
An account of the Rosenberg Trial
Lillian Hellman's Letter to HUAC (and other texts related to HUAC).
The Trial of the Scottsboro Boys
The Literature & Culture of the American 1950s by Alan Filreis
In recent weeks, I've followed the story in the Times of the quiet controversy over the White House's decision to place robot.txt files on their website preventing any pages mentioning the administrations policies in Iraq from being archived by Google or the Internet Archive. It seems this administration would prefer to keep the Web from serving as any kind of historical memory with regard to its policies in Iraq, and would prefer that its website not interfere with its own approach to the malleable past. I followed a link from the Times today to the memory hole, a site that grabs, scans, and makes public many documents about which publishers had second thoughts. Some, such as the DoD's September 23 Draft Board Notice are fairly ominous.
The BBC reports that the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the prolonged dentention without due process of “Enemy Combatants” from the Afghan war is constitutional.
In their application to the Supreme Court, lawyers for two Australian and 12 Kuwaiti nationals, and the Britons, said: “The United States has created a prison on Guantanamo Bay that operates entirely outside the law”.
“Within the walls of this prison, foreign nationals may be held indefinitely, without charges or evidence of wrongdoing, without access to family, friends or legal counsel, and with no opportunity to establish their innocence.”
While I'm on politics and foreign policy, Al Gore recently gave a rousing speech at an event sponsored by moveon.org in which he spoke out on the Bush administration's approach in Iraq and in particular on the civil rights abuses of the Patriot act:
. . . this President has claimed the right for his executive branch to send his assistants into every public library in America and secretly monitor what the rest of us are reading. That's been the law ever since the Patriot Act was enacted. . . . And speaking of the Patriot Act, the President ought to reign in John Ashcroft and stop the gross abuses of civil rights that twice have been documented by his own Inspector General. And while he's at it, he needs to reign in Donald Rumsfeld and get rid of that DoD “Total Information Awareness” program that's right out of George Orwell's 1984.
This is probably old news to most of you, but I just heard about the US Army’s latest recruiting tool, America’s Army. The army spent $4.5 million to develop the game, and is reporting that it has been wildly successful. In a Chicago Tribune story, the game’s project director, Col. Casey Wardynski, reported that on the night of Oct. 28 alone, “1.3 million games got played . . . At six minutes a game, that’s 150,000 hours of game play, where kids were virtually inside the Army.” Wardynski praises the game as a cost-effective recruiting tool. The game takes kids from basic and special forces training to virtual battlefield operations.
I guess it’s one way to keep those body bags filled.
What’s next? The CIA could be at work on America’s Effective Intelligence: Mission One — Learn to Translate Arabic. Maybe the State Department is working on America’s Diplomats: Mission One — A Nonviolent Solution.
Nah. Where’s the fun in that?
This post originally published on Grand Text Auto.
I just watched about 45 minutes of a news conference on rebuilding Iraq, and I was impressed with Paul Bremer. But I don't think he should be in charge of rebuilding Iraq. I think that after President Bush and the majority of his administration step down, we should put Paul Bremer in charge of the interim authority in charge of rebuilding America. Somebody's going to have to run the show in a responsible manner until we're able to elect a legitimate government, and I think Bremer's got the chops. Colin Powell's pretty smart too, I think we should give him some kind of title like interim vice-administrator, and kick the rest of the bums out. And give Madeline Albright some kind of title as well, Secretary of State or something. Bring back Bill Clinton for a few months and let him handle GW's photo ops. Get Gore on the interim EPA. Give Rumsfield, Cheney, and Jr. Texas as a kind of parting gift, but build some kind of wall around it, just in case they get any more bright ideas.
Just to followup on my earlier post on intellectual property: The EFF has launched a campaign to encourage the WIPO to reconsider its opposition to open source and collaborative approaches (actually, even worse, its US Patent and Trade Office-led refusal to even discuss open source and collaborative models). If you disagree with this decision, you can express your opinion by sending a letter to the USPTO through the EFF.
This post originally published on Grand Text Auto.
I'll soon take down the dead civilian counter. I'm glad that “we” “won” the war in Iraq and that the pace of death has slowed somewhat. A month, six thousand or so bodies, twenty billion dollars later, “liberation.” Candid fear: that the protestors fearing a war on Islam are correct, that Syria is next, in time for the election, that Iran will follow, that terror and the war in dread will become givens, that Bush will be reelected on a promise of fiscal irresponsibility serving the rich, that the economy will remain stagnant, that libraries will close and art programs will fall like cut daisies, that the aughts will be remembered for the closing of the American mind and the flush last days of the American empire.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood writes a spirited Letter to America. An open letter from the Globe and Mail, gleaned from boingboing.
You're gutting the Constitution. Already your home can be entered without your knowledge or permission, you can be snatched away and incarcerated without cause, your mail can be spied on, your private records searched. Why isn't this a recipe for widespread business theft, political intimidation, and fraud? I know you've been told all this is for your own safety and protection, but think about it for a minute. Anyway, when did you get so scared? You didn't used to be easily frightened.
George Soros, chairman of the Open Society Institute, wrote a short and thoughtful comment on the Bush doctrine.
“Mr. Bush's administration deliberately fosters fear because it helps to keep the nation lined up behind the president. We have come a long way from Franklin D. Roosevelt's dictum that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
The Baghdad Snapshot Action is one of the more interesting methods of protesting the War I've run across on the Net. Since February, the group has posted snapshots taken of people living everyday life in Iraq on the Internet as .pdfs and encouraged readers to print them and post them locally. It's a subdued and subtle form of protest, serving to remind people of the human cost of war.
From the site: “We want to show the world the people who will get both liberty and death in one fatal blow if this war begins. We want you to show them in your city. The entire snapshot collection is online as pdfs. Print them out and poster them anywhere and everywhere.”
The site designates this Sunday March 23rd as a postering day. Print a few and hang them where you will.
A decent ongoing aggregation of war news can be found at command-post.org.
Some pictures from the Chicago Tribune of the protest that briefly shut down Lake Shore Drive yesterday sort of made me miss home. Also, some pictures from San Francisco.
According to this story if the terror alert goes from orange to red, the people of New Jersey are supposed to stay home. Let's hope we stay orange — or maybe they ought to come up with some shades of red — fire-engine red means just stay in bed, blush red means you can make a quick trip to the grocery store.
Dear Raed is a compelling blogreadingexperience allegedly coming out of Baghdad. Technology writer Paul Boutin speculates on whether or not the blog is real.
Also of note: Kevin Sites, blog of a journalist in Northern Iraq (though he hasn't posted since the shooting started) and BBC News Group Blog with personal perspectives from several of the writers around the globe as the war unfolds.
Just added an Iraqi Body Count tracker to the blog. A useful resource, since the Pentagon isn't counting.
Sigh.
Read a little Michael Moore to help with the completely justified cynicism.
Take a look at this collagemap, titled The Maw.
Sigh.
Go back to grading papers.
Newspoetry, which ceased continuous online daily publication of a poem a day about the news at the start of this year after 4 years, is firing up again, this time in the form of a War blog.
A good antidote to the Poets for the War site.
This site suggests that Congress take a step further than renaming the French toast in the cafeteria, by giving back the Statue of Liberty to France.
Follow me on Twitter 
Recent Comments