October 2004

Evidently George W Bush recently laughed off suggestions that he was wearing a wire during the 2nd presidential debate, referring on CNN’s Good Morning America to the speculation about a bulge on his back as a “wrinkle in my badly-tailored shirt”.

In an article dated October 29, 2004, here’s one of NASA’s top scientistswho specializes in the detailed analysis of images, on Bush’s bulge and wrinkled shirts:

“Everyone wants to think my colleague and I are just a bunch of dope-crazed ravaged Democrats who are looking to insult the president at the last minute,” he says. “And that’s not what this is about. This is scientific analysis. If the bulge were on Bill Clinton’s back and he was lying about it, I’d have to say the same thing.”

There’s clearly something there.”

…and also states, brazenly, that they resent us bringing them “democracy and freedom”

Via CNN.com:

Study: 100,000 Excess Civilian Iraqi Deaths Since War

By Patricia Reaney

LONDON (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence since the U.S.-led invasion last year, American public health experts have calculated in a report that estimates there were 100,000 “excess deaths” in 18 months.

Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations sanctions blocking food and medical imports but the researchers described what they found as shocking.

From the Industry Standard:

Bush campaign Web site blocks overseas visits

A Bush-Cheney campaign spokeswoman referred questions to Michael Turk, the organization’s Internet campaign director. Turk did not return several calls seeking comment.

I like playing with words … obviously
Some of you know that over the last year-plus I’ve actually met quite a few of the bloggers whom I read, or have developed some sort of friendship / rlationship with via comments and exchanges of opinion and information.

Much has been made - pro and con - of all the chattering that goes on in the blogosphere, and predictably established forms of transmitting information have looked askance at this new form of interactive communication. But advances in the capabilities keep happening … a couple of years ago it was RSS and Atom feeds, foloowed by various forms of aggregation capability. All of this helps us to create, and follow, emergent meaning (if I remember correctly, Doc Searls called it the scaffolding of knowledge, and thence meaning).

During these past couple of years, it has also dawned on many people that in an interconnected and interlinked world, some form of carnal representation and exchange (no, not THAT!) will also be necessary to make interacting in this interconnected world more meaningful, more purposeful, and perhaps more useful, in the sense of actionable exchange.

The people I read and interact with in the blogosphere are typically people I respect and admire, and from whom I can learn a lot. I’ve decided, some time ago, to become aggregarious, reaching out in my own way to make more real the richness I get, personally, from the magic in the people I have met in the blogosphere.

Josh Marshall is suspicious that this major screw-up has been known to the Bush administration for some time, and that it may have pressured the Iraqi government not to mention it.

If Bush cannot even protect our troops from explosives at a sensitive facility in a country he had conquered, how is he going to protect the American public from terrorists who have not even yet been identified?

… and then I said to myself “oh, well … it’s just more of the same”

Even though the story is from www.cnn.com, it’s still unfuckingbelievable.

Halliburton may keep disputed money

According to Pentagon documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, the Army has acknowledged that the Houston-based company might never be able to account properly for some of its work, which has been probed amid accusations that Halliburton’s Kellogg Brown & Root unit overbilled the government for some operations in Iraq.

…. who’da thunk it ?

Hunter S. Thompson weighs in, in this month’s Rolling Stone, on the absurdities of this year’s event called the election (reminiscent of Rageboy’s style, but cleaned up to go out in public).

If Nixon were running for president today, he would be seen as a “liberal” candidate, and he would probably win. He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum organization who are running the White House today — and who will be running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and widely respected “American people”) don’t rise up like wounded warriors and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on November 2nd.

You bet. Richard Nixon would be my Man. He was a crook and a creep and a gin-sot, but on some nights, when he would get hammered and wander around in the streets, he was fun to hang out with. He would wear a silk sweat suit and pull a stocking down over his face so nobody could recognize him. Then we would get in a cab and cruise down to the Watergate Hotel, just for laughs.

… more on an emerging theme, about how connected voices and minds help spread messages to the audiences that want to hear and find out.

Hugh Macleod of GapingVoid and the Hughtrain is on a roll these days, speaking out clearly about why the advertising and PR games are changing in this interlinked environmen.

Ross Rader of Blogware has picked up on this, and adds his perspective about the changes underway.

From Ross’s blog (Thanks, Ross):

The New Buzz: On replacing analysts and pitchmen

This excerpt only shows up in the RSS feed of the article - presumably it has been edited out of the webpage version of the post…too bad - Hugh hacked out the most compelling part - read it again: gapingvoid is a better marketing vehicle than USA Today because of the trust relationship that Hugh has with his readers.

The Underground Railway is a famous example of humanitarian support raised against an immoral society, whereby slaves in the U.S. South in the middle part of the 19th Century were helped by many caring people to make their way north, eventually crossing the US - Canada border. They were then helped to settle in Canada and begin new lives, adding another rich chapter to the development of a multicultural society of immigrants.

I’d like to believe otherwise, but I sense that GWB will win the American presidential election on November 2, 2004. In that case, my fear for all Americans (and also us Canadians) is that daily life will become much more uncomfortable, in the sense of various aspects of authoritarian control being imposed.

What would make me think that? Well, in addition to Ron Suskind’s recent NY Times Magazine piece titled Fear, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, more and more assertive (polite Candian term) mutterings are being floated each day. For example … whilst in Ottawa this morning I read that both Israel’s Ambassador to Canada (Alan Baker) and the US Ambassador to Canada (Paul Cellucci) stated yesterday that “Canadians must realize additional restrictions on rights and freedoms are necessary to counter the relative ease with which terror groups can now infiltrate Candian society and launch attacks here, against the United States or on Israel and other foreign interests in Canada”.

The Internet, the Web and the interconnected information systems which pervade and surround our lives used to be called the Information Highway a few years back.

I think it may be time to plant the seeds for a new version of the support provided by the Underground Railway to beleagured people … I am calling this the Underground Blogway.

I will undertake to help, in whatever way I can, anyone who wishes to explore the possibilities of moving to Canada. This help may consist of information, links, connections to people (I know people who may be helpful in Toronto, Montreal, the Maritimes, Vancouver), shelter for periods of time (if I can get enough people interested who would be willing to share a bedroom, a spare garage, a vacant house or apartment, and if it comes to this, food and money.

There are seriously troubling times a’coming, I think. I hope not, but I am worried … for you, my American friends. And probably … dammit … for us up here in Canada.

Found on Gibson’s blog:

How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

– John Cleese

Thanks to Ming the Mechanic for the heads-up. With thanks to Flemming, I’ve borrowed his post in its entirety because I don’t really know what to add and i want my 5.5 regular readers to see the message in the post.

NetWar and stupidity

Yes, of course there must be smart people, also in the U.S. military, who’d actually have an idea of what to do. A better idea than starting some old-fashioned ground war, against the wrong people, sending several trillion dollars up in smoke, and pretending that everything is going great.

… so do search engines.

Dave Winer, on organizing information and finding what you want or need:

Two years ago: “Now of course there are non-hierarchic links, that accounts for serendipity or daydreaming, but when you want to get a job done, hierarchies do the hard work of organizing for quick retrieval.”

And I imagine that the granularity afforded by microcontent and tagging, and new applications like Icerocket and others (Nova Spivack’s work) will make hierarchies as the key means of organizing information less and less dominant … or necessary.

I wrote a short blog post about a year or so ago, when social networking software …. the likes of LinkedIn, Ryze, Ecademy, Orkut, Friendster, Tribe, and so on … was all the rage. I thought that while those offerings and their capabilities were all nifty-like, what would work for me (and, I suspected, many others) was blogging, me being my normal sometimes-confused, sometimes-clear, sometimes-smart, sometimes-clueless me on my blog … writing and linking about things that interested me, issues that perplexed, frustrated and inspired me.

I thought that finding and exploring my own voice would help me eventually find other people that also were interested and interesting. I thought that this process might let people start conversations with me (and vice-versa) that were more important and ultimately more honestly useful than swapping contacts and trying to get the combination of my past jobs and titles, plus my interests in music and books, “just right” … so that I could find a new job or make a deal. I found that too cold, linear and frankly, one-dimensional.

For me, this blogging thing has worked well. In a year and a half or so, via blogging, I have made many friendships that I think and feel are real, and are mutually respectful, growthful and beneficial … in the Netherlands, in France, in the UK, in the USA, in Canada and elsewhere … and in some cases I suspect that these friendships will lead to enduring collaborations.

This makes sense to me. Blogging is, I think, the online process that mimics how we converse and engage in the real 3D world, AND it has some useful supplementary aspects. For example, much has been said and written about the absence of “body language” in blogging … and with this I agree. Body language helps us greatly to interpret and understand what someone else is trying to communicate. However … with blogs, one can go back to a post and read it, several times if needed or desired. One can sit and think, and muse about responding or not … one can grab a post and work with it, adding some thoughts, some facts, some links (Doc Searls has called this process “the scaffolding of meaning”). One can also send posts or comments to posts, to others .. via email, or work it into an essay, a research paper, a business plan. The information spreads itself around … and helps to create understanding, meaning and sense. It also clearly creates real and tangible connections between people … that this is happening is clearly obvious.

This process … active on several levels … also helps people build trust and credibility in this online environment. There are many examples of conflicting perspectives and voices … often called trolls on blogs where a particular point of view is espoused,elaborated and reinforced. I think trolls are an essential part of creating better, deeper, more widely shared meaning … they provide a wall, a fixed point of refernce against which to bounce meaning, explanations, better or more comprehensive facts. One also comes to find and know blogs that are interesting, relevant, useful .. and in reading them, and perhaps commenting form time to time, we get a clear sense of the commitment (to a point of view, or to openness, or …) of a blogger. Our interaction and interpretation of that blog, or another blog, also helps us get a sense of those mostly intangible but oh-so important attributes of trust and credibility.

All this is much like having, and working at, meaningful and enduring conversations and dialogue in the offline world … the process of human discourse .. and this is where and how trust, credibility and reputation are built. And those attributes are what make “social networking” work for people … helping them accomplish what they need or want to do, with other people, in this oh-so-social world.

Doc Searls points us to a new search engine today … IceRocket, a search engine that searches blogs for exact phrases and also has a “Find a Firend” feature (disclaimer: I have only looked at the home page, and have not yet tried it).

What I also believe is very interesting about blogging, social networking, and the ongoing evolution of semantic and collaborative technology - the enablers of human conversation - is that technology such as Icerocket will help us find and evaluate what others are saying and doing on their blogs, and so enhance the process of finding like and different-minded folks, enhance the process of listening and of using voice to create connection and meaning.

And that, I think, is a good thing, in a world that is rapidly changing because of information, technology, interconnectedness, the accumulated experience and consequences of all that has gone before, and troublesome complexity.

I’ll keep on blogging. I have long since stopped even looking at my LinkedIn connections, and I haven’t looked at Orkut for probably nine months. In the spirit of my point of view, I probably should go and look around, and see what’s happening there, since I keep on telling myself that I am open-minded and dedicated to learning. I should practice what I prognosticate.

My father maintains friendships with people in various parts of the world. He is getting quite old, and at times reflective. Here’s a letter he sent recently to family friends in Italy.

Dear Marchesinis :

What a misfortune that our present world is plagued with the arrogant “Americans”.

Here’s their reply …

Bob;

Andrea

This fair and balanced letter to Tony Blair, from James Cox, says it all.

Get back to basics. After all, you’re gonna die some day …

So … take one whole day, grab your honey (or Highly Significant Other, or whatever you call each other), turn off the tv, forget that your job has a hold on your soul, get some chocolate and some raspberry coulis (or whatever other kind of tasty syrup you might like), and go through each of these one by one

You’ll be glad you did
Thanks to Paul Hughes.

…. is here at The Accordion Guy’s blog.

Remember the brouhaha several months ago when blogs hosted by weblogs.com just went pffft ! momentarily, and then generated a two-week long yip-for-yap as to why it happened, and what the respective parties’ expectations and responsibilities were ?

I would think any users that go to this just-announced “party” would wantto be clear as to what might happen if they invest time and energy in putting their creativity and content into this new initiative.

I did understand, at the time, Dave Winer’s decision and rationale … I just think he communicated it ineffectually, in his style, and then caused himself lots of work to get back to some semblance of trust with people who probably had trusted him before.

Just be aware … that’s all.

From Scripting.com …

Also, per Steve Kirks’ request, I plan to do a weblogs.com ping center for podcasts. In other words, a simple infrastructure is needed to cope with the new flow, which is a great problem to have, and one we know how to deal with after experience with weblogs.

Developers and users party together!

… said President Chimpy McSmirkputz, in response to a question at last night’s debate about cheaper medications available over the Internet from Canada.

He must still be mad at us for not joining his freedom-lovers coalition of invading crusaders … and There ARE rumours he has an anger management problem (seems every time Kerry mentions Poppy, Georgie gets kinda upset-like … is there something there, a raw nerve, maybe ?)

WTF ?

It’s my understanding that Canada has some of the most advanced pharmaceutical research facilities and companies in the world … this terrestrial world, that is … and we do also have something called Health Canada, which evidently has some of the most advanced, and stringent, drug licencing protocols anywhere (again) on this planet.

I guess he’s one of those Yanks that thinks they’ll still find igloos just a couple of kilometres up the road from the border, in which we all still sit around and chew on whale blubber … makes sense … he doesn’t read papers or books, and in the debate he called our new-ish means of communicating … “internets”, and stuff. I guess we’re such an undeveloped nation that we’re importing drugs from somewhere like Ghana or Uzbekistan, where he thinks they cook the drugs up in iron pots over open fires. Or maybe it’s Mexico he had in mind, where lots of American companies (supposedly) go for cheap labour and lax legislation.

So … we Canadians might be providing unsafe drugs to Americans in massive numbers ? That’s probably more dangerous to Americans than non-existent Weapons of Mass Deception. But remember, Saddam might have reconstituted a weapons program, and might have posed some form of vague threat at some possible point in the future.

Fellow Canadians … let’s all start getting ready for the possibility that Cheney-Bush-Rove-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld might decide to invade us, on the pretense that we pose a clear and present danger to America, so that they can lay their hands on our Alberta Oil Sands, our clean water and our Clear Skies.

Fuck ‘em. What a bunch of morons. I used to like lots of Americans, but those dumb asshats can’t even figure out that this guy poses them much more danger than any other single individual on the planet … except maybe his boss Dick Cheney. And they keep on trying to make excuses for keeping him in office, even after he stole the election 4 years ago. What a bunch of idiotic masochists … it’s unfortunate for all of the rest of us that they insist on foisting their psychoses on the rest of the people on the planet.

What a dork he is … really.

It is not the Americans’ planet, dammit. Let’s all develop an infrared metal melter that can be deployed by planes fllying over the USA that renders all guns and bombs completely useless, and then convince the Japanese and Chinese stop honouring the Americans’ need for financing … once the overdraft hits it’s limit, the economy will be brought to its knees very very quickly, and then … let them see what it’s like to live without credit … without TV’s, SUV’s and air conditioning.

I’ve found myself doing this more and more often … and I suspect many others are doing the same thing, in this new interlinked, interconnected environment. I’m thinking in links, and linking my thinking … and it’s creeping into my behaviour on dry land.

It makes me think of the process I’ve experienced that involves learning a new language.

At the age of 35, I embarked upon the process of learning French. Today, I speak French almost as well as I speak English. Learning French involved moving to Montreal, settling into an almost all-French neighbourhood, and going out and speaking my (initially awful) French. I found I needed to be persistent when people politely reverted very quickly to English, in order to communicate effectively with me.

I also found that (for me) the learning unfolded in waves and plateaus. Early in the process, I found that when I spoke French all evening, or all day, I got physically tired. I’ve since learned from language teachers tha this is a normal and well-known phenomenon. But every once in a while, in a subtle and barely noticeable way, it became obvious that i had moved permanently to a new level of fluency.

This accelerated when I began going out with a French woman in Montreal, and then accelerated again when I moved to London (UK) and began living with Veronique la supersonique, a Bretonne whom I had met in Paris a year or so earlier.

I’ve begun to notice the same sort of thing with respect to interconnectedness and interlinking, or interlinkedness and interconnecting … learning the language and dynamics of blogging is taking me along a very similar path.

last night I went to a charming little Uruguayan file titled “el viaje hacia el mar” (The Seaward Journey), presented by the Vancouver International Film Festival with another friend, Isabelle ( a gloriously gorgeous-and-flamboyant Frenchie, too). I found myself continually saying, during our conversation, ” oh, I’ll send you this link, and that link” while trying to explain what Wealth Bondage is all about, or when wanting to shore up an example by pointing to Ray Kurzweil’s site, or explaing why I think the Rude Pundit is essential to read, but requires a strong stomach.

Anyway, it’s clear that I now have a “linky” frame of reference, and increasingly a “linky” mental model, and the process in which I am learning all this is very similar ot the process I experienced while learning another language.

Oh, well. I think I’ll just float and live in this interlinked river of life, and enjoy it just as much as I can … which is usually a lot.

Over at The Happy Tutor’s place, the Wealth Bondage bordello … in the parlor we often talk about civility, ideals, values, literature, some of the ways that seem to have been lost, and a range of smart and cute ways to think through and comment on some of the unhappy, or despairing trends we see occurring in this postmodern society of ours.

Which is kinda fun and kinda nice, and a place to relax in a time when many many people are finding it harder and harder to distinguish between what ’s on nightly at the Word Wrestling Federation arena and the activities on your street, in your town, on your tv, or in your name in some distant land.

So … many people have gotten numb, or gone through some version of Kubler-Ross’ cycle of denial … bargaining … depression … acceptance when it comes to the idiocy and lunacy of Bush et al. Not me … I feel mad everyday.

Now, I’ve found a screed penned by the Rude Pundit that helps me get pretty close to how pissed I feel that these almost-people have been allowed to have their way with North America and the world.

Do you feel this way too ?

What Kerry Should Say, Part 2 (Rude Version):

If, at tonight's "town hall debate," when Kerry is asked, "What did you mean in the last debate by 'global test'?", he doesn't answer, "You have got to be motherfucking kidding me, ma'am. That's like asking Martin Luther King if he wipes his ass properly. That's like asking an Iraqi child with his arms blown off by American bombs if he's happy that Saddam's gone.