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Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Author:   Doc Searls  
Posted: 1/29/2003; 12:18:46 PM
Topic: Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Msg #: 3005 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next: 3004/3006
Reads: 6323

Blog Angeles 
 So the place to be on the evening Feb 15 is Live from the Blogosphere (alternate link here) at the Electronic Orphanage in Chinatown, Los Angeles. It's a production of Rhizome.org, and features Mark Frauenfelder, Heather Havrilesky, Evan Williams, Susannah Breslin, Tony Pierce and moi.
 To get ya'll riled up, here's a quote du jour, from Tony:
 we have an imbecile in the oval office.
 lord knows most of you keep trying to make something good from that
 Kurt Vonnegut elaborates:
 I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d¹etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka ³Christians,² and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or ³PPs.²
 To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete¹s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
 And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.
 What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can¹t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody¹s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!
 
Blech support 
 We're needing to open some Peachtree files in some other accounting system, in either Linux or OS X. Any recommendations?
 
Atkins Rulez 
 In case you were worried: High-protien diet OK.
 
Anybody covering it? 
 Mitch Kapor will be giving a talk about Chandler at a Stanford colloquium this afternoon. Here's his blog. There's more at OSAF and at Chandler's wiki.
 
Blournalism 
 Tom and Sheila volley on stuff J.D. brought up about RSS. Dave adds:
 RSS creates a level playing field that's open to all. Amateurs and pros, young and old, rich and poor, the homeless, the uninsured and people with AIDS, you name it -- they all can slug it out for readers in the same venue. If you subscribe to Scripting News, today you've already heard about a new peer-to-peer network, you've learned a little math, and read an amusing Glenn Fleishman piece about skiing in Montana (if you clicked) and heard that Dubya is borrowing a few lies (oops lines) from Teddy Roosevelt. And it's not even 7AM.
 ... and you can read your friends kicking the tires of your President's State of the Union speech: He's not wearing a uniform. That's a relief.
 Factual question: is RSS involved in whatever Google does to gather Google News? And if not, why not?
 [Later...] Julian Bond has a related question.
 
So that's what it is 
 Dana Blankenhorn writes to suggest that force majeure is the expression I was looking for the other day. Dana's Corante blog is Moore's Lore. That's where I just discovered that Jonathan Peterson has a Corante blog too: Amateur Hour.
 
Say where? 
 Judith: The Power of the Blog
 The nature of blogging allows us to point to what another individual said, adding our opinion without mutilating theirs¹ in the translation.  
 Each opinion in the string remains intact while the message goes ¹round.
 This is very different from the Telephone game where the message is always translated by the forwarder. (The news media is more like the telephone game.)
 The ideal scene of blogging being "the voice of the people" is that the precise blogging voice echoes repeatedly, thereby gaining velocity and power.
 Interesting. I never though about blogging as insurance against the distorting effects of the telephone game. Now I do.
 [Later...] Here's more, from Frank Patrick.
 
Now is the Winter of our Content 
 Just heard from Justin Chapweske that Open Content Network is up and running.
 It's a peer-to-peer thing. Reading about it makes me think "crossloading" is a better term for what happens than "downloading," which implies something more top-to-bottom than peer-to-peer.
 
Homebound 
 Had to sit on the tarmac at RDU for an extra half hour, so I ran like hell at ORD to get from the last gate in the F Concourse to the last gate in the B Concourse, just in time to make the plane to LAX. Amazingly, my bag made it, which was good (see, United may be broke, but it doesn't suck completely), because my keys (dangerously equipped with a nail clippers and the smallest model Swiss Army pocket knife) were in it, and I'd needed them after I got off the third plane at SBA.
 It was about freezing when I left Raleigh, snowy and 20-something in Chicago, hazy and about 62 at the airport in L.A., and a sunny 65 in Santa Barbara, down from 70 at midday.
 I'm tellin' ya, there is not a nicer U.S. airport to come home to than SBA, or a lovelier U.S. town. It always gives me such a lift to arrive here. The mountains are green, the air is sweet with Spring flowers, and baggage arrives immediately, since the baggage pickup tent is a couple hundred feet from the plane.
 The way I figure this morning, if I'm going to have an unbelievable amount of backed up work to do, this is the place to have it.


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