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Greenery
Earlier, over breakfast at Minnie's in Seattle, Don pointed me to MichaelMoore.com, which is, like Michael, equally threatening and enjoyable company. (While speaking in Madison, he says, "I must encourage more people to spend time in Wisconsin — 'It's Michigan Without the Militia!'") The meta-message, I suppose, is that Don is for Ralph, the only presidential candidate I have publicly declared myself annoyed by. Rather than argue the matter with me, Don invokes Mike. Of course, Mike is huge on Ralph Nader. Anyway, while looking arournd the Mike Site, I discovered that the Ralph site to which I had pointed in my disendorsement piece was of Ralph himself (www.ralphnader.org), not of Ralph the candidate (www.votenader.org). One of my gripes was that Raph's own site had darn few inbound links (a mere 4, in fact). It turns out that Ralph's campaign site has 157. I have the reverse ratio. This site (my closest equivalent to a campaign) has 15, while my more-or-less inert personal site has 105. Whatever, I'm not any closer to endorsing Ralph. But, as I told Don, I'm kind of a lily-livered Libertarian, which means that I like a lot of what Ralph's party — the Green — stands for. I'm also an old Quaker-trained pacifist Catholic, sort-of. Commitment-wise, I'm a Type 9 on the Enneagram, about which it is said, their solution is to decline or delay either option and rather to embrace all sides of an issue, so as not to have to choose. No decision and procrastination are the conflict resolution methods for NINES. Which I agree with completely. Or maybe not. I'll decide later. Just before I left Seattle, I checked my mail and found that I had pissed off Dave, who thought I took an intellectual short cut in the Ralph piece. This was not something your 9-Type wants to hear. But when I looked at what I wrote, I saw he was right. I wasn't giving credit where due. So I wrote a quick response before I drove into a traffic jam so thick it took me 1.5 hours to get to the airport. Fortunately, the plane was delayed, so I had time for a quick email exchange with Dave. You can read his account at yesterday's Scripting.com, where he also say this: Doc writes for a Linux pub. I guess he has to make it seem as if open source developers saved the software world, and that open source projects are some kind of utopia. It's unrealistic. What's real? Doc uses a lot of software that's not open source. In fact, most usable software is not open source. While I admire and love Doc, and was cheering his piece about Nader (what a fool) I think Doc puts on the blinders for his bosses, like so many do. So there! Ironically, that was one piece where I went out of my way to break ranks with the anti-corporate bias of many open source advocates. My good friend and boss at Linux Journal, Phil Hughes, is probably leaning toward Ralph as well. But Linux Journal is in the mainstream of Linux and open source advocacy, and advocacy is about taking sides. I wan't consciously taking sides there, but in fact that's exactly what I was doing. As a Type 9, however, what I really want to do is look at the big picture that includes both open and closed, proprietary and public domain — and isn't about any of those things. Dave says, The problem is that ALL SOFTWARE SUCKS and we should all be working together to make it not suck. The open sorce guys are dreaming if they think they can do it all. He's right about that, too. Now, what's "it?" I think it's building a new world. Craig Burton calls it a growing sphere of individuals — all of us — that's absolutely empty in the middle. I think this is at least implied by what Larry Lessig calls "end to end." On this sphere, it's all beginning and it's all end. To see that world, much less build it out, we have to get past our ideologies. Michael Polanyi calls ideologies "fighting creeds." That's why I have a problem with Ralph. He's fighting for the Greens' causes by fighting against it's perceived enemies — or the enemies he perceives, which are big corporations and the politicians those corporations buy. Some big corporations do some bad things, but this fact does not deserve tagging anybody with a "corporatist" label. Here's how Lessig puts the end-to-end thing, which I just found on the Web: The Internet is the fastest-growing computer network in history. It is not, however, the first computer network. There were many before it, many of which were extremely well-funded. Something, however, was different about the Internet, something in its design. In the view of many, the critical difference is a design principle that network architects Jerome Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David Clark call "end-to-end." This model regulates where "intelligence" in a network is placed. It counsels that intelligence be placed in the applications. As described by Saltzer, "end-to-end" says: "Don't force any service, feature, or restriction on the customer; his application knows best what features it needs and whether or not to provide those features itself." Build the network to give the application or users control over the service; don't allow the network any such control. The network is to remain stupid, and intelligence is to reside at the ends. Of course we also need to give full credit to David Isenberg and his "Rise of the Stupid Network." I think David owns the Stupid brand. Well, Jeffrey is on my knee, wanting to hear music. So it's time to roll the credits. Today's blog was brought to you by the music of Little Feat, specifically Lowell George's Fat Man in a Bathtub, from the Dixie Chicken album, and Time Loves a Hero, from the album by the same name. And also by Tsar Wars, by theSpace Cossacks, which I bought on Don Marti's recommendation after both hearing them live in Santa Cruz and again on Napster. I don't usually listen to music when I'm writing — I'm just too easily distracted — but Little Feat and the Cossacks. Man.
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Don Marti told me yesterday "that red-eye reduction thing" doesn't work on him. For proof he pointed to the 
