I just posted an essay on activist technology at WorldChanging.com, a site where I post regularly. Today is WorldChanging's first anniversary! [Link to Activist Tech post at WorldChanging]

Joi blogs about an inherent demographic bias at WikiPedia and a plan to address the problem. He also mentions Orlowski's comments, but (as usual) he's more tactful than I was.

In my last post, I should have included a link to Ethan Zuckerman's post about bias in Wikipedia and the CROSSBOW project formed to deal with it. CROSSBOW is resonant with Ethan's other work to bring developing nations into the conversation. He says

While I think these are all valid directions, I feel the solution to systemic bias in Wikipedia is the same as the solution to systemic bias in open source software development and in the blogosphere: broaden the sphere of producers. Part of what makes Wikipedia great is that people write about subjects they're knowledgeable and passionate about. I think it's possible that CROSSBOW participants will become sufficiently knowledgeable about the civil war in Guinea-Bissau that they can write about the conflict... but I bet the article would greatly benefit from the perspective of someone who survived the conflict. I think CROSSBOW is mostly likely to succeed if it can recruit people around the world to participate in the Wikipedia project - in their own languages and in English - to help start filling the blank spots in Wikipedia and helping it reach its full potential.

Dick Cheney

We have two debates related to the 2004 presidential contest behind us now; consensus is that the first was a win for John Kerry (against a jumpy, erratic George Bush whose jittery tongue-tied performance was almost painful to watch), and the second was more of a draw between John Edwards and a cool, collected Dick Cheney. An exception to the consensus on last night's debate: the MSNBC crew of pundits gave the debate to Cheney, feeling that he had blown Edwards away on several points, which is not what I was seeing, and I'm not quite sure what trick of perspective set them apart from the rest of us. I do think they were trying to be objective, and the NBC news crew was quick to produce a clip of Dick Cheney explicitly saying there was a connection between Hussein and Al-Qaeda – Cheney denied during the debate that he never made that connection. The synapses pop and crackle and fade when you're getting old, and you can forget these things. (Cheney also forgot that he'd met John Edwards before, but Elizabeth Edwards was quick to remind him post-debate, we hear. I was relieved to hear that: I figured a Vice President, since he presides over the Senate, would have met all the senators by now unless he was indifferent to his critical role in the process.)

David Weinberger posts about Brad Sucks:

On his site you can buy his CD for $5 (including shipping!) or download the very same music for free. If you buy the CD, it includes the MP3s to encourage you to share them. You can also buy his music from iTunes, from which he gets 65% of your money, a somewhat better deal than being squeezed like a Tropicana orange by a record label that uses some of its profits to sue your fans. I just bought his CD from Magnatune, who pays him half of what you choose to pay them ($8-$18) because I want to support Magnatune and I don't like the thought of Brad wasting his time sticking CDs into mailers when he should be recording. That's why we have middlepeople.

Comment spam has been so steady and voluminous here that I'm requiring authentication via TypeKey, which means you can post comments here only if you've gone to Typekey and completed their registration. TypeKey is free, and is operated by Six Apart, the company that makes the blog software I'm using, Moveable Type. If you already tried to post and got a screwy response, that appears to be fixed now (long story).

Dan Gillmor, columnist at the Mercury and one of the first journalists to maintain a weblog, is discussing his new book We the Media on the WELL, with Christian Crumlish, author of The Power of Many, leading the discussion. You can read the discussion here, and you can send comments/questions to inkwell-hosts at well.com.

One inkling of media changes is in the book. In the mid-1980s I was
an avid user of XyWrite, the great DOS word processing program. It had
an internal programming language that could do everything but boil
water for tea. I was puzzled by a small XyWrite programming problem one
day and posted a note on a CompuServe forum asking if anyone could
help me solve it. I came back a day or so later and found several great
replies, including (if memory serves) Australia. That was the first
day I truly got how the power at the edges of networks can serve us
all.

 

That difficult man, Jacques Derrida, has died. Derrida practiced direct transmission of the zen of decontstruction. Or perhaps not. [Link to NY Times obituary]

Update: Alan Sondheim notes that the New York Times is not a fair or comprehensive assessment of Derrida, let alone a fitting obituary. Here's a link to a pdf of a ten-page tribute to Derrida in Le Monde (in French).

Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, believes that the AIDS virus was deliberately created as a bio-weapon. This doesn't seem outlandish: scientists have worked on biological weapons for decades now; it's not a stretch to imagine that one might've "escaped." Don't know how you'd ever prove it, though, or whether it matters at this point, except as an argument to stop developing new weapons of mass destruction – and given human nature, I don't expect that argument would be particularly effective. [Link]

obit

Hey girl we’ve got to get out of this place
There’s got to be something better than this
I need you, but I hate to see you this way
If I were superman then we’d fly away
I’d really like to change the world
And save it from the mess it’s in
I’m too weak, I’m so thin
I’d like to fly but I can’t even swim

Joi made himself available to serve on the ICANN Board, which is an uphill thing to do, but as Joi says, "ICANN is changing and it's critical that ICANN is successful." Because Joi is so highly cooperative, collaborative, and polite, he's probably just the kind of catalyst that ICANN needs. (As one who often takes the bull-in-china-shop approach, I can say that uncommon courtesy is much more effective.) [Link]

Andrea Mackris is suing Fox news journalist personality Bill O'Reilly citing repeated instances of sexual harassment. The complaint is pretty interesting. In includes references to O'Reilly's "paranoid rambling." He also likes phone sex. No wonder he's so tense. [Link]

Kos has a good morning-after piece on last night's presidential debate. [Link]

In last night's debate John Kerry said that Bush's administration had cut the Pell Grants for education, and Bush said "We've increased Pell grants by a million students. That's a fact!" Mitch Ratcliffe notes that "most of the "million more students" who got Pell Grants did so because the law required the Bush Administration to do it, not because President Bush decided to expand the program." Mitch also notes that Bush made misleading statements about about tax cuts, that "most of the tax cuts went to low and middle income Americans."

Any way you cut it, most of the tax cuts, in dollars and as a percentage of the total reduction in taxes, went to the wealthiest Americans. It simply isn't honest to say that the tax cuts were stimulating to the economy because they put more money in lower and middle class pocket—the Bush tax cuts were designed to trickle down to the rest of us from the very pinnacle of American capital.

If the President were to describe his tax cuts this way, honestly, and said "hey, it's just going to take more time for the rest of you to see the results," then he would be talking honestly with the American people and they could decide if they will accept this kind of fiscal policy making. My bet is they would show President Bush the door before the election, but the President lies to us about his tax cuts.

President Bush only talks about education as a prop, because he's interested in protecting fortunes that exist today. But real capitalism is built on the uncertainty of fortunes, they can be lost if they are not shepherded carefully. America's future fortunes will come in large part from today's privileged families. President Bush is trying to preserve those fortunes at the expense of the rest of us.

Happening in Austin:

There will be a benefit Auction held on
Monday October 18 at
B. D. Riley’s Irish Pub,
204 E. 6th Street (at Brazos)

All proceeds will benefit the Austin Wireless City Project

Benefit Silent Auction!

Friends of the Austin Wireless City Project will host a benefit silent auction at the Pub on Monday, October 18th, starting at 7:30pm. There will be wireless internetworking gear, professional services, gift certificates from cool stores and venues and more, with all proceeds going to support the efforts underway to bring wireless internet access to Austinites for free.

Music will be provided by the Chris Toast Trio and the Hickory Street Jazz Combo, with no cover charge, and all auction bidders will get special Happy Hour Pricing all night.

Anyone wishing to donate goods or services to the auction or seeking more information should contact Zane McCarthy by email

Directions & Details:

B.D. Riley's Irish Pub,

204 E. 6th St,
(just East of Brazos, near the Driskill Hotel)
Phone: 512-494 1335 ~ Map at: http://www.bdrileys.com/map/

Parking: Free on-street parking is often available on 5th, 7th, Brazos or San Jacinto.
There is a surface lot at 7th & San Jacinto, and an enclosed garage (Littlefield/Scarbrough Garage) on Brazos, between 5th and 6th, usual charge for both paid lots is $5.00

During Wednesday night's debate a bunch of us were hanging ouit in a chat room being subversive. Kevin Marks syned the chat room with audio from the debate. (Thanks to David Weinberger for the pointer.) [Link]

The Neo Kaiju Project is a series of mini-figures based on Japanese monster toys but designed by contemporary U.S. artists and designers. The project's introduction is a cool animation.

While blogging about Neo Kaiju, I ran across another great item: GodzillaFest in San Francisco, November 17-23. I became a fan of Godzilla culture after reading Mark Jacobson's great surreal novel Gojiro, a postnuclear monster fantasy that got into my head for a while. (In Jacobson's book the monster is a postmodern philosopher of sorts.) This set me thinking about the cultural symbolism of these monster flicks, how they represent uncontrollable chaos and destruction and the human need to make peace with unrelenting nature. Or perhaps I enjoyed watching guys in monster suits stomp carboard cities. Whatever the case, with a Godzilla resurgence sorta fits the retro 50s USA political scene, and the renewed threat of nuclear holocaust - though this is toy nuclear holocaust, bite-sized bursts emanating from terrorist suitcases. (In Gojiro the monster shrinks to fit his buddy Komodo's pocket.) [Link]

Chris Allen has written and shared what strikes me as a first draft of a history of the concept of social software as well as the label (which seems to have been applied first ins the nineties, though not widely adopted before the last couple of years, applied especially to blogs, wikis, and connective tissue (syndication, i.e. RSS and Atom). It's probably useful to establish the history and understand the context for the "technologies of cooperation" (per Rheingold) that are forming robust communications systems in the 21st century. To me the term itself is marketspeak: those of us who do Internet-based communication consulting and develop technologies to support group-forming and interaction needed a label more apt than "virtual community," one that would address business as well as casual applications for computer-mediated communication. However communication is the key (and when I'm wearing the relevant hat I'm more likely to say that I do "communication consulting.")

I can see where Chris might expand his article into a book; hope he's giving that some thought.

Malcolm Gladwell writes about ketchup and, more generally, why some food products are better than others. What makes Heinz so much better than its competitors? You can extend the thinking in this piece: what are the metrics for food quality? What, more generally, is quality all about? [Link]

After breaking the ketchup down into its component parts, the testers assessed the critical dimension of "amplitude," the word sensory experts use to describe flavors that are well blended and balanced, that "bloom" in the mouth. "The difference between high and low amplitude is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing 'Ode to Joy' on the piano," Chambers says. "They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist." Pepperidge Farm shortbread cookies are considered to have high amplitude. So are Hellman's mayonnaise and Sara Lee poundcake. When something is high in amplitude, all its constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. You can't isolate the elements of an iconic, high-amplitude flavor like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. But you can with one of those private-label colas that you get in the supermarket. "The thing about Coke and Pepsi is that they are absolutely gorgeous," Judy Heylmun, a vice-president of Sensory Spectrum, Inc., in Chatham, New Jersey, says. "They have beautiful notes--all flavors are in balance. It's very hard to do that well. Usually, when you taste a store cola it's"-- and here she made a series of pik! pik! pik! sounds--"all the notes are kind of spiky, and usually the citrus is the first thing to spike out. And then the cinnamon. Citrus and brown spice notes are top notes and very volatile, as opposed to vanilla, which is very dark and deep. A really cheap store brand will have a big, fat cinnamon note sitting on top of everything."

Jamais Cascio just posted at WorldChanging about a Paul Hawken speechin SF. An entrepreneur and an environmentalist, Hawken has written about sustainable approaches to business in books like Ecology of Commerce. More at his web site and the site for Natural Capital Institute. Says Jamais,

Hawken articulated, in passionate language, a vision that aligned with and expanded what we've been saying here at WorldChanging: there's a revolution taking place, one which is powered by (and in turn powers) the efforts of thousands of disparate movements, groups, networks, ideas, and people, all over the world. They are distributed and diverse, not focused on ideology or power; in fact, this is the largest movement in history not seeking power. It is mainstream, but not centralized, so it often seems to operate beneath the media radar. It links social justice and environmentalism, activism and science. And it is changing the world.

There's some good stuff in this NY Times piece about Kerry's positive points and qualifications, but it's more an indictment of Bush. [Link]

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.

When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.

David Weinberger links to Ron Suskind's NY Times article on the Bush administration's attitude toward reality, quoting this bit (suspicions confirmed):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

David Isenberg just told me about the VON-sponsored conference called "The CEO Forum on the Next Billion: Finding ways to move access to communication from 1 billion people on earth to 2 billion and beyond" at the Berkman Center. David Weinberger is blogging the conference here and here (so far; I'm sure he'll blog more). Community network people have been talking about universal access for years, but as VoIP and other technologies progress, more and more recovering telco people are getting into the conversation, understanding that we must ensure pervasive freedom to connect, in developing as well as developed nations – and at the same time we have to think through the implications of Internet technology, the need for a "stupid network" with intelligence at the edges, and the fact that it will be increasingly tough for monolithic corporations to sustain revenues by providing access to communications networks. We're not just talking about technology here; a global, open communications network has far-reaching political and economic implications. And for obvious reasons it's not just going to happen. (Therefore, I'm paying attention to the current evolution of network thinking, and I hope you are, too.)

This is a great site: The Human Flower Project is an international newsgroup, photo album and discussion of how people live through flowers. We report on art, medicine, society, politics, religion, and commerce. The site originates from Austin. (Thanks to Jason for the pointer!) [Link]

Adina Levin notes, in response to a post by Brian Dennis, that social software is loosely coupled, not within any individual tool, but in the combination of tools (and I would add that this includes tools that link or aggregate output from other tools). In a comment on Adina's post, I note that Nancy White made this explicit for me in a phone conversation a couple of years ago, in feedback on a presentation I was pulling together for an online conference. The emphasis is on the social, it's really all about communication. A good example of all this is Joi Ito's toolkit, which includes a weblog, a wiki, a chat room, and accounts on various systems that give visibility into social networks, including flickr, a site where you can share photos with members of your social network. People like Joi, Marc Canter, and yours truly (among many others) keep working and playing with a stew of social software products and innovations, picking combinations that work for us. When my company consults about communication or builds a site, we suggest a combination that we might build, or that might involve integration of tools that already exist.

This brings me to an important point about the evolution of software in general, especially in the Open Source world. We're getting away from the idea that you build one product to suit everybody, which is the Microsoft/shrinkwrap model, and it made sense when we didn't have the kinds of information networks we have now. You hear complaints about the bloat in Microsoft products, but that bloat is inherent in an approach where one product has to serve many different users with many different applications for that product. The requirements are crazy complex in that case.

However in a network environment you can have a bunch of coders building innovative products for very focused applications. Sometimes the products are built as a core technology, which software consultant-developers customize and integrate into fairly seamless systems to meet specific customer requirements. You can do that with Open Source (or applications where you can acquire access the source code, even if the license is not exactly according to Open Source principles).

My own company sees this as the wave of the software future, so in our consulting and developing, our approach is to do collaborate with our customers on very clear requirements and architecture, then determine whether to build new solutions, integrate exisiting solutions, or some combination of both. We think this is the wave of the software future. I've been working with like-minded consultants and developers in Austin to build an Open Source Business Alliance, and part of our intention is to educate potential customers about this approach. We can build custom systems with a high degree of efficiency and overall lower costs.

There's a community aspect, too. Nonprofits can acquire robust but still affordable systems, and find knowledgeable volunteers to support them. Open Source tools have many adherents throughout the world, in large and small communities, so you're more likely to find a knowledgeable local resource to install, customize or develop an Open Source package. And they can get at the source code and make direct changes, if necessary – something you can't do with proprietary, closed-source software.

Getting back to the question of social software as centralized vs. loosely coupled, the essential point is that it's both, and that's true of other kinds of software, and it's true of the social and political future, too, I think: we can be more decentralized in many ways, thanks to network approaches to social and political engagement, but we still need centralized approaches for some things. To build software that's effective and bug-free, you have to have some degree of centralization and management, but once developed the software can be loosely coupled with other pieces, and the ongoing enhancement, integration and support can be somewhat decentralized. And in politics, we can have decentralized activism, discussion, and debate, but when it comes to making decisions or managing government organizations, we need approaches that are more centralized.

The UK Guardian dipped its toe into the overheated – practically scalding &nash; waters of the current US presidential contest and got a bit of a burn. A project to connect Europeans with American voters from Clark County Ohio, intended "to get people talking and thinking about the impact of the US election on citizens of other countries," was more than successful in meeting its goal, but not without pain. [Link]

Then came the backlash. We had expected it, of course. Fox-viewing America was never going to embrace our modest sortie into US politics and we knew full well that any individual voter might take exception to the idea of a foreigner writing to offer some advice on how they should vote - our website explicitly urged participants to "imagine how you would feel if you received a letter from an American urging you to vote for Tony Blair ... or Michael Howard." But you couldn't fail to be a little shocked by the volume and pitch of the invective directed our way. Most of it was coordinated by a handful of resourceful bloggers - the ringleader of whom is fittingly published on a site called "spleenville" - and much of it was eye-wateringly unpleasant. "I hope your earholes turn to arseholes and shit on your shoulders," was one, more repeatable example of the scatalogical genre. Another memorable mail asked:

"How secure is your building that contains all you morons???

Do you have enough security??

ARE YOU SURE ??? Are you VERY sure ??"

Interestingly, one of the recurrent themes running through the onslaught was an ardent admiration for Tony Blair from the kind of people who might feel slightly out of place in even the biggest of New Labour big tents. Another was a curious obsession with the state of British dentistry: "MAY YOU HAVE TO HAVE A TOOTH CAPPED. I UNDERSTAND IT TAKES AT LEAST 18 MONTHS FOR YOUR GREAT MEDICAL SERVICES TO GET AROUND TO YOU." At times, it felt as though whole swathes of America had suffered an epidemic of Tourette syndrome.

We all know that we have "beneficial bacteria" in our bodies, but scientists are thinking harder about the "commensal" relationship between humans and bacteria. Commensal relationships are similar to symbiosis, but in symbiotic relationships both organisms benefit. In commensal relationships, one organism benefits from another without damaging or benefiting it. We have more than 500 different species of bacteria in our bodies, and this leads some scientists to think of humans as superorganisms, or "highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells." [Link]

gut, they get very complex indeed. The information in the human genome itself, 3 billion

The Austin American-Statesman endorsed George Bush, which was a surprise given Austin's liberal character and reputation. There was a rumor that local staff wanted to support Kerry, but were overruled by the paper's publisher. I wondered how the paper's editorial supported its endorsement, so I did a bit of reading and analysis. Here are some excerpts from the editorial, with my comments:

"Americans should ask themselves whether they really believe that European nations critical of the war effort will intervene in Iraq if Sen. John F. Kerry is elected president. They won't."

BS - the fact that they were critical of the war effort doesn't mean they wouldn't participate in a cooperative effort to clean up the mess Bush et al have made there.

"Further, we should ask whether they really believe that anything less than a fundamental change in the way Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs are funded is adequate to meet future demands."

What "fundamental change" are we talking about here? Bush has proposed no clear plan other than diversion of some funds into individual investment accounts, which would incidentally result in something like $940 billion in profits for financial services firms over 75 years. Meanwhile Bush's record deficits compromise funding for all programs.

"changing administrations now might embolden enemies who believe that Americans don't have the stomach or the patience for the kind of protracted, unconventional warfare in which we are engaged."

Why would that be? Kerry has said - quite clearly - that he will not end the war on terror - because the terrorist threat is clear and likely to persist - or the war in Iraq - because the commitment's made and we can't simply pull out. If enemies initially assume otherwise, that won't last long. There's no squishiness about Kerry, he's clearly equipped to be a strong commander-in-chief - much better equipped than Bush, whose dubious military experience and his foreign relations inexperience was hardly the foundation for a turn as commander of U.S. forces. (Re. foreign relations - remember that Bush had never been outside the U.S., with the exception of a few trips to Mexico, before he became president.)

"Though Kerry is an honorable man who knows firsthand the horrors of war, he is deluding himself if he thinks a different administration will change the outlook of a foe that doesn't make war on an individual administration, but on the West in general and the United States in particular."

I have two problems with that paragraph. First, I don't know that Kerry has ever suggested that he will "change the outlook" of terrorists. (In fact, I kept hearing him say he would track them down and kill them - which might qualify as an outlook change, but really.) The other is th at I don't know about this "doesn't make war on an individual administration" bit. The documented connections between the Bush and bin Laden families raise questions. When I heard of them, I couldn't help but wonder whether Osama's grudge is narrower than we've realized.

The editorial has a section on domestic policy, but oddly enough, it seems to conclude that Bush is screwing up. And under the section on "Civil Liberties, Appointments," the Statesman says that Ashcroft must go, and Bush should make balanced appointments (I wouldn't bet the farm on it, though, would you?) So it seems that where most stuff is concerned, the Statesman doesn't really favor the Bush administration, but they've endorsed him anyway.

I do get the feeling, after writing this and thinking about it, that the staff at the Statesman wanted to endorse Kerry. This editorial feels like a compromise... a weak endorsement of Bush based on gloss about some of his positions, but also filled with criticism that actually comes across louder than the supportive part.

The President to argues that he's the only guy qualified to fight the War in Iraq has just seen another blunder on his watch, this one pretty horrifying... 380 tons of explosives disappeared from an ammunition dump. Mitch Ratcliffe did some research and found this is enough to make about 950 bombs, kill 19,000 and wound 95,000. [Link]

I attended the first meeting of the Science, Technology, & Society Program Advisory Board, today. STS is an interdisciplinary concentration in the College of Liberal Arts focusing on the social impacts of rapid scientific and technological change. The menu of key areas of study fits my interests pretty well:

• Nanotechnology
  
• Gaming
  
• Collaborative work and work-life
  
• Education
  
• Bio-health
  
• Computer-mediated communication

Someone created a clever bit of satire called Yes, Bush Can!, supposedly a citizen initiative supporting Bush that changed its mind after touring the country and decided to support Kerry instead. The group just sent an email that says

Last week, the group officially split with Bush. "In the course of
our travels, we ended up learning more about Bush's policies than he
wanted us to know," said Harmon Spellmeyer, one of the Yes, Bush Can
team. "We came to see that this administration is a catastrophe for
most people."

Before breaking with Bush, the Yes, Bush Can team worked earnestly to
support him. They went to the Pacific Northwest to promote Bush's
Healthy Forests Initiative--and discovered it was enabling the
logging industry to cut down our last old-growth forests. They
visited a nuclear power plant in Ohio to promote Bush's domestic
security policies--and found no one in the guard booth to meet them.
In western Pennsylvania, while promoting the President's energy
policy, they learned that it allows coal emissions which kill 23,000
people a year. Finally, while defending Bush's war on terrorism, they
found out that even Donald Rumsfeld feels the Iraq War has made the
world a more dangerous place.

After many similar discoveries and much internal turmoil, the Yes,
Bush Can group arrived at the difficult conclusion that they could no
longer continue their work. At a press conference Tuesday, in order
to demonstrate how profoundly they are rejecting their former boss's
ideas and policies, the team defaced and abandoned the bus they had
purchased and outfitted.

President Bush, with Attorney General John Ashcroft, has met the threat of terrorism at home with the USA PATRIOT Act. The Act has encountered more liberal opposition than anything else the President has done, even though <patriotic, law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from it. Liberals simply refuse to believe that Americans are prepared to make meaningful sacrifices to support the war on terrorism.

From the Economist, a report on cognitive enhancers, or what we used to call "smart drugs." The conclusion is (natch) that drugs can improve memory and mental acuity but they don't necessarily make you "smarter" &ndash you can't remember what you never knew. I'm pretty sure they don't increase your intelligence (your ability to reason), either; I think that's a complex phenomenon that depends on more than the firing of synapses. The best news here is that a good-enough smart drug is readily available: caffeine.

Agents from the Department of Homeland Security visited Pufferbelly Toys in St. Helens, Oregon. Was the store harboring terrorists? Not quite - the agents asked her to remove a toy called Magic Cube because it was supposedly an illegal copy of the popular Rubik's Cube. Eh? Turns out the Rubik's Cube patent has expired, so Magic Cube doesn't infringe at all. But why was Homeland Security involved?

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency's intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

"One of the things that our agency's responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation's financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications," she said.

Well, we thought it was a clone war when we saw a Bush ad with hundreds of U.S. soldiers, and so many of them looked exactly alike! Whatever it takes, right? In this case, it took a bit of photoshopping, as Salon reports.

From TheStranger.com, a list of 2004's scariest Halloween costumes, with photos and instructions. Pictured above: a Florida Voting Machine costume. [Link]

Michael Ventura's latest column presents an interesting analysis of the State of the Union:

The great days of the United States of America are over. Nothing will bring those days back. It's too late. The damage has been done. There is no possible political, military, or economic solution. The general prosperity of the Fifties and Sixties (as opposed to the one-sided prosperity of the Nineties) is irretrievable. The capacity of the U.S. to lead the world has been drained. The only question is how America will decline – gracefully, clumsily, or tragically? Will we decline with our Constitution intact? Will our decline make us more tolerant and interesting, or meaner and more dulled? Britain declined drastically between 1914 and 1950, yet still produced great literature and a leader of the caliber of Winston Churchill. France declined just as badly, yet still had the cultural power to produce influential art and philosophy. Europe as a whole declined during the 20th century, but retained the intellectual vitality to reinvent itself for the 21st and become another kind of power. How will America decline? At this moment in history, that is the important question: How will America decline?

Here's what I said (dangerously reposted without thought or revision):

The analysis is simplistic, but he's pointing in an interesting direction. My own thought is that "decline" is inevitable, as those things that gave America its economic lead are adapted by other cultures and markets that America has dominated become global markets where many nations and cultures compete. The current Bush administration and its intellectual substructure (the New American Century people) are prepared to enforce "American" dominance in the world with our superior military force, but they've fallen into the same hole that broke the Soviet economy: enforcing dominance via military engagement has significant costs, and there are other forces in the world (such as the Al Qaeda network) that are more agile, and that *will not stop fighting.*

My opinion is that we should take a equitable place in the world and accede to the inevitable evolution of global rather than national thinking. An 'ecological footprint' analysis shows that if everyone in the world lived at my own fairly modest standard of living (modest for an American, that is), six earths worth of resources would be required - this gives you an idea how much wealth we currently have. Are we willing to lower our standard of living so that others in the world may have better lives? Jamais Cascio, my colleague at Worldchanging.com, feels that through innovative thinking we could build a world where everyone could have an high standard of living, but we would be operating from a different set of assumptions. (I'm still not sure I agree with him, but his background involves the construction of plausible futurist scenarios, so I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt).

As for politics, I think another four years of Bush will clearly be disastrous, because he will continue to choose contention over cooperation with the rest of the world, and will take no steps to adopt a global vision of the future. Ultimately our economy will fall apart, partly because he'll continue to spend billions on defense and tax cuts, partly because the rest of the world will stop buying American goods and investing in American companies, and partly because competitors will continue to emerge (think about the amount of work that's moving to India right now).

As for Ventura's argument that Americans are "immature," well... some are and some aren't, but I think that's bogus. I think the real problem is that Americans are not well-informed, and my hope is that we'll have "post-broadcast" computer-mediated tools to rectify that situation. Of course I would think so, being an Internet guy.