WhitePrivilege.com is up and running.

A year in the slammer couldn't keep her mouth shut

and J. Edgar Hoover couldn't move her from my heart

Hey!

Emma! Emma! Emma Goldman!

[another piggy tune, 2.7MB]

David Grenier, writer, bowler and domestic terrorist tries to Reclaim the Streets.

One kid stepped forward and the cops tackled him and slammed his face into the pavement. This is what the cops wanted. They could now call us "violent potesters" because we were protesters in a violent situation they had created.

...

The real shits and giggles part of all this is that there were two groups on the street that day. One group carried guns and clubs, used chemical agents on unarmed civilians, made up laws as they went along (you can’t share food in the park, for example), and used violence to advance their boss' political career and try to intimidate folks from exercising their freedoms if those freedoms conflict with commercial interests. The other group gave food out freely, tried to avoid conflict by staying on the sidewalk, and was armed only with puppets and costumes. Yet the cops are praised in the media by the politicians, while the FBI has labeled Reclaim the Streets a terrorist organization.

So what the media really means when they say "protesters clashed with police" is "police brutally beat and sprayed poisonous chemicals at protesters, who were committing serious crimes, such as jaywalking."

[for google]

The Bad Writing Contest.

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

"South Carolina is a strong right-to-work state and a citizen's right not to join a union is absolute and will be fully protected." Apparently.

The Onion's interview with Berkeley Breathed is chock full of sharp commentary, of which the following excerpt is not really an example. Well worth reading.

I started as a news photographer at the University Of Texas' Daily Texan. They failed to see the marketing advantage in manipulating news photos (this is pre-digital, remember) to enhance the drama. I recall a dandy front-page photo of a community street preacher, in which I burned a halo floating above his head. I got fired and started writing stories for the campus magazine. I wrote about an unnamed student who secretly released hundreds of baby alligators into nearby Lake Travis, which would have been compelling if I hadn't made it up. Property values around the lake plummeted over $70,000,000 the next week, which brought federal game agents into town. I was arrested, eventually--you think I'm lying again, but I'm not, check the records--and then the death threats and getting kicked out of my apartment complex and I won't bore you with the rest, except to add that some wise sage finally suggested that the cartooning desk might be where I belonged, as I could let my little imagination soar wherever it wanted, and federal agents wouldn't be needed. So I started copying Doonesbury, and you know the rest.

Intellectual Property and the Organization of Information Production [100k, pdf] looks interesting.

...increased protection benefits commercial information producers that vertically integrate new production with management of large-scale owned inventories of existing information, and that have incentives systematically to misapply human capital to information resources. This benefit comes at the expense of alternative strategies, both commercial and noncommercial.

The Purpose of Copyright

As the Supreme Court has recognized: "The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an 'author's' creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good."

...

Modern-day copyright harbors a dark side. The misunderstanding held by many who believe that the primary purpose of copyright law is to protect authors against those who would pilfer the author's work threatens to upset the delicate equilibrium in copyright law. ...this pervasive misconception is turning copyright into what our founding fathers tried to guard against - a tool for censorship and monopolistic oppression. This may sound extreme to some, but consider the beginnings of copyright in this country. The first Copyright Act in the United States granted only the exclusive right only to print, publish, and vend a copyrighted work, and it lasted for only fourteen years, with the possibility of a second fourteen-year term. No exclusive rights to perform the work or to create an adaptation of the work were granted, only the right to print, publish, and vend for, at most, twenty-eight years.

Piggy was once a great radical Calypso band from Halifax, though their music lives on through compact disc... and now MP3. I've posted one song "Money is King" [2.4 MB].

I recently discovered Boondocks, and have been reading the archives obsessively. Some choice panels (in no particular order): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

The Transformers Multiverse. Information about every Transformer. Through some combination of nostalgia and geekiness, this stuff still fascinates me. I can still remember the first time I got all the pieces of the Constructicon in one place and was able to assemble the whole thing. Wow, Hasbro got way too much of my money.

Some films I have recently seen (some for the second or third time), and think are quite worthwhile. So next time you feel the inclination to go see Planet of the Apes or similar worthless tripe, rent one of these instead. I command it.

• Seven Samurai

• Crimes and Misdemeanors

• State and Main

• Roger and Me

• Original Kings of Comedy

Robert Fisk on working at regional newspapers.

And we wrote in clichés. Always clichés. When the police were seeking a hit-and-run driver, they either "spread their net" or "narrowed their search" or "stepped up their hunt". Company directors were "bosses", scientists were invariably "boffins", officials were always "chiefs", storm-battered ships inevitably "limped" into port. Suicides were always tragic, brides always beautiful, angry councillors were "hopping mad" and protesting villagers would always "take to the streets". Those who discovered bodies were, of course, "horror-struck" or "mystified"; the latter applied to the construction gang building a new Blyth bypass who excavated dozens of corpses – all in their Victorian Sunday best – and thought they'd discovered a mass murder before realising they were digging up an old cemetery. Needless to say, Tory election candidates always "lashed out" at the sitting Labour MP, Eddie Blythe.

I'm on a bit of a Chomsky kick.

Chomsky on Postmodernism:

...that ``plain language is not enough when the frame of reference is not available to the listener'' [is] correct and important. But the right reaction is not to resort to obscure and needlessly complex verbiage and posturing about non-existent ``theories.'' Rather, it is to ask the listener to question the frame of reference that he/she is accepting, and to suggest alternatives that might be considered, all in plain language. I've never found that a problem when I speak to people lacking much or sometimes any formal education, though it's true that it tends to become harder as you move up the educational ladder, so that indoctrination is much deeper, and the self-selection for obedience that is a good part of elite education has taken its toll. Johnb says that outside of circles like this forum, ``to the rest of the country, he's incomprehensible'' (``he'' being me). That's absolutely counter to my rather ample experience, with all sorts of audiences. Rather, my experience is what I just described. The incomprehensibility roughly corresponds to the educational level. Take, say, talk radio. I'm on a fair amount, and it's usually pretty easy to guess from accents, etc., what kind of audience it is. I've repeatedly found that when the audience is mostly poor and less educated, I can skip lots of the background and ``frame of reference'' issues because it's already obvious and taken for granted by everyone, and can proceed to matters that occupy all of us. With more educated audiences, that's much harder; it's necessary to disentangle lots of ideological constructions.

On Economic Experiments:

There have been quite a few experiments in economic development in the modern era, and though it is doubtless wise to be wary of sweeping generalizations, still they do exhibit some regularities that are hard to ignore. One is that the designers seem to come out quite well, though the experimental subjects, who rarely sign consent forms, quite often take a beating.

More examples of Corporate appropriation of revolutionary imagery, accompanied by some rather clueless analysis.

Some interesting photos of the 1968 (?) World Fair.

Hey, it's me, talking to Michael Moore at Webzine 2001 in NYC.

Chomsky on Israel vs. Palestine:

The purpose of the terror, economic strangulation and daily humiliation is not obscure. It was articulated in the early years of the occupation by Moshe Dayan, one of the Israeli leaders most sympathetic to the Palestinian plight, who advised his Labor Party associates to tell the Palestinians that "you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave."

Is Linux ready for the corporate desktop?, By Miguel De Icaza.

Full Coverage for the People, a design for a transparent, collaborative, and somewhat more democratic way of organizing news coverage, loosely based on Yahoo's Full Coverage. Comments welcome and encouraged.

Which little boy will grow up to be President?

Nader on Online Voting Records. "New technology is beholden to old politics and power structures, just like the old technology." That's worth repeating.

Filegate.gov, an old Wired article about why Congress still doesn't put most of their documents online.

The Congressional Accountability Project is still working on it, apparently.

Capitalizing on the Anti-Capitalist Movement.

www.lightpollution.it

A story about Anarchism in the mainstream media. Who'd have thought it possible?

I've been using the term Left Wing Wacko to describe myself and my activities, especially when visiting folks back home. Now I know I was using it accurately.

Dave Grenier on Poetry Slams.

An interesting theory about Japanese culture.

Oh. God. The country I grew up in is intentionally killing children.

After a brief hiatus, the Daily Churn is back, with (potentially) better software guts.

Who Pays for Content? Funding in Interactive Media.

The Deconstructed Journal: a new model for Academic Publishing.

I saw planet of the apes. I'm really too disgusted to write about it at any length, so go read Dave Grenier's review, which I mostly agree with (Except for the suggestion that the plot has any redeeming qualities. It must be emphasized that it doesn't).

I'm travelling again. Go ahead and post interesting links by using the 'post a comment' feature. It doesn't matter if they have nothing to do with misnomer. I'm interested in what people who read this are interested in.