Michel Foucault: What is Enlightenment?

NYTimes: Afghan Journalism's Postwar Mission (login/pass: cypherpunk40)

Noam Chomsky: The World After Sept. 11

Washington contemptuously dismissed the tentative offers to consider extradition of bin Laden and his associates; how real such possibilities were we cannot know, because of the righteous refusal even to consider them. This stand adheres to a leading principle of statecraft, called "establishing credibility" in the rhetoric of statecraft and scholarship. And it is understandable. If a Mafia Don plans to collect protection money, he does not first ask for a Court order, even if he could obtain it. Much the same is true of international affairs. Subjects must understand their place, and must recognize that the powerful need no higher authority.

The best free reference websites, according to the American Library Association.

The US is still throwing $2.5 billion in foreign aid to Israel annually, most of which is used to buy arms from the US.

Google's end-of-year Zeitgeist

Big domains are getting bought by companies who put their own system behind the old interface.

So KB Toys, for example, now operates an online store that has the name and colors of the defunct but popular eToys and that mirrors its own Web site. Amazon.com (news/quote) is similarly presenting the face of Egghead.com, which is no more.

What I find interesting is that internet retailers haven't had the same idea, except the other way around. What if Amazon (for example) let folks set up a virtual bookstore, providing the same information as amazon, but putting a different "skin" on it. All the shipping, warehousing, and ordering would be handled by Amazon, but there would be a commission in it for the person running the site in question. There would probably be a lot of crappy knock-offs, but maybe there would be some good ones too - in any case, all the money would go to the same source, and the time and effort wouldn't be wasted on trying to promote the front end. If it worked, the physical goods and front end would be effectively split off from each other, and each part would be slightly more commoditized. A lot of folks would probably be layed off or paid less, but the resulting proliferation of online "storefronts" would be interesting. It's not much different than amazon's affiliate program, except that the "branding" and access to features and information would be closer to complete.

This NYTimes article about the 9-11 memorial has some interesting, isolated ideas, but it's hard (for me) to make sense of it as a whole. (login/pass: cypherpunk40)

There has been some interesting discussion (and some not quite as interesting) of my article on homophobia. Kendall's bit on the process of assembling the bible is especially interesting.

Phantom limb for the rest of us.

BuskPay looks like an interesting addition to microdonation schemes, though I haven't tried it out. The essay on "Mass-Market Busking" looks interesting too.

Locolombia.org looks like a home-grown news site with articles about Colombia, the drug war, plan Colombia, and other politics that Americans should be interested in.

Infoanarchy now has an irc-driven weblog based on the ChumpBot.

DayPop indexes a lot of weblogs and lets you search them.

Dean Allen: Reading Design

The Dead Media Project needs a link now and then.

The Open BeOS Project is trying to re-create the BeOS from scratch.

Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan.

The Morning News hosted a roundtable discussion about writing for the web.

Right after some heavy bombing, the US government bought up all the relevant satellite images, preventing other folks from seeing how much damage was caused.

Weblog madness is a directory of all things weblog, including a list of weblog software.

How can anyone with even the tiniest clue continue to call what the US did in Vietnam "humanitarian interventions"?!

As of today, I'm back in Washington State for a few weeks. If you want to get together, just send me an email (dojy@mta.ca), as usual.

Merry Consumerism! I updated my Amazon.com wishlist. Emphasis on wish.

Look at all the pretty pictures of possible powerbooks and other fun mac designs by people who are only slightly less obsessed with macs than I used to be. Then again, the titanium powerbook is making me go back to my old ways.

FinderMail is a mac mail client that stores mail as plain text, and lets you display or edit in any app. It reminds me of how the BeOS stored email messages in the system database, and let you move them around in the file system, sort them by sender, etc. It was very elegant, but I guess I'll have to settle for findermail.

Informed Dissent looks like a decent lefty weblog.

In case anyone was wondering, Henry Kissinger is an evil pig.

The Monkeyfist.com redesign is up and running!

The last Argosy issue of the season hit the streets last Thursday.

My editorial: The Marketplace of Idea(l)s.

My roommate Matt wrote an excellent review of the Rheostatics show we went to.