too many topics,

    too little time.

but this is a pretty cool flash unrelated to that i suppose.

and overcoming it.

Nick Dyer-Witherford, “Cognitive Capital Contested” [Interactivist Info Exchange]

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interesting little essay on the computer game industry….

Anti-Joppolos. I’m rereading a superb article by Robert Kaplan called “Supremacy by Stealth” that appeared in the July/August 2003 Atlantic Monthly. His thesis is that the… [Outside the Beltway]

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sounds interesting….

RTMark reports false arrest of artist by FBI who mistakes art for bioterrorism.

RTMark

FBI ABDUCTS ARTIST, SEIZES ART
Feds Unable to Distinguish Art from Bioterrorism
Grieving Artist Denied Access to Deceased Wife's Body

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ DEFENSEÊ FUND ESTABLISHED - HELP URGENTLY NEEDED

Steve Kurtz was already suffering from one tragedy when he called 911 early in the morning to tell them his wife had suffered a cardiac arrest and died in her sleep.Ê The police arrived and, cranked up on the rhetoric of the “War on Terror,” decided Kurtz's art supplies were actually bioterrorism weapons.

Thus began an Orwellian stream of events in which FBI agents abducted Kurtz without charges, sealed off his entire block, and confiscated his computers, manuscripts, art supplies… and even his wife's body.

Like the case of Brandon Mayfield, the Muslim lawyer from Portland imprisoned for two weeks on the flimsiest of false evidence, Kurtz's case amply demonstrates the dangers posed by the USA PATRIOT Act coupled with government-nurtured terrorism hysteria.

Kurtz's case is ongoing, and, on top of everything else, Kurtz is facing a mountain of legal fees. Donations to his legal defense can be made at http://www.rtmark.com/CAEdefense/

It reminds me a bit of when the Secret Service came after etoy.

RTMark is nortorious for social hacking, but this story appears to have at least two supporting news stories.

WKBW Local News - Local Investigation Into Ub Artist Continues
WKBW Local News - Bio Hazard Or Art?

The weird thing is that these news articles are archived on RTMark's site and I can't seem to find them on the WKBW site. Having said that, a search on Google News shows an article about this, but it has “expired” and can't be accessed.

IF this is true, it's another example of patriotic stupidity, but it's often the role of artists to help us understand this stupidity.

Anyone else heard about this? Lately I'm becoming more wary of single source news stories. Any help in veting this story before I get really excited would be greatly appreciated.

via Scott

[Joi Ito's Web]

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this could be false, but if it isn't it is just wrong and our government shouldn't be doing things like this.

Going to an intervention? Be Prepared.. No one likes to go to interventions. Tensions are high and there is always a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt. You can't eliminate the unpleasantness of an intervention, but you can ease some of the tension by simply being… [Ernie The Attorney]

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funny…..

Eric Idle Says “Fuck You Very Much” To The Shrub, The FCC, Cheney, Condi, Arnie, and the Lot of Them. This just in from Eric Idle: The FCC Song. Here's My mirror of the song, in case you have trouble with the first link. Lyrics: Here's a little number I wrote the other day while out duck hunting with a judge. Fuck you very much the FCC Fuck you very much for fining me Five thousand bucks a fuck So I'm really out of luck That's more than Heidi Fleiss was charging me So fuck you very much the FCC for proving that free speech just isn't free Clear Channel's a dear channel So Howard Stern must go Attorney General… [On Lisa Rein's Radar]

My Work Is Done Here.

Blogging is hard to quit for many reasons. Not least because once you've made the decision to quit, you need to blog about it. It's like a glue, or something.

I've been thinking about whether I should stop, and if I stop whether I should say I'm stopping or just, well, stop. Or whether this is just another temporary impasse or blockage. If I had to call it today, then I'd say I'm stopping. But you can never say never, so to speak.

What's brought this sudden change of heart? Frankly, and I'm not sure if I'm 100% on the ball with this, it's an identity crisis that was quietly baked in from the very beginning but which lately, has been surfaced and exacerbated by my recent spate of meetings. In short, my blog self is not my entire self. I've been cool with that as long as both of those selves never appear together in the same room. When that happens, it shines a spotlight right on top of that partial disclosure or split identity issue.

This isn't a profound real life personal identity crisis thing, fear not, it's just something that I've recently come to notice and realise is a conflict in my blogging terms of reference, and one which seems to have mortally wounded my blogging self.

Perhaps this blog was a journey of self development or discovery and I've just reached it's natural and inevitable end. I'm not sure.

What I am sure about is that I have no motivation to continue this, but that is not to say that I intend to absent myself from this place or community entirely, or that I'll never 'blog' again in the future. But if I do, it'll probably be different.

In whichever capacity I choose to involve myself in the future, I should say that I have enjoyed myself enormously, made some great friends and relationships and hopefully have spread a little worth or value around to make my participation in this community vaguely worthwhile to a few people.

Take care, I'll see you around.

[memoria technica]

Bye GT, We'll see you around, and your public thoughts will be missed.

Exercising the Right of Dissent. by TChris Cynthia Tucker reminds us that it isn't unpatriotic to criticize President Bush, his administration, or his decisions. Exercising the right of dissent is so vital to the democratic process that the Bill of Rights enshrines it in the… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

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dissent, for those interested in politics, is the key motivation toward change. consent always yields conservativism, and its partners authoritarianism/fascism. this is why Guattari wrote about dissensual politics.

Guess I'm square.

Isn't “personal democracy” an oxymoron? Unless you don't mind nothing but unanimous votes, I guess. In any case, I wish I was here.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

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looks like an interesting conference, but yes, there is no such thing as personal democracy. demos sort of rules that out.

How to Build Open Information Societies. Amy Mahan and Yuri Misnikov at UNDP's regional center in Bratislava, Slovakia, have edited a book on How to Build Open Information Societies: A Collection of Best Practices and Know-How. “Case studies and examples from 19 countries illustrate different e-governance… [InternetPolicy.net]

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interesting free book

Sweating the small stuff.

Last year, I fell off my bike, and had to have my arm in a sling for a couple of days. I don’t care, even a little bit, that Bush had a spill. It happens.

But if the White House is going to come out and blame the fall on “what the White House described as soil loosened by recent rainfall”… (Here’s the quote: “It’s been raining a lot. The topsoil was loose.”)

Well, I can check that. There hasn’t been any rain in Crawford all week. The last day with more than an inch of precipitation was May 1.

Again, not a big deal, but why would they say that? And do you share my suspicion that Caren Bohan, who wrote the Reuters report from Crawford, knows perfectly well that there wasn’t any rain?

UPDATE: Kos has a similar post, with a different data set but the same conclusion.

[Crooked Timber]

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lying is a habit, a practice, you do it repeatedly and you learn to do it all the time. this is not so to speak 'good'. it is a vice, a viciousness, an insociability, and that in the end, is problematic.

Something like Fire, or the Wheel. I spent a lot of a flight from London to Singapore reading Tragically I was an Only Twin, a well-edited collection of the comedy sketches, monologues and occasional journalism of Peter Cook. It turns out that Cook addressed many of the issues that preoccupy us at CT. Like intelligent design theory:

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: Well, I’d like to say I believed in God, of course, but I’m afraid that, as a thinking person … there are two very good reasons why I simply can’t. … A — Wasps. Can’t see the point of a wasp, can you? And B — caviar. I mean really, what is the point of having caviar locked away inside sturgeon? So inaccessible. I’m sure if there were a real God he’d have arranged for caviar to just sort of toddle over to your house on a pair of little legs in a self-opening jar.

Or sociobiology:

Interviewer: [B]ut isn’t an anthill a very organized society?
Prof. Henrich Globnik: If your view of an organized society is thousands of ants milling around in corridors, bumping into each other with bits of twig and other rubbish in their mouth then I understand why you elected that woman.

Or political theory:

Arthur Grole: No you don’t [speak Russian], you poor sod. And you have an inalienable right not to speak Russian in this country. In Russia you have to speak Russian. But in this country we have an inalienable right not to speak Russian.

And philosophy of language:

Ludovic Kennedy: Do you speak any Lap yourself?
Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling: I have a smattering — or a smeurtering, as they call it. They don’t in fact call it Lap. They call it Leurp. But I do have a smeurtering of Leurp. A few words … I like to think if I found myself in fourth-century Lapland I could get by — probably. Or preurbeurbly.

So obviously you should just buy it.

[Crooked Timber]

this seems like a book that i might like to read……

UN official: terrorism justifies info control. “The threat of terrorism has made it more important for nations to control the flow of information through the Internet, United Nations ICT Task Force Deputy Executive Coordinator Sergei Kambalov told Interfax during an interview at the 4th Annual Forum… [InternetPolicy.net]

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information control is a certain kind of population control and can easily turn dominating and fascistic….. it should be avoided.

DrupalEd and DrupalBlog: Preconfigured Drupal Distributions.

Getting the word out to see if anyone has any feedback. This was originally posted on cyberdash.com:

One of the biggest complaints about Drupal is that it's difficult to configure. I'll agree. As I've said in this discussion thread on drupal.org, most Drupal users know “that the reason that Drupal is difficult to customize is that it's like a block of clay–has to be molded for the particular site configuration.” And I firmly believe, despite some of the comments in the same thread, that this is the number one obstacle stopping many people from adopting it.

Well, I'll admit. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to take the Linux kernel, assemble the necessary packages, and configure everything. That's what Linux distributions are for.

So in the interest of making Drupal easier for newbies, I've assembled two Drupal distributions:

• DrupalEd is intended for the writing classroom. I say that not because it can't be used for other classes, but writing teachers are generally more interested, I believe, in discourse and community interaction more so than content delivery. And in this area Drupal excels. Looking for testing and grading modules? They won't be here. It's simply the configuration that Terra and I have been using for a few semesters now.
• DrupalBlog is setup as in individual blogsite, much like what Terra, Clancy and I use. By modifying a couple of permission settings, it can easily be configured to allow for multiple authors like Kairosnews.

[Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]