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Sails to harness Vox Populi winds : "Technology is changing politics" [ not to mention journalism ] intones the well connected Personal Democracy Forum, and everybody's leaping into the "Blogging vs. Journalism" fray. Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media, has quit his job after receiving seed money from Mitch Kapor and from Omidyar Networks, to found the for-profit "Grassroots Media Inc." : Gillmor's got a hand, as well, in the noble and name studded OurMedia.org : "We'll host your media forever — for free.....Video blogs, photo albums, home movies, podcasting, digital art, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads"

Meanwhile, SusanG - in her most recent recently released investigative piece into the Jeff Gannon/fake journalism scandal notes her research group's effort "now encompasses so much more than Gannon" and announces future stories will post under the organizational name of ePluribus Media

"We're the People ! No you're not, we're the People ! No way ! We're the...."
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comment posted at 4:33 AM on Mar-29-05

As long as we're on the subject of Lovecraft, did you know that his works had inspired a role-playing game, a cute plush toy, a breakfast cereal, and a number of blasphemously bad films (flash, sound)? The best, though, is the unspeakably evil musical.
comment posted at 8:24 PM on Mar-28-05

Mustache March is a silly little idea/project where every guy at a company grows a mustache during March, they take photos, then at the end of the month a BBQ fundraiser is thrown with proceeds going to a charity. A side benefit is that the month of ridiculous facial hair leads to questions from strangers which leads to awareness of the charity. I only wish I had heard of this in February.
comment posted at 4:48 AM on Mar-29-05

A Child's View of the Army "....Like every other boy he was going through the little green army men phase....Gabe is roughly five years old and very articulate. Thus it should have come as little surprise when he began having one army man in charge, and the rest start building something. "Sir, we're ready to build the rocket." " : Five year old Gabe explains - via stacked creamers and table bricabrac, at an IHOP breakfast - the ramifications of mindless subservience to authority.
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Remember this? It has won recognition as "Best Interactive Viral" in the Viral Awards. With all the viral¹ and stealth² marketing campaigns, comment spam, astroturfing³, and other tools that marketeers are using to infiltrate the Brave New(ish) World of blog, we sometimes forget that we also have the power to do good, so "you know, like, reclaim the streets, or re-frame the conversation, or some damn thing". Words of wisdom from our not-so-subservient chicken. [and, a bit more...]
comment posted at 6:29 AM on Mar-26-05

The New York City Department of Education has recalled 3rd-7th grade basic math prep materials after finding multiple errors. Like what? Multiplication errors, addition errors, poorly worded questions, and incorrectly spelling Fourth on the cover of the Fourth Grade Book. "The fact is, if third- or fifth-grade students made the mistakes made in the test prep materials, they would be flunked and no one would be asking them for an explanation."
comment posted at 6:07 AM on Mar-25-05

T. rex soft tissue! No, not dino-kleenex -- scientists have extracted organic compounds from a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex bone. Can Jurassic Park be far behind?
comment posted at 10:07 PM on Mar-24-05

Fake name. Fake reporter. Fake news agency....Fake Marine ! Latest tasty research treat from Propagannon Group : Guckert lied re military service. Whips 'n chains and web based military theme escort services ? Whatever. Hey, I'm a social libertarian. But lying about being in the marines? - Tacky.
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The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights is slowly making its way through the Florida Senate. This bill would give students the right to sue professors if they feel their beliefs are not being respected during a class.
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What is the ID SNIPER(TM) rifle? "It is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. [...] At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis." Other popular products by Empire North include JUJU the Citizen Eye. Empire North is run by Jakob Boeskov.
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The US Living Will Registry electronically stores advance directives, and makes them available to health care providers 24 hours/day via secure internet or telephone facsimile... a free service, by the way. Be sure to check out the state-by-state list of Advance Directive Forms. See also, the American Bar Associations information for advanced medical directives.
comment posted at 10:26 PM on Mar-23-05

Eat like an Athiest or eat like Jesus. Because godless heathens know how to make 2 minute microwave cakes while good Christians might whip up the prodigal son's fatted calf.
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Physicians and scientists around the world even go as far as to state that smoking leads to premature death. Don’t we all know someone who smokes constantly, even heavily, yet is still living — or has lived — to the mature age of eighty, ninety, and older? Furthermore, the MDs and PhDs state that smoking causes cancer and emphysema. If this diagnosis were definitive, wouldn’t these afflictions affect all smokers equally, rather than the small percentage that it actually does affect?
comment posted at 8:50 PM on Mar-23-05

Mythmaker of the Machine Age. In the statue erected above his grave in Amiens, in Picardy, Jules Verne, who died exactly 100 years ago, resembles God. He is, after all, the second-most-translated author on earth, after Agatha Christie. To celebrate the anniversary, there's a Verne exhibition at the Maritime Museum in Paris, one of a series of events from Paris to the western city of Nantes, where Verne was born on Feb. 8, 1828, to the northern town of Amiens, where he died on March 24, 1905. His many fans, some of them quite famous, will be treated to exhibits, concerts, films and shows in Verne's honor. “Underground City”, a lost classic written by Verne and never before published unabridged in English, emerges this month in not one but two new unique editions.
100 years later, questions remain about his life: Why did he have two homes in Amiens? Why did he burn all his private papers? Why was he shot in the foot by his nephew, Gaston, in 1886? Gaston was locked in an asylum for 54 years after his attack on L'Oncle Jules. Was Gaston, in fact, Verne's natural son? More inside.
comment posted at 9:09 PM on Mar-23-05

Welcome to Ourmedia.org We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.
comment posted at 11:05 PM on Mar-24-05

Come quick! I'm being eaten by a bear! In 1977, Cynthia Dusel-Bacon, a 31-year old geologist working for the US Geological Survey, lost both arms after an encounter with a hungry black bear during a field trip in Alaska. Not only she survived her ordeal, but she resumed her work as a USGS scientist. She can also tell you a few things about living a life without arms (she calls it "a multi-media approach"): how to chop carrots, undress, wash the dishes, read, and use a mouse.
comment posted at 9:31 PM on Mar-23-05
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Journalists at large. With the mysterious murders/suicides of Gary Webb and Steve Kangas, have underground reporters signed a death wish with their unconventional tongue? Webb's Dark Alliance is hot material for those protest cheerleaders but who is to blame?
comment posted at 9:40 PM on Mar-23-05

Copyright a yoga move? If yoga has been around for 5,000 years, can a 21st century businessman claim to own a piece of it? Bikram Choudhury says yes. The Beverly Hills yoga mogul, who popularized his style of yoga and then franchised a chain of studios bearing his name, has long rankled traditionalists, who dislike his tough business tactics and brash outspokenness. Now Choudhury is facing a challenge in a San Francisco courtroom, where a federal judge is hearing arguments in a lawsuit that some legal experts say could define a new frontier in intellectual property. At issue: Can Choudhury take a sequence of two breathing exercises and 26 yoga poses from an ancient Indian practice, copyright it and control how it is practiced? The Open Source Yoga Unity people say he can't. More inside.
comment posted at 9:44 PM on Mar-23-05

Hitler's "fountain of life." In 1935, Heinrich Himmer and the SS launched a network of Lebensborn maternity centers to increase birthrates among Aryans, where German soldiers were encouraged to mate with genetically desirable local women in occupied countries like Norway. These women were given the option of raising their kids themselves or turning them over to SS-run homes where they would be "Germanized." The lives of these kids was hell after the war, when they were shunned and worse by the Nazis' previous victims. To those who are nostalgic for the Reich, like this veritable eBay of Nazi memorabilia, the Lebensborn program represented " wonderful social experimentation."
comment posted at 9:59 PM on Mar-23-05

Scenes from the Cultural Revolution. A compilation of quotes about American Universities as compared to Maoist propaganda.
"'If the system were fair,' says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, 'Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.'"

"We will strike down the reactionary, bourgeois academic savants! . . . We will vigorously establish proletarian intellectual authorities, our own academic savants."
comment posted at 10:12 PM on Mar-23-05

The End Of Faith

A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person’s life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world; they dictate your behavior; they determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions: 1. You have only two weeks to live. 2. You’ve just won a lottery prize of one hundred million dollars. 3. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts.
comment posted at 10:52 PM on Mar-23-05

Ever wonder who gets the spin money from the government to sell us everything from wars to reforms to reconnect the Army with the American people. A rundown on the seven biggest PR firms doing business with the government, and their refusal to come clean about what it is they're doing with our tax money. PRWatch has much, much more, including exposing the funding and associations pushing Social Security "reform"
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Break out your tinfoil hats for the conspiracy du jour: It seems just before Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide, he was working on a piece about the WTC attack. It also seems he hinted that the Bush administration was somehow involved . He was talking to his wife on the phone when he died, yet she heard no gunshot. Was it suicide, or murder?
comment posted at 8:43 PM on Mar-3-05

What is going on in Dulce, New Mexico? The federal government is apparently working in tangent with several species of extraterrestrials in a gigantic underground base the size of Manhattan. This came to light with the release of the Dulce Papers, a set of documents explaining the whole conspiracy. An alleged former guard at the base has also spoken out against it and revealed more information. Of course, a lot of this relates back to the shadow government and Jesus having been genetically engineered by the Greys, but really, what doesn't these days. Want to take a relaxing holiday to Dulce Base? Well, you'll probably be shot, but there's always this nice video footage.
comment posted at 9:13 PM on Mar-1-05

"... Giordano Bruno might have been a pantheist. A pantheist believes that God is everywhere, even in that speck of a fly you see there. You can imagine how satisfying that is—being everywhere is like being nowhere. Well, for Hegel it wasn’t God but the State that had to be everywhere; therefore, he was a Fascist.”
“But didn’t he live more than a hundred years ago?”
“So? Joan of Arc, also a Fascist of the highest order. Fascists have always existed. Since the age of . . . since the age of God. Take God—a Fascist.”
Umberto Eco in the New Yorker
comment posted at 9:40 PM on Feb-28-05

U.N. Peacekeepers to third world: bend over, spread 'em.
comment posted at 10:55 PM on Mar-5-05

The gays continue to spread their “homosexual agenda” through cartoons and children’s shows. First it was Tinky-Winky (the Gay Teletubbie), then SpongeBob SquarePants and PBS’s Buster. Last night it was The Simpsons. And now today we learn that Shrek is up to no good! What should a proper upstanding citizen do? Get me the President!
comment posted at 9:31 PM on Feb-21-05

The argument I make in my book is that what I describe as the new American militarism arises as an unintended consequence of the reaction to the Vietnam War and more broadly, to the sixties... If some people think that the sixties constituted a revolution, that revolution produced a counterrevolution, launched by a variety of groups that had one thing in common: they saw revival of American military power, institutions, and values as the antidote to everything that in their minds had gone wrong. None of these groups — the neoconservatives, large numbers of Protestant evangelicals, politicians like Ronald Reagan, the so-called defense intellectuals, and the officer corps — set out saying, “Militarism is a good idea.” But I argue that this is what we’ve ended up with: a sense of what military power can do, a sort of deference to the military, and an attribution of virtue to the men and women who serve in uniform. Together this constitutes such a pernicious and distorted attitude toward military affairs that it qualifies as militarism.
An interview with Andrew Bacevich, international relations professor and former Army colonel, and author of The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War--and here is a review. Recently by Bacevich: We Aren't Fighting to Win Anymore - U.S. troops in Iraq are only trying to buy time.
comment posted at 9:42 PM on Feb-21-05

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction, but the sandstorm chases you". Murakami Haruki writes about love, earthquakes and -- in his new novel "Kafka on the Shore" -- mackerel raining from the sky. He is so famous in Japan that he was forced to flee the country, and now the rest of the globe (.pdf file) is fast catching on to his singular vision. More inside.
comment posted at 9:10 PM on Feb-9-05

This .pdf (accessible to laypersons) from the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute suggests that a falling dollar is probably very bad news for Europe.

The euro area is one of the slowest growing economic areas in the world, yet it will bear much of the burden of relieving the pressure of the U.S. trade deficits. This will deprive the euro area of demand for domestic products at a time when such demand is necessary to forestall a full-blown recession.

Via Marginal Revolution.
comment posted at 8:43 PM on Nov-28-04