i was up in chicago on march 20 at the big anti-war protest. there were a lot of different people handing out different socialist newspapers, and when i was offered the fifth or six different socialist newspaper, i asked the person "why are there so many different socialist newspapers?" that person was stephen edwards, president of AFSCME local 2858 and proponent of a workers' party in illinois. today i read a metafilter thread about the work less party of vancouver. rather than "workers of the world unite" it's "workers of the world relax". they've got good slogans, but i'm still waiting on the newspaper.
on more like this:
So here's a story: John Francis, disturbed by an oil spill caused by a tanker collision, stops using cars, buses, trains, and planes. He tires of arguing to justify his decision. So he stops talking, for 17 years.
a quick google search for an RSS feed of the daily show clips comedy central offers turned up nothing. this surprised me, because i regularly see references to these daily show clips around the weblog world. i don't have a television, so this is an important source of entertainment for me. today i finally got tired of checking the website every day, and decided to make an RSS feed of the daily show clips.
i notice on the coalition provisional authority website, "business opportunities in iraq" comes before "democracy in iraq". that may be the fault of the craptastic webmaster (complete with flag animation), or it may be a reflection of priorities.
i'm watching CSI episodes on DVD and one character just said "scent triggers memory more accutely than any of the five senses." this caught my attention because i have a poor sense of smell (anosmia) and a poor long term memory. a while back, tom coates, who also has anosmia, clued me in to information about anosmia with an essay on the topic. from the comments, he seems to have helped quite a few people with anosmia down a path of discovery about the problem. i'd be interested to hear how many of these people have poor long term memory as well.
here's a idly speculative theory i just came up with. absent the boogie man of communism, american politicians are now free to combine the "ownership is good" principle of capitalism with the "ownership is bad" principle of communism. the result could be twice as good or twice as bad. a good politician would say "ownership is good for you and bad for me." but sadly most american politicians seem to be saying "ownership is bad for you and good for me."
ownership is decision making ability as far as economics are concerned, and how politicians view decision making ability in the economic realm tends to reflect how they view decision making in other realms. bush, for example, seems to support competition, except where his own interests are at stake. then he supports state-sponsored monopolies (like haliburton) that look an aweful lot like how things work under communism. he likewise voiced support for states' rights to make their own decisions regarding gay marriage, until they started making decisions he didn't like. then he supported taking that decision making ability away from them. similarly, he supported the judicial branch's right to interpret the constitution when their doing so gave him the presidency. but then they began interpretting it in ways he didn't like (gay marriage, affirmative action, etc.). now he calls them "activist judges".
the new division in politico-economic thought after the fall of communism - according to this theory - is no longer "communism vs. capitalism". it's "more for me" vs. "more for you".
for those who don't know, ebay owns paypal now, allowing me to do two rants in one and appear to be one the same topic.
first: why doesn't ebay just embrace fake ads? people are always selling things like "iraq" on ebay, which goes against their terms of service. why don't they make a special submission form for fake ads and not take bids (or take bids, but don't follow up with payment requests) on such ads. that would provide a cheap way to draw in users, and it would remove any confusion for those people who don't get the jokes.
second: why does paypal allow me to make a transaction drawing funds from a bank account that has been closed for months? i thought i was drawing funds from my credit card. i suspect this is going to cost me three or four times the transaction amount to deal with this.
josh occassionally sends me toothpaste for dinner URLs, which are always funny, but it's just so much work to visit a site every day to get the new funniness. so i made an RSS feed of toothpaste for dinner. then i thought "i wonder if someone else has already done this..." which a wiser coder would have thought before starting, because as it turns out two people already have. but mine includes the full content, and the others don't. so enjoy the funniness delivered to your RSS reader.
sometimes i close my eyes at night and see what i can best describe as cloud skeletons. imagine a circle, and then imagine the inverse of that circle, which would look something like a cross, only a bit more arched. now imagine the same thing with a cloud. and now the same thing with a bunch of clouds. the inverse clouds - the cloud skeletons - make new clouds, which then fade into their own skeletons, and this cycle continues. this is the closest thing to a recurring nightmare i can remember having, but it happens when i'm still awake. then i open my eyes for a bit before trying to sleep again. eventually the cloud skeletons go away.
jonathon delacour has returned from his long absence from writing. i suspect the "where is jonathon?" post i had in mind would have been typed out in the next few days, but we'll never know for sure now how many days i can tolerate an unexplained absence of jonathon. anyway, he brings up a few topics in his return on which i have something to say. and in the great tradition that started this whole webblogging craze, i now say it here. first, on drinking, he writes:
I respect the resolve of those who, around the same time, decided to quit but I was after something different: I wanted to drink less and, when I did drink, I wanted it to be from choice rather than habit. For me, quitting would simply mean replacing one type of obsessive-compulsive behavior with another.
i think the same was true for me when i swore off alcohol in the past, but i never realized it until reading this. so i thought i should look at the other popular things i don't do, but i don't think any of them fall into the same category. i don't do any drugs, but i think that's based on some pretty objective sources suggesting that drugs would be quite harmful to my health (particularly so because i'm thin and diabetic -- your mileage may vary). i don't eat meat, but i don't think i can really be non-obsessive about that. if you don't eat meat for a while, your body adjusts to treat meat as an inedible substance. eating meat causes sickness for anyone who has been vegetarian for as long as i have. i'm sure there are ways of re-introducing meat into my diet that wouldn't cause sickness, but i never much liked meat when i did eat it, so i think between that and the sickness factor, i'm pretty safely outside of obsessive-compulsive behaviour here. i don't think i have any other unflexible habits, but i trust my readership will let me know if i'm mistaken.
on to the next point of comment. this time jonathon quotes jeneane sessum on the growing perception of an elitist culture within weblogging:
Yes, I do think a divide is emerging within a medium that attracted us initially by its flatness?no one really wielding any more power than another except through the quality of their writing and ideas and the strength and power of their individual voice?
i have two comments on this. first, i think this divide has been emerging as long as weblogging has, and what's been emerging more recently is recognition of the divide. i'm reminded of being told once (i don't know if this is true, but it makes a good story either way) that the american government has only ever broken monopolies after they've destroyed themselves already. i think we might be recognizing the divide in weblogging after it would be possible to do much about it. i think the all-stars of weblogging have already left the rest of us with no reconciliation in sight. those of us further from these all-stars aren't particularly bothered by this, but the claims of impartiality are getting a bit tired.
my second comment is that this is exactly what happens with any group that is critical of another group's unfairness but offers no solution to it more substantial than "put us in charge." the communists were critical of capitalist unfairness, only to be unfair themselves as soon as they gained power. the democratic criticisms of bush's abuses of power sound an aweful lot like republican criticisms of clinton. and now the webloggers were critical of big media keeping them out only to be later accused of keeping others out. power is routinely abused, and anyone who doesn't recognize this and put systems in place to prevent it is no less likely to abuse it. they're just more likely to do so believing they are doing otherwise, which is even more troublesome.
with both alcohol and power, it seems moderation is a good idea. because both can too easily shift from means to ends.