Pickup Lines for Lady Luck. Want to get lucky? Just start thinking like you already are. [MetaFilter]

A Good Way to End the Year © 2003, John H. Farr This is from today's Counterpunch. It's a song Willie Nelson wrote last Christmas but will perform for the first time at a Kucinich for President fundraising concert in Austin, Texas on January 3, 2004. The song is called, "Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?" and I'd love to hear it. I doubt Counterpunch would mind my reposting the lyrics, and I'm sure Willie won't:

There's so many things going on in the world
Babies dying
Mothers crying
How much oil is one human life worth
And what ever happened to peace on earth
We believe everything that they tell us
They're gonna' kill us
So we gotta' kill them first
But I remember a commandment
Thou shall not kill
How much is that soldier's life worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth
(Bridge)
And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we've been told from our birth
Hell they won't lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liar's word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth
So I guess it's just
Do unto others before they do it to you
Let's just kill em' all and let God sort em' out
Is this what God wants us to do
(Repeat Bridge)
And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we've been told from our birth
Hell they won't lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liar's word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth
Now you probably won't hear this on your radio
Probably not on your local TV
But if there's a time, and if you're ever so inclined
You can always hear it from me
How much is one picker's word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth
But don't confuse caring for weakness
You can't put that label on me
The truth is my weapon of mass protection
And I believe truth sets you free
(Bridge)
And the bewildered herd is still believing
Everything we've been told from our birth
Hell they won't lie to me
Not on my own damn TV
But how much is a liar's word worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth

[FarrFeed]

British Self-Deprecation Taken to an Extreme. Guardian Unlimited | Sweet smell of failure. The possible loss of the much-hyped (here, anyway) Beagle 2 Mars Explorer has caused some dark humor. This article is a particularly funny example of it. It begins, “the stubbornly silent Mars probe Beagle 2 has reminded us what Britain does best: heroic failure….”... [Discourse.net]

Top Ten at BlogCritics. Here's a list of the various top ten lists posted at BlogCritics. That is, both this list and the entries on the list point to entries at BlogCritics. Oh, the hell with it.... [Joho the Blog]

Stepford Children. Stepford children as the new Stepford Wives? Margaret Talbot in The Atlantic makes the case for a more appropriate Stepford movie circa 2004. [MetaFilter]

Awesome Post from Scott Rosenburg.

Awesome Post !!!
Source: Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment

Yearend fugue
Blogging from me will be light over the holidays. Any spare time I get over the next week will be devoted, weather allowing, to building my kids a swing set in the backyard. But before the eggnog haze descends upon us, a few choice links.

First, Mother Jones has an interview with Tony Kushner in which the "Angels in America" playwright states, with crystalline precision, the essential fact of the 2004 election. This should be etched into the consciousness of everyone who hopes that things in the U.S. can be put back on course:

Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country's future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs -- if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate -- don't give him your vote. Listen, here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this. The GOP has developed a genius for falling into lockstep. They didn't have it with Nixon, but they have it now. They line up behind their candidate, grit their teeth, and help him win, no matter who he is. MJ: You're saying progressives are undone by their own idealism? TK: The system isn't about ideals. The country doesn't elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great.

One light of hope this year is that the citizenry has important and still-underestimated tools at its disposal to egg its leaders on to greatness. If you're keeping up with the blogosphere you may be sick to death by now of reading about the power of many-to-many decentralization, "social software" and the Dean campaign's remarkable online successes. But what if you're stuck inside the Beltway? Frank Rich's Sunday column this week serves as a useful reminder that most of the Washington press corps remains utterly and pathetically clueless about what has already happened during this election cycle. Jay Rosen's annotation of Rich's column is well worth reading, too.

So we're fortunate to live at a moment when the technologies many of us have enthusiastically embraced for two decades are showing signs of achieving social and political ends beyond simply bringing delight to geekdom or fueling the stock market. Cory Doctorow has good words here:

The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It's about realizing that all the really hard problems -- free expression, copyright, due process, social networking -- may have technical dimensions, but they aren't technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can't solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.

(And Kevin Werbach points out that technology and policy are always intertwined.)

Finally, as many of us retreat from the daily grind to take year-end stock, I want to offer you this wonderful passage that Kevin Kelly cited earlier this month on his Cool Tools blog. It's from a book titled "Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking," by David Bayles and Ted Orland, that I will have to add to my 2004 reading list.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work -- and learning from their mistakes -- the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Which, I suppose, is an anecdotal version of the Nike slogan, "Just do it." But I prefer the Samuel Johnson version: "Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome."

Thanks to Salon's subscribers for keeping us going through these thin years -- and special thanks to all the Salon bloggers for keeping their "quantity" and "quality" fires stoked. Happy holidays to all. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

[Dewayne Mikkelson and his Radio WebDog, Shadow]

It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Alton Brown analyzes the current Mad Cow scare. If you watch FoodTV, you may have seen his show "Good Eats" or at least read a previous thread. His rant reminds us that there are consequences to our lust of more for less. [MetaFilter]

The Daily Show.

Newsweek's feature on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

[The Agonist]

Monasteries of Mustang. A restoration project has been underway since 1998 to restore the 15th-century Tibetan Buddhist monastery wall paintings of Lo Monthang, a city in the kingdom of Mustang in northwest Nepal. The results have been very impressive. Mustang is also home to some amazing cave temples. [MetaFilter]

Kevin Kelly: Powering Virtuous Circles. In the latest edition of Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools ezine, some thoughts on giving:

There's no shortage of opportunities to support important causes. Lot of charities are local and community based. Some are more internationally- and future-oriented such as Amnesty International, EFF, Long Now Fondation, World Vision, the AFCLU, and Oxfam to name just a few. Everyone can add their favorite. But let's say you were interested in a "tool" to leverage the least amount of money into the largest measurable effect over time. For that I'd like to recommend a type of giving that multiplies itself. Over the years, these are the criteria I've adopted for this challenge:

1) The help is aimed at the lowest, those with the least, where small makes a huge difference.
2) The gift expands itself, gaining amplitude with each cycle.
3) The range is global.

Think of it as enabling philanthropy: take a minimum of money and aim it at the precise point where it can do the maximum good, multiplied by many generations. Maximum good is measured simply: when you enable someone to enable someone else. That is a virtuous circle. I've found the follow three do-good organizations to meet these criteria. They fund the neediest in the world. They are highly-evolved programs that produce amazing results. And one tangential result is that when we give to these three, we feel optimistic.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

A very good idea. The Whispering Wheel Ever see a brilliant invention and you wish you had thought of it? Simply genius. Might change the world for the better. [MetaFilter]

Newsmark.

Refdesk.com has links to every newspaper home page in the world. Very handy. A huge set of lists, though I'm already at least one missing paper: the Independent in North Carolina. Still, a highly impressive compilation.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Friedrich Nietzsche. "It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!" [Quotes of the Day]

R.U. Sirius interviews Richard Metzger. Boing Boing pal R.U. Sirius interviews Boing Boing pal Richard Metzger (Editor of Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult) in the latest issue of R.U.'s online magazine The NeoFiles:

"Most people have this assumption that magick is all about some kind of 'hocus pocus' or 'eye of newt, tongue of toad' thing or the sort of 'incense and affirmations' school of thought that a lot of New Agers and Wiccans are into. I don't see it that way. When I was a teenager, I read in one of the RE/Search books that a modern magician uses the tools of their time. It was Genesis P-Orridge, the rock star, who said that, and it made a major impression on me. He meant that a modern day "sorcerer" would employ video cameras, printing presses, television, electronic instruments, the Internet and so forth to work their magick and since so much of magick is about INTENT, then it stands to reason that something like the Internet can have magical uses. Advertising, too, is a magical act and so is PR, basically. Advertising allows these big corporations to create a desire in the center of your head that you should run out and buy things you don't need! That is magick, right? Right."

Link
[Boing Boing Blog]

Barry LePatner. "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." [Quotes of the Day]

Christmas Ornament.
Merry Christmas, Internet. The Opte Project Needs A Big Server for Christmas, Please Sir Internet, The 850k+ Motion Picture [Beyond the Beyond]

Terror alerts as breakfast cereal. Talented net.cartoonist Goopymart has shipped this new Terror Alert Chart just in time for the latest installment in the Homeland Security Free Floating Anxiety System. Link (Thanks, Goopymart!)
[Boing Boing Blog]

Best news summary yet. From Gen. J.C. Christian, Patriot: "We finally found Saddam. Sure, it took an invasion, nine months of military operations, thousands of lives, and 130,000 troops to do it, but we finally captured him. It's a great day for America. I'd cry if I wasn't so manly. "Now, it's time for the next step. We need to invade ourselves. Only then, will we nab the anthrax terrorist."... [MyIrony.com]

Perhaps the glass is half full. Mother Jones interviews Tony Kushner for their December issue. Kushner won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, Angels in America, which is currently showing as a two-part film on HBO. A bit of the interview that caught my attention: There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we've misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left... [kottke.org]

FUH2. FUH2! Flipping the bird at Hummers. Collaborative web photography just doesn't get much better than that. (With the possible exception of the Mirror Project, which, by the way, just hit 20,000. Congratulations!) [MetaFilter]

First Impression. "We're at our best when we're fully engaged."

-David Weinberger , Author, ``Small Pieces Loosely Joined``

[Fast Company]

- Posted by Richard Chlopan - 1:12:31 PM -

FIFTEEN THINGS. FIFTEEN THINGS THAT IT TOOK ME OVER 48 YEARS TO LEARN by Dave Barry 1. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night. 2. If you had to identify, in one word, the... [The Daily Irrelevant]

The Dark Side of Digital Identity. Steven Levy has an article in Newsweek about the dark side of digital identity. Levy ponders a world, very much in the offing, where the Internet becomes a tool for corporate and government interests by locking down every bit of data with strong identifying information and the authorizations to go with it. The upside, of course, is a world free of SPAM and viruses. The downside is that you might have to pay for every link you make in an HTML document. Sort of a virtual Singapore. This is a topic not enough people are paying attention to. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Phenomenal Photos. Some jaw-dropping scientifical photos here, suitable for framing.... [Joho the Blog]

Twelve (!) Free Dickens E-Books from Fictonwise. Wow! This is a great, great offer. Twelve free Dickens e-books from Fictionwise this week only.      [The Zimmerblog]

Arguments. Taran points to this piece on How to Argue by Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Humanities, The University of Texas at Arlington. Good Arguments are the lifeblood of intellectual existence. They have the ability to stretch your way of thinking and questioning your beliefs. The unfortunate part of argument as a device to... [raving lunacy]

Shadows are hardwired into the brain [New Scientist]

Free Wal-Mart.

Posted by The Happy Tutor

behind the megacorp: distrust antitrust. In Sunday's NYTimes, Steve Lohr asks Is Wal-Mart Good for America? but then usefully explains how Wal-Mart came about: changes in antitrust: Antitrust has traditionally been the tool for insuring competition and keeping a watchful eye on powerful companies [net.narrative environments] "We the people" - did we vote for this? Who made the call about the rules changes that made this particular ant heap possible, or inevitable? And were we informed? Or, should be bow down in the Wal-Mart parking lot and worship the building as the Free Market? [Wealth Bondage]

Harper's Magazine has an interesting taxonomy. (Scroll down.) [Scripting News]

Conversation: A Foundational Skill of Democracy.

Posted by The Happy Tutor

Thought of Doc, David and Cluetrain reading this. Civil Society itself is a many to many conversation. The net and blogging are subsets of civil society.

Non-Profit Quarterly, Fall 2001,The Magic of Dialogue by Daniel Yankelovich 
 
The very process of dialogue has a "civilizing" influence. Dialogue binds us together as communities. To engage in genuine dialogue is to create and strengthen such values of civil society as: building trust in one another; feeling familiar and comfortable together; finding it easy and natural to cooperate with one another and knowing how to create the common ground on which successful cooperation depends; weaving a complex web of working relationships that cut across institutional boundaries; and feeling a sense of identity with those with whom one shares community.

If the values of reciprocity, stewardship, responsibility, citizenship, civic virtue, and love describe various facets of how we take care of one another in a civil society, it matters a great deal whether we like, respect, trust, and understand one another or stereotype, distance, distort, and mistrust one another. Civil society stands or falls on this foundation of feelings. The magic of dialogue is that it really does enhance respect and acceptance of others, thereby creating community and social capital.

[Wealth Bondage]

The language of native American baskets. The language of native American baskets - simply gorgeous display of native basketry with commentary from five weavers who keep classic traditions alive. It includes contemporary and antique basketry ranging from burden baskets, jars, and ollas to fancy baskets and hats. This is exhibit is currently on view at the National Museum of the American Indian. [MetaFilter]

Great science fiction radio plays, open licensed and free for downloading. My pal hugh Spenser is a hell of a science fiction writer, and he's got a passion for the golden age of science fiction radio dramas. He wrote a six-part series of radio plays about the early days of science fiction fandom, which were produced by the wonderful Shoestring Theater and aired last summer on NPR. Hugh and Shoestring have released all six epiisodes as MP3s under a Creative Commons license that allows for the noncommercial redistribution -- give them a listen, they're way boss.

Amazing Struggles Episode 1, 28.8MB MP3 Link
Amazing Struggles Episode 2, 29MB MP3 Link
Amazing Struggles Episode 3, 29.4MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 1, 30.1MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 2, 31.2MB MP3 Link
Astonishing Failures Episode 3, 30MB MP3 Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Japanese Proverb. "The reverse side also has a reverse side." [Quotes of the Day]

Steven Weinberg. "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." [Quotes of the Day]

Here's a new thing to worry about
Fear of new things shortens life [New Scientist]

[Outwardly Normal 2]

Turning Heads With PowerPoint: David Byrne. In today's edition of Wired News, an interview I conducted with former Talking Heads member David Byrne about his art-explorations into PowerPoint:

From televised presidential aircraft carrier visits to the glut of unreal reality TV shows, "American culture is becoming a culture of pageants," says David Byrne. "We're surrounded by show, just as the Roman Empire turned to bread and circuses to hide other things that were taking place." To examine how the medium shapes the message, the former Talking Head uses Microsoft PowerPoint -- the ubiquitous presentation software -- as a creative tool.

His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

lightning. How to light a christmas tree? Well, like this.... [The Daily Irrelevant]

Climate Linked to the Quality of Stradivarius Violins. Nobody really knows why Stradivarius and other violins designed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries still sound so good compared to modern ones. Is it because of secret techniques, use of special wood or something else? Now, two researchers think the cold climate, a mini ice age which ruled over Europe during this period, is responsible for the quality of musical instrument making. [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

Damn the Weather up there. Thanks to Dave of How to Save the World for pointing out this environics survey. To quote Dave on the survey's findings: "What is even more striking is the trend over time. In the US, values are becoming more fatalistic, angry, apathetic and fearful (in 1992 American men and women were both in the upper right quadrant). Meanwhile, in... [Indigo Ocean]

The 90-Year-Old Bear © 2003, John H. Farr That's the financial, not the furry kind. And go ahead and scoff. I have it coming. But what Bill Fleckenstein's current "Contrarian Chronicles" column at MSNBC has to say about Sir John Templeton's take on the "broken" stock market and housing prices he says could dip to ten percent of where they are is satisfactorily scary reading for anyone who's bothered by this country's $31 trillion debt. (Eek!) The rest of you, just get on with your business. After all, I've waited 30 years for this to happen, and all it's gotten me is no Lexus SUV or farmhouse in Provence. Anway, here's a sample:

Moving on to housing prices, Sir John comments: "Every previous major bear market has been accompanied by a bear market in home prices. . . . This time, home prices have gone up 20%, and this represents a very dangerous situation. When home prices do start down, they will fall remarkably far. In Japan, home prices are down to less than half what they were at the stock market peak." Sir John adds, "A home price decline of as little as 20% would put a lot of people in bankruptcy." Sir John also had a few words about debt -- a four-letter word that folks seem not to care about: "Emphasize in your magazine how big the debt is. . . . The total debt of America is now $31 trillion. That is three times the GNP of the U.S. That is unprecedented in a major nation. No nation has ever had such a big debt as America has, and it's bigger than it was at the peak of the stock market boom. Think of the dangers involved. Almost everyone has a home mortgage, and some are 89% of the value of the home (and yes, some are more). If home prices start down, there will be bankruptcies, and in bankruptcy, houses are sold at lower prices, pushing home prices down further." On that note, he has a word of advice: "After home prices go down to one-tenth of the highest price homeowners paid, then buy."

[FarrFeed]

Google. Go to google, type in "miserable failure," and click "I'm Feeling Lucky."... [The Daily Irrelevant]

Portable and off the grid. Necessity Is the Mother of Invention. (NY Times, reg. req.) Amy Smith teaches MIT students about the politics of delivering technology to poor nations and the nitty-gritty of mechanical engineering and helped start the IDEAS competition; she herself designed (among other things) a screenless hammer mill suited to third-world conditions and using "materials available to a blacksmith in Senegal."

Smith's entire life is like title="Mohammed Bah ABBA -- A True Human Scientist">Mohammed Bah Abba, a Nigerian teacher who came up with the pot-within-a-pot system. With nothing more than a big terra-cotta bowl, a little pot, some sand and water, Abba created a refrigerator -- the rig uses evaporation rather than electricity to keep vegetables cool. Innovations that target the poorest of the poor don't have to be complicated to make a big difference. The best solution is sometimes the most obvious.

A rare optimistic story for these downbeat times. [MetaFilter]

Soylent Dean poster. Nice work from the Dean campaign: downloadable Soylent Dean posters. These are the next "When you download MP3s, you're downloading communism" posters, or possibly the next "When you download porn, God kills a kitten" posters -- mark my words! 520K PDF Link)
[Boing Boing Blog]

Where's Bill?. If you can offer the world a strip like Calvin and Hobbes, don't you have a responsibility to keep working? The Cleveland Scene travels to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, trying to track down its most famous (and famously reclusive) resident, Calvin and Hobbes author Bill Watterson. Along the way, the reporter contemplates micturating Calvins, burning paintings, the cost of hewing to one's principles, and the utter vacuity of Jim Davis's soul. In the end, there's even a brief encounter with a man who may or may not have once made millions happy by drawing a six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger. [MetaFilter]

NaNoWriMo Book. The I Ching interpreted by my photographs. (This is the book, but like I said, there's lots of errors and omissions, to be fixed soon. But look, I got it done with 3 minutes to spare!) [101-365]

Foot in Mouth award. Donald Rumsfeld has won the 2003 Foot in Mouth award. The award is given by the Plain English Campaign for the most baffling quote by a public figure, but they don't seem to realize that Rumsfeld was actually creating poetry. I wonder who will present the award. [MetaFilter]

Salon has a good article on MoveOn (worth clicking thru the ad). Our complete Baseline package on the Dean campaign, due out next week, has a sidebar about activist Web groups including MoveOn and some of its conservative counterparts.

[EdCone.com]