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“Let's slow down the rhetoric, cut back on the scare tactics, and pray for peace. Let's spend less of our money on plastic sheets and duct tape, and more on candles of peace!”Norman Kember - kidnapped in Iraq yesterday.
Purged. New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion -- it's free of all of those things now. God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there -- and now we're going to start over again."
Rev Bill Shanks
Parasitic media... Just curious, but does the Sunday Times ask permission - or pay - when it reproduces vast swathes of the best blog reporting from inside New Orleans?
And wouldn't it be possible to credit Michael Barnett by name? Or do only 'real journalists' deserve proper credits?
And finally, is it credible that Sunday Times' reporter Tony Allen-Mills just happened to chance on the "Don't try - I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman, two shotguns and a claw hammer" sign - when it has been all over the web since AP's Bill Haber posted a shot of it last Thursday?
(Allen-Mills mistranscribes to have the poor guy sleeping with 'ugly women' - an additional, and unnecessary slur...)
Devastating news from London this morning.
BBC is attempting to find out what's happening: "If you're in the area we would like to hear from you. Send us your comments using the form below including if possible a phone number. If you have any pictures please send them to yourpics@bbc.co.uk or by mobile phone to 07921 648159."
Rigging war games: the Millennium Challenge fiasco...
Phil Nicholas, killed in Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka. Per Goodman, owner of the Stardust Hotel, was also swept away. Per is survived by his partner, Merete Scheller, who managed to climb onto a roof. The Stardust's guest book is filling up with messages of sympathy.
Ski online. "The Bro Model was the first ski ever conceived online by a group of people who met online, run a business online, sell the ski online, and chronicled the entire process online during that six month period, from Mt Hood to Argentina to Tahoe.
"A hot topic on Internet ski forum messages boards in countries everywhere, the Bro Model exists as a tribute to the worldwide Maggot brotherhood's ability to manifest the greatest of things, without ever meeting face-to-face. Our most sincere thanks to the Bros that made it possible - the Maggots."
Don’t give us your money. It’s a long story, but I ended up selling some theatre tickets for the Producers on eBay after one of the people I was going with had to have an operation.
It didn’t seem right to make money from an illness, so I thought I’d donate the profit to charity. Via PayPal.
Email to the Royal Marsden and the Leukaemia Research Fund (two charities I have a strong affinity with):
“I have around £250 that I would like to donate which is in a PayPal account. Will you accept a donation via PayPal? If so, please send me your PayPal details.”In case they didn’t know how big PayPal was these days, I sent them a link showing that $17bn of PayPal transfers are now made a year.
A few hours later, a bloke from Leukaemia Research phones up - seemingly under the impression I’m engaged in Internet fraud.
Convinced that I'm not trying to rip off people with nasty blood disorders, he explains that it would be too expensive for Leukaemia Research to set up a PayPal account and, if that’s the only way I’m prepared to pay, they’d rather not have the money.
The guy had clearly never heard of PayPal and had no idea how it worked. Nor had he any interest in finding out. But he was quite sure he didn't think that much of me, my money or the world's other 56 million PayPal account holders.
The Marsden is yet to get back to me.
Index on Censorship: "founded in 1972 by Stephen Spender with the goal to protect the basic human right of free expression."
From the Index in 2005:
"Theo van Gogh was a fundamentalist believer in the right to free expression, his 2 November murder may have been his very own 'martyrdom operation'...
The September 11 attacks on the US set the perfect stage for Van Gogh, a man who addictively cultivated controversy...
Cleverly he would often seek out the most extreme and ignorant opponents for his public battles, reinforcing the perception that only the extreme and ignorant opposed him...
The inevitable violence of their response was grist to his mill. He reinforced Fortuyn's achievement of turning debate on minority rights and integration into a baying dogfight. Theo van Gogh became the Jerry Springer of Dutch political discourse...
Fortuyn founded a land where the spoken language is bullshit and where van Gogh is its poet laureate.
Van Gogh's juvenile shock-horror art finally led him to build an exploitative working relationship with Somalia-born Dutch MP Ayann Hirsi Ali, whose terrible personal experience of abuse has driven her to a traumatizing loss of her Muslim faith.
Together they made a furiously provocative film that featured actresses portraying battered Muslim women, naked under transparent Islamic-style shawls, their bodies marked with texts from the Koran that supposedly justify their repression. Van Gogh then roared his Muslim critics into silence with obscenities. An abuse of his right to free speech, it added injury to insult by effectively censorsing their moderate views as well...
Fortuyn and van Gogh freed the Dutch from responsibility to rationally debate the country's cultural crisis. So without fear of further disturbing already ravaged public sensitivities, applaud Theo van Gogh's death as the marvellous piece of theatre it was.
A sensational climax to a lifetime's public performance, stabbed and shot by a bearded fundamentalist, a message from the killer pinned by a dagger to his chest, Theo van Gogh became a martyr to free expression. His passing was marked by a magnificent barrage of noise as Amsterdam hit the streets to celebrate him in the way the man himself would have truly appreciated.
And what timing! Just as his long-awaited biographical film of Pim Fortuyn's life is ready to screen. Bravo, Theo! Bravo!"
Schrodinger's new cat.
Juxtaposed headlines on Google news today...
From light to shade Interviewed by the BBC today...I won't name the correspondent, but the way he corrected his introduction was telling: "We'll be exploring these issues in light of the US election - I mean in the shadow in the US election."
A leading pollster comments: "It's close, it's close, it's close. The candidates are locked in a dead heat among Catholics, young voters, voters over 70, men and women, and independents."
The Guardian makes a decisive intervention in the US election...
Team America... "The movie was originally given a NC-17 Rating by the MPAA. It was reduced to an "R", after a sex scene between two puppets was edited." Long wait, though - January release date in the UK.
Some thoughts on consultation over at IdealGovernment...
Open up public documents... making public documents (like the Butler report) linkable and commentable...
Trustworthiness on the wikipedia.... an experiment.
The Long Tail: "In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again...
What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.
Particularly notable is that when Krakauer's book hit shelves, Simpson's was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson's book - and if they had, they wouldn't have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.
This is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it...
People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture). "
Wired