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while we’re on the subject of how you protest and where you protest, and creative prosecution, the miami-dade independent review panel has released their draft reports on the ftaa demonstrations and the complaints that resulted.
draft documents are available in pdf format, and they are actively seeking public comment.
so bush spoke at the air force academy…
Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless, surprise attack on the United States. We will not forget that treachery, and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy.
Like the murderous ideologies of the 20th century, the ideology of terrorism reaches across boarders [sic], and seeks recruits in every country. So we’re fighting these enemies wherever they hide across the earth.
from the official white house transcript, no less… we now know that the terrorists are somehow reaching across our hospitality industry… which is just funny.
what’s not quite as funny is that thing about the “murderous ideologies of the 20th century” – because my history lessons didn’t include anything about the japanese empire recruiting south americans to fight in their war. and it didn’t include anything about the nazis recruiting in africa… in fact, the “murderous ideologies” (and i’m only assuming that’s what he was talking about, with the reference to the second world war and ruthless surprise attacks and all…) were pretty much racist ideologies – and certainly wouldn’t be recruiting around the world where the less-than-pure races were, y’know. living.
did i miss something? can anyone throw me a source that backs up bush’s statement? anyone got a global recruiting document from the history of the 20th century?
and while i’m at it… terrorism isn’t an ideology, it’s a method.
does bush actually believe this stuff he says? why do i even bother to ask anymore…?
i guess it was funny when quayle butchered the language, it was somehow innocent…
update 2004.06.05: doubleplusgood! the party workers voice their gratitude and joy!
i’m skipping the controversy, and even the “expert opinions” that come with the baggage of the copenhagen consensus. that’ll be hashed out elsewhere in much better form than i can offer here in my dark little corner of the net.
what’s interesting to me is the gross list of challenges…
economy
1 digital divide
2 financial instability
3 lack of intellectual property rights
4 money laundering
5 subsidies and trade barriers
6 transport and infrastructure
environment
7 air pollution
8 chemical pollution and hazardous waste
9 climate change
10 deforestation
11 depletion of the ozone layer
12 depletion of water resources
13 lack of energy
14 land degradation
15 loss of biodiversity
16 vulnerability to natural disasters
governance
17 arms proliferation
18 conflicts
19 corruption
20 lack of education
21 terrorism
health and population
22 drugs
23 hiv/aids
24 human settlements
25 lack of people in working age
26 malaria
27 living conditions of children
28 living conditions of women
29 non-communicable diseases
30 undernutrition / hunger
31 unsafe water and lack of sanitation
32 vaccine preventable diseases
that’s 32 challenges that face humanty… which ones would you prioritize? did they miss any?
ow, you can be charged with misdemeanor disturbing the peace (not too outrageous for a protest action), plus felony “false report of location of explosives” and “hoax device” if you happen to have wires attached to your fingers when you do it. the march of creative prosecution in america continues.
if this really was interpreted as a bomb threat by the boston police, and there wasn’t a several-block immediate evacuation, then you really should be careful going to boston for the democratic national convention – you could be dead before the police decide to rprotect you from the obvious (as in, standing in full view on the sidewalk) threats, let alone the sneaky ones. on the other hand, as i fear, if this was a case of finding any charge that might stick to silence a political protest, then the terrorists have won. and we did it to ourselves.
as disturbing as that is in this land of the free… more disturbing [to me] is this quote from the police…
So if Previtera didn’t mention a bomb, what exactly constitutes a bomb threat? “It can be implied, with fingers and wires — especially in a heightened state of alert, as we are,” says Officer Michael McCarthy, Boston Police Department spokesman. And McCarthy thinks this is common knowledge, even if the wires are accessories to a costume. “Mr. Previtera should know better. He’s a young adult educated at Boston College from a wealthy suburb. I’m sure he knows wires attached to his fingers, running to a milk crate, would arouse suspicion outside a military recruiters’ office [when he’s] dressed in prisoner’s garb. If he has any questions as to why people think he may’ve had a bomb, then he needs to maybe go back to Boston College to brush up on his public policy. Or at least common sense, but they can’t really teach that there.”
[via metafilter]
update: i couldn’t resist the irony… emphasis is mine.
Like other totalitarian movements, the terrorists seek to impose a grim vision in which dissent is crushed, and every man and woman must think and live in colorless conformity. So to the oppressed peoples everywhere, we are offering the great alternative of human liberty.
with some protestors still in prison…
and many hundreds or even thousands of people dead…
a nod of the roj-blog to those who stood in protest for something that they believed.
one of the oldest threads you’ll find woven through this blog is the idea of the attention market… generally approached from the perspective of the music business, with which i’m most familiar. but, the attention market isn’t limited to music, in fact, it is, by definition, everything you do with your time.
so to pick up the thread (this is the theme of the morning, the thread up-picking), i direct your attention (ahem) to an article that appeared in the new york times at the end of march. behold, the impact of the constrained attention-market on the business of television…
Leisure Pursuits of Today’s Young Man [new york times, march 29, 2004]The television industry was shaken last October when the ratings from Nielsen Media Research showed that a huge part of a highly prized slice of the American population was watching less television. As the fall TV season began, viewership among men from 18 to 34 fell 12 percent compared with the year before, Nielsen reported. And for the youngest group of adult men, those 18 to 24, the decline was a steeper 20 percent.
the times provides the comfortable little personal anecdote to make the story relevant to all their readers….
Leisure Pursuits of Today’s Young Man [new york times, march 29, 2004]Television, he says, is bogged down by commercials and teasers that waste his time.
i’ve got my own set of issues with television – and at the top of that list is the increasingly animated and screen real-estate-consuming overlay teasers that channels are imposing on my eyeballs. i’m annoyed with a station-id logo superimposed over a corner of the screen – these randomly-inserted animated masterpieces of self-promotion and viewer-annoyance are more than i’ll put up with. then there’s the issue of “faking up” news or documentary programming with recreations that aren’t explicitly labelled as recreations, and the “reality-ing up” of programmig that’s “real” except for the fact that it’s socially engineered and professionally edited. but i digress… the point is that i’m not watching much tv either, because television has gone out of its way to annoy me.
…and i’m not a big sports fan (we all have our quirks, i know..), but i was impressed to find wisdom from the field of sports as well. mark gets it. and he’s got a blog so i can link to it, which is nice. i’m not sure how far out of the way sports franchises are going to annoy their fans, but i imagine they’re putting at least as much effort into it as the television people.
…and i’m not buying a lot of “major label” music, because the major labels have gone out of their way to annoy me.
i’m going to suggest, on the record, in public, that these businesses (and all the others that depend on my limited attention) stop trying to find ways to annoy me, and instead focus on making me feel comfortable devoting my precious attention in their general direction. just a thought…
google, that means you too… i remember back around… 2000 or so (?), google added a little bit of code that brought the google home page “forward” automagically and refreshed the page at some relatively short interval. i found that exceedingly annoying, since i tended to keep a search engine window tucked away on the screen somewhere for handy internet searches, and it started “popping up” on me. i told them they were annoying me, and i’m sure i wasn’t the only one that complained, because they fixed it within a day or so.
be careful out there… you can have me for life, or until you annoy me too much, whichever comes first.
i’ve been out of the loop (and the echo chamber) for most of the year, and now we’re already in june. lots of odd things have come up, and while many things in my life have changed, some things feel incredibly stagnant – i dropped a lot of balls over the past six months. several of them aren’t really worth picking up – some of them are. i hope i have the wisdom in my old age to know which are which. today, i’m going to pick up a story about changing the world (i’ve never been accused of thinking too small…).
some time ago, joi talked about organizing a blogger expedition, of sorts, to africa.
i can only assume that the trip is still on, that joi and ethan have hordes of underlings tasked with bringing this idea to fruition… i’m sure it’s probably even approaching the end of the “idea” stage… after all, that was way back in february.
i pick this up again because this post was sitting in my “to blog” collection of drafts, also from february (19th), and it came with a name and a link. the name was ck prahalad, and the link was to a story in fast company back in 2001.
four months ago i thought ck prahalad was worth writing about. joi’s probably in an airplane somewhere on the way to europe, so i guess i should go ahead and get this thing written – if for no other reason than to give the guy something to read while he’s looking for things to do.
prahalad came to my attention in february in an ancient (internet time) archive…
Can C.K. Prahalad Pass the Test? [fast company, august 2001]…about five years ago, Prahalad read a book about the history of the potato and how its eventual spread transformed the world. Somehow, it made him think differently about the Internet. Just as international trade had fostered the potato’s growth, the Internet would foster the global diffusion of individual power — and that would transform the world.
The connection is perhaps obvious only to Prahalad. But that’s his way. “If you want new ideas, you have to push yourself into the periphery,” he says.
perhaps for reasons obvious only to me, this prahalad thing and joi’s africa thing clicked for me. the fast company article is mostly about prahalad starting a company, shortly after the great internet burst – praja. praja has since been sucked into tibco, and i don’t know if anything of substance remains – and by substance, i mean the vision and philosophy and management that got it started in the first place – i’m sure the code and the paperwork remains in some form or another.
i suppose that prahalad is best known for his paper co-authored with stuart hart, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid [pdf]. this is a paper that works for me – and not just because i’ve spent most of my adult life trying to squeeze a living out of the worst possible economic situations i could find. it’s one of those business-sense-versus-common-sense concepts that i am constantly amazed need to be discussed.
i’ve always been fascinated with business models that “lose money on every deal, but make up for it in volume.” i’m still amazed at things like mcdonald’s – i know the numbers work. i know there’s a mcdonald’s in nearly every conceivable space on the planet, but it’s still fascinating to me that a “speedee service system” spitting out 15-cent burgers and 10-cent fries can do enough volume to grow into the beast that it is today. but, this is america, and we do amazing things.
as an american, i realize i live a life of comfort and luxury, perhaps not the most comfortable and luxurious, but compared to how the other billions live, i’m not doing too bad (and $2-a-gallon gasoline, no matter how many times i hear about it on newscasts, isn’t going to shatter my world).
prahalad has since moved on and now seems to be working with the world resources institute on the digital dividend.
in typical roj-fashion, i probably don’t have a whole lot of new material to add to this, but i can lend some [odd] perspective. out here in my box, this makes sense.
ck prahalad, creating digital dividends conference“Don’t look at the poor and say there is no hope. Selling to the poor may be more profitable than selling to you and me. This is where the future is. Opportunities are everywhere. This (digital divide) is not about lack of opportunity; it is about lack of imagination.”
perhaps we should imagine a digital dividend project wrapped around the bloggers-to-africa trip? i think there’s an opportunity.
One preacher told fellow passengers as the Continental Airlines plane taxied down the runway, “Your last breath on earth is the first one in heaven as long as you are born again and have Jesus in your heart, ” according to FBI spokesman Paul Moskal.
Passengers on the Wednesday flight to Newark, New Jersey told a flight attendant, who alerted the plane’s captain, officials said. The captain turned the plane around.
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