connecting*the*dots

Eastward (pg. 16)

[…]

Along the Leestown Road, near an old whitewashed springhouse made useless by a water-district pipeline, I stopped to eat lunch. Downstream from the spring where butter once got cooled, under peeling sycamores, the clear rill washed around clumps of new watercress. I pulled makings for a sandwich from my haversack: Muenster cheese, a collup of hard salami, sourdough bread, horseradish. I cut a sprig of watercress and laid on it, then ate slowly, letting the gurgle in the water and the gutteral trilling of red-winged blackbirds do the talking. A noisy, whizzing gnat that couldn’t decide whether to eat on my sandwich or ear joined me.

Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I’d never have found this spring under the sycamores. Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest. Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s — believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get — that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.

Etymology: curious, related to cure, once meant “carefully observant.” Maybe a tonic of curiosity would counter my numbing sense that life inevitably creeps toward the absurd. Absurd, by the way, derives from a Latin word meaning “deaf, dulled.” Maybe the road could provide a therapy through the observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye open an inner one. STOP, LOOK, LISTEN, the old railroad crossing sign warned. Whitman calls it “the profound lesson of reception.”

New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?

John has topped himself with this shot. Check out the entire set.

I got into NYC late last night and just checked my news aggregator. What a great surprise. Best wishes to the Carroll family and a thank you to the men who ultimately decided to do the right thing and set her free.

Now, someone find them and hold them accountable for murdering Allan Enwiyah, Jill’s translator.

You gotta love the Aunt Jemima bottle as Ann. More can art over here.

Terry Heaton
Telcos buying legislation to screw you and me

[…]

Meanwhile, there’s a House hearing tomorrow on a new bill that gives the Telcos what they want and will alter the way the internet is used by allowing them to divide bandwidth into a haves and have-nots system. By refusing to spell out net neutrality, this bill gives that authority to, of all people, the FCC and sticks a screw you finger in the eyes of small businesses and entrepreneurs in the U.S.

Declan McCullagh writes for CNet News:

“A November draft of Barton’s (Republican Joe Barton of Texas) bill (click here for PDF) explicitly said broadband providers “may not block, or unreasonably impair or interfere with” Internet access. The final version (PDF), on the other hand, simply gives the Federal Communications Commission the authority to set rules and publish violations.”

Barton released the text of the bill (the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act) Monday and scheduled a hearing for tomorrow. A vote could come as early as next week. Why the hurry? Because that’s the way flimflammery works.

Despite all the nice rhetoric about the Telcos needing to recoup their costs, the reality is that this legislation has been bought and paid for by Telco profits, and the only thing it guarantees is the furtherance of that. Call or email your Representatives and tell them you want net neutrality spelled out in the bill.

If you care about this and other internet freedom issues, I’d advise you to use this as a reason to pop on over to EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) and become a member supporter.

UPDATE: Kevin Marks has written a smart post on the Telcos trying to force their obsolete dedicated pipes model on an already supportive network model.

Within hours of posting my need for pro-bono legal assistance in setting up The People, Yes! as a non-profit organization, Liza Sabater got the word out at culturekitchen and Sue Polinsky — local blogger, tech genius and contributer to everything non-profit — pointed me to David Kyger at the local law firm, Smith Moore LLP.

Today, I’m very grateful to be able to announce that David and Jordan Nance have taken my project under their legal wings.

Thank you, gentlemen.

Artist: Lou Reed
Song: Magic And Loss

==========

When you pass through the fire, you pass through humble
you pass through a maze of self doubt
When you pass through humble, the lights can blind you
some people never figure that out

You pass through arrogance, you pass through hurt
you pass through an ever present past
And it’s best not to wait for luck to save you
pass through the fire to the light

Pass through the fire to the light
pass through the fire to the light
It’s best not to wait for luck to save you
pass through the fire to the light

As you pass through the fire, your right hand waving
there are things you have to throw out
That caustic dread inside your head
will never help you out

You have to be very strong, ’cause you’ll start from zero
over and over again
And as the smoke clears there’s an all consuming fire
lying straight ahead

Lying straight ahead
lying straight ahead
As the smoke clears there’s an all consuming fire
lying straight ahead

They say no one person can do it all
but you want to in your head
But you can’t be Shakespeare and you can’t be Joyce
so what is left instead

You’re stuck with yourself and a rage that can hurt you
you have to start at the beginning again
And just this moment this wonderful fire
started up again

When you pass through humble, when you pass through sickly
when you pass through I’m better than you all
When you pass through anger and self deprecation
and have the strength to acknowledge it all

When the past makes you laugh and you can savor the magic
that let you survive your own war
You find that that fire is passion
and there’s a door up ahead not a wall

As you pass through fire as you pass through fire
trying to remember its name
When you pass through fire licking at your lips
you cannot remain the same

And if the building’s burning move towards that door
but don’t put the flames out
There’s a bit of magic in everything
and then some loss to even things out

Some loss to even things out
some loss to even things out
There’s a bit of magic in everything
and then some loss to even things out

Jeff Jarvis

BULLSHIT!

[…]

Pulling back from the political absurd to the culturally sublime, it is also utterly ridiculous that the FCC contends it is enforcing community standards when it says that the nation as a whole finds bullshit to be among of the most offensive words in the language. Show me the man or woman — or, yes, child on a playground — who has not said “bullshit.� Show me one, and you will have found me a liar. Go to Google and you will find 30 million uses of bullshit. Bullshit is part of our language, part of our culture, part of our politics, part of our democracy. Those are not our community standards the FCC is enforcing. They are enforcing the fetish of the so-called Parents Television Council and their ilk. By stretching to make shit not merely indecent but now profane and by stretching again to include the s-word variants in that ruling — thus specifically encompassing bullshit — the FCC far overextended not only its dubious authority but also common sense. Gotcha again.

So let’s say the FCC reconsiders its foolish ways and decides that bullshit is, indeed, political speech and thus protected beyond even its reach. This, too, illustrates the absurdity of all this. What happens when that protestor yells the next time that Bush’s war is the byproduct of a rat or a monkey or an owl? Does the FCC has to decide which animals’ shit is protected? That is the level of absurdity we have reached here.

At the Foursquare conference recently, I questioned FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, saying that in the room we were hearing CEOs of major worldwide corporations calling on the FCC to pay attention to the urgent business of preparing our telecommunications infrastructure to protect us in case of disaster or attack and also the vital necessity to catch up to Korea and even France in broadband to protect our industry and our future. Yet, I complained, he was wasting his time instead, on farts.

And bullshit.

[…]

Unbelievable. Read the entire article, it’s spot on.

I need a few hours of consulting to help get thepeopleyes.org set up as a non-profit. If there are any lawyers out there with non-profit experience, and are willing to donate a little time and/or a few emails, I’d really appreciate it. Please comment here or get in touch with me at spcoon~at~seancoon~dot~org

(I’ll also gladly take advice from people with experience in non-profits)

UPDATE: I just spoke with a law firm here in Greensboro that might be able to assist me — pro-bono — on this project. Once our relationship is official, I’ll post the name of the firm and the gentleman who gave his valuable time on the phone today. Thanks for the tip, Sue!

Nicholas Carr:
“…The whole reason businesses exist is to control forces that are hard to control.”
(hey Nicholas, try keeping the comment permalinks active so next time I can properly attribute your quote)

Busting out the HOWTO Corporate Blog post over a whole bunch of nothing…

UPDATE: I’m putting where my money where my mouth is and picking up the X-Box 360. I’ve been a PS2 guy forever, with more than 25 games and waiting patiently for the PS3, but you know what? Sony’s DRM / Rootkit stupidity compared to Scoble’s integrity has proved to be the tipping point for me.

And I’m Mac addict! (read = Microsoft hater)

C’mon Locutus, quantify this decision with a corporate metric.

I met John Ford at the Greensboro Web Design Meetup he was running last month. Over the following week, we traded emails and eventually decided to share portfolio and application ideas over a six-pack in my home office. After going through some work and chatting up each of our killer app ideas, we ended up discussing how we make software, going back and forth between Getting Real and Cooper’s Goal Directed methodology.

As John was about to go on a month long trip to Asia and Australia, I gave him my copy of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to enjoy on the trip, but under one condition: he had to take a few pictures of it at various exotic locals on his trip.

C’mon John, one more!

More than a half-million people protested horrible Republican Immigration bills in L.A and across the country, but since 1998 more than 3000 people have died in the desert heat while trying get to a job mowing your lawn, watching your kids and rebuilding our communities.

How do we thank them?

Tony Herrera
“U.S. to Illegal Immigrants: Drop Dead.”

As Spring arrives and the days become warmer my mind begins to focus on Summer. I think of Summer and the promise of scorching 100+ degree days in our deserts of Arizona. While the heat begins to rise in our deserts our Congress is involved in its own intense and heated debate over illegal immigration. No matter what position one might take on the issue of illegal immigration the fact remains that this year over 300 men, women and children will die as they make a desperate attempt to illegally enter our country.

During the period of 1998-2004 over 3000 deaths were recorded in the surrounding desert areas of Tucson, Arizona. The deaths are a result of a shift in migration patterns by illegal immigrants as they sought alternative routes due to an increased border patrol presence and fences built on the border between San Diego and Tijuana. The beefed up Border Patrol presence and fencing resulted in the smugglers and immigrants moving further inland to desolate areas in their effort to reach the U.S. undetected.

The majority of the immigrant smuggling trade is now transacted in the Naco, Arizona and Naco, Sonora, Mexico region. It is no small secret that the Mexican town of Naco functions mostly as launching point from which Mexican and Central American immigrants attempt their perilous journey into the United States. The deaths have continued for the past 10 years and they have attracted the attention of various groups such as No More Deaths an organization that has openly provided humanitarian aide despite the risk of arrest and fines for their actions. A list of some of the dead is provided here.

As the Senate prepares to tackle the most sweeping immigration reforms in years, a top Democrat has vowed to do everything in his power, including filibuster, to thwart Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist’s proposed overhaul. Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, has stated that he would “use every procedural means at my disposal” to prevent Frist from bypassing the Judiciary Committee. Majority Leader Frist has made clear the Senate will take up his proposal next week in the event the 18-member committee fails to complete a broader bill.

Whether or not Congress can agree on a comprehensive immigration bill remains to be seen. In the meantime a bill approving a new 700 mile long fence on the Mexican border with Arizona has been passed. The bill will force employers to check the Social Security numbers of new hires against a national database. The bill also contains all sorts of punitive measures - such as making it a felony for illegal immigrants to be here and making it a felony for anyone who knowingly helps an illegal immigrant.

Twenty years after passing the most sweeping immigration reform our leadership in Congress now fails to reach common ground on immigration reform and has enacted potentially dangerous and regressive immigration policies.

In California issue of illegal immigration has been a hotly contested debate especially since then Gov. Davis granting Illegal Immigrants Drivers Licenses. The much touted accomplishment of Sen. Gil Cedillo were short lived as Gov. Schwarznegger citing Homeland Security issues forced the Assembly to cave and grant a repeal of the same law.

As we continue this contentious debate angry voices will rise from both sides, as surely as the heat in the Arizona desert. Indeed protest and demonstrations are already being scheduled in major cities including Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona.

The images to come will likely be seized upon by our mainstream media and used to boost ratings but will fail to provide any real contribution towards healthy dialogue that could contribute towards resolving the issue of illegal immigration. The images that our mainstream media is likely to provide will be those of groups engaged in heated exchange of words - such as inviduals from the Minuteman Project and Immigration Watchdog locked in angry shouting matches with pro immigration groups the likes of NCLR and MALDEF.

As insults get traded and angry voices rise during our Nations debate on illegal immigration, the death toll will also rise in the sorching heat of the Arizona desert.

Something has to give.

Jesus’ General hit his stride a long time ago, but he’s in the zone this week. If you don’t know the General by now, well, you’re going to hell.

Repent sinners.

Some of the General’s recent classics:

• My response to the vile bastards who are trying to destroy America by destroying me
• Red State Jesus
• Three Years

The Consumerist
Ma Bell To Shut Down New Orleans WiFi

One of the surprising acts of compassion and competency that came out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was that the city began providing a free WiFi service to business owners and residents whose phone service had been wiped out. The 512 kbps service allowed many business owners to begin struggling back to their feet and corporate sponsors like Yahoo and Google were in discussion to expand the service in the coming months.

Well, no longer. Telecommunication lobbyists from Bell South have put the lean on New Orleans, demanding that the free service be outlawed. Apparently, it violates a law that prevents the public sector from competing with the telecommunication sector. By law, then, cities can provide no more than a 128 kbps service to citizens.

“The vendors, the BellSouths of this world, are not only going to force us back, making our existing Wi-Fi illegal, but also they want to close a loophole for emergencies so that we would not do this again,� says Greg Meffert, New Orleans’ chief information officer. But Greg’s no lily-livered pansy. “If I have to go to jail, I guess I will,� he said. “If they really want to play that game, I guess they are right. But we simply cannot turn off these few lifelines we have to our city and businesses.�

[…]

More sources

• FactoryCity - BellSouth to New Orleans: Let Them Eat Cake
• Sploid - Telecoms out to kill NOLA’s free WiFi
• WebProNews - Telecoms Better Keep An Eye On The Big Easy
• Red Herring - WiFi Fight Brews In Big Easy

(via missrogue)

I had planned on writing a long review of V and linking over to current memes that voice a similar “power to the people” message, but there’s no need.

The people are on it.

If you’re a blogger that watches TV not only for it’s unbelievably passive entertainment and programmed misinformation (heh), but to find video clips that just might reinforce your thesis in your next post, I’ve found a service that you need to keep on your radar.

My good friend, Jonathan Daniel, has been working diligently for the past few years as the VP of Product Development at Critical Mention. A few weeks ago he gave me a tour of their services, and a beta account to play with. Let me tell you, as a blogger, the functionality they’ve developed to date (and in the wings) completely blew me away.

From their web site:

Broadcast media is the number one force shaping public opinion and driving consumer decisions every day. Every company and organization with public relations, crisis management, investor relations, competitive intelligence and brand management initiatives must track critical mentions on broadcast TV in order to monitor public perception, respond to events and crises, and gather market intelligence.

In contrast to traditional broadcast monitoring services, Critical Mention employs technology to monitor broadcast television in real-time. Using Critical Mention’s CriticalTVSM search platform, customers can view their broadcast clips and transcripts within seconds of airing.

Yeah, you read that correctly: Instantaneous transcripts AND broadcast clips. Drooling yet?

CM’s service uses the practically ubiquitous implementation of closed-captioned satellite feeds as a source for full-text searches. The instant digitizing of each broadcast to their servers allows for instantaneous clipping of video surrounding the term or phrase being searched.

While the interface design is somewhat clunky, the functionality is superb. The above image shows the result of a search for the term “blogging.” As you roll over the results on the right, a vid-cap puppets on the left with the transcript of the one minute clip and the highlighted search query. Found a broadcast that you’d like to use? Simply click on the expand button to expand the clip to display up to seven, one-minute clips that surround the queried term.

Once expanded, the current version allows the user to save the selected clips to a working library, send an email of the video and transcript or order hard copies — very smart and useful services for CM’s current business model.

CM gained financing and grew over the last few years by partnering with broadcasters to enable partnered companies to track mentions of products, services, employees, intellectual property, etc. across the airwaves.

To a number of bloggers, this concept might sound very familiar.

Back in November, Daniel Lyons (Forbes.com) espoused a similar position on media monitoring, except Lyons’ position was steeped in venom, advising corporations to explicitly track posts from bloggers. Once published, he immediately drew the ire of bloggers for his ridiculous and stereotypical assertions of blogging in general and for his positioning of such monitoring as Fighting Back.

The customer conversation isn’t one to fight, it’s one to join.

So how can this proprietary service add to the richness of blogging? The advent of YouTube — with their free, unlimited storage of video and automatic generation of code that enables bloggers to present in-line video — has prepped the web publishing market for Critical Mention to open up their service model outside the walls of partnered corporations.

A few examples of how a professional / public version of CM might be used:

• An analyst site, such as TheStreet.com (disclosure: I’m consulting on the current redesign), could present inline media coverage of companies and news events to fortify the context of their assertions
• Media Matters, a conservative misinformation analyst site, would be able to greatly reduce their investment in tracking staff and hardware
• Blogumentaries, such as The War Tapes and The Echo Chamber Project could gather and post media clips as research and/or extensions to their narrative thesis
• Bloggers in general would go gonzo for such access to media clippings, as the service would replace the time consuming tasks of manually recording programs or scouring the internet for the chance of discovering a timely, linkable/postable file.

The usefulness of the service is practically endless and the various business models are just waiting to be developed.

In the realm of unbundled content, each re-post of video content is actually a form of advertising for both the original broadcast and the broadcasting network. Once a value proposition has been quantified by CM, I’d imagine that forward-thinking broadcasting ownership would be gung-ho to participate in such a far-reaching, viral broadcast model.

CM could then serve as the middle man, establishing both a professional fee-based service level and a free public blogging service level.

This service could truly “2.0″ media in one swooping move.

Jimmy Carter is now a blogger:

There is a desperate need in America to block and reverse the radical departures from the moral and ethical principles that have made ours a great nation.

This is not a conflict between liberals and conservatives or even between Democrats and Republicans. The unprecedented changes in policy are from those of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower, and also, of course, from those of Democratic presidents.

These changes involve the most basic aspects of America’s moral values: peace, human rights, justice, the environment, fiscal responsibility, respects for the civil rights of Americans, the honoring of international commitments, separation of church and state, and the control of nuclear weapons.

[…]

The man may not have been the best politician, but he’s an extraordinary human being.

Blogger gal vs. Newspaper guy!

Well, not quite, but it makes a great lede, eh?

Sue, Lex and I met over lunch yesterday to discuss potential strategies for evolving the News & Record’s citizen journalism efforts. And no, we didn’t have a stare off.

Man… Lex is in a tough position; he’s completely open to forward-thinking ideas (I mean, his title is Citizen Journalism Coordinator), but he also seems to be up against a bottom line business that’s very adverse to risk. Apparently, changing the approach to meeting a historically profitable bottom line is a tough sell, even within an industry that’s on shaky ground.

It’s amazing how palpable sand can become to the heads of industry during innovative times.

That’s not to say that the N&R hasn’t been progressive with their citizen journalism efforts to date — they have — but Lex knows that in just a few years the N&R (both print and online) will have to directly compete with new forms of dynamic, community-based, participatory, online news applications (e.g. Newsvine), which will be free of legacy organizational overhead and be able to react with agility.

And you can’t forget those pesky bloggers.

The N&R needs to step up their game.

So we chatted. And ate. And chatted some more. And by the time our conversation came to a close, we had a number of interesting ideas on the table:

• Personal Relationships - Lex is looking to develop relationships with members of the Greensboro community, offering them the opportunity to use N&R resources (legal, photography, journalist feedback, etc.) to craft substantive citizen journalism. To me, this approach perfectly fits the future of print newspapers, as time-based news is dead on paper. They’ll have to compete as daily magazines (more depth, less coverage).

• Real-time Blogging Input - I suggested promoting a tagging schema that matched the classification structure of both the paper and the site:

  For example, identify and promote a unique set of “greensboro[xxxx]” tags, for anyone to use on blog posts, flickr images, etc. when generating Greensboro specific news, events, opinions, etc.

  Internally, the N&R editorial staff would then set up RSS aggregators with subscriptions of each tag search result.

  The real-time input of potential stories and assets would increase exponentially, while the N&R would continue to have editorial control, as the aggregator would serve as the queue into the publishing process

• Representation Across The Community - Sue focused on the concept of encouraging participation along the lines of community diversity (her connections with Uplifter is right along the lines of my focus with The People, Yes!). We talked about ideas ranging from developing blogging 101 material to share with a non-computer literate demographic to grass roots representation within sub-communities (e.g. school board meetings) to encourage live-blogging with the unique tag identifiers

An interesting start, but there’s still one major component that we’re skirting: Revenue incentives.

Lex made it clear that creating a participatory revenue model doesn’t fall under his charge, but the N&R is open to ideas. My perspective is that without incentive, participation will be lighter, with less quality and dedication. Any revenue generated out of these relationships should be viewed as found money, so share and share alike:

• To tap into the wisdom of the blogosphere by republishing the original post or an edited version, a buisness needs to develop a revenue model that fairly represents such a relationship.
• To partner with individuals from the community to generate community-based journalism, a business needs to develop a revenue model to encourage such a partnership.

It comes down to this: Pony up or we, the citizens, will simply get together and form collaborative blogs, creating relevant identities, gain a better footprint in Google over a 3 month period of time and, eventually, sign up with BlogAds to support our own voice.

That’s not a threat. ;-) I’m looking forward to our next conversation, folks.

UPDATE: Six months after the fact, in the NORG session at ConvergeSouth, Ed Cone backs up my philosophy regarding partnering with local bloggers/writers in a revenue share program.

Yesterday, Andy and I had the opportunity to rap with a handful of UNCG film students, as his former professor (Matt Barr) invited him to present his documentary, reveal his creative process and expose the realities of the distribution game. I tagged along to introduce the possibilities of the web; how it can be used as both a creative channel and a viral mechanism for distribution.

Andy dove right in and introduced the story behind his documentary (Greensboro’s Child) to the students — the ties between the 1979 KKK shootings of five worker’s rights protesters and the unjust sentencing of a civil rights activist’s child to two life sentences for unarmed burglary just 7 years later.

The entire time I sat listening intently to my brother’s passionate presentation, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of times he mentioned his desire to not only go back into the film and improve upon his student-level production techniques (he began the documentary back in 1996), but to continue to document the unfolding story by re-editing the film and updating it with the findings of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

While I completely understand his intent and agree with the desired results, I just don’t agree with the approach — not in this day and age.

As a blogger and an enthusiast of web/documentary projects like the Echo Chamber Project and The War Tapes, my perspective of an evolving narrative is completely different than Andy’s.

When I think about Greensboro’s Child, I view it as a foundation of knowledge; an element that can be built upon with new elements of video, images and text to create an even broader and more reputable narrative thesis. It’s an impossible goal to continuously include the numerous, ever-evolving tentacles of the story (the Greensboro police department, the community attitude, etc.) within a single 1.5 hour long documentary.

So once the lights came back on and the students finished their Q&A, I introduced myself, a bit of my career history and proceeded to find my zone… Somewhere in the midst of my presentation, I introduced:

• myself as an activist, rather than a designer (a first)
• the possibilities of using cutting edge video distribution channels to introduce their voices to the world, such as youtube, currentTV, democracy
• how a mixture of blogging and video can have a more lasting reach than both tv and film (Rocketboom for example)

By the time my diatribe subsided, I found myself engaged in a conversation surrounding The People, Yes. Once we moved beyond the concept of the collaborative blog for the homeless of Greensboro, we evolved into a conversation about weekly trips into the community to capture the various stories of the underprivileged, on camera, and turning it back around as weekly shorts in a vlog. Heads were nodding left and right as the film students seemed eager to participate in such a project.

So I now have a new angle to TPY… and quite possibly a pool of energetic, dedicated, creative filmmakers to participate in the cause.

While walking off the UNCG campus, I turned around to take in a final glimpse… something, I don’t know what, just seemed different…

The making of…

Artist: T-K.A.S.H.
Song: Made In America

==========

[The Last Poets - updated by Ethan]

I love niggas, because niggas are me. And I should only love that which is me. I love that you niggas go through changes, love that you niggas act, love that you niggas make some plays and shoot the shit. But there’s one thing about niggas that I don’t love. Niggas are scared of revolution.

[T-K.A.S.H.]

There’s a war going on at home
It’s like Baghdad
In American cities where all the blacks at
Little kids that pack straps and backpacks
Who clap cats for scratch snacks and gas masks
Hard times
Niggas are on the grind
All of the time
Faith in Allah small as a dime
A cup of noodles for breakfast
A cup of noodles for lunch and
A cup of noodles for dinner
Every day is the Winter
Every day is December
Cause evin in the middle of Summer
The streets shudder from the poverty blizzard
Rocket propelled grenades
Landmines and letterbombs
Open up your envelops
With thoughts of them shuttin off
Your water and your lights
And your foods and your rights
All you got in your life
Is little dude and your wife
So you move in the white
With the crew in the night
But you’re nervous:
The block drafted you into the service
The curse

You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga

Wakin’ up is the beginning of a day that’s fucked
Spoons and forks and napkins and plates and cups
Everything but a meal
I bang with my steel
And feel hunger pains in me still
I hit the front line with my ammo and my canteen
Basketball and tennis shoes as a sand screen
Shootin’ jumpers as the boys in blue pass me
Casually
I pass cream to the crack fiends
The other day a first Lieutenant was moded
Started up the car and it exploded
But didn’t nobody notice
I’m knowin’ how it goes
When if the the nigga with the purple heart of courage ain’t the oldest
It’s cold shit
But if I let little man push
Little man could go and create a plan to ambush
Double jeopardy
Brothers reppin’ me
And tellin’ me they lovin’ and respectin’ me
Could be the death of me

You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
God in heaven could you tell me why you never chose me
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
Times I asked you to provide or we wasn’t goin’ to eat
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
Why was everything that you was supposed to do on me
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
Since I’m not in heaven it’s only one other place I can be

Now shit’s hard, when you’re up in rank this far
I hit bars and I mix and mingle with stars
You flip cars with overtime you get scarred
And with your broad you begin to whisper “discharge”
Traumatized by the lies of the turncoats
Who walk enemy ground to go and burn smoke
Five dead single shot glock nine to the head
And you like, “Fuck em’”
Them niggas have to learn though
But things deepen
Your enemy’s peepin’
The rate you’re gain’ weight got your thinergies creepin’
They see you’re not sleepin’
So they got reason
To send a soldier in your circle
And manipulate the treason
A psychological Hurricane Katrina
And ain’t nobody comin’ to help
Fuck FEMA
I slowly turn the gun to myself and squeeze it
And Mohhamed Era Su Allayet (?)
I couldn’t see it
The grievous

I didn’t create this shit, I was born into it. Like I didn’t create the projects, I didn’t create homelessness, I didn’t create poverty, I didn’t create unemployment, I didn’t create this poor educational system, I was pushed into it, and now you want to blame me for not rising above it? Shit, I may not be that strong!

You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga
You ain’t a made nigga, you just afraid nigga

(via Navaho Gunleg)

Let’s play a game that I call, “Guess Who’s Masturbating.” Read the following quote and try to guess who wrote it (and don’t cheat).

Quoted three years ago, a week into the invasion of Iraq:

The people of Eastern Europe stared into the abyss of tyrannical evil for decades, and recognizing the Iraqi regime for what it is, they stand with us today. Some people may mock the fact that Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, and other minor countries are part of this coalition — but they remember what life was like without freedom. They remember what it took to climb up from the rubble.

They remember what it was like to hear the words of Vaclav Havel (who would go on to make more than 100 official speeches, with no speechwriters), on his New Years address as first President of the free Czech Republic:

“My people, your government has returned to you.”

Soon, the Iraqi people will hear those words. The sound you hear, Saddam, is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your doom.

So what’s your guess? Dick Cheney? Someone else from the PNAC gang? Not even close.

Give up?

I’d like to introduce you to Ben Domenich, the 24 year-old founding father of the RedState blog and freshly hired blogger at the Washington Post.

Only someone this young and naive could actually believe the bullshit he espouses as fact. In this particular case, Eastern Europe does what they’re told, or maybe he missed the memo on the New World Order?

While I’m a huge proponent of citizen media, and completely support young Ben’s right to publish his perspective, his track record is obviously partisan, and at times, skirting an extreme position. What is WaPo thinking? Are they trying to create a loose cannon, ideological microcosm of the political blogosphere within their walled garden?

Media Matters’ David Brock seems to think so.

The thing that WaPo doesn’t get is that by hiring Ben Domenich, they’ve taken away his blogging ID; both his credentials and his independence. In their haste to capitalize on his partisan readership in this 2.0 world, they haven’t just lowered the bar — they’ve replaced it with a hula-hoop.

Aloha, WaPo.

< --->
No connection, eh?

Neo-Nazis threaten to massacre Muslims at World Cup

ROME (AFP) - The World Cup in Germany is set to become a battleground between fascists and Muslims, an Italian member of a new European neo-Nazi movement warned.

In a statement published by Italian daily Repubblica, the member of AS Roma’s notorious ultras hooligan group claims neo-Nazis across Europe met in Braunau in Austria to plan attacks against supporters from Islamic countries during the World Cup in Germany from June 9 to July 9.

“We are united. For the first time we are talking and planning together, with the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Spanish, everyone with the same objective. At the World Cup there will be a massacre,” said the Italian ultra.

“We will all be in Germany and there will be Turks, Algerians and Tunisians. The Turks, we can’t stand them. In our country (Italy) there are not many, but in Germany, there are many of those guys there. They are Islamic terrorists.

“We will attack them. They are all enemies that need to be eliminated, just like the police. If we make the Roman greeting (the fascist salute) they put us in prison. We will be tens of thousands. Nothing but the English are feared.”

With the tone and accent of Daniel Carver on Howard Stern back in the day:

“Wake up, white people!”

(via The Black Iris of Jordan)

Tara Hunt (aka MissRogue) has created the Pinko Marketing Manifesto; a pointed conversation centered around how business, products, services and marketing in this 2.0 world should operate, but through the lens of the desires of the people, not the elite. (Shel, Doc, this world really does need a 2.0 upgrade of numerous features)

I love it.

Unfortunately, in this country any “ism” without capital attached to it becomes a target, so I figured I’d testify to Tara’s message by reducing it to its bare essentials through the Word of George:

The Word of George (5:22-86)

George: It’s not working, Jerry. It’s just not working.

Jerry: What is it that isn’t working?

George: Why did it all turn out like this for me? I had so much promise. I was personable, I was bright. Oh, maybe not academically speaking, but… I was perceptive. I always know when someone’s uncomfortable at a party. It became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I’ve ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every of life, be it something to wear, something to eat… It’s all been wrong.

(A waitress comes up to G)

Waitress: Tuna on toast, coleslaw, cup of coffee.

George: Yeah. No, no, no, wait a minute, I always have tuna on toast. Nothing’s ever worked out for me with tuna on toast. I want the complete opposite of tuna on toast. Chicken salad, on rye, untoasted … and a cup of tea.

Elaine: Well, there’s no telling what can happen from this.

Jerry: You know chicken salad is not the opposite of tuna, salmon is the opposite of tuna, ‘cos salmon swim against the current, and the tuna swim with it.

George: Good for the tuna.

(A blonde looks at George)

Elaine: Ah, George, you know, that woman just looked at you.

George: So what? What am I supposed to do?

Elaine: Go talk to her.

George: Elaine, bald men, with no jobs, and no money, who live with their parents, don’t approach strange women.

Jerry: Well here’s your chance to try the opposite. Instead of tuna salad and being intimidated by women, chicken salad and going right up to them.

George: Yeah, I should do the opposite, I should.

Jerry: If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.

George: Yes, I will do the opposite. I used to sit here and do nothing, and regret it for the rest of the day, so now I will do the opposite, and I will do something!

(He goes over to the woman)

George: Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice that you were looking in my direction.

Victoria: Oh, yes I was, you just ordered the same exact lunch as me.

(G takes a deep breath)

George: My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.

Victoria: I’m Victoria. Hi.

See how simple it is? Go the opposite route of participating in the realm of old school, big business corporate marketing and product development and you’ll get the blonde and a gig with the Yankees.

I should become a life coach.

It’s amazing how much you can learn about yourself and someone else over a “coffee cup” of coffee.

Cara Michele and I agreed to meet over at The Green Bean yesterday to discuss how we can get moving on our new joint project. Well, after 4 hours of caffeine and an intense conversation ranging from the project at hand to religion to the MPAA, I realized that while we’re very different, amazingly enough, we’re so very much the same.

She’s a devout Christian, living and serving humanity through the love of Christ, and tends to look for absolutes to help guide her through life.

I’ve found my higher power, yet I don’t call it anything particular, believing instead that “it” is woven throughout our actions and surroundings. I’m wary of anything claiming to be an absolute, instead looking for natural patterns to clue me onward to my next experience.

We’re completely different, right? Wrong.

We both share a strong desire to empower the men and women who are left on the periphery of society; Cara Michele has been walking that walk for years, while I’ve been going all city since ‘91. So while I strongly believe in the power of information and she strongly believes in the power of Christ, our common desire is upliftment.

It’s all good.

Now if I can only get her to be comfortable with the fact that there are endless ways to describe a “coffee cup”… ;-)

Photo by birdcage

We’re now exactly three years into this debacle of a war.

More than 2,300 American men and women have lost their lives and upwards of 30,000 more are now physically and mentally handicapped. We’re consistently told that the mission is just, as democracy must be spread. We’re told that we need to fight the terrorists over there instead of fighting them over here.

The truth is that we’re knee deep in a mission to fight an “ism” that we don’t even understand.

Why should that stop us?

Photo by Rod Graves

We’re rooting our perception around the world as the global strong-armed thug. When our president casually mentions an Iraqi civilian body count to be upwards of 30,000, more or less — as if he’s guessing the amount of gumballs in a swimming pool — that should send shivers down our collective spines, yet for some reason, it doesn’t.

9/11 was a horrible moment in American history, but all we’ve done is respond by killing an even greater number of people. How does that quell a radical response to our status quo?

Photo by The Original Mozzy

Yeah, we all need to do some soul searching.

Andy sent me an email requesting this song as a Lyricist Wednesday post, and while the message of the lyrics absolutely fits the vibe of c*t*d, the artist is, well, a bit too folksy to land between GZA and T-K.A.S.H. (that’s a hint for next week). So, I figured I’d go the extra yard and post the video he shot at Guilford College a bit ago.

Imaginary Foundation: A site full of brilliant t-shirt designs.

(via Yahoo!)

Preface (pg. xvi)

[…]
However, just as the Christian Reformation opened the door to multiple, often conflicting, and sometimes baffling interpretations of Christianity, so has the reformation of Islam created a number of wildly divergent and competing ideologies. Perhaps it is inevitable that, as religious authority passes from institutions to individuals, there will be men and women whose radical reinterpretations of religion will be fueled by their extreme social and political agendas. In this sense, jihadists like Osama bin Laden must be understood as products of, not counters to, the Islamic Reformation. Indeed, bin Laden joins a long and unsavory list of militant puritans — whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu — who consider themselves and their individual followers to be the only true believers, and all others to be hypocrites, imposters, and apostates who must be convinced of their folly or abandoned to their horrible fates.

Like puritans of other faiths — militaristic or not — the jihadists’ principal goals is the “purifying” of their religious communities. In other words, their first target is not the West, or Jews, or Christians, or Zionists, or Crusaders, or any other outsiders (what the jihadists term “the far enemy”), but those hundreds of millions of Muslims who do not share their puritanical worldview (”the near enemy”). Their agenda can most clearly be observed in the civil war they have launched in Iraq. For whatever else may be fueling the violence in that country, there can be little doubt that the primary aim of the jihadists who have infiltrated Iraq and who represent the most ruthless segment of the insurgency is the massacre of all those Muslims (particularly the Shi’ah majority) whom they regard as rawafida or apostates.

Of course, that is not to say that the far enemy is not a target of jihadism, as New York, Madrid, and London can testify. But it is mainly as a means to galvanize other Muslims to the jihadist cause that most of these attacks against the West should be understood. The attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, were by bin Laden’s own admission specifically designed to goad the United States into an exaggerated retaliation against the Islamic world so as to mobalize Muslims to, in the words of George W. Bush, “choose sides.”

Now, four years removed from that tragic day, perhaps the most hopeful development in this internal battle to define the faith and practice of over a billion people is that Muslims themselves are becoming increasingly aware that they are as much endangered by the extremist agenda as are the so called infidels. Thus, the day before the London bombings, one hundred seventy of the world’s leading clerics and scholars, representing every major sect and school of law in Islam, gathered in Amman, Jordan, where, in an unprecendented display of intersectarian collaboration, they issues a joint fatwa, or legal ruling, denouncing all acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam. The Amman declaration was not only a tacit (if belated) acknowledgement of the civil war raging within Islam, it was an attempt by the clerical institutions to re-exert some measure of authority over those who have hijacked Islam for their own murderous causes.

It didn’t work. The next day, and almost as if in response to the Amman fatwa, London was attacked. Two weeks later, a bomb demolished aa hotel in the resort town of Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, killing nearly a hundred people — many of them poor, many of them Muslim. Two weeks after that, three hundred fifty bombs tore through Bangladesh, one after the other, in a violent attempt to dislodge the country’s fledgling democratic government. After each of these attacks, a new wave of fatwas was issued, again denouncing the use of violence and terrorism in the name of Islam. And after each fatwa, the jihadists struck again. And the war goes on. Reformations, as we know from Christian history, are bloody events. And though the end is near, the Islamic Reformation has some way to go before it is resolved.

Photo by Colin Gregory Palmer

I usually tend to keep announcements under wraps until I’ve made enough progress to warrent them, but in the spirit of Tantek Çelik’s building blocks presentation, Kent Bye’s Echo Chamber Project and Chris Messina’s barcamp escapades, well, here goes nothing:

thepeopleyes.org

Photo by stickerbandit

Can anyone point me to a few good spots in town to get some run? I only have a few requirements:

• More 35+ year-old players than 18+ year-old pogosticks (I need time to get back to that degree of comp)
• A decently maintained court (nightlights are a bonus)
• Enough people consistently around in the mid/late afternoon to get in a decent run

All suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Fresh on the heels of their first campaign blunder, AT&T dives right back in and makes the exact same mistake:

Unbelievable.

Tompkins and Adamson at the Austin airport

Well, it took me until today to be able to write my goodbye to Austin. Man, that town and conference kicks some serious ass. Some of my favorite moments from this past week:

• Bruce Sterling’s closing remarks on the state of the world. I’ve never been moved to tears by a public speaker before… I’ve a new favorite author.
• Running into Doc Searls after the Sterling presentation, and chatting with him for an hour about everything from our shared past in Jersey and Greensboro (my current residence) to our love of basketball to our vastly different experiences with the KKK (mine is through my brother’s documentary, you gotta ask Doc about his) and then hitting up a BBQ joint with Doc, Marc Canter, Nancy White and Jerry Michalski.
• Experiencing Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated and Alan Berlinger’s Wide Awake at the greatest theatre experience I’ve ever come across, the Alamo Drafthouse.
• Adam Greenfield’s ubiquitous computing presentation. (Adam is so very articulate and cultured, I can only hope that experience design is taken more seriously within the world of ubicomp than it is within the web) and Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability presentation. Two very similar topics, yet two very different presentations.
• Finally meeting Tish Grier, Will Giese, Thomas Vander Wal, Peter Merholtz, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina in person after months of blogging, commenting, plazing and flickring each other (did I say flickring?). And yes, I can confirm without a doubt that missrogue and factoryjoe are the web 2.0 version of Bonnie and Clyde.
• Hitting up the town with Khoi, Chris, Ralph and Jeff. We were robbed of the SXSW Web Award for Best Green / Non-Profit site (mediamatters.org) damnit! So we drank more.
• I only ran into one former collegue/friend at the conference —