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Power to the (pedal) people
Talk about innovation! Lee Felsenstein -- industry legend and sometime Salon blogger -- is working with the Jhai foundation to bring a bicycle-pedal-powered Internet system to remote Laotian villages. There's more info here, and you can read Lee's own blog post about the project, or a brief New York Times magazine piece. Like many good things, the project needs money -- read Lee's e-mail appeal.
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Philip Pullman's lecture on storytelling and writers' responsibility is worth reading at least twice. Though he specifically addresses things as an author of fiction, his advice is good, I think, for writers of all stripes. [Link courtesy Arts & Letters Daily]
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No, you weren't hallucinating -- that was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, right before Christmas, arguing for universal health insurance. The president of Johns Hopkins pointed out that the advent of genetic screening will make the old model of health insurance untenable, as insurance companies' business imperative to refuse service to people who test positive for major disorders clashes with society's moral imperative to provide health care for as broad a population as possible. "Genetic testing is health insurance's iceberg."
The piece is online here.
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Korea counseling
As far as I can tell, the Bush administration drew a line in the sand for North Korea, North Korea stepped over it and called the U.S. bluff, and now the president's gang are saying, "Gee, we don't have any choice but to negotiate here, otherwise North Korea will incinerate Seoul."
It's the worst possible position for an international power to be in -- with its credibility shot and no apparent plan for either diplomacy or force. How can the otherwise bellicose Bush team have found itself in this mess?
It looks like another example of Bush Syndrome -- that way our president has of responding to major events by saying, "Don't bother me with reality, I've already made up my mind." The syndrome has hitherto been on display in the administration's economic policy, which has doggedly stuck to precisely the measures least likely to lift us out of the lingering recession because, well, they are what Bush embraced back in 1999. In the case of North Korea, Bush has already determined that Saddam is public enemy number one. Who cares that North Korea is more volatile, closer to nuclear capability and less predictable?
Josh Marshall's comments today are worth reading.
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Mafia diplomacy
Apparently there's this multiplayer game called Mafia that has long been popular in SF fandom and that is now crossing over into New York literary circles, thanks at least in part to Jonathan Lethem. (The New York Observer's much-blogged report is here.) When I read about this game -- which involves no paper or board but chiefly is a matter of players choosing whether to cooperate with or deceive one another -- all I get is flashbacks to Diplomacy.
Diplomacy was (is?) a seven-player board game set on the eve of the First World War; in theory it was a historical strategy game but in practice it was mostly about negotiation, psychology, and stabbing fellow players in the back. Many of us geeky teenagers spent inordinate amounts of time in the 1970s playing this game both FTF and in a by-mail format, which developed its own 'zine-based subculture. Mafia does away with the board and the pieces and pretty much zeroes in on the psychology, which makes a lot of sense and no doubt accounts for its popularity.
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Back
Refreshed and recharged. Spent the holidays with family, entertaining the kids and (like the rest of the universe) seeing "The Two Towers." I share the view of Patrick Neilsen Hayden: "Just as with the previous movie, any film of Tolkien that gets so much so right earns a lot of slack from me."
What I wrote last year about "Fellowship," I think, still holds for this second installment: "Anyone who watches 'The Fellowship of the Ring' with a deep knowledge of the text on which it's based can see -- moment by moment, scene by scene, image by image -- that what's best in Jackson's film is directly drawn from what's best in Tolkien's prose." With "The Two Towers," this is overwhelmingly the case in the movie's presentation of the savage poignance of Gollum.
That I have lived to see a good movie adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings" remains a great source of wonder, and a New Year's gift.
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