Colourful regular winter visitors at our bird feeder yesterday: chickadees, juncos, grosbeaks, nuthatches and cardinals.
The usual weekly mix of the profane and the ridiculous:
China Watch:
Since my recent article calling for a boycott of Chinese products, I
have been besieged with hate mail and worse (and yes, someone has
translated the messages sent to me in Chinese). I'm unrepentant, and
the news from China (and that's just the news that gets out) continues
to justify my arguments. We are just learning that up to 20 unarmed
Chinese protesters were shot to death
last week by a police mob when the protesters dared to complain about
the seizure of their land for yet another dirty coal-fired power plant.
And, ironically, the same day there was yet another coal mine explosion in China, with 74 killed and 32 more missing this time around. The UN last week also denounced the widespread use of torture
(notably electric shock, sleep deprivation and submersion in sewage),
indefinite internment without trial, and forced labour camps in China.
The report also noted the 'culture of fear' and vast restrictions on
the scope of interviews and visits meant that the investigation was
largely limited to what Chinese authorities wanted the team to see.
The Costs of Asymmetry and the Death of the Web: Doc Searls and the gang that understands Internet technology much better than I do explains
the delicate balance that will be needed to simultaneously do two
things: Open the 'online' market so that small and home office
businesses can use bandwidth to produce, not just consume, and compete
head-to-head with big corporations that have their own technology
infrastructure, and, at the same time, prevent the phone and cable
company oligopoly from devising and ramming through regulations that
would charge 'freeloaders' (Google, Microsoft, AOL, Skype, and of course you and me) by the gulp for use of 'their' bandwidth, effectively killing the Internet. This is important stuff, everyone. We need to stay on top of it.
Consumerism and the Myths of Surplus and Scarcity: A fascinating article from 2001 by Paul Lutus explains
the enormous con job -- the "big lie and the little lies" that the
'consumer society' is based on, and why we've fallen for them. Thanks
to reader Brad Mills for the link.
Online Music Collaboration: Ninjam solves
both the time latency problem and the problem with restricting music
collaboration to MIDI devices. Anyone with a voice or an instrument of
any kind can contribute, sending their 'tracks' into the mix in any
format. Here's how the latency problem is addressed: "The Ninjam client
records and streams synchronized intervals of music
between participants. Just as the interval finishes recording, it
begins playing on everyone else's client.
So when you play through an interval, you're playing
along with the
previous interval of everybody else, and they're playing along with
your
previous interval. If this sounds pretty bizarre, it sort of is, until
you
get used to it, then it becomes pretty natural. In many ways, it can be
more forgiving than a normal jam, because mistakes propagate
differently." Wow. Innovation lives. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.
Great Lakes Next Eco-Collapse Zone?:
As reported earlier, it is the ecological collapse of the Gulf Coast,
and specifically the disappearance of the buffering wetlands, that has
made the damage of hurricanes like Katrina as devastating as they have
been. A new report says
the same wetlands destruction threatens eco-collapse in the Great
Lakes. Bush's reply, through his EPA lackey? "We don't have any more
money to spend to rectify this".
Pinter's Nobel Speech: You've heard about it, pro or con. Allow yourself 45 minutes, watch it and decide for yourself. You don't have to ask what I thought of it.
Quotes for the week, from Bill Maher:
"Stop
taking stupid polls. Every little news program on every cable news
network has their own dumb-ass online poll. And it's always some
ridiculous question like 'Is John Bolton too much of an asshole, not
enough of an asshole, or just the right amount of asshole?' This is
America. Knowing nothing and choosing one of two options isn't a poll.
It's an election."
"Leave the children behind, at least until
they've learned something. A new survey finds that only half of
America's high schoolers think newspapers should be allowed to publish
without government approval, and almost one in five said Americans
should be prohibited from expressing unpopular opinions."
"Ladies, leave your eyebrows alone. Here's how much men care about your eyebrows: Do you have two of them? Okay, we're done."
"Stop
whining about gas prices. Gas costs a lot because we have to find it,
bribe or kill the people who live on top of it, extract it, refine it,
ship it, and pump it. You'll pay $2 a gallon and you'll like it because
you know what the alternative is -- riding on the bus with poor people.
How come we have cars with GPS, satellite radio, and voice-activated
Web access, and we still power them with the black goop you have to
suck out of the ground? Hate to tell you this, folks, but gas doesn't
cost too much, it costs too little." |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
