This Typepad account expires in February, 2008.  I've long since abandoned Typepad due to cost, performance, and publishing flexibility issues.  Now I write at my own space:  Listics.  I hope you can join me there.  If you'd like to subscribe to my Listics feed, just click here, or click the "Subscribe now" link beneath the rotating Listics post titles in the box above.

Check out my notes on the Freedom to Connect conference now, at Listics dot com.  Have I mentioned that http://listics.com is Sandhill Trek rel. 3.0 and you should update your links?

This site will henceforth be very drafty.  The empty halls will echo with the remembrance of long lost posts.  Well, not really THAT.  I'll do my best to prevent link rot.  But do change your blogrolls to point to Sandhill Trek rel. 3.0 otherwise known as "listics."  Listics is at http://listics.com

The RSS 2.0 feed is simply http://listics.com/feed

Please.  Toss me a link there...

...Opens Online Home for Wayward MySpace Profiles

San Francisco - You might have noticed that EFF has removed its Student Bloggers' Legal FAQ. This was in response to a cease-and-desist notice we received for "encouraging kids to talk back to their parents and teachers." This incident has opened our eyes to a new plague on the Internet -- the lost and wandering MySpace profiles of thousands of young people across our nation.

"These profiles are an unfiltered view of young people's thoughts and dreams, and that's just scary," said Bea Kweiter, a volunteer at the online home. "If this freewheeling expression is allowed to continue, there's no way the people associated with it will ever get a job in the real world. Well, unless some boss somewhere has a MySpace profile of her own. But that would never happen."

The home offers a safe place for profiles to learn how to self-censor. There is also a detox center for exclamation-point overload.

For this release:
http://www.eff.org/cgi/tiny?urlID=556

Maria at Alembic shares some drawings, including a pencil sketch of Mount Tamalpais the way she remembers it before the rains of March closed it off from view.

I'm at the Hilton in Silver Spring, Maryland.  The day dawned bright and humid.  It's a musuem day... Hokusai at the Sackler, Degas/Sickert/Lautrec at the Phillips Collection.

In technology news...  a marvelous web 2.0 smash-up at The Register that allows you to customize your own interface. USB tanning unit at ThinkGeek.

I'm off to tweak the listics design a little more.  Actually... today I'm downloading the Qumana 3.0 beta to see how it will play into my strategy to workaround the posting limitations of the native WordPress interface.  (No fooling).

Work continues on my new site.  You are invited to drop in, leave a comment, subscribe, whatever...  Sometime in the next few weeks Sandhill Trek rel. 2.0, this site, will be frozen and Sandhill Trek rel. 3.0 will be born at LISTICS.COM

Don't get me wrong.  Franklin D. is the man.  But the part about "all citizens" needs to be broadened so that our friends and neighbors who live here in hopes of one day being full citizens are granted the rights we take for granted.

Fiddling with listics (fiddlistics, fatalistics?) I haven't taken the time to comment on any of the good stuff or the bad that's happening all around us.  How about this breath of sanity from the Oglala Sioux:

"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty." President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, says "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

The Federal Elections Commission has exempted blogs from campaign contribution and spending limits. 

In a unanimous vote yesterday, the Federal Election Commission left unregulated almost all political activity on the Internet except for paid political advertisements. Campaigns buying such ads will have to use money raised under the limits of current federal campaign law.

Perhaps most important, the commission effectively granted media exemptions to bloggers and other activists using the Web to allow them to praise and criticize politicians, just as newspapers can, without fear of federal interference.

This one sounds great but it will probably bite us on the ass again as the army of the Republican christian faithful smurf hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contributions through PayPal to the zombies and vampires they have running the country.  They were just getting good at it in 2004.  Made the Colombian Cartel look like a piggy bank.  I can just see the money baling machines in the Football's basement, the Pundit and Instawife wheeling grocery carts of cash into Captain Blowhard's garage.  Well, even though the rank criminal minds of the Republican Party will corrupt it out of all proportion, it still has the odor of a victory for democracy and egalitarian politics at this point.  I'm thinking Atrios and Kos better stay out of light planes for the next few years.

And speaking of values and practices... how about those jokers at Pew?  Let's make a list of the ten worst sins.  Well, there's straining Aqua Velva through a loaf of french bread before drinking it.  Or, if you prefer something more psychedelic, there's always Robitussin from a brown paper bag.  But who are these people really?  Who the f**k did they poll to find out that

A majority of Republicans say 7 of the 10 behaviors are wrong, while a majority of Democrats say just adultery, underreporting income taxes and drinking to excess are wrong.

Should I be pleased that while Democrats and Republicans agree that getting totally shit-faced while balling the neighbor's spouse is indeed repugnant behavior, far fewer Democrats than Republicans consider homosexuality to be morally wrong.  Indeed, if you read it the way the newspapers are reporting it, you'll see that there is a moral equivalency between lying to spare someone's feelings and homosexuality.  Just so we're straight about this, if I get shit-faced and let your husband blow me, I should probably lie about it to spare your feelings.  This l'il white lie - I think - will reduce the overall rate of perceived f**kéduppédness to roughly one-third if you're a lady with a college degree.

I have to finish building that blog so I don't miss out on all this good stuff!

Fresh from his victory lap around Bhopal, Andrew ("whatta") Card has decided to cash in his chips before the indictments.   Whatever went on between  GWB and his chief of staff in that sultry tropical land will probably never be revealed.  ("What happens in Delhi, stays in Delhi.")  The fact that the CEO of Dow Chemical feels free to travel in India says a lot about the atrophied sense of social justice among those in power there.

after much cut and pastage entirely contrary to the Wordpress plug and play philosophy, I have the Stat Counter site linked up to the listics site.  Now I don't know how accurate any of it is, or what I'm really going to see, or why I would want to see that anyway, but heck...

Did you hear that Cap Weinberger bit the dust?  There's a Bohemian Club membership available.

I feel like izzyp.

Having problems making Stat Counter work over at Listics.  All this php scripting is a baffler.  I'd like to just be able to stuff the code between the <body></body> tags of a plain old html page.  Thanks to those who are clicking over there from time to time in order to help me test.

I am involved in serious doinkage on my new site, Listics.com.  I expect to move over there in a while.  Hell, it's been fallow for a year while I played with WordPress and themes and such.  It's about time I got started on the biennial Sandhill blog migration.

I need a favor.  In return you can ask me for any content you'd like to see on the new the site.  (Cackle... you can ASK!)

I've set up the Stat Counter, I think, and I need a few visitors to see if it works.  It's pretty arid over there... but if you have a moment, please click through to these test links...

link

link

link

(I feel so "Shelley"...)

Doc posted a lengthy examination of our response to the war this morning.  He calls it "War in pieces."  It brought tears to my eyes.  I mean that in a good way.  The emotion I felt reading Doc's reflections and the thoughts of so many concerned bloggers around the world is something we all can share.  It was that "lump in the throat" you get watching a really good movie, listening to powerful music, hearing a speech filled with truth. 

Doc examined writing from dozens of sources, from Iraqis and US soldiers, from American bloggers and pundits, from the left and the right.  There is so much information and perception in what he quotes from all those sources that it is almost impossible to find a point of entry for discussion.There are so many things I agree with in what Doc presents that it would be small and mean-spirited to pull apart what he wrote over the differences.  One of the observations I found most compelling was this:

... we've lost our sense of what Good Governance is. In the midst of our prosperity, I feel a deep sense of ennui in the country, not unlike what I sense might follow a coup d'etat. In fact, many of us have never gotten over the sense that something very like a coup happened when the Supreme Court sided with Bush on the ambiguous Florida results in the 2000 election. That was a constitutional crisis, right there, and it was resolved in a creepy kinda way. Meaning, it was never resolved. I think it left the nation with a form of cancer. Maybe it's benign, but I don't think so.

I suspect this must be what it felt like during the prosperous years of the eighties in Iraq under the despot.  The oil revenues were feeding a growing middle class, the people were unfettered by the sectarian mugging that had brought chador back to the women of Tehran, but absolute power was found in the palaces on the river.  True freedom was compromised by totalitarianism.  Here in America, we have all the creature comforts, but we are beginning to know the boundaries that a war on terror dictates.

I watched a good movie the other night,  Samuel Jackson and Juliette Binoche in In My Country.   The movie is about South Africa, truth and reconciliation.  I was moved by the hard-boiled racist Afrikaaners' characterization of the ANC insurgency as "terrorism."  The brutality of their own occupation was excused by the exigencies of apartheid "freedom."  Social and political circumstances seldom map one-for-one when we compare a situation.  Viet Nam was quite different from Iraq.  But this use of "terrorism" as an excuse for repression needs to be surfaced.

Anyway, Doc's thoughtful post is worth reading.  I'm sure it will bring up a lot of thoughts and feelings for anyone who give it a read.