Tuesday, April 1, 2003

BON

Blogging at VON, which is Pulver's Voice over Networks show in San Jose. Hanging out with Om. Picture due shortly... Voila:

Om isn't far from release of his book, Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist. Follow that link to buy a copy in advance.

Decentralities

I'm heading up for the day to the VON conference in San Jose, where I'll be on a Decentralized Communications panel with David Sifry, Kevin Werbach and Duncan Davidson. (Talk about decentralized... maybe all four of us can blog live from the front of the room.)

Anyway, I'll probably be off-line for much of the day. But I really don't know. Stay tuned, I guess.

Bonus Link: John Gruber's Interview with Brent Simmons of the ever-more-popular NetNewsWire, found via Duncan's blog.

Northern Light

A "Canadian mother" with a U.S. background writes,

I think Joshua Micah Marshall is on the money...

It is hard to watch as America falls sway to an administration that appears to be headed in the direction that Josh indicates.

If you stepped out of the US for a period you would get out of the emotional carpet bombing that has been going on for months...the weekend terror alerts, plastic and duct tape and now the constant war images.

The so called Patriot Bill 2 is as scary a piece of legislation as I have seen in my half century of life.

I find myself angry and in mourning for a people that are being manipulated by a very clever propaganda campaign that would make the old Nazi masters proud. The scary thing is how well it works.

There is an image of Canada as a mouse living beside an elephant. Many of us are looking at the elephant as having gone rogue.

Check out The Anglo-American Military Axis by Michel Chossudovsky.

Check out the Dee Hock and Mark Twain quotes in David Isenberg's last Smart Letter.

They go well with the quotes below.

"Let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt--it may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege." — Tommy Douglas (Link to source.)

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power. — Benito Mussolini (Link to source.)

Benito Mussolini

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship." — Hermann Goering, from Nuremberg Diary, by Gustave Gilbert. (Link to source.)

The links to sources are mine. Not only is it easier to copy and paste from a browser than from email (with all those returns to remove), but some of the longer source pieces are worth reading as well.

Bonus link: American hawks' plan sounds chilling today, by Vinay Menon in the Toronto Star.

Congrats

...to Colin Crawford on his new job as VP, New Business Development & Operations at IDG. Colin is one of the Good Guys of the magazine publishing business.

Dial 9 for Low-Speed Access

Ian Evans discovers that "Internet Access" at this Holiday Inn means "dataport on phone." Sounds a little like my own experience at Digital Hollywood last September.

I found the hotel where I'll spend tonight by: 1) Getting a list of hotels and rates at United's Hotel site; and 2) Calling one hotel after another on the list until I found one that had real high-speed internet access. The one I got offers the access for free, and the hotel is cheap too.

But you have to make the call.

One of these months, we'll be able to filter out the low-speed and no-speed hotels at these travel sites on the first pass.

Means to Means

For some reason my post pointing to Jamie Lewis' excellent End and Means (about the World of Means that BigCo players constitute), is #13 on Daypop. Why isn't End and Means itself up there? Weird.