"I am in Levi, Finland, at a meeting where we are talking and playing and working wireless. I pull out my laptop, fire up the bluetooth manager to connect with my cell phone to dial up a connection and ... whoa ... is this slooooow ... where *did* the connection go ... and just when I am about to give up I see hundreds of bluetooth devices on my laptop's bluetooth manager! Headsets, phones, devices, all revealing themselves in low security mode. It's a shock, as I can hardly believe my eyes. Like looking at a Windows Networking window at a LAN party or conference, but these are phones and devices and laptops aplenty. Later I try it in my room and the same thing happens, with a few less connections but the same effect..."

"All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It's not hard. The Net isn't rocket science. It isn't even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars’ worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You're at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.

Sure, that’s a feel-good statement about everyone having value on the Net, etc. But it’s also the basic rock-solid fact about the Net's technical architecture. And the Internet’s value is founded in its technical architecture.

Fortunately, the true nature of Internet isn’t hard to understand. In fact, just a fistful of statements stands between Repetitive Mistake Syndrome and Enlightenment ..."

"Had dinner tonight with Lawrence Lessig to talk about emergent democracy and other things. Larry pointed out some interesting work called deliberative polling being done by Professor James S. Fishkin. Since polling is forces people to vote on something they don't really know too much, the data may be statistically accurate, but is not necessarily the best way to promote a democratic system. deliberative polling takes a diverse group of people, forces them to discuss the issues in small group, in large groups, small groups, over and over again for a fairly lengthy process until everyone has a pretty good idea of the issues and an balanced and eductated position. Polls are conducted through the process to track how people's opinions change. Afterwards, many of the people who have participated become much more active citizens. I think that this is similar to the emergent democracy idea that we have. Maybe we can try to do this deliberative polling using the online tools that we have."

"Deliberative polling turns to the representatives to execute on these opinions. Antoin was the first to point out (many others have pointed this out later) that my paper misses an important part of the democratic process. The execution. It focuses on the deliberation part. Maybe emergent democracy should focus on those interesting moments in history where the people wake up and change government. Larry talked about how there were three such instances in the US. When the framers went against the bill of rights in writing the constitution, during the civil war and during the "new deal." Each of these involved a deviance from constitutional democracy because of a huge swell in the opinion of the people. Maybe emergent democracy enables the people to force an issue when it become important enough to engage the public to rise up. Sort of an information militia. We can rely on the experts in the representative democracy when this are running smoothly and the people are not engaged... Anyway, still very malformed thoughts, but a lot to think about."

"In the fall of 1967, I was flying C-130s in Viet Nam and my fiancée was marching for peace in Washington. We didn't see that as a conflict—more like covering both sides of the story. Nor did we feel any tension around this. I was there because I was expected to be there, and, having been born in 1942, I had grown up with the expectation of military service. She marched because our generation was working out a new voice and that view had to be sent to the politicians."

"If we don't occupy Iraq now, the body count goes up—not because that's where the terrorists are, but because we will not have been forceful enough to do so and silence the Arab machismo affect."

Eight days before the outbreak of the Gulf war, Saddam summoned April Glaspie, then the American ambassador to Iraq, and launched into a tirade. He railed about the pernicious role of the British in the region, reminded her that without Iraq the Iranians would not be stopped from taking over the whole region by anything short of nuclear weapons, and complained about the "economic aggression" of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in agitating for lower oil prices. He made it all too clear that he intended to use force to stop what he claimed were Kuwaiti incursions onto Iraqi territory in the so-called Neutral Zone. Glaspie replied that the Americans, too, had experience with "the colonialists," which indeed seems odd given that the US and these very "colonialists" would be jointly bombing the hell out of Iraq is a little over a week's time. As for the price of oil, Ms. Glaspie opined that "We have many Americans who would like to see the price go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states." At a time when the US secretary of state was none other than James Baker, a Texan who virtually personifies Big Oil, the implications of what the US Ambassador was telling Saddam were inescapable. Glaspie went on to say:

"I think I understand this. I have lived here for years. I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60's. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods . . ."

"If we humans synergically reorganized our world, we would all be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. Today in 2002, if we were to reclaim the gift of all the land and natural resources presently held on planet Earth as individual property. And if we were to further reclaim the gift of Progress from those few who control it today, and then divided these two gifts equally among the 6 billions of us living on the planet, we would discover to our surprise and amazement that every man, woman, and child is wealthy beyond their dreams.

With synergic organization, and careful utilization of the planet’s total wealth for the benefit of all humanity, the carrying capacity of the Earth could be maximized to solve all our human problems and meet our all our needs. And this is without any need to damage the Earth, or degrade our environment.

There would never be any need for humans to earn their livings again. Our livings have already been earned by all those humans who lived and died to give us the great gift of progess. Then all humans would be free to spend their time making their lives meaningful by creating more wealth to be gifted to living and future humanity."

"Synergic consensus is not availability to humanity today. We do not yet know how fast it will be at making decisions. But, I predict that unanimous rule democracy will prove faster than majority rule democracy. Synergic consensus elimates conflict. Recall conflict is the stuggle to avoid loss. Conflict is at the very heart of majority rule democracy. The focus of synergic consensus is very different. The entire group knows from the outset that they cannot lose. They are focused on choosing a plan of action that serves the needs of all the members in the group—to choose a plan of action that causes no one to lose. The synergic veto is not invoked capriciously. The only basis for synergic veto is to prevent someone from losing. This is a mechanism to eliminate loss—to choose the very best plan of action for everyone. This may well speed up the process of decison making. In any event regardless of the speed of decision, implimentation will be rapid. There is no conflict. This is a major advantage over majority rule democracy."

"My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc."

"My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It's a great place."

"If you want to understand how the world views the US, it is probably very similar to the way we view Microsoft:

Extremely successful, much of it appears to be undeserved.

We are totally dependent upon them, and there isn't much of an alternative.

Becoming too successful in our niche simply means that we will attract their attention.

We like it when we see them fail.

We are uncomfortable when we see them fail because they just keep working at it until they get it right -- they will always be back. Unless, of course, it is determined to be an uninteresting market.

They don't care about us. We are just a source of revenue. The quality of their products and support is only as much as absolutely necessary to keep us in the fold.

We hate them, but if they offered us a job, we would join them in a second and gleefully begin to oppress our former colleagues."

"U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has a strikingly simple idea to bolster customers' rights to freely use software, movies and music that they've paid for: Force the sellers of such products to tell the truth about the restrictions they're imposing on users.

When customers know, for example, that the compact disc they're buying is technologically rigged so they can't rip MP3 files from it for use on a portable player, they won't buy it. Eventually, these informed customers will demand change in the copyright laws..."

Federalist No. 4, John Jay:

"[T]he safety of the people of America against dangers from foreign force depends not only on their forbearing to give just causes of war to other nations, but also on their placing and continuing themselves in such a situation as not to invite hostility or insult; for it need not be observed that there are pretended as well as just causes for war.

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; [rulers] will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandise and support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people."

• I've been talking with Britt Blaser and Mitch Ratcliffe about Xpertweb, and mulling over the details. It involves a peer-to-peer economic network, using XML data structures. I'm going to play with the elements of a more simple and powerful prototype
• There are a number of features in this NewsLog program (which this weblog appears in) that I need to add:
  • At least two levels of RSS feeds, one with full pictures and formatting, and another, more minimal.
  • I already made the functionality that can send the daily contents of a newslog out in e-mail, but I need to finish the subscription mechanism, so that people can sign up for it.
  • A preview function is needed, so one can see how one's posts will look before one publishes them.
  • Spell checking is an often requested feature
  • The stuff that appears in my left sidebar in ming.tv is custom. I need to make an easy interface for others to do all the same things.
  • The MetaWebLog and Blogger API interfaces need to be implemented, to make it easier to post from various sources.
  • I need an integrated RSS aggregator
  • Trackback features need to be finished.
  • Need to link with TopicExchange as a feature.
  • RSS 2.0 features for backing up the full contents of a log
  • Switch over to CSS for formatting, and XHTML well-formedness.
  • Many more little things
• I just installed Quicktime Streaming Server on my server, but didn't take the time to quite figure it out. And maybe video clips in the weblogs would be a fun idea.
• I just re-compiled my PHP with Sablotron support for XSLT. Cool stuff for transforming XML documents. I need to think about whether to use that to do some things seriously differently.
• I need to make another attempt of getting into Flash enough to know how to make ActiveScript client-server connections with XML. For a number of projects I could really use a little applet in a corner of a page with a real-time server connection. You know, saying "Bing! Your friend Joe just logged in."
• I need a word processor like way of editing text online. You know, where you paint over part of the text and click the Bold button and it becomes bold. One can do that in Java, but I hate Java, and I've turned it off a while back in my Mozilla, which means it hasn't crashed since then. One can do it in Flash. Or I believe one can do it with dynamic HTML if one is a little clever. So I'm going to play with that part some more.
• I wrote a system for laying out websites from within a web browser. I need to make it more general purpose, so it can can used for, for example, laying out the contents of a weblog sidebar, or the way a product is displayed in a shopping cart, or a bunch of other things I need it for.
• I need to update my own server monitoring tools. I administer many servers, and I need a better overview of what is going on with them. I never seem to be completely happy with the existing tools, like Big Brother. I wrote a thing earlier that used XML-RPC for each server to report its status frequently. I just need to patch it up I think.
• I wrote this DNS administration program, for keeping track of hundreds of domains with thousands of virtual hosts, and writing the configuration files and updating secondaries, etc. It works great. However, I need to make it do some more things, such as keeping track of when domains need to be renewed. And keeping better track of servers and IP numbers.

What Bush said:

"I said when I was running for President, I supported ethanol, and I meant it. (Applause.) I support it now, because not only do I know it's important for the ag sector of our economy, it's an important part of making sure we become less reliant on foreign sources of energy." – Bush at South Dakota Ethanol Plant 4/24/02

What actually happened:

According to the AP, Bush’s 2004 budget proposes to eliminate funding for the bioenergy program that funds the Dakota Ethanol Plant he visited. [4/22/02]

A couple of years ago Stamets partnered with Battelle, a major player in the bioremediation industry, on an experiment conducted on a site owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation in Bellingham. Diesel oil had contaminated the site, which the mycoremediation team inoculated with strains of oyster mycelia that Stamets had collected from old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Two other bioremediation teams, one using bacteria, the other using engineered bacteria, were also given sections of the contaminated soil to test.

Lo and behold. After four weeks, oyster mushrooms up to 12 inches in diameter had formed on the mycoremediated soil. After eight weeks, 95 percent of the hydrocarbons had broken down, and the soil was deemed nontoxic and suitable for use in WSDOT highway landscaping. By contrast, neither of the bioremediated sites showed significant changes.

"The United States spends more than $1 billion annually to examine patents. Despite this expenditure, the Patent Office has become a glorified diploma mill, routinely granting rights that should never have been issued. The patents wouldn't stand up in court, but they're expensive to litigate. So why are we forcing developing countries to follow our lead when we don't do a good job ourselves? [...]

The system protects two groups: software companies with weak products who use patents to harass competitors, and patent lawyers. The ease of getting patents makes it economically attractive to abuse the system in a number of unpleasant ways. People obtain patents and then ask businesses to pay licensing fees that are cheaper than the cost of mounting a legal defense. Also, firms are wary of investing in new products for fear they will be ambushed by an infringement claim that may or may not be valid but will cost millions in legal fees."

"The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?"

"Mister Rogers wouldn't lie to us, but he wanted us to have a happy childhood anyway. Through it all, he talked to us like people."

"There's only one person in the whole world like you."
-- Mr.Rogers

"[T]hey are trying to convince every other nation on the planet that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words, they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed with either.

By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access to McDonald's and the Home Shopping Network, all 'news' will come through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac."

"A few decades from now, there will need to be a 'global civilization' in which both words are literally accurate — a planetwide community of mutually cooperative nations, bound by interdependence and international law, whose citizens are accorded freedom and economic opportunity. This is the goal we're forced toward by some of the creepier aspects of technological evolution: ever-more-compact, ever-more-accessible, ever-more-lethal munitions, and the ever-more-efficient crystallization of interest groups, including hateful ones, via information technology."

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CODENAMED Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving [Lyman L] Lemnitzer* (right) and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.

"One is not allowed in the modern culture to speak about love, except in the most romantic and trivial sense of the word. Anyone who calls upon the capacity of people to practice brotherly and sisterly love is more likely to be ridiculed than to be taken seriously. The deepest difference between optimists and pessimists is their position in the debate about whether human beings are able to operate collectively from a basis of love. In a society that systematically develops in people their individualism, their competitiveness, and their cynicism, the pessimists are the vast majority.

That pessimism is the single greatest problem of the current social system, we think, and the deepest cause of unsustainability. A culture that cannot believe in, discuss, and develop the best human qualities is one that suffers from a tragic distortion of information. "How good a society does human nature permit?" asked psychologist Abraham Maslow. "How good a human nature does society permit?"

... It is difficult to speak of or to practice love, friendship, generosity, understanding, or solidarity within a system whose rules, goals, and information streams are geared for lesser human qualities. But we try, and we urge you to try. Be patient with yourself and others as you and they confront the difficulty of a changing world. Understand and empathize with inevitable resistance; there is some resistance, some clinging to the ways of unsustainability, within each of us. Include everyone in the new world. Everyone will be needed. Seek out and trust in the best human instincts in yourself and in everyone. Listen to the cynicism around you and pity those who believe it, but don't believe it yourself."

- Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jørgen Randers