• 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

High school and college students generally do not have the home phone numbers of any but their closest friends. Before initiating a call to a keitai, they will, almost without exception, begin with a text message to determine availability; the new social norm is that you should "knock before entering." By sending messages like "Can you talk on the phone now?" or "Are you awake?" text messagers spare each other the rude awakening and disruption of a sudden phone call.

One teenage couple that participated in our study exchanged 30 text messages over the course of three hours as they watched television, ate dinner and did their homework, before engaging in a one-hour phone conversation. This voice contact was followed by another trail of 22 messages that kept them in contact until bedtime.

Keitai-wired youth are in persistent but lightweight contact with a small number of intimates, with whom they are expected to be available unless they are sleeping or working. Because of this portable, virtual peer space, the city is no longer a space of urban anonymity; even when out shopping, solo youths will send photos to friends of a pair of shoes they just bought, or send fast-breaking news about a hot sale that is just opening. After meeting face-to-face, a trail of text messages continues the conversation as friends disperse in trains, buses and on foot, nimble thumbs touch-typing on numeric keypads.

Just as Weblogs are distributing journalistic authority on the Internet, mobile media further de-centers information exchange by channeling it through networks that are persistently available to the mobile many.

"See the world as energy, and become responsible for your energy. Realize that everything you do, say, and touch, everything you pass - even for a fleeting second - is affected and changed by you. You impact the animals and plants; the air, water, and buildings; and people - the energy of each drops or rises to reflect the subtle etheric pressure you place on it.

When you are angry, fearful, mean and vindictive, the energy of the room you are in starts to wobble and act chaotically. It metaphysically starts to implode. Anyone standing nearby will be robbed of energy and pulled down. Everything gets sucked into the vortex of your negative implosion.

With perception comes responsibility. Understand that if you are infinite you are everywhere, and you can be anywhere, and you are inside all things, and you affect them. Remember that the solidity of the world is an illusion created by the speed at which atoms oscillate. If they slowed down just a little, you'd be able to walk through walls. In an out-of-body experience, you have consciousness inside a subtle body that we believe weighs four grams. You can pass right through the wall.

In effect, physical reality is both opaque and ethereal - just a collective feeling. It's only by habit that you consider yourself solid. In a sense, you are a collection of particles, transmuted from being in the solid-particle state of physical existence to the more ethereal wave-state.

In the wave-state, you are an amorphous oscillation, existing at no particular place in space or time, with no particular human definition. That wave state contains your consciousness and can be driven by your force of will. Through it, you have an immense potential to exert yourself on the etheric reality. The wave can move, so you move. It's everywhere, so you can be everywhere."

-- Stuart Wilde, Silent Power

Something opens our wings.
Something makes boredom and hurt disappear.
Someone fills the cup in front of us.
We taste only sacredness. --Rumi

"Times are over when questions of war and peace could be decided in the context of international power politics. Right cannot be decided by might, in the international field any more than in the personal domain. In an interdependent global community every war between nations is fundamentally a civil war."

Terrorists and potential aggressors must be stopped, but war is not the way to stop them. Warfare must be replaced by dialogue leading to mutual understanding as a basis of multilateral cooperation in regard to relations among nations in the political as well as in the economic and the ecological spheres.

According to the Club of Budapest, the project of creating a structure of global cooperation beyond the veto-power and special status of individual states is best pursued in the framework of a 'World Futures Council' as proposed among others by Mikhail Gorbachev and Jacob von Uexkuell. The Council is to be constituted of one hundred independent individuals of high integrity who place the shared human interest above any parochial national or cultural interest. The Club of Budapest takes an active part in the creation of such a Council and will promote its work with special attention to questions of civil and political values and perceptions, and the humanism and sustainability of the policies motivated by them.

WAR: A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

The time has come for the world community to recognize that war, rather than an instrument for the elimination of terrorists and aggressors, is a crime against humanity. It is itself an act of aggression that threatens human life, and the environment on which human life vitally depends.

No other species kills massively its own kind: war is a uniquely human phenomenon. Such killing was never justified, but it had a marginal warrant at a time when war was waged among neighboring groups for the acquisition of territory with natural and human resources and could be limited to the territories and the warriors of the protagonists. At a time when resources are not limited to defined territories and hostilities cannot be contained, war is neither politically nor economically justified. Given that modern warfare kills innocent civilians, inflicts serious damage on the life-supporting environment, and may escalate to a global conflagration, waging war needs to be declared a crime against humanity. No nation-state should have the legitimate right to wage war against any other nation-state.

The stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction is not a warrant for waging war. Weapons of mass destruction whether they are nuclear, chemical, biological, or conventional are a threat to human life and habitat by whoever possesses them. They are not tolerable in the hands of any state, whether it is large or small, rich or poor, and headed by a dictator or by an elected politician. Such weapons need to be eliminated from the arsenals of every state, a task that is not the self-declared prerogative of any government but the responsibility of the global community of all peoples and states. There will be no lasting peace on earth until all weapons of mass destruction are destroyed, their production and stockpiling proscribed, and strategies calling for their use replaced by strategies of dialogue, negotiation and, if necessary, internationally agreed economic and political sanctions.

Attempting to eliminate weapons of mass destruction with weapons of mass destruction is to fight violence with violence on the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, a policy that can end up making everyone blind and toothless. Aggressors and terrorists must be stopped, but war is not the way to stop them.